Originally it was East and West Dakota (Dakota Fanning in The Watchers)

The Watchers (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
screenplay by Ishana Night Shyamalan, based on the novel by A.M. Shine
directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw Let’s get something straight: I love terrible movies like Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers, a handsomely mounted, well-cast, high-concept bit of folderol that swings wildly at a soft, underhand pitch…and misses. But you can’t fault the effort, the desire in that swing–the arrogance of it. It’s the hubristic brio of a Ken Griffey Jr. tearing a rotator cuff striking out at t-ball. M.’s daughter isn’t exactly the Mighty Casey, but the lead-up to The Watchers carries with it the same mythopoetics, the same anticlimactic denouement, the same whiff of mustiness that comes with a reference to Ernest Lawrence Thayer in 2024. Granted, that’s my fault for noticing it. I also thought a lot about “People Are Alike All Over,” that “Twilight Zone” episode where astronauts figure out they’re the new exhibits in an interstellar zoo, and another “Twilight Zone” called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” in which five disparate individuals find themselves in a mysterious container, isolated from the outside world. I thought of Walter Kubilius’s incredible 1954 novella The Other Side, which influenced Peter Weir’s exceptional The Truman Show, and of Raymond Feist’s 1988 Faerie Tale, one of my all-time favourite horror novels. So hail to the skilled excavators, or at least the dedicated raiders of popular culture. Hail to the hyphenate debut that feels like something I picked up on 99¢ VHS rental Friday at King Soopers in 1991. Hail to nepotism working as it should by reintroducing the concept of the mid-level genre piece to curry favour with a former A-list director who keeps letting the air out of his own tires. And hail to the new “Night Shyamalan” who has learned her lessons exquisitely, the good and the bad. Just like that, she’s neatly doubled the number of directors of terrible movies I will like a little bit.

Criterion Closet, here we come: Furiosa

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
written by George Miller, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw In matters of vengeance, the Greeks had it all figured out. Their God of such things was a tripartite Goddess: Alecto (“unceasing”), Megaera (“grudging”), and Tisiphone (“avenging murder”), collectively called the “Erinyes.” Hesiod gave their parentage as the Titan Ouranos and Gaia: When Ouranos was castrated by his son, Cronos, three drops of Ouranos’s blood fell to the fertile soil of Mother Earth, impregnating her with his resentment and rage. Other sources describe the Erinyes’ parentage as Night and Hell. The Romans renamed the goddesses the Furiae, and now George Miller houses them in the slight frame of his Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Furiosa, who births herself from the dirt and, over the course of a too-short 150 minutes, pursues her vengeance like the “darkest of angels” her nemesis, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), dubs her. He asks her, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” He already knows she does. Furiosa is the very definition of epic. It’s a treatise on how archetype remains the blueprint for our behaviour, and in its absolute simplicity, it has a sublime power. Furiosa is born of our rage to avenge the death of the world. She reminds me of a Miyazaki heroine, and the film itself is as obsessively detailed, thought-out, and functional as a stygian Miyazaki fantasia. If it’s opera, it’s Wagner. As a film, it may be George Miller’s best.

Night Swim (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

Night Swim (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

Posted in2024, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren
screenplay by Bryce McGuire
directed by Bryce McGuire

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Welp, it’s come to this: a haunted swimming pool. There was a slasher movie set in a public pool (2001’s The Pool), and pools have been at the centre of some seriously creepy set-pieces in films ranging from the original Cat People to the remake of Cat People, from Let the Right One In to the remake of Let the Right One In. As far as definitively haunted swimming pools go, however, the only precedent I can think of is in Poltergeist III, and that one came in a package deal with a haunted skyscraper so it’s a bit of a cheat. Swimming was the only form of physiotherapy that didn’t feel like penance when I was growing up. Before my family put a pool in the backyard, I would swim at my next-door neighbour’s place or the rehabilitation centre where I took swimming lessons as a child. At one of those lessons, I broke my arm, but it didn’t scare me off pools–it scared me off swimming instructors. One evening, on vacation with my parents in Florida, I swam in the hotel pool, and every time I went below the surface, a pretty girl followed me down. We would bob there near the bottom, staring at each other within kissing distance through a veil of chlorine. Not a word ever passed between us; it was strange and wonderful. The pool has since become my respite from screens. I don’t know how to meditate, although I suspect that’s what I’m doing in there. Swimming has always seemed to liberate me mind, body, and spirit. I’m sentimental about swimming pools, in other words, and looked forward to Night Swim, the new film from horror megaproducers Jason Blum and James Wan, ruining them for me.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry
screenplay by Terry Rossio and Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Maybe this is how it starts, though I know we must be in the middle if not at the end. More to the point, maybe this is when we notice how close we are to the door to the processing house–to the slaughter. I want to be clear, for posterity’s sake, that I believe we are at the very edge of it. I want it to be on record that I’m afraid. I think we may even be inside, in the stench of its fear and blood and shit, pop-eyed with the too-late realization that all this time, we were waiting in this line for this outcome, and we’ve known it all along. We have been conditioned to be surprised every single time it swims to our attention for a few minutes (which used to happen infrequently, first years, then months, then days, then hours apart; soon it will be seconds) that our lives hold no value to the machineries running us save for the material weight of our flesh. We have been conditioned to forget this every time we’re accidentally confronted with it again. They did it by teaching us to question–and discount–the suffering of others. Not completely; not everyone and not yet. But mostly, and some of you are making me a little worried. I feel like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, although I’m not as sure I’m who I used to be anymore, either.

"What would really get me hot is a ceasefire." K-Stew and Katy O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris
written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska
directed by Rose Glass

by Walter Chaw Love is like a lamb and love is like a sledgehammer. Love crawls into your head and fills the empty spaces, the canyons and tunnels and holes in between, making it so full of noise it makes you fucking nuts. It’s too big, but it keeps growing. It kills you, but it won’t let you die. Love makes every love story a tragedy. Everyone writes about love, but the only person to ever do it right was Maurice Sendak, who wrote a survival guide for the fury called Where the Wild Things Are. Therein, a little boy named Max threatens to leave his friends, monsters on an island where they all jamboree. They beg him to stay: “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.” And they will, you know, because they have fangs and dangerous desires and horrible appetites. Love growls and gnashes its teeth. Love’s claws rattle like castanets. Love roars. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a love story about two terrible women and two terrible men who do bad things to one another and for one another because love is the fire in which, happily, we burn.

Madame Web (2024)

Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

Madameweb

**½/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor
screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
directed by S.J. Clarkson

by Walter Chaw S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a rare and specific variety of disaster, which is interesting because it’s largely centred around a rare and specific variety of spider. That is to say, not “interesting” so much as unintentionally ironic or something. Rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, you know? The mass-appealing, notes-driven, “for dummies,” not-entirely-accurate pop-cultural definition of a literary conceit. This reminds me of the swoony, heartthrob moment where Ethan Hawke defines “irony” perfectly in Reality Bites. I don’t actually remember what he says, though, because I haven’t seen that movie since its 1994 release–about ten years before the events of Madame Web, the screen debut of Marvel mutant Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who’s named after the Greek archetype who can see the future but no one listens to her and Marc Webb, director of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. Just kidding. She’s named Webb because spiders spin them, with an extra “b” to throw you off the trail but not so violently that you don’t know it’s fucking with you. Madame Web (one “b,” because the picture is more invested in making sure you know it’s related to the lucrative Spider-Man franchise than in being such a tedious asshole) opens in 1973, with Cassandra’s super-pregnant mom Constance (Kerry Bishé) tromping around the South American rainforest like Sean Connery in Medicine Man in search of a super-spider when…okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, 30 years later, Cassandra is a paramedic who can sometimes see the future, but nobody believes her. You might have deduced that by her name is all I’m saying.

Eileen (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Eileen

***/****
starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland
written by Luke Goebel & Ottessa Moshfegh, based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh
directed by William Oldroyd

by Angelo Muredda Thomasin McKenzie gives the armpit-sniffing Mary Katherine Gallagher a run for her money as the eponymous weirdo loner in William Oldroyd’s Eileen, an admirably icky take on the Ottessa Moshfegh novel of the same name, adapted by the author and her partner, Luke Goebel. An awkward, horned-up femcel, Moshfegh’s Eileen is the kind of ostensibly normal but secretly maladjusted creep you’d find in a Patricia Highsmith novel–as relatable as she is perverse. While Highsmith’s work has lent itself to any number of successful treatments (including Carol, the film this one most closely resembles in its melding of pulp and queer desire), Moshfegh’s text is less of an obvious sell for the movies, fixated as it is on its protagonist’s unruly gut feelings, which frequently extend to her actual bowel movements. While Eileen, with its lovingly upholstered retro-1960s aesthetic, is a tidier affair than the novel, it’s to Oldroyd’s credit that he realizes something of its shabby outlook on the human experience, where violence is your best, if not only, ticket out of your crummy small-town New England existence.

Saltburn (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Saltburn

*/****
starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

by Walter Chaw People keep expressing in the weariest, archest way how disappointing Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) has turned out to be, or, if they’re more passive, how they do hope he doesn’t end up like the last one–you know, that one; why do they all end up that way? Well, who wouldn’t snap under that kind of aristocratic disapproval, I ask you? It’s like if Jay Sherman’s butler caught you nicking from the buffet table. And indeed, all of Emerald Fennell’s insufferable Saltburn is like The Talented Mr. Ripley written by Fleabag–if Patricia Highsmith and Phoebe Waller-Bridge were trying to follow up an underbaked piece of shit with another underbaked piece of shit while producers were still bedazzled by her empty, shit-eating bullshit. Sorry, I mean to say Saltburn is hackwork that doesn’t know what it’s trying to say because Emerald Fennell, a member herself of the larded gentry, isn’t remotely self-aware enough to recognize the extent to which she’s completely bought into her systemic privilege and its attendant noblesse oblige. Yes, good Queen Emerald has a story to tell about how bad her people are. Now listen up, peon.

SDAFF ’23: Monster

Posted in****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

Sdaff23monster

****/****
starring Ando Sakura, Kurosawa Koya, Nagayama Eita
written by Sakamoto Yûji
directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda is a keeper of secrets, a guardian of hidden things and a priest of the ritual of childhood. Watching his stuff feels like an invitation into intimate spaces, and I can’t shake the feeling, however impossible, that they’re places I’ve been before. I recall, for instance, a little half-loft built into the silversmithing store my father used to own. When I was too young to work or too tired from working, I’d climb up into it to read, or sleep, or peep down onto the sales floor, where customers would mill in and out. I hadn’t thought at all of that tiny vantage, a crow’s nest floating above a turgid sea of confused nostalgia, until I saw Kore-eda’s new film, Monster, which, of course, has nothing to do with silversmithing stores or fathers who have journeyed past the horizon or boats unmoored and lost in listless seas.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

Posted in****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Thriller, Tom Cruise

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

Killersoftheflowermoon

**½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw I think Martin Scorsese is perhaps too principled a filmmaker to indulge in the dark poetry of Killers of the Flower Moon; too bound by limitations he’s aware of and wary of violating, too respectful of the horror of the history to mark it with the crackle of verve and vitality. A sober topic deserves a sober treatment, no question, yet Scorsese at his best is doing lines off the hood of a vintage Impala, not running lines with actors and advisors, all with competing interests and hardwired biases, to find the most cogent, most reasonable way to approach a tripwire. He’s so careful not to set off the powderkeg that is the Osage Murders of 1921-1926 that he doesn’t set off any sparks at all. While I don’t think Scorsese is capable of making a bad movie, with things like Hugo and even The Irishman, he’s shown he can make movies that are enervated in the fatal way of a conversation you have with a beloved elder you’re lucky to engage with but dread, too, for the repetitiveness and dusty formality. I’m not saying Scorsese was the wrong person to adapt white-guy journalist David Grann’s NYT-feted true-crime book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a celebration of an organization that has done grievous harm to these very people it swooped in belatedly to protect this one time. On the contrary, he’s told what is probably the most palatable version of that story–but it’s a story I don’t want to hear. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time investing much in devalued institutions and their saviours.

The Creator (2023)

Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Thecreator

*/****
starring John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Allison Janney
screenplay by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Fifty-three minutes into Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, there is a “What is Heaven?” talk between a hardened American soldier broken by grief and regret and a little Asian kid who happens to be a potentially world-destroying cyborg. The cyborg asks the question, and the G.I. says it’s where people go when they’re turned off, then clarifies that he won’t be going there because only good people get into Heaven. The A.I. then observes they have something in common, as it, too, will be denied entrance to Heaven as a non-person and, it goes without saying, non-Christian. I think this is maybe a critique of Christianity, which believes that the 69% of people on this planet who do not share their beliefs will literally burn for an eternity in a lake of fire. Or perhaps it’s a critique of American exceptionalism that believes we have the corner on morality, even as the country’s engaged in vicious dynastic colonialism and has been since its conception. Mostly, and accidentally, it’s a meta-critique of how whenever white creators seek to get all dewy-eyed about trans-humanism (see: Cloud Atlas), they tend to use Asian bodies as the battleground for their philosophical evolution, thus exposing a bias that should probably be examined with the help of non-white creators involved in the decision-making process. Why is it, they might ask these science-fictional advisors and creators, that when you talk about spiritual thought-leaders who transcend this mortal plane, the first thing you think of is a magical, mystical Oriental? Think hard.

TIFF ’23: Sleep + Smugglers

Posted in2023, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff23sleepsmugglers

SLEEP
Jam
**/****
starring Jung Yu-mi, Lee Sun-kyun
written and directed by Jason Yu

SMUGGLERS
Milsu
***/****
starring Kim Hye-soo, Yum Jung-ah, Park Jeong-min, Zo In-sung
screenplay by Ryoo Seung-wan, Kim Jeong-yeon
directed by Ryoo Seung-wan

by Bill Chambers Jason Yu’s Sleep had me at hello. Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) and Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) are a young couple expecting their first child. One night, out of the blue, Hyun-Su starts talking in his sleep. “Someone’s inside,” he says. Soo-jin wonders if he’s trying to tell her something. It’s the opening scene of Poltergeist with considerably less grandeur, but horror, like punk, thrives in lo-fi. (The movie’s biggest formal swing is to instantaneously alter the mood of a scene through jump cuts or abrupt lighting changes.) Though Hyun-Su has no memory of the incident, he thinks he knows why he said what he said: because he’s an actor and one of the lines he has in his current project is, “Someone’s inside the building.” It’s enough to placate Soo-jin until the following night, when he dozes off and…well, you’ll have to see for yourself. Soon, bedtime becomes a jack-in-the-box full of nasty surprises that have Soo-jin sleeping with one eye open. A doctor gives Hyun-su what would be very practical and hopeful advice for someone suffering from an actual sleep disorder, but is that what’s going on? Or is something supernatural waiting until he lies down at night to use him as a marionette? And what, if anything, do the new downstairs neighbours, a single mother and her adolescent son, have to do with his condition?

TIFF ’23: Evil Does Not Exist

Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Music, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff23evildoesnotexist

悪は存在しない
Aku wa sonzai shinai
***½/****
starring Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, Ayaka Shibutani
written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Angelo Muredda Evil is a big-city land developer running a roadside Zoom meeting with his gormless staff about the fastest way to turn a self-sustaining village into an anonymous corporate glamping site in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist. An ice-cold followup to the more reassuring awards darling Drive My Car, it’s a remarkable slow-burn thriller about the human capacity to look away from the downstream effects of our disruptions to natural equilibrium, dressing that violence up in HR-friendly euphemisms the ecosystems we’re poisoning couldn’t care less about.

TIFF ’23: Anatomy of a Fall

Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff23anatomyofafall

Anatomie d'une chute
***/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Samuel Theis, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner
written by Justine Triet & Arthur Harari
directed by Justine Triet

by Angelo Muredda The list of thematic provocations is long in Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet's twisty Palme d'Or winner–the kind of winding, enigmatic character study that people who miss reading literary fiction wistfully describe as "novelistic." Even before the credits sequence, a montage of old family photos and videos taken in better times, we've been introduced to any number of hooks that one could build a hot-button arthouse legal thriller around. From the dead husband found at the bottom of a chalet by, of course, his blind son and support dog–below the window from which he either fell or was pushed–to the mysterious upstairs presence of his aloof, probably bisexual wife, a foreigner who isn't fluent in the language of the court she's about to be tried in, Anatomy of a Fall plants itself in the land of ambiguity and intrigue. That's to say nothing of the icy, wordless air we feel pass between the strained partners in the opening moments, where the now deceased man was blasting a steel-drum cover of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." on repeat during his author wife's flirtatious interview with a female student, still more circumstantial evidence for us to file away for later. From the start, then, Triet commits to a tricky balancing act, pitching her work somewhere between a formalist drama concerned with observation and perspective, attuned to what we can or can't know of a person or a marriage from the outside, and a more prurient genre exercise about killer wives, cuckolded husbands, and unseeing witnesses.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Birth/Rebirth

Posted in****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

Fantasia23birthrebirth

****/****
starring Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland, AJ Lister, Breeda Wool
written by Laura Moss & Brendan O’Brien
directed by Laura Moss

by Walter Chaw In this year of the distaff Frankenstein riff, sandwiched between Bomani Story’s exceptional The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming Poor Things, find Laura Moss’s fucking awesome Birth/Rebirth, which, like Story’s film, manages to smuggle in a sharp, eloquently deployed payload of social and philosophical issues alongside just enough satisfying gore and a gratifying amount of real terror. I wonder if the key to the success of these films, Story’s and Moss’s, has to do with filmmakers who aren’t white men taking their shot at interpreting what is and always has been an essentially, perhaps the essentially, progressive genre text–one authored by a woman, no less, the daughter of one of the most important figures in the early women’s-rights movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (who published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and political philosopher/anarchist William Godwin. First-time readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might be surprised by its political sensitivities–its critique of a carceral state in which there is no forgiveness, only the presumption of guilt based mainly on appearance and social status. By how the Monster’s fate is predetermined as he’s cast off to educate himself with pilfered books and shelter amongst others whom polite society has labelled “misfit” and “outcast.” Frankenstein is a story of class war. Mary and her husband didn’t even eat sugar because of its role in the Caribbean slave trade. The Monster says, “I heard of the division of property of immense wealth and squalid poverty of ranked dissent and noble blood.” He was woke as fuck, and this was 1818.

Fantasia Festival ’23: New Life

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

Fantasia23newlife

**½/****
starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George
written and directed by John Rosman

by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman’s New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer’s The Train measures the value of a man’s life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner’s remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they’ve gone to survive. New Life‘s stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller–the “Trolley Problem” where one of the hero’s choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she’s not even doing it for herself.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Sympathy for the Devil

Fantasia Festival ’23: Sympathy for the Devil

Posted in2023, Action, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Nicolas Cage, Thriller, UK

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joel Kinnaman, Kaiwi Lyman
screenplay by Luke Paradise
directed by Yuval Adler

by Walter Chaw A History of Violence for Dummies, Yuval Adler’s slow-moving, never-ending Sympathy for the Devil is a Nicolas Cage vanity project in which America’s slavering hambone tries on some kind of accent, a scarlet dye-job, and a half-assed high-concept that’s familiar to everyone, it appears, except those responsible for carrying it off. Cage is The Passenger, a mysterious lunatic with a gun who carjacks father-to-be The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) in a hospital parking garage and forces him to drive down the Las Vegas strip to a neon-lit Edward Hopper bar where screaming fits can be engaged in for the bemusement of the easily bemused. “There he goes again,” one might say of Cage as he bares his teeth, bangs on the table, flashes his eyes, and raises his voice. Lest one think he’s merely punching the clock here, he’s also listed as one of the producers, so I have to believe that phoning it in, all dials turned to “11,” is the creative choice he’s making at this point in his career. Cage can be an exceptional actor when he wants to be, don’t get me wrong. I just wish he wanted to be more than once every ten years.