FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray (2021)

December 23, 20212021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best-of Lists, Blog, Blu-ray Disc

by Bill Chambers It was a pretty strong year for Blu-ray and another bad one for civilization, which is probably why an unusually high number of discs (Donnie Darko 4K, The Road Warrior, and Criterion’s Citizen Kane, to name a few) fell victim to human error in 2021. I’m not dissuaded by this, I’m touched by the format’s resilience in the face of adversity. One thing is for certain: the pandemic has not been kind to the hoarder of physical media–this hoarder, at least. It’s led to short-stocked titles, import levies, fewer offers of review copies, and me not making one of these lists in 2020 because there was so much I missed. I don’t think I expected to be back in the same boat 12 months later–or maybe, to paraphrase the world’s greatest detective, I knew I would be, but I hoped I wouldn’t be. I’m ignoring any pangs of FOMO this time around, though, because I did see at least 10 titles worth singling out, even if collectively they don’t tell the whole story of the year in home video. Besides, any excuse to proselytize for physical media as the oil slick of streaming continues to submerge preexisting content delivery systems.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

December 21, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical

½*/****
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.

The Agony and the Ecstasy: An Interview with Lauren Hadaway

December 19, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

World-weary and wise and sharp as the crack of a pistol, Lauren Hadaway, after years as a top-shelf ADR artist, set a goal for herself to become a director. During the downtime between looping sessions on Justice League in 2017, she started writing the script for what would become The Novice, a semi-autobiographical film about a driven young woman joining her college crew team and finding in it an Everest she must scale just because it's there. Just because, nay, especially because, it's hard. The resulting film is as sharp and as driven as its creator, every frame composed not just beautifully but to tell a visual story of the protagonist's interiors. It's clear almost immediately that, more than a sports story, The Novice is about finding purpose through ritualized pain–and maybe a little bit or more about Hadaway overcoming self-doubt and enduring an unprecedented global event to see this project through to completion.

I began our interview by asking her about the process of coming through a difficult time.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

December 17, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Marisa Tomei
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Parker (Tom Holland), having just been outed to the world as Spider-Man by a dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), finds himself besieged by press and angry mobs mistaken in their belief that Mysterio was a very handsome hero. This pushes Peter into hiding with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon). The kids need guards when they go to school (why are they still going to school?) and are trying to focus on applying to MIT because they’re all three of them brilliant, in case you’ve forgotten. Recognizing the toll of his exposure on the people who have remained loyal to him, Peter asks Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell on the universe so that people forget him. How this might be achieved in the age of social media and pocket cameras is dismissed as “magic,” which is also how it’s explained that a hole in the multiverse opens up, allowing a bunch of villains and other versions of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield) to cross over into this one’s reality. At least the film has the self-awareness to constantly call out the facility of “magic” as a catch-all, layering its characters’ incredulity in a running joke about a “wizard’s dungeon” and one character’s “You have magic here?” As wit goes, it ain’t much, but I’ll take it.

The Novice (2021)

December 16, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sports, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsyth, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry
written and directed by Lauren Hadaway

by Walter Chaw Lauren Hadaway’s hyphenate debut The Novice is so good, so self-assured, so kinetic and so very much about something that, all hyperbole justified, it heralds the arrival of an important new artist. Garnering instant comparisons to Whiplash for its heart-attack-fuelled kineticism and hyperfocus on the obsessive, gnostic practice of an obscure discipline and to Black Swan for similar reasons as well as its troubled female protagonist, The Novice‘s closest analogue for me is actually Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, a film about the pursuit of knowledge and sublimity free of the depressingly quotidian limitations of the body. The Novice itself is free of Damien Chazelle’s preening and the literalness of the hero’s emotional fracture in Black Swan. Rather, it preaches the gospel of being fine with who you are not despite how fucked up and “intense” you might be, but because of that. At the end of all that auto-excavation, it says that the self, whatever its attendant flaws and hardwired weaknesses, has intrinsic value, and the knowledge of that value comes with immeasurable power. The title of Hadaway’s film recalls the Christian concept of the religious “novitiate,” that period where a person called to servitude enters into intense study, constant prayer, forced brotherhood, and an invasive interiority, all to prove whether or not they will be welcomed into the fold. In The Novice, the novitiate is Alex Dall, and the “fold” is everyone at her school who thinks she’s some kind of freak.

Being the Ricardos (2021)

December 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda
written and directed by Aaron Sorkin

by Walter Chaw One of the best home viewing experiences I ever had was going through New Line’s “Infinifilm” DVD of Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days with my wife, clicking on every single prompt to view the voluminous supplementary material threaded through the picture and getting what felt like a freshman-level introductory course on the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. An old and dear friend here in the Denver Market threw his hands up while we were talking about Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos and asked, rhetorically and not to an imaginary Sorkin, “Why Aaron Sorkin?” It’s a great question. I think the “why Aaron Sorkin” is that he is the human manifestation of the “Infinifilm” concept but less educational and more facile and self-indulgent, hence populist in the worst way. That is, populist in a way that seems prestigious but is, in fact, playing to the groundlings-infested pit. Emboldened perhaps by the success of the David Fincher-directed/Sorkin-scripted The Social Network and the Bennett Miller-directed/Sorkin-co-scripted Moneyball, Sorkin’s directorial efforts so far–Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and now Being the Ricardos–have all been based on true stories. Maybe he figures he’s hit a rich vein of biopic dramaturgy that he can strip-mine until this mountain is just a pile of rubble littered with Oscars. Sorkin is a slick one-trick pony, that guy. Giddyup, cowboys.

Extracurricular Activities: “Voir”

December 9, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Streaming

Heads up! This past Monday Netflix launched "Voir", a new 6-part series produced in collaboration with David Fincher. Featuring visual essays on film from a variety of Internet-based critics, "Voir" wraps up its first season with an episode written, produced, and narrated by none other than our own Walter Chaw. In "Profane and Profound," Walter takes a close look at Walter Hill's 48Hrs., which launched the movie career of Eddie Murphy and cemented the "buddy-cop genre" as a staple of '80s cinema--even though, as Walter points out, "buddies" hardly describes what Murphy's and Nick Nolte's characters are to each other.…

SDAFF ’21: Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

December 7, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Gûzen to sôzô
****/****
starring Kotone Furukawa, Ayumu Nakajima, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Katsuki Mori, Fusako Urabe, Aoba Kawai
written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Ryusuke Hamaguchi listens well. His films may be indicated by the denseness of their dialogue, their patience in allowing their characters to speak it, and his trust in his actors to do unbroken takes and in his audience to go along for the ride, but what enchants about them is how carefully they hear what their characters are saying, and how they invite us to do the same. At some point during each of Hamaguchi’s films, I’ve found myself leaning in–not because the mix is too low, but because I’m socially conditioned to lean towards a speaker when they’re saying something that’s at once difficult for them to say and imperative that they say it. I’m giving these characters eye contact and attention. Hamaguchi’s movies are a form of communion–that is to say, a connection that touches on profundity. Given their intimacy and wisdom, they hold within them the capacity to rip my guts out. Which they do, remorselessly and sweetly. Does that describe the concept of “winsome”? In “Magic,” the first of the three short films that comprise Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, beautiful Tsugumi (Hyunri), in the back of a long cab ride with her friend Meiko (Kotone Furukawa), describes a platonic first date in which she and her partner “caress” each other with their words. Not “talk dirty,” she clarifies–getting to know the other person by telling the truth when lies are expected. Through Tsugumi, Hamaguchi is talking about his process.

Malignant (2021) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 5, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan’s Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone’s The Hand is–or, more to the point, Brian De Palma’s Sisters. It’s what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic “madwoman” picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also… Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That’s What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It’s the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can’t believe someone hasn’t done before. I’m not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

West Side Story (2021)

December 2, 2021****/****, 2021, Crime, Drama, Musical, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ansel Elgort, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Rachel Zegler
screenplay by Tony Kushner, based on the stage play by Arthur Laurents, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw West Side Story is the perfect vehicle for all of Spielberg’s prodigious strengths while deemphasizing his obvious weaknesses. In that way, it reminded me of another Stephen Sondheim adaptation, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, wherein a savant-like visual artist is paired with a genius for storytelling, plotting, and characterization. It occurs to me that every single Robert Wise film would be better had Spielberg directed it. This isn’t because Wise butchered The Magnificent Ambersons and betrayed Val Lewton, it’s because he played in the same sandbox as Spielberg and no one has ever been better at building those particular sandcastles. There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Spielberg, with a drumbeat gathering power on the soundtrack, transitions from a sign at a crossroads pointing to Berlin to a book burning in a public square. Kind of like the ones they’re organizing in central Virginia right now. He does it again in A.I. in the lead-up to the Flesh Fair. The combination of action and the rising thrum on the soundtrack is…visceral? Yes, that; kinetic, too. Chills-inducing. He uses the tactic again in the build-up to the “Mambo” number as Anita, Bernardo, and Maria arrive at the school gymnasium for the big dance. You hear the music, muted, through the doors, and then they’re thrown open, and Jerome Robbins’s ageless choreography explodes with all the furious vibrancy a collaboration between Jerome fucking Robbins and Steven fucking Spielberg promises. It’s a synesthetic representation of life and youth, ridiculously effective. We speak of spectacle films and the magic of “big” movies–I don’t know that I’ve felt a film’s scale like this in decades. All of this West Side Story‘s showstoppers are just that. They are alive and fresh, and Spielberg gets that when you have a Robbins or a Fosse or an Agnes DeMille, your job is to dance it like your shoes are on fire and let us see the bodies from head to toe. There is possibly no better visual storyteller in the history of movies than Spielberg, who finds in this partnership with great artists alive and dead the truest fruition of his gift.

Life During Wartime #25: THE GODFATHER (Patreon exclusive)

November 29, 2021Patreon

by Walter Chaw The Godfather (1972) U.S.: Fubo, Showtime, DirecTV, Spectrum Canada: Paramount+ My daughter turned 18 last month and my son just got his driver's permit, so I've never felt more mortal--not even when my dad died. (When that happened, my daughter was a month away from being born.) Not even when my in-laws died, because the labour of supporting my wife and kids through their grief mitigated the arc of my own. Not even when I got a few scary medical diagnoses, causing me to change my diet and habits, or when my mom was diagnosed with stage-4…

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

November 26, 20212021, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, France, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott’s second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is… And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics–it’s all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of “MST3K”–although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto’s turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here’s the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino’s accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There’s a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, “I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you’d-a unnerstan!” while Aldo makes the “c’mon” expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the “you disappointed the hell out of me” kiss of death and, again, it’s… Well, it’s notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Licorice Pizza (2021) + Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

November 22, 20212021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

LICORICE PIZZA
*½/****
starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE
**½/****
starring Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace
written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, John Michael Higgins plays real-life restaurateur Jerry Frick, proprietor of “The Mikado.” Frick is married to a severe and disapproving Japanese woman (Yumi Mizui) who apparently doesn’t speak any English, although she seems to understand it fluently. She certainly understands her husband, who doesn’t speak Japanese but does speak English, when he’s speaking it to her, in a cartoonish Asian accent. This is perhaps a commentary on how backwards everyone was in 1973, but Licorice Pizza is not otherwise a satire, so what the fuck is going on here? Is PTA reserving the barbed edge of his keen sociological blade exclusively to excavate anti-Asian depictions in film and nowhere else? Based on Hong Chau’s brief but memorable turn in Inherent Vice as a tough hooker (oops) who tries to warn the idiot hero of danger, there’s reason to hope. Yet if Frick is meant to be a satire of how white men are racist towards Asians in general and Asian women in particular… How? Just by the fact of him? In his second scene, he shows up with a different wife (Megumi Anjo), explaining how his first wife has left him and this is the new Mrs. Frick. The joke is either that Frick is a fetishist, or that all Asians look alike.

Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021)

November 19, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Musical, Streaming

tick, tick…Boom!
**/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesús, Vanessa Hudgens
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on the musical by Jonathan Larson
directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda

by Walter Chaw Dropping the same weekend as another hagiography for a narcissistic workaholic (King Richard), tick, tick…Boom! at least doesn’t include a 70-page manifesto for its subject’s unborn children. Also in its favour? It doesn’t centre a man in the success story of two women. No, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s technically-proficient biopic instead adapts the autobiographical musical of self-pitying tragic figure Jonathan Larson, played in the film by Andrew Garfield. Watching it, I got the feeling the whole exercise was just a way of showcasing songs from Larson’s defunct sci-fi magnum opus Superbia, which… Look, there’s a Ray Bradbury story called “The October Game” that tells about that nasty kid’s game where you turn out the lights and put your hands in a bowl of spaghetti and someone says, “This is the witch’s hair,” and so on. Except Bradbury suggests that there’s been a pretty terrible murder, and this is the murderer’s idea of a Greek kind of justice. It ends with one of the most memorable lines in Bradbury’s career: “Then …… some idiot turned on the lights.” I think about that line a lot, unbidden at the weirdest times; I thought of it during tick, tick…Boom! because I realized that some idiot will one day resurrect Superbia, a musical based on 1984, and make a billion dollars, thus driving me insane.

No Time to Die (2021)

November 16, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, James Bond, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge
directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Cary Fukunaga’s No Time to Die, the twenty-fifth canonical James Bond film, is the best one since Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and for many of the same reasons. One could hazard that the similarities, a vulnerable Bond chief among them, comprise the guiding principle behind this picture, with its multiple call-outs to Fleming’s books–On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in particular, along with its downbeat, mortal sequel You Only Live Twice, the last Bond Fleming completed himself. In the latter, 007’s boss, M, uses the same Jack London quote to eulogize the presumed-dead superspy (“The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time”) that his screen counterpart (Ralph Fiennes) uses to eulogize Bond in No Time to Die. It ends with Bond, initially dumbstruck by grief over the death of his wife in the previous novel (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), now stricken by amnesia and about to abandon his impregnated wife–the child a development Fleming never got to bring to term, but who finds her fruition in Fukunaga’s film. At a late point in No Time to Die, two combatants reaching the end of their struggles agree that the only reason to live is to leave a legacy. I find it touching that this film brings a small and precious note of Fleming’s to life, so many years after his death.

SDAFF ’21: Introduction + In Front of Your Face

November 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

인트로덕션
INTRODUCTION
**/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Park Mi-so, Shin Seok-ho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

당신 얼굴 앞에서
IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE
**½/****
starring Cho Yunhee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Hong Sang-soo’s films, more so than most, are only ever about Hong Sang-soo–and in his mind, Hong Sang-soo is Henrik Ibsen: the iconoclast, the great social observer and auto-didact, the artist who, late in his career, shifted his observations from class concerns in general to the insular peculiarities of individuals imprisoned by lifetimes of secrets. Hong is now more playwright and stage director than filmmaker; increasingly, the act of capturing his interpersonal dissections on film has felt like an afterthought unto inconvenience. One gets the sense Hong would rather be left alone with his company of players like the playwright/theatre director hero of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, initiating a lifetime of rehearsals with no opening date in sight. I think, closer to the truth, he can’t get out of his head anymore. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that two new Hong films are dropping simultaneously, given that both credit Hong as director/writer/editor (and, one presumes, sound engineer, gaffer, and craft services). In Front of Your Face is the less consumer-grade-home-movie-seeming between it and Introduction, though neither seems like something that took much time to put together, landing the same way as vignettes in a local one-act play festival might. Which is not to say there aren’t pleasures to be had, only that these are less full meals than amuse-bouches served at a tastefully-set party to which you weren’t necessarily invited.

SDAFF ’21: Time

November 10, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, San Diego Asian Film Festival

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko’s Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin’s shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there’s pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like “take a hit out on twilight,” Ko’s flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, ’70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief–roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung’s the only one of them, really, who isn’t all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job–a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He’s still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

My Fair Lady (1964) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital (Bryant Frazer’s last review)

November 9, 20211960s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Family, Musical, Romance

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

This is the final review Bryant Frazer wrote for FILM FREAK CENTRAL before he passed away. It’s technically a work-in-progress, but I don’t think its publication is anything to be embarrassed about. For what it’s worth, Bryant neglected to provide a star rating or grades for the audio, video, and extra features, so I’ve left them off rather than attempt to second-guess him. As our own Walter Chaw poetically put it to me, “His last act was not an act of judgment.”-Ed.

starring Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Theodore Bikel
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based upon the musical play as produced on the stage by Herman Levin, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, from a play by Bernard Shaw
directed by George Cukor

by Bryant Frazer My Fair Lady opens, provocatively enough, at a performance of Gounod’s operatic adaptation of Faust, that ageless drama of unforeseen consequences. As in the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, the role of the Devil is filled by Dr. Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a linguist who loudly (and rudely) laments the Cockney patois spoken by the lower classes. Drawing his attention is a wary flower girl named Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a London-born-and-bred Faust who’s intrigued by Higgins’s boast that, through speech training alone, he can elevate her from working-poor status into a new position as society maven. The drama pivots around that transformation: Hepburn moves into Higgins’s spacious home for the duration of her schooling, with an upcoming embassy ball–where Higgins hopes to debut his newly cultured creation–imposing a deadline on his project. Surrounding them are a variety of colourful characters, such as Higgins’s sponsor, Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), Hungarian language scholar Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel), and Eliza’s father, Alfred (Stanley Holloway), whose big pre-wedding number, which includes the immortal turn of phrase “Girls come and kiss me / Show how you’ll miss me / But get me to the church on time,” is a highlight of the film’s otherwise logy second act.

SDAFF ’21: Catch the Fair One

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Revenge, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

***½/****
starring Kali Reis, Tiffany Chu, Michael Drayer, Kevin Dunn
screenplay by Josef Kubota Wladyka
directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Josef Kubota Wladyka follows his Colombian drug-trafficking adventure film Dirty Hands with the concussive, propulsive sex-trafficking thriller Catch the Fair One, announcing himself as an artist with the chops to handle an efficient action vehicle that functions as a vibrant social statement, too. It’s a rich, angry work that has not a hint of sentimentality to it nor an ounce of fat on it. The uncharitable would maybe call it too straightforward: a march, brutish and uninterrupted, with a message that’s more like a klaxon than a statement–but the picture is admirable for its unwillingness to gild the intensely ugly lily of vanished Native American women and white law enforcement’s utter lack of interest in doing anything about this epidemic. Kali Reis collaborated on the story, a personal one for her as one of the most visible spokespeople for the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) movement–visible because, as a boxer, she’s the WBA super lightweight world champion.

SDAFF ’21: 7 Days

November 7, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**½/****
starring Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni, Gita Reddy, Zenobia Shroff
written by Roshan Sethi & Karan Soni
directed by Roshan Sethi

by Walter Chaw Roshan Sethi’s 7 Days is a charmer. It opens like When Harry Met Sally… with interviews of real couples at different stages in their relationships talking about how they met and how they’re getting along. In this incarnation, the couples all appear to be desi, and the common theme that binds them is their arranged marriages. They set the stage for this story of traditional cultures trying to maintain in the diaspora, of how a young generation of desi struggle with the pull of tradition versus the siren’s call of assimilation. I don’t use this metaphor loosely: assimilation is a kind of death. If it results in rebirth, so be it, but a thing dies in the process of that renaissance and I’m no longer certain that the transformation is necessary or, if it’s necessary, worth it. The rewards fall far short of the price one pays for surrendering something so valuable as a cultural lineage, an identity beyond the one provided by an adopted culture that would prefer you edgeless and easy to compartmentalize.

Red One (2024)

SDAFF ’24: A Traveler’s Needs + By the Stream

Juror #2 (2024)