UK Archives - Page 4 of 33 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’21: Dash Cam

September 14, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, UK

Dashcam
*½/****
starring Annie Hardy, Amar Chadha-Patel, Angela Enahoro
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage

by Bill Chambers Rob Savage's Host dared to suggest our new digital fortresses were inadequate shield against the old insecurities and became a cultural phenomenon as a result. There had been movies like it (Unfriended and its sequel, for instance), but the pandemic subtext gave its core premise–a haunted Zoom call–mass appeal, and having the actors play "themselves" à la Blair Witch added a veneer of documentary credibility. With Dash Cam, his much-anticipated follow-up (and his first film for horror factory Blumhouse), Savage again sets things against the backdrop of COVID and continues the neo-realist conceit of giving the lead the name of the actress playing her, but he's in murkier conceptual territory here, tipped off by the early and frequent abandonment of the titular gimmick. Real-life musician Annie Hardy, from the band Giant Drag, stars as a version of herself, seemingly the worst version of herself (though I gather her online persona is somewhat controversial), an MC who hosts BandCar, "the Internet's #1 Live Improvised Music Show Broadcast from a Moving Vehicle." At the beginning of the film, Annie abandons her L.A. apartment and feline roommate for an extended stay in England with former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). Boarding the plane, she turns out to be the type to let their mask droop below their nose. It's the first real hint of an impulse to troll that is reflexive bordering on pathological and seems to particularly flare up around the socially conscious or anyone who tells her "no." In the case of Stretch, these are one and the same, and after she manages to alienate him completely, she steals his car and looks for trouble in London (which is really as simple as not wearing a mask), broadcasting it all for the amusement of her followers and sometimes their tips.

Telluride ’21: Cyrano

September 9, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Musical, Telluride, UK

***½/****
starring Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Ben Mendelsohn
screenplay by Erica Schmidt, based on the play by Edmond Rostand
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene in Joe Wright’s derided Pan where Nirvana‘s anthemic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is stirringly transposed into an indentured/enslaved orphans’ lament. I thought to myself that Wright had a musical in him if he wanted, and here it is, this umpteenth adaptation of Cyrano (de Bergerac), which I fought against for a little while and then went along with. I had a similar experience with Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, where an old idea presented in an earnest and earnestly gonzo way lives or dies by our investment in the chemistry of its central pair and the melancholy embedded in the thought that every love story is a tragedy eventually. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National wrote the songs and score for this musical reimagining of Rostand’s fable. They are the band I have seen the most times in concert. They were my kids’ first experience at Red Rocks–we planned it that way, planting the seed maybe for somewhere down the line when they will look back and understand why the band’s stories of loss, regret, and the briefness of all things spoke to me so loudly.

Telluride ’21: Spencer

September 8, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride, UK

***½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris, Amy Manson, Sally Hawkins
written by Steven Knight
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw The last 12 minutes or so of Derek Jarman’s excoriating, experimental The Last of England is just Tilda Swinton armed with garden shears, framed against a stark background, ripping through her wedding dress in a rapture of rage–a resounding rejection (or a prophecy of the inevitable fall) of the tradition and ritual, the future and hope, that marriages represent. The whole film is scenes of atrocity and decay intercut with home movies of the child this bride was, the couple this bride is a part of, and the calamity of the union into which society has forced her, culminating in this exorcism of these ties that bind. It’s one of the great exits in Jarman, and The Last of England‘s afterimage is all over Pablo Larrain’s impressionistic Spencer, a biography of three miserable days, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, at the end of Princess Diana’s tenure. It seeps through especially in a sequence where Diana (Kristen Stewart) dances by herself down the empty halls of Sandringham, an act of rebelling against the norms and controls imposed on her by the misfortune of her station. The scene would play perfectly against the mute wanderings of a grief-stricken Jackie Onassis in Larrain’s previous examination of a woman encased–and left adrift–in a patriarchal system of power and exchange, Jackie. They are complementary portraits of the suffocation of empire. Both can be unpacked by Jarman’s takedown of Thatcher’s England, and all three left me a mess.

The Green Knight (2021) + Pig (2021)

August 30, 2021****/****, 2021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, Ireland, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, VOD

THE GREEN KNIGHT
****/****
starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Ralph Nelson
written for the screen and directed by David Lowery

PIG
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
written and directed by Michael Sarnoski

by Walter Chaw A thing has no value if there is no risk of losing it. A treasure is only that if there are hobbits. If you’re a parent and you’ve done everything right, and everything goes exactly as it should, your children will know the exquisite pain of your death. The story for us all ideally has the tang of misadventure to it and a sad ending full of irony. It is a great fable without a moral, wrought with temptations–though hopefully, when the curtain falls, free of too much regret. The key to navigating the labyrinth of the Rose Poet’s medieval romance “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is perhaps in its prologue, where it presents the history of the founding of England from the Fall of Troy through to Aeneas’s further stories: his conquests and foundings, sure, but also the inevitable decline of his line. A popular version of this history around the time that “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” would have been written holds that Brutus of Troy is the grandson of Aeneas, exiled from Italy because, in fulfillment of a prophecy similar to the one that doomed Oedipus, he accidentally killed his father with an errant arrow. In the course of his wanderings, this Brute, the product of a cursed line beset with hubris and tragic folly, becomes the first king of what would be called England.

Siberia (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 27, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Greece, Horror, Italy, Mexico, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Christina Chiriac
screenplay by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw I had a dream when I was very young. A fever dream, while tangled in my parents’ bed sheets, delirious and afraid, soaked and burning. I bore horrified witness to a line of bald monks stretching into an impossible black, all awaiting their execution by beheading and various other cranial offenses. I couldn’t make out the executioner. I wondered why my parents couldn’t see what I was seeing, and in my confusion, I didn’t know if they were angry with me or lying to me. Abel Ferrara’s Siberia has somehow manifested this fever dream of mine in a sequence where its ex-pat protagonist, the Jack London-ian Clint (Willem Dafoe), rides a dog team through the arctic on his way to a cave carved into the side of a jagged rockface. He passes a village in the midst of some sort of violent cleansing where gunmen force a group of men, naked and bald, into the cold to be executed, one after the other. When I had my hallucination as a child, I couldn’t have been more than five or six. I had never, at that point in my life, actually seen a monk. When I finally did, some years later, I felt as though I’d already borne witness to their martyrdom. When you first read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, you’re confronted with two beginnings–two approaches to what is one of the most profound works of self-examination in the history of Western thought. The first is in the prologue, the next in the first chapter (called “First Years”). In the prologue, Jung writes:

Full Metal Jacket (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

July 11, 2021****/****, 1980s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Drama, UK, War

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer It’s obvious from the beginning that Stanley Kubrick loves R. Lee Ermey. Loves him. Though Ermey is only the fourth-billed actor in Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman may as well be the star of the show. He’s described in Gustav Hasford’s source novel as “an obscene little ogre in immaculate khaki.” His barked insults and obscenities dominate the first section of the film–a tour de force showing how Hartman wears down (and, supposedly, toughens up) a barracksful of U.S. Marine draftees, blasting away at their natural aversion to aggression and reprogramming them as soldiers. Kubrick was lucky to find him; a Vietnam War vet and former Marine Corps drill instructor, Ermey brings an irresistible combination of outrageousness and authenticity to the part. Hartman could have come across as an unlikely caricature but for Ermey’s ferociousness.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 9, 20212020, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it’s not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn’t the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world–who’s playing an immortal superhero–tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I’m saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Zoom Generation: FFC Interviews Rob Savage & Jemma Moore

April 4, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews, UK

Shudder’s Host, directed and co-written by Rob Savage, is this peculiar moment’s The Blair Witch Project, a landmark film that provides insight into not just these dark times via the technologies that have evolved from our collective woe, but also how we ourselves have evolved, changed in unexpected ways by the products of our hands. Never so much as to lose touch with what scares us, though. Even the genesis of the project–Host was born of a prank a bored Savage devised to scare his friends on a Zoom chat one evening (a prank posted later on social media, where it gained another half-life)–has its roots in how things that are old-hat (the noise in the attic, the jump scare, the Rear Window effect of being a voyeur to the love and death of loved ones without the power to affect them) don’t go away as the tools of our existence change. They adapt. What we’ve always feared, we fear still. And here we are now with this stuff we’ve Frankensteined into existence (social media, virtual hosting, Bluetooth, the cloud) without a complete understanding of the doors it’ll unlock in our relationship with the universe. We’re playing with fire, and Host is a warning no less eloquent for being too late.

Supernova (2021)

February 22, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, UK

****/****
starring Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci
written and directed by Harry Macqueen

by Walter Chaw Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is an author of some minor renown who has a way with a toast and a loving, if sometimes crabby, relationship with his husband, Sam (Colin Firth). Sam is a concert pianist of even more minor renown whom Tusker teases at a diner along the route of a holiday they’re taking in the English countryside by telling a waitress that Sam will be glad to sign an autograph for her if she likes. It’s clear the poor woman doesn’t have the first idea who Sam is, but she’s very polite about it. Sam asks why Tusker does things like this when Tusker admits that half the time he doesn’t get any joy out of it. Tusker says, “For the other half of the time.” In his film Supernova, writer-director Harry Macqueen’s script is consistently like this: understated, beautifully observed, intensely human. It’s a two-hander with two of the absolute best actors on the planet, so how much script and direction do they need? However much it is, Macqueen gives them just enough. I love the way Sam says “Tusker” like “Tosca,” the Puccini opera, but I love it because that’s the way, accent or no, your name will evolve with your partner over a life together. It’s not a nickname, it’s a secret language. After 24 years, no one says “Walter” like my wife says it. It’s subtle, but I hear it. I know the contours of it in her voice like I know the curve of her hip when I sleep next to her. The film opens with Sam and Tusker bickering, first about a map, then about what station they’re listening to. When Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” comes on the radio and Tusker, to cool the tension a bit, cajoles Sam into singing along, well, I fell in love with them. Tusker and Sam are real people.

The Reckoning (2021)

February 3, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, UK, VOD

½*/****
starring Charlotte Kirk, Joe Anderson, Steven Waddington, Sean Pertwee
written by Neil Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, Edward Evers-Swindell
directed by Neil Marshall

by Walter Chaw The first film of British director Neil Marshall’s I haven’t liked, The Reckoning is his contribution to the niche but endlessly rich Witchfinder General horror subgenre. What I’ve liked about Marshall to this point–from the Hawksian platoon-meets-soccer hooligan bonhomie of his werewolf debut Dog Soldiers through to his reboot of the Hellboy franchise (a widely-derided piece that I found delightfully perverse, gory, and hewing closer to the Mignola source, for better or worse)–is the efficiency and lack of sentimentality driving his narratives. His best-known picture, The Descent, is a triphammer thing, not an ounce of fat anywhere on its body–an instant classic about interpersonal tensions and resentments expressed through collapsing, wet, vaginal tunnels and the monsters that live there. It’s a product of a distinct directorial voice that I could trace through all of his pictures. In contrast, The Reckoning could have been directed by anyone and, more to the point, feels a lot like it was directed by its star, Charlotte Kirk, who had a hand in its production and writing. It’s a romantic hagiography of Kirk, establishing her as a romance-novel heroine in various carefully-arrayed, soft-focus, medieval tableaux. The Reckoning is not simply bad, it’s uncharacteristically bloated and flaccid. Embarrassing, too.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

December 23, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

WW84
½*/****
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

Promising Young Woman (2020)

December 14, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Emerald Fennell’s feature debut Promising Young Woman trails the same kind of buzz that accompanied David Slade’s Hard Candy 15 years ago. Here, that buzz says, is a film that will turn the tables on predators in a meaningful way; it purports to put the bad guys on notice that things are about to change for them: the hunters will now enjoy a bitter draught of their own medicine. Delicious! Unfortunately, like Hard Candy, Promising Young Woman is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a mousetrap made out of wax, good intentions, and the right politics that pulls its punches in absurd, and absurdly consistent, ways. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t discover a new way to have an old conversation. And at the end of it all, it manufactures an ending in which the authorities it’s spent its entire thesis crucifying as ineffectual are relied upon to be the cavalry coming to save the day. Promising Young Woman is the punk that wants very much to be acceptable to the system against which it’s rebelling. At least it has some effective performances.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020)

November 13, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finnernan, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see Freaky in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw “You’ve gone strange on me,” Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that’s impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn’t himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he’s surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he’s vulnerable to the mistakes he’s made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning “parts” or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven’t been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don’t think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

TIFF ’20 ‘Quibi’: Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom

September 22, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some ‘quick bites’ in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe it’s true that there’s no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis that’s jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleagues–Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)–while out celebrating Nikolaj’s 40^th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn Skårderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommy’s soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means “binge-drinking”) is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowers–but, y’know, it’s booze, and the four men eventually can’t resist drinking past the point of “ignition,” leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoon’s credo from James L. Brooks’s How Do You Know: “Don’t drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better.” Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role that’s 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.

Ghost in the Shell (1995) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

September 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Kazunori Itô, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow
directed by Mamoru Oshii

by Bryant Frazer I’ll get this out of the way first: the soul is the ghost and the body is the shell. The title is a reference to Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, which itself refers to a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the duality of mind and body. The writer and illustrator Masamune Shirow borrowed and altered the phrase for his serialized 1989 manga “Mobile Armored Riot Police”, which bore the subtitle “The Ghost in the Shell.” I haven’t read the manga, but the animated feature it inspired is positively heady with ideas. Ghost in the Shell is a cop movie about robots with human souls. It’s science-fiction about the human rights of artificial intelligence. And it’s a fantasy about a sexy cyborg who knows how to use a gun. It’s all of those things, and it’s a disquisition on human consciousness, a meditation on urban loneliness, and also, maybe, a poem about unrequited love. It’s extraordinary.

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)

August 28, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, UK

**½/****
starring Dev Patel, Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Armando Iannucci, Simon Blackwell, based on the book by Charles Dickens
directed by Armando Iannucci

by Walter Chaw I hate Charles Dickens. I hate what I know about him as a human being. I hate how he writes. I hate his books. To be sure I hated them, I read them all. Because I majored in English and then British Romanticism, I even had cause to study his work–sometimes in great, exhausting detail. I have read volumes of critical studies, been subjected to numerous stage, television, and film adaptations, and had the great displeasure of watching a “colour blind” local production of A Christmas Carol a few years ago that filled me with irritation and upset. I have listened patiently to professors, friends, girlfriends who swore by Dickens; their eyes get twinkly when they talk about him, like they were talking about the Beatles or some shit to someone who maybe just hasn’t heard the George Harrison tracks, yet, before forming an opinion. I read David Copperfield on a fancy-bound garage-sale find my parents brought home alongside volumes by Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, and Melville. They were to be my friends through elementary school when I had precious few of the human kind. You could say it was movies and these books that taught me English, and you wouldn’t be far off. I still love those other authors. I still hate Dickens.

The Unholy (1988) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

August 23, 20201980s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, UK

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ben Cross, Ned Beatty, William Russ, Jill Carroll
written by Philip Yordan and Fernando Fonseca
directed by Camilo Vila

by Bryant Frazer The Unholy, a moderately-budgeted religious horror drama from Vestron Pictures, is notable mostly for its outsized ambitions. Sure, it has the B-movie elements you’d expect from a late-1980s genre outing with Satanic undertones. There’s a troubled, tempted priest, a couple of gory set-pieces, and a phalanx of latex monsters that storm into the final act. But it also boasts moody cinematography, leisurely plot development, and a mini-dream team of character actors. Want to see Ned Beatty and Hal Holbrook play a scene together for the only time in their careers? You want to see The Unholy. How about an elderly Trevor Howard, in his final role, as a blind demonologist? The Unholy is the movie for you. Or the recently-deceased Ben Cross as a Catholic priest with an expiration date of Easter Sunday? You guessed it: The Unholy. It’s an unusually earnest variant on those Catholic-themed horror movies that became A Thing in the 1970s, after The Exorcist and The Omen established an audience for lurid horror dressed up with religious themes and prestige names.

Host (2020) – Shudder

August 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming, UK

***½/****
starring Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage

by Walter Chaw I’ve spoken in front of audiences large and intimate. I’ve hosted discussions in opera houses, stadiums, and gymnasiums, as well as seminars in classrooms and private homes. When the pandemic hit and I suddenly found whatever teaching or speaking opportunities I was still being offered relegated to “Zoom” meetings, for the first time speaking in public as a professional, I knew anxiety and fear. There’s something about it. Is it that everyone is a foot away from your face? I hosted a discussion group recently that had over 100 attendees. On Zoom, that means there are pages and pages of participants you can scroll through as you’re talking, and it means that every time someone so much as moves, you’re distracted by it. Thrown. Unsettled. Of all the things I didn’t anticipate about this odd period in our time together, it’s this new horror of engagement. Zoom, the fractured screen it represents, reminds me of that scene in Playtime where M. Hulot visits an old war buddy in an apartment building where an entire wall is made of glass. It’s uncanny, wrong, unnatural in a constructed way. It feels like a vivarium, like that old “Twilight Zone” where an astronaut realizes when a wall falls away in his house that he’s on display in an alien zoo. I’m afraid to look, because I see more than the subject can see. I’m afraid because I know they see more than I can see, too. I’m afraid because, in these things, I’m having an intimate, face-to-face conversation with dozens of people I can’t all see, much less respond to. Zoom is a vampire, and I am drained.

Gladiator (2000) [20th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

June 30, 20202000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Morocco, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Franzoni and John Logan and William Nicholson
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bill Chambers

“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
-Captain Clarence Oveur (Peter Graves), Airplane!

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is good now. I suppose it was always good, if money and Oscars are indicators of quality, but for me, it was a late bloomer whose virtues have seemingly become more visible since the tide of its success receded. I remember Roger Ebert’s review of the film, which he called “Rocky on downers,” as one I felt a kinship with. In print and on television, he was especially dismayed by the “shabby” computer-generated Colosseum. The year before, George Lucas had set The Phantom Menace against digital cityscapes, but Gladiator marked one of the first times CGI was used extensively in a non-fantastical setting. (Harping on the Colosseum is a compliment, really, as in all likelihood it means the other products of the mainframe–the flaming arrows, the crowds, the patchwork performance of Oliver Reed–didn’t draw attention to themselves.) In a currently-offline article published in 2001, I wrote that “Gladiator provokes meatier discussion as the computer age’s first fully dehumanized non-sci-fi film: the late Oliver Reed became a mere mediator for his technologically aided performance, the stony streets of Rome bear an anachronistic (and soulless) patina, and Maximus is the most passive bloodlust-er Hollywood has ever seen, a video game hero on the fritz.” Some context: that was me trying to hex Gladiator‘s chances at the Academy Awards. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Tommaso (2020)

June 7, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Greece, Italy, UK

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara, Maricla Amoriello
written and directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw There’s something about the late careers of musicians that has, in the middle of all this static Sturm und Drang, moved me in ways I don’t know that anything’s ever quite moved me before. The new Bryan Ferry, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithful… So much longing and wistfulness. What’s that quote by who’s that poet who said something along the lines of how the sum of pain, loss, and time is wisdom? I feel more mortal now than I’ve felt since I was a suicidal teen–and even then, I believed my tragic surcease of sorrow would feed a grand, romantic storyline. Now that the world has enacted its apocalypse, I don’t believe my death would be much more than a bump, a tickle, the noise a bird makes when you hit it with your fender. You don’t even slow down if you notice it, but you won’t notice it. Even grief, I’ve found, for all its profundity, is only a caesura in a toneless cacophony. We rumble forward, heedless, encumbered, until the weight of it all crushes us and our decaying bodies are allowed to come to rest at last. That’s all. That’s all there is.