We’re Still Here
Thanks for your patience, folks. Lots of good stuff on the way, asap. In the meantime, check out our Master Review Index, which has ballooned of late as we get closer to fully restoring the archives.-Ed.
Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision – Books
Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision
FFC rating: 7/10
by Charles Elton
by Bill Chambers Six years after his death, Michael Cimino remains an enigma, shrouded by a swirling mass of rumours and contradictions. A biographer has their work cut out for them. Before reading Charles Elton’s Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision, I took stock of everything I knew about the mercurial filmmaker: that he helmed seven movies during a span of 22 years, the second of which he was fêted for (The Deer Hunter), the third of which he went to director jail for (Heaven’s Gate); and that he gradually began to look different in ways for which time alone cannot account. I also had some preconceived notions about Cimino–that he was vain, an egotist, one who burned a lot of bridges–that are more or less borne out by Elton’s overview, but it’s important to note that Cimino was not around to defend himself when the author went rummaging through his past. (I feel fairly confident in saying, again from the picture Elton paints, that he probably would’ve spent more energy trying to halt the book’s publication altogether.) Though Cimino is not one of the great posthumous bios on the order of David Weddle’s If They Move…Kill ‘Em! or Lee Server’s Baby, I Don’t Care, it does have unique virtues (which I’ll get to) and is reasonably good at preserving Cimino’s dignity while countering or outright demolishing his own unreliable narrative.
All at Once: An Interview with the Makers of “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Walter Chaw interviews “The Daniels,” Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writer-directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once
The function–the true function–of art at any time, but particularly in dark times collective and personal, is, I think, to provide evidence of grace. However low, however diminished, however stricken we may find ourselves, here are these artifacts of others who went before us into the breach to retrieve…I don’t know: signposts? Breadcrumbs in the wild, overgrown wood; strings in the labyrinth; a way out or a way in. I don’t know. Everything Everywhere All At Once returned fragments of myself to me that I had not been aware were missing. It is one of the most meaningful films of my life, appearing at a stage of my experience and movie-obsessed existence where I thought it was no longer possible to feel that way about a movie again. It reminded me of why I, more than love, why I need art to fill the spaces in me.
The Northman (2022)
**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers
by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers’s latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There’s even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film’s settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers’s previous film, The Lighthouse, and it’s the first of his movies that doesn’t require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.
All the Old Knives (2022)
*/****
starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Olen Steinhauer
directed by Janus Metz
by Walter Chaw Fred Schepisi’s The Russia House is a dignified, austere, mature adaptation of John le Carré that feels like a Graham Greene in its colonial exhaustion and resignation. Sean Connery plays “Barley” Scott-Blair, a publisher pulled into a game of international intrigue as the CIA and MI6, from opposite sides of the pond, seek to make him and a young Russian, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), into pawns in a game of Cold War chess. Barley falls in love with Katya, of course; who wouldn’t fall in love with Michelle Pfeiffer? And he plays both sides–well, all three sides–against the middle in order to secure a romantic future for himself and his lady fair. It’s the best film Schepisi’s made outside his native Australia, with a Jerry Goldsmith score (featuring Branford Marsalis on the soprano sax) that treats it as a bit of a chamber piece, like a story told to grandchildren when the danger has faded but the love’s continued to bloom. They’ve heard it a million times, but let the old guy tell it: he seems so happy when he does. I’ve loved The Russia House ever since seeing it on Christmas in 1990. It’s one of my comfort movies, twisty enough to engage with performances that feel lived-in like an old and beloved sweater.
The Contractor (2022)
***/****
starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland
written by J.P. Davis
directed by Tarik Saleh
by Walter Chaw Tarik Saleh’s The Contractor reminds me a lot of Michael B. Jordan’s recent attempt at a franchise-starter Without Remorse in that both are the sort of workmanlike action pictures that once kept multiplexes afloat but now occupy a mid-budget niche relegated to streaming services. Its closest analogue might be Amazon’s “Reacher” series in terms of its clean action, straight-line plotting, and lantern-jawed “all-American” hero trained to kill and prone to angst over his lethal ways. The Contractor adds some wrinkles in using the plight of veterans returning from service with neither financial nor emotional support while also reserving some criticism for the private, for-profit contractors who send mercenaries into conflict zones for the purposes of ratfucking and wetworks. Mostly, though, it’s an able showcase for Chris Pine as a sturdy action hero who is also a non-threatening avatar for the Average Joe demographic: handsome but cool, clever not brainy, self-sufficient but loyal to an old buddy, a good dad and good Christian good at tamping down “girl” emotions and, moreover, good at boom-boom stab-stab.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents’ story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It’s an immigrant story–a typical one, I’ve come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it’s a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn’t approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them–they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to “break” my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don’t know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I’m broken. I’m working on fixing it.
Life During Wartime #27: SE7EN (Patreon exclusive)
by Walter Chaw Se7en (1995) U.S.: Peacock, Peacock Premium Canada: Starz (Crave, Amazon) My son is very protective of his experience. He's come to some horror films late. My daughter, who's now 18, is much more adventurous. Still, she's stayed away from Se7en until now. There are a few films like this that her mother and I have strongly discouraged her from watching. I have a long list of red flags, stuff like the Italian animal-cruelty/found-footage flicks, which I don't think offer anything of value beyond shock and dismay, as well as great world masterpieces like Salò, The Glass Cage, and…
Umma (2022)
*/****
starring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, MeeWha Alana Lee, Dermot Mulroney
written and directed by Iris K. Shim
by Walter Chaw Sandra Oh is very good as a woman working through the generational trauma shared by many first-gen Asian immigrants to the United States. She’s exceptional occupying a range of complex, polarized emotions, managing in many instances to pull off scenes headed towards histrionics with exactly the right amount of reserve to keep it south of camp. Consider when her amateur apiarist Amanda learns of her mother’s death from a long-estranged uncle (Tom Yi), who appears on her doorstep unannounced. He disapproves of how Amanda’s daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart), born and raised in the United States, doesn’t speak a word of Korean, and he blames Amanda for causing her mother’s passing by the fact of her absence sitting vigil at her deathbed. He gives Amanda a bundle comprising her mother’s favourite things along with her ashes, telling her to provide her a proper burial, lest Amanda herself become as vicious and intolerable as her Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee). Oh keeps her emotions steady. She holds on to them like a drowning sailor. You can see the turmoil in her face, though it’s carefully held, and when she tells him to leave, she does it without turning the table over. That’s powerful stuff. There’s an entire film here, a good one, that never goes to a supernatural place with Amanda’s baggage–one that recognizes how strong Oh’s internalization of this role is and lets her do it without things jumping out at her from the basement. The parts of Umma that explicitly fail are the horror-movie parts. It’s not simply that they don’t work, it’s that making an Asian mother the literal monster in an American horror movie is absolutely fraught with representational landmines writer-director Iris K. Shim doesn’t quite know how to avoid. Had a white creator made either this or the recent Turning Red, there’d be an uproar. A justified one.
The Matrix Resurrections (2021) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version
½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski
by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn’t mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn’t spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you’re riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it–run with it, for fuck’s sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it’s particularly undignified. It’s Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who’s way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. “Okay, okay, see, Neo is–haha–NEO is Mr. Anderson again and–haha, check it–he’s like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called ‘The Matrix’, and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait… What if Trinity was The One, too?” You’ve heard of the concept of “raising all boats”? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat–sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she’s holding. “Hi, I’m Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I’m drawing on an inside straight.” Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.
X (2022)
****/****
starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi
written and directed by Ti West
by Walter Chaw Early on in Ti West’s X, a guy pulls out a guitar in the rented bungalow he’s sharing with his buddies and starts playing a familiar riff. His girlfriend sings. She has a pretty voice. Not a world-shaking voice, but she means what she’s singing, which makes up for a multitude of sins. It’s a tough scene to pull off due to it being a set-up that’s been paid off a few times, as it was in Animal House, by someone walking by and smashing the guitar against a wall. There are fewer muscles necessary to affect a snarky posture than to strike an earnest pose–less skill required to arch an eyebrow than to build a situation with fully-rounded characters we care about enough not to mock for their desire to connect with one another. How exactly, in 2022, do you do a scene where a group of kids performs “Landslide” without eliciting eye-rolls? Especially in a horror movie where a certain amount of superiority to the material is the expectation rather than the exception? Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” in 1974 to talk about a period of separation from her boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. An underestimated, perhaps superb lyricist, Nicks uses a natural disaster as a metaphor for both the violence and the inevitability of change over a lifetime: how she’ll lose her looks to age, how she’ll weather the tribulations of being in love in a temporary world. West shoots this scene without a hint of jokiness, intercutting the young folks at repose with elderly folks–their hosts–dressing for bed. The camera lingers on the sharp valleys and clefts of an old woman’s back, casting harsh shadows in the moonlight. I expected many things from X, but I didn’t expect it to make me cry.
“The 50 Best Witch Movies” by Walter Chaw
I'm terrified of witches. I'm afraid of mermaids, too, but I stay off the ocean generally because of the whole shark thing. Sirens, same. And banshees--I think they're in Scotland mostly, right? But living in Colorado makes wilderness difficult to avoid. No doubt the way I associate witches with the wild has something to do with a fear of female sexuality. More specifically, witches are what men accuse women of being when women pose a danger to them--when women get a little too close to coming fully into their power as disruptors of systemic masculine order. Accused of rape, adultery,…
Patreon exclusive: The 50 Best Witch Movies, by Walter Chaw
Now live for our Patreons, Walter Chaw chooses the 50 best witch movies. Lots of great streaming ideas in there if you want to throw your own mini-festival of witch classics. (Why? Why not?) And as you may or may not know, Walter's regular "Life During Wartime" column was also recently updated with entries on The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. We don't post a lot of subscriber-exclusive content--our Patreon is there mainly to subsidize this, the mothersite--but when we do it's available to read at whatever dollar amount you've chosen to pledge. Happy reading!
Deep Water (2022)
****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Ana De Armas, Tracy Letts, Grace Jenkins
screenplay by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, based upon the novel by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Adrian Lyne
by Walter Chaw Patricia Highsmith’s closest analogue in film for me is David Cronenberg–insect anthropologists, both, who see human beings in terms of their emotionless, biomechanical tics and repetitions. Her books are insidious things, death by quicksand or, like the protagonist of her short story “The Snail-Watcher,” drowned beneath a sea of the snails he keeps and breeds as objects of…well, it’s more than fascination. The hero of Highsmith’s Deep Water, Vic Van Allen, keeps snails, too. He names them, studies them, escapes to them when he can’t bear the company of his licentious wife, Melinda. He finds profundity in their couplings and multiplications as well as tragedy in their deaths, and he sees in them a corollary to his relationship with a wife he despises and a child he adores. Vic Van Allen can be understood entirely as an insect in a man’s clothing. He is slow, inexorable where Melinda is quicksilver, flighty, and resentful of their life together, seeking comfort and an escape of her own in a parade of lovers. At the root of it all, Highsmith is about forms of escape: the bomb shelters to which we retreat when stimulated, prodded, provoked like snails back into our shells.
The King’s Man (2021) [Ultimate Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Charles Dance
screenplay by Matthew Vaughn & Karl Gajdusek
directed by Matthew Vaughn
by Bill Chambers Make no mistake, 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service is reactionary horseshit, but I got a kick out of its shock tactics and couldn’t deny that this new chapter in producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughn’s career held some unlikely appeal as an alternative if not an antidote to the antiseptic Marvel and faux-gritty DC cinematic universes. The film was tacit confirmation that Vaughn, after courting controversy with Kick-Ass, had embraced his inner Droog: he would now revel in the violence and latent fascism of his favoured crime and superhero fiction–albeit drolly, like a more cartoonish S. Craig Zahler. In retrospect, however, it’s probably more accurate to say that Vaughn let muse Mark Millar, who wrote the graphic novels Kingsman and Kick-Ass were based on, Pied Piper him into a brick wall, i.e., the dead-end that is The King’s Man, the third chapter in a trilogy that had nowhere to go and so goes backwards to tell an origin story–complete with the dulled edges that tend to happen to adult-skewing franchises as kids become their prevailing consumer. Unlike RoboCop 3 or Police Academy III: Back in Training, The King’s Man retains the R rating of its predecessors, though here it feels like the MPA is primarily trying to protect children from boredom.
Turning Red (2022)
**/****
screenplay by Julia Cho, Domee Shi
directed by Domee Shi
by Walter Chaw There’s a classic ONION article where an Asian San Francisco dry cleaner is picketed for upholding harmful Asian stereotypes that I think about a lot–especially when I wonder what would happen if I ever wrote something about my experiences with a domineering mother and a father who often stood by and watched when I could’ve used a champion. There are so few representations of Asian-Americans in American film that the other edge of that sword of getting a shot at telling a story is, what if the story we tell is merely a (hopefully) more nuanced version of the same old shit? Asian women are slotted into two types by this culture: prostitutes and dragon ladies–the assumption being that the former eventually ages into the latter. They are fetish objects with their own category in porn and shorthands for stentorian parenting and management styles, heavy on the scolding and light on the positive affirmation. These stereotypes arise from WWII GI encounters with brothels in Pacific war zones and a myth of Asian exceptionalism constructed to pit Asians against Blacks in the United States. I have seen white versions of these characters as well (both the whore and the drill sergeant-as-mom), but I have also seen the entire range of human possibility expressed through white faces and bodies in the same films. What I have not seen is a similar courtesy extended to minority characters. One dragon lady in a movie filled with other Asian faces and experiences is fine; it wouldn’t even be unrealistic. When it’s the only characterization, however, it’s a problem that actually gets people murdered. I mean, no one watches Carrie and thinks Mrs. White is a stand-in for all white mothers.
Offseason (2022)
*½/****
starring Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Melora Walters
written and directed by Mickey Keating
by Walter Chaw As her star-making performance in Ti West’s exceptional The House of the Devil will attest, Jocelin Donahue makes for a compelling lead. She has about her something of Famke Janssen’s quality of toughness that isn’t undermined by a vulnerability. Lately, Donahue has shown up here and there, doing good work in supporting roles in big films like To the Wonder and Doctor Sleep and taking larger roles in smaller projects like Mickey Keating’s Offseason, where her Marie is summoned back to the family reserve upon the desecration of a relative’s grave. That should’ve been her first warning. Her second is the grizzled local colour–like the Bridge Man (Richard Brake), who tells her and her asshole boyfriend, George (Joe Swanberg), that the island they’re trying to get to is about to have the bridge connecting it to the mainland raised for the season. “How do you close an island?” George wants to know. The better question is, will Offseason be able to lard Marie’s guilt about her relationship with her dead mother with enough gravity to serve as a metaphor for an entire Silent Hill village’s bargain with some nameless, Lovecraftian Deep One? And the answer is…complicated. I think a mother/daughter thing could have provided enough subtext had Keating been in better control of the story he’s telling. The pieces are there, like a payphone receiver left off the hook and swinging for pregnant seconds, but the connective tissue seems to be missing, as in how that missed connection on a dead technology relates to Marie’s inability to connect with mom Ava (Melora Walters) before Ava’s death. I like films that eschew exposition, but what a film lacks in exposition it must replace with a persistence of vision. Without it, it’s like when you drum out a “tune” with your fingers on a table and think that anyone else knows what you’re playing.
The Seed (2022) – Shudder
**½/****
starring Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge, Sophie Vavasseur
written and directed by Sam Walker
by Walter Chaw A spirited if familiar body-horror comedy, Sam Walker’s hyphenate debut The Seed showcases a sharp, clean writing/directing aesthetic that doesn’t do anything particularly novel but does the old stuff with verve and economy. Here, a trio of pals decamps to a mod-mansion in the middle of nowhere to watch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower. At least, that’s why “geek-hot” Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) is there. Her influencer buddy Deidre (Lucy Martin) is on hand to livestream the weekend’s events, while yoga instructor Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) wouldn’t say no to a few new clicks for her business, either. The sunbathing, margaritas, mild eruptions of personal grievance, and almost-immediate interruption of cell service are all taken care of in the first 10 minutes. Then it’s on to the uncomfortably-close meteor shower that leads to them wondering if “it’s supposed to do that?” Probably not. Suddenly a thing falls into the pool, starts gooping, is fished out by our heroes (lest Heather’s dad “kill” her), and, of course, resolves itself to be a very stinky alien. “I think God took a shit in your pool, Heather,” observes Diedre, the mean one. The rest of the film is what happens when this divine excrement wakes up.
The Batman (2022)
**/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell
written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig
directed by Matt Reeves
by Walter Chaw I love Matt Reeves. I think Cloverfield is exceptional, that I underestimated Let Me In upon its initial release, and that, for as popular as it was, the Planet of the Apes trilogy–to which he contributed two entries–remains underappreciated for how cogent and incisive a satire it is of the doomed trajectory of our irredeemable state. Reeves appears to be the rare bird who can work within the framework of franchise and intellectual property and still manage to produce largely uncompromised pieces, unbeholden to stock set-ups and happy pay-offs. I had the highest of hopes for his turn at the wheel of the Batman machine: if anyone was going to do a down Batman in defiance of the jealous protectors of a billion-dollar money tree, it was Reeves. Alas, The Batman is overlong, over-serious, poorly-paced, and the first of Reeves’s films to show obvious production interference in the sort of narrative post-script–delivered via world-weary Blade Runner voiceover, no less–that is never not embarrassing for its awkward pandering. Any sins of structure can at least be attributed to Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, who lean heavily on the “detective” part of Batman’s “Dark Knight Detective” moniker in an earnest, all-in go at neo-noir. But the grafted-on epilogue suffers an instant, gaudy tissue rejection. It’s sap in a movie that, for all its gravid clumsiness, has decidedly not been sap.
Adams Family Values: An Interview with the Creators of “Hellbender”
Walter Chaw interviews Hellbender creators
John Adams, Lulu Adams, Zelda Adams, and Toby Poser
Of all the movies I saw last year, two viscerally exhilarated me, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end for the power of their craft and the empowerment of their messages. The first was Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, the finest spectacle film I’ve seen in I can’t remember how long–a smart updating of a well-travelled text by one of the few unquestioned masters of the medium. The other was Hellbender, the seventh film by a family of wanderers–and artists–who decided at some point to buy a rickety old RV, drive it across the U.S., and make a very particular brand of home movie to document their nights and days. Hellbender is so alive with the rapture of living that it almost pulsates; watching it is a tactile experience, and its celebration of women and coming into power feels effortless. It’s not unlike the idea of “blood harmony”–when it happens, it’s supernatural. Hellbender is the truth. So when I was offered the chance to interview filmmakers Toby Poser and John Adams and their daughters Lulu and Zelda Adams over Zoom one snowy afternoon, I was beside myself. It’s fun to catch phenoms right before they take off into the stratosphere.