Titane (2021)

October 22, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Horror, Palme d'Or Winner, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Titane

***/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw In Julia Ducournau’s first film, Raw, there’s a part involving scissors wielded near a vagina that almost made me pass out. A sequence in her second film, Titane, involves another massively inappropriate object wielded near, and inside, a vagina, yet it didn’t bother me half as much. This may have something to do with Titane‘s tone and attitude towards menace: In Raw, there’s a tenderness and familiarity to it all that makes the horror invasive, whereas Titane gives off an alien, madcap, Mack Sennett vibe that announces the movie’s allegorical intentions as a barker at a carnival sideshow might. What’s constant in Ducournau’s two films is an admirably reductive drive to boil a woman’s body down to its biological functions. As Titane opens, hero Alexia (Agathe Rousselle)–badly scarred from the titanium plate behind her ear, the product of a childhood car accident she caused by wanting very badly to sing along to the car’s engine noise–is making her living as a stripper/model at an underground car show. Her body is a fetish object the way a car is to certain men, you see, and I’m thinking immediately not only of how men often assign a feminine pronoun to their cars, but also of e.e. cummings’s naughty poem “she being brand.” Here it is in full:

The Manor (2021)

October 19, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming

Themanor

*/****
starring Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison, Nicholas Alexander, Jill Larson
written and directed by Axelle Carolyn

by Walter Chaw Edited like a dog would edit something in a room full of tennis ball-throwing squirrels, Axelle Carolyn’s The Manor is terrible by almost every standard measure of quality. Carolyn’s own script is tediously overwritten, weighed down by goth-with-a-clove-at-the-all-night-coffee-shop-cum-bookstore notes like, “Oh, wormwood!” and, “I don’t know plants but I do know absinthe!” and ironic jokes about Elizabeth Bathory. The only thing missing is a dramatic recitation of a line from “Troilus and Cressida,” a red rose held in a harlequin’s flourish, and an invitation to a game of chess. Yet despite all the smug listing-off of genre bona fides, all the strained lines and lines upon lines, it still leans heavily on a hilarious bit of exposition obviously inserted in post (“It’s your fucking hair, Roland!”) at the end as if the lead up to this moment weren’t already extravagantly, explicitly spelled out, pitched to the most disinterested student in class. At least one of the alleged jump-scares is telegraphed by the reaction shot before the scare, and all that broaching of serious subjects such as elder abuse in nursing homes, dementia, and privatized healthcare for profit is handled without the slightest hint of the emotional intelligence necessary to deal with them in a substantive or respectful way. Honestly, it would be more offensive if it weren’t so clearly the product of incompetence. I don’t even know why it’s called “The Manor.”

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

October 15, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel, VOD

Needleinatimestack

*/****
starring Leslie Odom, Jr., Freida Pinto, Cynthia Erivo, Orlando Bloom
written for the screen by John Ridley, based on the short story by Robert Silverberg
directed by John Ridley

by Walter Chaw A cautionary tale about writing something whilst in a state of forced, artificial love-drunk, John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack is this year’s Serenity: a film so intensely invested in its adolescent feelings that it’s headed towards a specific state of camp immortality. Nick (Leslie Odom, Jr.)–because “Nick of time,” get it?–is married to Janine (Cynthia Erivo), and they’re that kind of The Notebook couple who speak to each other as though they were scripted by Nicholas Sparks, who, let’s face it, on the Stephanie Meyer scale of cultural whoopsies, can barely string three words together. “Dance like no one’s watching,” someone moans in a high state of agitation. “Love is a closed circle,” someone else declares; between that and “True Detective”‘s “time is a flat circle,” circles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the realm of purple overwriting. In this future as imagined by a perfume commercial, time travel is a recreational lark indulged in by the hyper-rich, causing occasional “time waves” that wash over the world like the exact same visualization of the exact same concept in A Sound of Thunder, a film so terrible that your body’s autonomous defense mechanism has already largely expelled it from your memory. That film, like this one, is based on a classic science-fiction story: Ray Bradbury there, Robert Silverberg here. The concept of “based” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this instance, too.

Bergman Island (2021)

October 14, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, Theatrical

Bergmanisland

**/****
starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Walter Chaw Eric Rohmer made some snoozers, too. So it is with Mia Hansen-Løve, the inheritor of Rohmer’s cinema of intimate behavioural observation and obsession, and her Bergman Island, which lands midway between pointlessly clever and fatally self-obsessed. It follows married filmmakers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) as they retreat to Ingmar Bergman’s compound on Fårö Island in the Baltic to finish their respective screenplays. Tony’s having a much easier time of it, and it’s revealed they’ve been invited to this unusual writer’s retreat at least in part so Tony can screen and conduct a Q&A for one of his films. From what we see of it, it’s possibly a horror film; whatever it is, it’s clear that Tony’s work is very different from Chris’s. Bergman shot a few of his film and TV productions on Fårö–in fact, Fårö was for him like Yoknapatawpha County was for Faulkner: an entire world unto itself that functioned as the canvas and backdrop for his working-through of major themes. There’s a tour of sites that Tony goes on and Chris does not, since she meets an earnest young graduate student, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), studying Bergman, of course, and decides to spend the day with him instead. You think this will be a source of conflict in Bergman Island, particularly as Chris comments that the couple will be sleeping in the same bedroom where Scenes from a Marriage was shot, but it’s not.

Halloween Kills (2021)

October 14, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Halloweenkills

**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Scott Teems & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Bill Chambers Depending on your perspective, Halloween Kills, David Gordon Green’s follow-up to his 2018 Halloween, is the third Halloween II, or the second Halloween III, or the twelfth entry in a long-running serial with a compulsion to press the reset button. Though other horror franchises have splintered into manifold continuities (you’d need Ancestry.com to sort out the various branches stemming from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Halloween is unique in that it’s not (just) a cash cow getting milked to death by new content farmers–no, a fairly consistent chain of ownership has made a habit of calling a mulligan whenever the consensus is that they’ve strayed too far from the beaten path. After a failed bid to rebrand as an anthology with the John Carpenter-backed Halloween III: Season of the Witch, whose reputation has since been reclaimed, the series resurrected Michael Myers and his Ahab, Dr. Loomis, only to fly too close to the sun with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween H20 followed, and in bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Michael’s sister, it wallpapered over the events of Halloweens III through VI. Then Halloween: Resurrection undid all of that movie’s goodwill, so Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of the first film. Zombie returned for a sequel that was roundly rejected despite being the ne plus ultra of Halloween movies for the misfit fans like myself, and the unlikely team of Green and Danny McBride took the reins, making the somewhat unconventional decision to do a legacy sequel to Carpenter’s 1978 original alone, again with Curtis but without the early retcon that Laurie and Michael are related.

Frank & Zed (2021) + Mad God (2021)

October 9, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

Frankzedmadgod

FRANK & ZED
***/****
written and directed by Jesse Blanchard

MAD GOD
****/****
starring Alex Cox
written and directed by Phil Tippett

by Walter Chaw William Blake etched the plates he used to press his poems with acid. His first books were hand-made by him in this way. He called it the “infernal method,” and the idea driving it is that every work of art is enlivened by the hand of its creator. Literally. He believed that touching a thing imbued it with animated qualities in the “soul-giving” sense of the word. I think about that whenever I watch any sort of puppetry or, as it relates to film more commonly, stop-motion animation. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I think Blake had a point. I feel like there’s a specific quality of life in graven idols that have been directly manipulated by the human hand. Traditional cel animation? The same: the little imperfections, the stutters and hesitations that keep it just the other side of the Uncanny Valley. It’s hard to put a finger on what it is, but it’s stimulating in the same way a film projected on 35mm is ineffably different from the same film streamed digitally. Shadows on the wall and all that; maybe Plato and John Lennon had something there. William Blake was, of course, a prophet.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

One_second_still_01

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

“Heaven” is for Real: An Interview with Aharon Keshales

October 3, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Aharonkeshales

I met Aharon Keshales during the junket for Big Bad Wolves and found in him something like a kindred spirit. A former teacher and film critic, he spoke fondly of his love for 1970s cinema and provided cogent defenses of modern blockbusters. Both his co-directing debut, Rabies (the first Israeli horror film), and its follow-up, Big Bad Wolves, demonstrate a strong distaste for hewing to conventional narratives and resolutions. His first American film, South of Heaven, finds Jason Sudeikis at the moment of his superstardom, bolstered by a supporting cast that includes Evangeline Lilly, Mike Colter, Shea Whigham, and Jeremy Bobb, each delivering career-highlight performances in the service of a script that feels personal and, above all, wise. Keshales spent eight years from his last film to get to this point and has some scars as proof of the hazards endured along the way. Like the weather-beaten films that inform his taste, South of Heaven begins as something like a love story and ends, as all great love stories must, in terrible tragedy. (Keshales is absolutely unafraid of the “down” ending.) Its obvious touchstones are Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Beat Takeshi’s Hana-bi; to say it’s exactly my jam is an understatement. I love Aharon as a person, so take this with whatever grain of salt you feel it merits, but South of Heaven is fantastic.

Telluride ’21: Encounter

September 30, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Thriller, UK

Tell21encounter

**/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Janina Gavankar, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Joe Barton and Michael Pearce
directed by Michael Pearce

by Walter Chaw It’s possible that Michael Pearce’s Encounter is its own worst enemy. The opening hour or so is remarkable stuff: tetchy, kinetic, terrifying–the honourable sequel in spirit to Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where insects become the vectors of an alien virus that appears to change our DNA and, with it, our behaviour. Such a smart idea for an era in which more and more people are coming around to the idea that fully half of us at any one time are mindless animals powered by the pleasure principle and the selfish cell and little else. They would watch us die without a flicker of recognizable empathy. Nothing is real to them unless it happens directly to them–there is no evidence save that of the flesh, of their flesh, that could compel them to care about the suffering of another human being. Not even care–nothing could compel them to acknowledge that suffering was possible. They are empty of imagination, devoid of personality; they are essentially alien things neither malign nor beneficent. And there is no better explanation for their existence among us than what Encounter at first appears to be getting at: the government is aware that an unknowable influence has taken over half the population, and it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us succumb. Delicious. Pearce’s treatment of it is delicious, too, as uncomfortable and alive as William Friedkin’s Bug, paired beat-for-frantic-beat with an extraordinary performance by Riz Ahmed, who might be incapable of providing any other.

TIFF ’21: You Are Not My Mother

September 28, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland, TIFF

Tiff21youarenotmymother

**/****
starring Hazel Doupe, Paul Reid, Carolyn Bracken, Ingrid Craigie
written and directed by Kate Dolan

by Bill Chambers Although I called last year’s iteration of the Festival “the COVID-19 TIFF,” it’s really the 2021 crop of films that have been shaped by the pandemic, formally and, perhaps as a result, conceptually, the way Jørgen Leth wound up with five dissimilar incarnations of his experimental short The Perfect Human when Lars von Trier tasked him with remaking it under different sets of “obstructions.” In a charming pre-taped intro that saw her receiving trick-or-treaters (points for creativity), writer-director Kate Dolan talked about how difficult it was shooting You Are Not My Mother during the second lockdown in Ireland, but there’s a low-key expressionism to the film that might be a happy accident, a bonus stemming from compromise. Our young heroine navigates a near-apocalyptically empty suburbia, which feels not necessarily true, but right, externalizing her feelings of isolation along with her vulnerability. The movie isn’t pushing any envelopes, however, and is, to some extent, modest to a fault.

TIFF ’21: The Guilty (2021)

September 27, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Streaming, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff21theguilty

**/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto, based on the original screenplay by Gustav Möller & Emil Nygaard Albertsen
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw Landing midway between Pontypool and Talk Radio, Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty finds disgraced cop Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) bumped down to 9-1-1 operator as he awaits trial for something the press is eager to hear his side of the story of. He’s falling apart, though; this much we can tell by the way his superiors in the call station keep him on a short–very short–leash, and by the way he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror like an animal injured and cornered. He calls his estranged wife and begs her to let him say goodnight to his daughter. She begs him to leave her alone. He can’t seem to catch a break. But he gets a call from Emily (voiced by Riley Keough), who’s been abducted by her ex-husband, Henry (Peter Sarsgaard). They’re travelling east on the 10–Joe figures that out because she sees a forest fire raging out the driver’s-side windows. Joe figures out a lot of things while, on a bank of screens in front of him, an apocalypse plays out. It’s a vision of hell. Our hell–we made it. It’s ours. Emily gives Joe one last chance to do a good thing before he vanishes, so he’s going to do it, whether or not it’s too late. It’s been too late for a long time.

TIFF ’21: Mothering Sunday

September 25, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

Tiff21motheringsunday

**/****
starring Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Sope Dirisu, Olivia Colman
screenplay by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift
directed by Eva Husson

by Bill Chambers An orphan groomed for servitude, young Jane (Odessa Young) is a maid in the employ of aristocratic couple the Nivens in post-WWI England. Jane is quiet, dutiful, mindful of the cloud of sorrow hanging over her employers, who lost a child to the war. (We infer that it’s left Mrs. Niven (Olivia Colman) catatonic and Mr. Niven (a grizzled Colin Firth) a babbling mess as he tries to fill the silences.) Jane is also, we glean from inserts of word prompts from her notebooks, a listener, hoarding material for some writing project we see her working on years later, boyfriend Donald (Sope Dirisu) close by to serve as a sounding board. Mothering Sunday, the UK version of Mother’s Day, arrives and the Nivens give motherless Jane the day off, which she spends in bed with the neighbours’ son, Paul (Josh O’Connor), who appears to have counted his blessings upon returning from the battlefield and refuses to risk disappointing his parents by breaking off his engagement to a woman of means for a maid, despite his obvious affection for Jane. Eventually, Paul takes off to go meet his fiancee, leaving Jane to explore the big empty house alone. Jane, au naturel, ventures downstairs and becomes particularly taken with the vast library, her lack of clothing critical to breaking down the hermetic seal of the rich and making all this profoundly hers. This show of somewhat transgressive behaviour feels transgressive in itself, partly because the movies have gotten so chaste lately and partly because, through a COVID lens, nudity is an especial act of hubris. It’s mesmerizing, these few minutes of Mothering Sunday.

TIFF ’21: Earwig + Night Raiders

September 23, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

Tiff21earwignightraiders

EARWIG
***½/****
starring Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers
written by Lucile Hadžihalilović & Geoff Cox
directed by Lucile Hadžhalilović

NIGHT RAIDERS
***/****
starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Gail Maurice, Amanda Plummer
written and directed by Danis Goulet

by Angelo Muredda Parenting and being looked after are the stuff of nightmares in Lucile Hadžhalilović’s genuinely creepy curio Earwig, which is as visually and aurally arresting as it is inscrutable. A cryptic dance between a man named Albert (Paul Hilton) and his ten-year-old charge, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), the film charts their ritualistic and mostly unspoken interactions in a dingy apartment, making us tense witnesses to an unexplained paternal science experiment conducted under the all-seeing eye of a supervisor who phones in his instructions from offscreen, apparently to prepare the girl for whatever is lying in wait for her. That’s about all we know, though Hadžhalilović skillfully hangs this threadbare plot on indelible images while evoking our primitive stirrings of anxiety for the future. No small feat, given how little dialogue there is.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

September 22, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

Dearevanhansen

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.

TIFF ’21: Dune

September 21, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, TIFF

Tiff21dune

Dune Part One
****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn’t get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert’s Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book’s story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn’t experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You’ve arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it’s not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called “Caladan”–that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called “Arrakis.” It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it–return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it’s why I’ve read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don’t actually want to know what’s inside the Monolith.

TIFF ’21: The Good House

September 20, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Tiff21goodhouse

*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney
screenplay by Thomas Bezucha and Maya Forbes & Wally Wolodarsky, based on the novel by Ann Leary
directed by Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky

by Bill Chambers Earlier this year, I revisited 1995's Copycat, in which Sigourney Weaver plays an agoraphobic criminologist assisting the police in their hunt for a serial killer who arranges tableaux in tribute to famous murderers of the past. It's the sort of B-movie in A dress they don't make anymore, an exuberantly tasteless piece of crackerjack filmmaking that made me wistful for medium-budget, middle-class movie-movies that exist for their own sake. But, perhaps because her most iconic roles are so heroic (this is a woman neither gorillas, nor xenomorphs, nor Bill Murray himself could cow), Weaver's brand doesn't bend towards powerlessness without showing the strain. I thought then and still think that Weaver was miscast as a woman who hyperventilates into paper bags in Copycat. Similarly, her character's reluctance to admit she has a problem with alcohol in The Good House seems as much informed by pride and social stigmas as it does by certain firewalls in Weaver's persona. Hildy Good (Weaver) is a real-estate agent in Wendover, Massachusetts (actually Nova Scotia). It's a small coastal town and she worries what her neighbours think of her, especially considering word-of-mouth affects her livelihood. Maybe that's why she's had her struggles with booze, because of the pressure of maintaining a reputation. Booze, of course, never helped anybody's reputation.

TIFF ’21: Flee

September 18, 2021Posted in2021, Animation, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Norway, Sweden, TIFF

Tiff21flee

**½/****
directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen

by Angelo Muredda The past is as fluid as the rotoscoped animation used to bring it to life in Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, a high-concept work of creative nonfiction whose unconventional style promises an immersiveness it can’t really deliver. Rasmussen’s animated documentary profile of his childhood friend, pseudonymously named Amin Nawabi to protect his identity, is intermittently moving and insightful about the horrors, the exhausting subterfuge, and the briefest moments of levity that define his life as a queer Afghan refugee, first in Russia and then in Denmark. But the opacity of its subject–whose story of family suffering, persecution, hiding, and now something like domestic stability, has frequently shifted not just for state officials but also for his friend and biographer–leaves the film as vague as its buzzword title. Moreover, Rasmussen’s inability to do more with those discrepancies besides shrug at the ambiguities of first-person storytelling from far afield places plagued by civil war flattens the closing emotional pitch.

Telluride ’21: The Lost Daughter

September 18, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Greece, Telluride

Tell21lostdaughter

****/****
starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, Jessie Buckley
screenplay by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on the novel by Elena Ferrante
directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw Leda (Jessie Buckley) is brilliant. She's translating Auden into Italian and, more than just translating, she's interpreting the work in a way that's exciting to other scholars. She so impresses a hotshot in the field, one Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard), that he seduces her during a conference–or she seduces him, cheating on her milquetoast husband and two young daughters. She abandons all of them eventually. It's a decision that haunts her. At least it should, though she's not so sure it does. But that was a long time ago. Leda (Olivia Colman) is now 48, vacationing by herself on a tiny beachfront in Italy. These days, she's an English teacher of no particular renown looking for a small patch of ocean to float in, a small stretch of sand to lounge on, food when she's hungry, and a bed when she's tired. There's this other family, however, consisting of a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who's struggling with a difficult child and a husband, Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who looks like bad news. Though maybe not as bad-news as Toni's sister, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who, seven months pregnant, wants to take a swing at Leda when Leda refuses to give up her umbrella for Callie's birthday party. The cabana boy, Will (Paul Mescal), spots this and tells Leda he admires her for it but also warns her against doing it again. "Why?" she asks. "Because those are bad people." When she's walking home that afternoon, a large pine cone falls out of a tree and punches a small hole in Leda's back.

Lady of the Manor (2021) + Copshop (2021)

September 17, 2021Posted in2021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

Ladyofthemanor

LADY OF THE MANOR
½*/****
starring Melanie Lynskey, Judy Greer, Justin Long, Ryan Philippe
written and directed by Justin Long & Christian Long

COPSHOP
**/****
starring Gerard Butler, Frank Grillo, Alexis Louder, Toby Huss
screenplay by Kurt McLeod and Joe Carnahan
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Walter Chaw The first perky, jaunty violin strokes in the oppressive score announce exactly the kind of garbage Justin and Christian Long’s Lady of the Manor is going to be: self-satisfied, high-concept comedy that apes Neil Jordan’s High Spirits and Jared and Jerusha Hess’s Austenland while entirely wasting Melanie Lynskey and Judy Greer. I would watch Lynskey and Greer in anything–and Lady of the Manor tested me sorely, immediately, repeatedly. Its execution is ’80s VHS Screwballs quickie tossed together with cheap gags, an overreliance on fart and dick jokes, exaggerated in-camera effects, and skits that fall flat and don’t stop falling for at least ten or twenty beats after they’ve died. They were dead before they got there. There are montages that are just expository scenes strung together and there’s a running gag where Greer is asked to shake her head disapprovingly while Lynskey sucks on a bar of soap and shrugs. There’s another where Greer makes “silly” faces in a mirror for a long, long time to demonstrate how she misses her friend and also how maybe she’s loosening up, and it’s unbelievably painful to watch someone so brilliant and naturally hilarious shoehorned into a square hole as stolid and unforgiving as this. Admittedly, it takes actual talent to make something this terrible. I mean, you can’t do it accidentally.