ZERO STARS Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Red One (2024)

November 14, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Mystery, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw I’ve been waiting decades for a spiritual successor to Jingle All the Way, that repugnant ode to materialism gussied up in Yuletide cheer like a corpulent whore from a Victorian stroke-book. Remember that moment in The Rundown where Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief cameo to “hand off” his action-king crown to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Turns out it was a monkey’s paw predicting the foolhardiness of them pursuing cush gigs in comic-book franchises and immortality in beloved perennial family holiday classics. How many fingers do monkeys have, anyway? Jake Kasdan’s Red One casts The Rock as humourless man of action Callum Drift. Not humourless like fellow professional wrestler Dave Bautista’s brilliant turn as neurodivergent Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, humourless like a guy doing a tough-guy bit… and also a dull-guy bit, and, uh, dense, you know–disillusioned, too, because grown-ups don’t love Christmas anymore. Callum, you see, is head bodyguard to Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) and the leader of ELF, which stands for I don’t fucking know, go watch it yourself. Elite L-something and Fortification or someshit; honestly, we’re both diminished just acknowledging it. Wait, “Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification.” Fuck. This is humiliating.

Here (2024)

November 6, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly
screenplay by Eric Roth & Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw If it were only vapid, insipid, faux-high-concept middlebrow treacle, then fine, you know, that’s between you and your withered stump of low-aspiring taste. If it were only a terrible concept done terribly, a body-temperature tongue-bath delivered without enthusiasm or interest, well, then, so be it; I have liked too many of Robert Zemeckis’s movies to muster up the energy to go after a genial tapestry of sopping Hallmark platitudes–especially those that make idiots happy. Happy is in short supply, after all. If it were merely mildly pathetic in its desperation to be liked; had it only avoided the deadly sin of also wishing to be relevant, wise, respected. But, alas, Here isn’t just awful by most measurable standards established over 130 years of this medium’s astonishing evolution–it’s didactic and self-satisfied about it. It’s the spiritual offspring of Paul Haggis’s Crash, another The Blind Side packed to the tippy-top with privileged foolishness in which the soft-pedalling of broad melodrama paints over history’s sins for the validation of one miserable, unmotivated white guy’s congenital lack of introspection and imagination. Who could’ve guessed that this film, widely touted as the reunion of Forrest Gump‘s writer, director, and stars, would be a redux of its messages, too? Has it ever occurred to you that you “never know what you’re gonna get” in a box of chocolates only if you refuse to read it?

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

March 29, 20242024, 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.

SDAFF ’23: Quiz Lady

November 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Awkwafina, Sandra Oh, Jason Schwartzman, Will Ferrell
written by Jen D’Angelo
directed by Jessica Yu

by Walter Chaw I don’t hold any particular rancour for Jessica Yu’s confused, miscast Quiz Lady. No bile, even when it seems to be trafficking in racist tropes rather than satirizing them, even when its feeble attempts at wit and timing fall shrilly by the wayside. It’s always a minefield for me to review a film by an Asian American this negatively, especially an Asian American woman working from a script by a (white) woman, but there’s a point at which our community should be allowed to make disasterpieces and still get another shot, if equality is the real goal. There’s a point, too, where pulling punches or pretending not to have seen something becomes patronizing and an act of making a work invisible, which is what we’re often complaining about in the first place. I’ll allow that Quiz Lady likely has an audience and that this film exists at exactly the wrong frequency for me to tolerate, much less appreciate; I do worry, however, that the range in which it vibrates is the one in which people who like to laugh at my people live.

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

May 20, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Romance, Streaming, Thriller, ZERO STARS

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they’ve lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It’s that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn’t been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron’s Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn’t a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners–but the rest of me feels like I’d rather be watching something that doesn’t suck. It’s the eternal struggle.

A Good Person (2023)

April 15, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, VOD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Florence Pugh, Molly Shannon, Chinaza Uche, Morgan Freeman
written and directed by Zach Braff

by Walter Chaw The answer to a question no one asked (what would happen if you smushed misery porn into eldersploitation and had Zach Braff do it?), A Good Person is, on a scale of 28 Days to Less Than Zero, somewhere in the Bright Lights, Big City neighbourhood of Girl, Interrupted. That’s not fair–it’s not as good as any of those movies. I don’t know if this trainwreck caused Miss Flo to come to her senses and leave her two-decades-older beau, but I like to think so, because then at least something good came out of this self-pitying 15-year-old’s adaptation of The Bell Jar. The hope that catastrophic events can lead to positive outcomes is the engine driving A Good Person, too, as Braff’s patented manic pixie dream construct, Allison, a girl who sings and plays the piano at her own engagement party, gets high and complains about not being able to feel her ankles, and tells her dull-as-dishwater fiance, Nathan (Chinanza Uche), about how a creepy doctor at work is maybe hitting on her. So effervescent! So full of life! Look at how she puts her foot in his face to underscore her ankle’s numbness! Look how she does a silly interpretive dance that Braff only shoots from the chest up, for some reason, before Allison wants to make out under a top sheet. Anyway, Allison is in the middle of a riff when she drives her future sister-in-law into a backhoe, killing her and sending Allison into a shame spiral as she faces the consequences of her quirkiness for the first time in her life. Apparently, she’s killed her future brother-in-law as well, though no one seems to care. I mean, both of her victims appear for all of 20 seconds before they become tragic devices inaugurating an irritating white girl’s redemption arc. They make so little impact that for the film’s first hour, I thought the brother-in-law (Toby Onwumere) was Nathan and that Nathan was a ghost.

If you think you’re exhausted, imagine how I feel.

Somebody I Used to Know (2023)

February 9, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Alison Brie, Jay Ellis, Kiersey Clemons, Julie Hagerty
written by Dave Franco & Alison Brie
directed by Dave Franco

by Walter Chaw My Best Friend’s Wedding is vile, happy-go-fucky bullshit that polishes the sociopathic behaviour of a solipsistic narcissist to a patently plastic Julia Roberts sheen. It stinks of flop sweat and forced artificiality, and it made somewhere in the neighbourhood of a kabillion dollars because it traffics in exactly the sort of soft-racist, misogynistic horsepucky favoured by a demographic that likes blended drinks and doing mall walks. About 30 minutes into Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know, someone confronts someone else by saying, “You’re not doing some My Best Friend’s Wedding thing, are you?” And, well, she is. Credit for knowing just how unbearable your film is, I guess, this comedy of cringe where “naturalism” means ending every statement as a question and the main character is a pastiche of insufferable tropes who decorated her childhood room with a Sleater-Kinney poster, a pen-drawing of Joni Mitchell, and the “Have a Nice Daze” Dazed and Confused and American Movie teaser posters. Get it? That real clear picture of who this person is and who the people sketching her are? The song over the closing credits is Third-Eye Blind‘s “Semi-Charmed Life.” Got it now? There’s a Chance the Rapper sighting, too. Run. Fucking save yourself.

Babylon (2022)

December 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Walter Chaw If it were only vile, only repulsive, it still would have been a disaster lacking insight and honesty, but at least it wouldn’t also be afflicted with bathetic false modesty wet down with spasms of cheap sentiment. Damien Chazelle’s back to his old tricks, in other words, with Babylon, a “love letter” to the end of the silent era in Hollywood presented with a child’s understanding of history, obviously, not to mention human relationships, aspirations, behaviour, everything. It’s a stroke fantasy made by a 13-year-old boy, meaning it’s soaked in excreta without much evidence of anything like experience animating it–the movie made by the antagonist of Monty Python’s “Nudge Nudge” bit, who, at the end of 10 minutes of naughty entendre, wonders rapturously what it might be like to touch a woman’s breast. I loved Chazelle’s last film, First Man: Sober and introspective, it found the soulfulness in an engineer’s deadening grief over the loss of a child. His other three films, this one included, are a trilogy of desperation to be taken seriously as a great auteur, a great historian of jazz and Hollywood, and an artiste of the first calibre. Alas, he doesn’t know the difference between being celebrated for his worst instincts versus fighting for his best ones. At the end of Whiplash, La La Land, and now Babylon, the only thing he’s successfully communicated is that he’s seen Singin’ in the Rain, if not entirely understood it. It should take less than eight hours to accomplish that.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

September 22, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ben Platt, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Adams
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on his stage play with songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
directed by Stephen Chbosky

by Walter Chaw Dear Evan Hansen is the Canadian-girlfriend grift, emerging from insecurity and good intentions–that mythological girl from a place far enough away for high-school kids that it might as well be Narnia or Middle-Earth, whose phantom existence affirms you are not as pathetic and alone as you really are. And when your Canadian girlfriend dies by house-fire or moose misadventure, perhaps there’s a vein of pathos to be mined there for whatever profit grief allows. It’s the illusion of depth for an immature, troubled, frightened kid, common enough that the “Canadian girlfriend” has entered the pantheon of urban fairytales. How ’bout if Dear Evan Hansen had been about the social pressures that harangue Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) into exploiting the death of a deeply unbalanced and complete stranger instead of how Evan Hansen’s own terminal thoughts and attempted suicide forgive his sociopathic manipulation of a grieving family and school community? Aye, there’s a movie for you–the one where Evan Hansen is a victim and not the hero, and the bad guy is not the truth of his unforgivable deception being discovered, but the overwhelming stricture to conform that weighs especially heavy on adolescents. The sneakiest thing about Dear Even Hansen is that at the end of it all, it’s not actually okay that Evan is an outcast. The premise itself is the bully.

Telluride ’21: King Richard

September 6, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jon Bernthal, Tony Goldwyn, Dylan McDermott
written by Zach Baylin
directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

by Walter Chaw You know what this movie is. You know the major beats, you know the resolution, and in those rare instances when something happens you maybe don’t expect, you know immediately how it will resolve. There is no surprise to movies like Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard by design, not misstep–they are by their nature for the least discriminating audience, the ones desperate to avoid challenge, thinking, reconsideration, discomfort. It is Taco Bell on vacation. You go there for a reason and none of it has to do with the quality of the food. It’s the disgusting robe you’ve had since college that your wife begs you to throw away, but you don’t. King Richard is garbage that people like, machine-extruded pap, hardwired and cynically engineered to garner a certain level of prestige. It’s the uplift picture multiplied by a minority voice. It’s ugly manipulation, more horse-betting than art–though the gamblers would argue that what they do is science rather than just venal calculation.

Demonic (2021)

August 24, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical, VOD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, Michael J. Rogers, Terry Chen
written and directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw Carly’s mom, Angela (Nathalie Boltt), killed a lot of people once and then fell into a coma, not that Carly (Carly Pope) would know, because Carly stopped talking to Angela years ago–long about the time Angela killed a lot of people. I mean, even if she had tried to talk to Angela, she wouldn’t have been able to. Because coma. Technically, she could talk to her, I suppose, and the jury’s out as to whether Angela could hear her, but being in a coma, Angela wouldn’t be able to respond. Comas are a bitch that way. Anyway, a sketchy beard-o in a suit (not Sharlto Copley, which is this film’s first and last surprise) from some tech company called Therapole reaches out to Carly and says, “Hey, what if you could talk to your mother?” And Carly says, “I don’t want to talk to my mother.” And he says, “She’s in a coma.” And she says, “Why is she in a coma?” Then she goes to the Therapole headquarters (erected on some kind of haunted burial ground, as her friend Martin (Chris William Martin) discovers while Googling stuff for her), since the news that Angela’s in a coma has made Carly want to reach out to her. This is what we call in the business “a really good plot” and “solid writing.” Seems Dr. Creepy (Michael J. Rogers, playing Sharlto Copley) has invented a virtual-reality technology that allows people to Dreamscape/Brainstorm themselves onto a holodeck of someone’s memories using advanced Bakshi-era rotoscoping technology. It bears mentioning that Martin believes Therapole–not to be confused with Theranos–wants to find a demon to exorcise, the drawing of which resembles one of Giger’s aliens. That’s because the writer and director of this mess, Neill Blomkamp, didn’t get to make an Alien movie like he wanted. It’s the world’s saddest Easter Egg–which says something, given that there’s a Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Palmer (2021) + Music (2021)

February 16, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Drama, Musical, Streaming, VOD, ZERO STARS

PALMER
*/****
starring Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Alisha Wainwright, June Squibb
written by Cheryl Guerrero
directed by Fisher Stevens

MUSIC
ZERO STARS/****
starring Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr., Maddie Ziegler, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by Sia & Dallas Clayton
directed by Sia

by Walter Chaw I feel like I’ve seen Fisher Stevens’s well-intentioned Palmer dozens of times in the last three months alone. This version takes a few half-hearted stabs at social relevance with a heartfully-plucked acoustic guitar on the soundtrack but is finally nothing more than Justin Timberlake’s latest shot at movie stardom. He’s going deep as Palmer, fresh out of prison with a gruff attitude and a neckbeard denoting his impoverished status, reminding largely that his best role isn’t the one where he plays a guy married to Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis, but the one where he lip-syncs The Killers‘ “All These Things That I’ve Done” in Southland Tales. The familiar movements: Palmer has to get laid, get a job, and become the guardian to a moppet, who saves him. He’s got a hard shell, that Palmer, though the hint of a grin halfway through as he’s driving his catalyst-towards-redemption to school hints that underneath his hard shell, there’s a big ol’ softy. The twist is that the moppet is non-gender-conforming Sam (Ryder Allen), who likes to wear pink, put barrettes in his hair, and have tea parties with the girls in his class. He also hates football but lives in the south, and Palmer used to be a bigshot high-school football player. Man, what a conundrum in which Palmer’s found himself. A dadgum conundrum’s what it is.

Malcolm & Marie (2021) – Netflix

February 6, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Zendaya, John David Washington
written and directed by Barry Levinson’s son

by Walter Chaw An eight-minute diatribe is the noxious centre of Sam Levinson’s intolerable ego trip Malcolm & Marie, distinct neither for the obnoxious volume at which it’s delivered nor for the hollowness of its content, but because it manages to stand out at all, coming as it does in the middle of the other shouted invectives that form the rest of it. In this diatribe, flavour-of-the-moment, hotshot movie director Malcolm (John David Washington), on the night of the premiere of his well-received debut, reads a glowing early review by “that white lady at the L.A. Times” and rails on about “woke” culture and how he, as a Black director, is only compared to other Black directors as opposed to people like William Wyler and Billy Wilder? Does he mean real directors, or does he mean white directors? Does he mean that he doesn’t like to be compared to John Singleton and Spike Lee because they are not good, or because they are Black and what he does, what Malcolm does, is entirely independent of his identity as a Black man? Is he suggesting that he has no identity as a Black artist? And if he’s not suggesting that, is Levinson, the unimaginably-privileged white son of Hollywood royalty (Oscar-winning Barry is his dad)? Why is either Levinson or Malcolm complaining about this straw lady also talking about how Malcolm’s film addresses trauma, recovery, and violence towards women? Is this not the one area in which she should be “allowed” to opine?

Irresistible (2020)

June 24, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, VOD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Carell, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Rose Byrne
written and directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart’s Irresistible hates you, absolutely loathes you. It can’t believe it has to talk to you and so it’s smug and dismissive, and then at the end of it all, it offers up three different but equally repugnant endings that give the viewer a variety of shit sandwiches to choose from, though you do have to pick one. As a metaphor for what’s going on in the world right now, it’s on-the-nose. As a movie, it’s an assault more objectionable than any Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke miserabilist exercise, because it clothes itself in an affable sheaf of menial, liberal equivocation–but underneath it’s this boiling, nihilistic condemnation of every single one of you fucking idiots who let it get so bad. It brings to mind nothing so much as George Sanders’s suicide note expressing boredom with the very notion of you to the very last. Everything is terrible. The experiment is over. We failed. There’s no hope. And Irresistible is precisely the kind of asshole who offers a utopian social solution he clearly thinks is a hopeless fantasy but pretends is advice given earnestly so you don’t think he’s the other kind of asshole who just complains about how stupid people are all the time. It’s a film about the mortal tone-deafness of liberals that is itself mortally tone-deaf.

Telluride 2019: The Aeronauts

September 7, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Anne Reid
written by Jack Thorne
directed by Tom Harper

by Walter Chaw If you would’ve thought that a film about the early days of meteorology would be deadly and ridiculous: good call. Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts imagines plucky meteorologist James Glashier (Eddie Redmayne) as a starry-eyed dreamer certain that one day humans will predict the weather badly in front of bluescreens. In pursuit of this, he enlists the aid of tragic hot-air balloonist (well, not hot air at that time–gas of some sort) Amilia Renne (Felicity Jones), a fictional character standing in for the real James Glashier’s erstwhile ballooning companion, Henry Tracey Coxwell. See, all the names are hilarious: the Glashier that will not melt damn the torpedoes, the pretty flying “wren,” and in real life there was a “Coxwell.” Anyhow, Amelia, named after the other woman pilot you know the name of, is a showman, arriving late to the launching grounds riding on top of her carriage (can you imagine!) with her trick dog and her magic voice that carries several football pitches in every direction with no magnification. You can tell from the start that James doesn’t approve of her showboating, except that the way the film is structured–as a series of flashbacks detailing their relationship–it’s clear that James has sought her out because of her draw as a public attraction. You can tell from the start, too, that the real vertical ascent is the friends they’ll become along the way.

Telluride ’18: The Front Runner

September 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Telluride, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina
written by Matt Bai & Jay Carson & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In 1988, Gary Hart, the democratic former senator from my home state of Colorado, was the front runner for the Presidency of the United States. About a week before the primary, which would have cemented his ascendancy to a post seemingly all but preordained, this guy–classically handsome, tall, masculine, progressive–did what powerful men in privileged positions sometimes do: he slept with a young woman who wanted a job with his campaign. That’s a problem, but the problem is he dared the WASHINGTON POST to follow him; he touted his ethics and morals as a foundational plank to his platform, and when the MIAMI HERALD took him up on his dare, they discovered that he was maybe a serial philanderer who in those last halcyon days before the Internet, hadn’t learned the voracious appetite the public has for a good, sleazy story concerning the tragic fall of kings. It’s hardly ever the crime–it’s almost always the cover-up. And in 1988, Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner says, politicians weren’t very good at the cover-up. Largely because the press was complicit in helping politicians, athletes, and other powerful men in powerful spheres keep sexual dalliances and abuses quiet. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, after all.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Rondo

July 27, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** written and directed by Drew Barnhardt by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt's sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it's so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field's Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill's (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party…

Telluride ’17: downsizing

September 3, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Satire, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2017, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Hong Chau, Christoph Waltz
written by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Imagine if Tracy Flick, the energetic, demonic high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne’s brilliant Election, were a Vietnamese exchange student, heavily and hilariously accented. That’s one of the things wrong with Payne’s excruciating downsizing, a film that takes his now-trademark twee misanthropy and mashes it up against this pretense of Swiftian social satire that sets the Sisyphus-like struggle of the bedraggled Everyman against a fatalistic backdrop of environmental apocalypse. It’s a broad discourse on a lot of things: poverty and the failure of capitalism; the United States tearing itself apart along arbitrary class distinctions politicized into dramas of dominance and oppression. It’s also about a filmmaker using science-fiction as a cudgel, swinging it about as disrespectfully as he does extreme racial caricaturing and destined to hold it up as a shield when whatever opposition comes rolling in to protest a film that mainstream publications out of Venice are already proclaiming some kind of contemporary masterpiece. It’s like George Lucas all over again, but imagine if it were like Charlie Kaufman instead. For me, when you have an Asian character as problematic as Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a figure set up as both an object of derision and a holy relic, everything else is drowned out in that noise.

Rough Night (2017)

June 17, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Scarlett Johansson, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Zoë Kravitz
screenplay by Lucia Aniello & Paul W. Downs
directed by Lucia Aniello

by Walter Chaw Going by the trailers, I thought Lucia Aniello’s Rough Night was going to be a distaff Very Bad Things–which in the grand calculus of things would’ve been a very good thing. Peter Berg’s masterpiece of bad behaviour and karmic vengeance is uncompromising, hilarious, vicious, and at least five or six years ahead of its time. (1998 was not kind to it.) The problem with this genre is essentially Judd Apatow, who, though fitfully funny, infects his pictures and their imitators–of which this is one–with a thick strain of conservative morality. His movies climax in marriage and monogamy and the very restoration of society. Very Bad Things ends with paralysis, death, and half-life; Rough Night ends by excusing everything, making sure everyone is friends and cool and shit, and explaining away why it is that the truly noxious character at the centre of it all is the way she is. Spoiler: it’s because her mother is dying of Alzheimer’s and she’s trying to give her a rosy picture of her…you know what, never mind. Above and beyond any ugliness embedded in the film’s premise and execution, the exploitation of this disease for some sort of moral reclamation is the ugliest. It’s completely unnecessary. It’s noxious.

Snatched (2017)

May 14, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Joan Cusack, Ike Barinholtz
written by Katie Dippold
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Walter Chaw Snatched is an unbearable piece of shit about an unbearable piece of shit (Amy Schumer) and her mother (Goldie Hawn), who get kidnapped for ransom in Ecuador and eventually escape into Colombia. Being an unbearable piece of shit is, of course, Amy Schumer’s shtick, and she plays it to the hilt here as Emily, a self-absorbed, selfie-obsessed piece of shit who gets dumped by her boyfriend (Randall Park, describing their respective career trajectories in his only bit of dialogue) after losing her job. Said boyfriend is a rocker about to go big and be inundated with “hundreds of pussies,” breaking the ice on the vagina jokes that begin with the title, sort of, and continue more or less unabated for ninety interminable minutes. Fans of Schumer will be reminded that her vagina smells like soup. It occurs to me that the only way this film could have been good would be if Tom Green were starring in it and it was twenty years ago. Tom Green was brave. Amy Schumer is not brave.