Fantasia Festival ’21: The Sadness

August 20, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Taiwan

Fantasia21sadness

***/****
starring Regina Lei, Tzu-Chiang Wang, Berant Zhu
written and directed by Rob Jabbaz

by Walter Chaw Canadian expat Rob Jabbaz has had it. His hyphenate debut The Sadness is one of the bleakest, angriest films I’ve seen in a long time, made rarer still by being carried off with obvious chops. Its focus is to unequivocally cut through the bullshit of this, our shitty timeline. The first real conversation of the film is between our hero, Jun (Berant Zhu), and his neighbour across adjoining balconies, concerning how a virus causing some doctors concern is a hoax perpetrated by big business and the media. A talk-show host in the background speaks over a virologist who warns of the potentially world-ending evil of politicizing a pandemic, and…well, you get the picture. The scariest thing about The Sadness–a very scary picture–is that it’s the product of a Canadian filmmaker working in Taiwan, which confirms that Trump is a symptom not the cause of whatever the good fuck is wrong with us. In my darker moments, I like to say that we’re just monkeys in clothes, and every minute we’re not killing each other over protein and access to women is a miracle. The premise of The Sadness is a thought exercise in ironic magnification, one where you make the point by exaggerating the scenario slightly. The premise of The Sadness is that we’re all monkeys in clothes, and imagine if we stopped pretending that we aren’t.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Don’t Say Its Name

August 20, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

Fantasia21dontsayitsname

***/****
starring Julian Black-Antelope, Samuel Marty, Sera-Lys McArthur, Madison Walsh
written by Rueben Martell & Gerald Wexler
directed by Rueben Martell

by Walter Chaw Colonialism is the monster in Saskatchewan (and Cree) filmmaker Rueben Martell’s Don’t Say Its Name, the “that which must not be mentioned” in a story set among Indigenous Peoples, battling the loss of its people to an inexorable malignancy. The Great Evil manifests as two things: white energy employee Donny (Tom Carey), representing European skullduggery through the fetishizing of Aboriginal women and the committing of all manner of atrocity upon the land and its people in the name of manifest right; and an invisible golem that announces itself with the cry of a crow and a vile stench before disembowelling the isolated residents of a remote Canadian backwood. The victims both bad guys claim are the people in this place–the one because he’s a representative murderous asshole, the other because its sense of outrage over Indigenous Peoples who have if not fully participated in the annexation of their land, are at least sympathetic to a policy of appeasement rather than resistance. Powerful, timely stuff in this age of the Keystone Pipeline and the discovery of scores of dead Indigenous children buried in Catholic schoolyards, made even more powerful by its centring of police officer Betty (Madison Walsh) and her new deputy, a former game warden and army vet named Stacey (Sera-Lys McArthur). Don’t Say Its Name isn’t fucking around.

Almost Famous (2000) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

August 18, 2021Posted in2000s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Music

00351.m2ts_snapshot_00.13.11_[2021.08.16_23.39.33]Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

Almost Famous **½/****
Untitled ***/****
Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Bryant Frazer Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s fondly remembered period piece about a bygone era of rock stars and the various satellites in their orbit, is a bit of a relic these days. Even on its release in 2000, when it was almost 30 years removed from its subject matter, Almost Famous was a notably uncritical celebration of a moment in 20th-century music history. Another 20 years on, having centred the phallic sexual and creative powers of a white guy with a guitar, Almost Famous is increasingly disconnected from the prevailing pop and hip-hop zeitgeist, and the film feels even more like cultural hagiography. On the other hand, it is a hell of a story. The fundamentals are autobiographical: Cameron Crowe really was a 15-year-old whiz kid who earned early graduation from high school; he really did seek career advice from legendary rock-and-roll critic Lester Bangs; and he really landed a ROLLING STONE assignment to hit the road with a group of next-big-thing cock-rockers. The story, as Crowe retells it here, has intrepid young journo William Miller (a fresh-faced Patrick Fugit) on assignment with the fictional rock group Stillwater–dealing with celebrity egos, yearning for the teenaged groupies who sprinkle their figurative fairy dust around a series of interchangeable ballrooms, basketball arenas, and hotel suites, and checking in with a protective mother (Frances McDormand) who can only peer helplessly into her son’s wonderland from her world outside the circus tent. Finally, William meets with his editors back at HQ to bang out a chunk of blistering reportage that will lay bare the raw emotional state of a band on tour and cement his status as a rock journalist. What could go wrong?

Fantasia Festival ’21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

August 18, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Fantasia21beyondtheinfinite

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi’s directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn’t have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It’s so good because it’s so…simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that’s kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

CODA (2021)

August 16, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Disability, Drama, Music, Streaming

Coda2021

½*/****
starring Emilia Jones, Eugenio Derbez, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin
screenplay by Sian Heder, based on the original motion picture La Famille Belier by Éric Lartigau
directed by Sian Heder

by Walter Chaw It says something, something terrible, that the Deaf community has expressed gratefulness for CODA because it’s some kind of representation, while also expressing trepidation because CODA trafficks in harmful stereotypes and centres the hearing perspective. The great Marlee Matlin made news by insisting that deaf actors be cast as the film’s deaf family, and that’s amazing, huge, a tremendous step in the right direction–and still, the material is so rancid that all of their great work highlights how desperately this community deserves to have material worthy of them. CODA is a grotesque bit of “big performance”/workingman’s blues uplift trash in the vein of Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dangerous Minds. It has a high-school audition montage, for Christ’s sake. (A practicing-for-the-big-recital montage, too.) CODA posits that Deaf people don’t like music even though it shows the parents, Jackie (Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), pulling up to a heavy rap beat, suggesting that the film itself doesn’t consider rap to be music, just a noise even Deaf people can appreciate.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Hotel Poseidon

August 15, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

Fantasia21hotelposeidon

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director’s fever dream, Stef Lernous’s Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro’s City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we’re all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It’s not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch’s work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious–a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

Beckett (2021) – Netflix

August 14, 2021Posted in2021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Greece, Italy, Streaming, Thriller

Beckett

*/****
starring John David Washington, Alicia Vikander, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Filippos Ioannidis
screenplay by Kevin A. Rice
directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s obvious what Ferdinando Cito Filomarino is after with Beckett: a 1970s paranoia thriller in the Three Days of the Condor vein. And it’s just as obvious that he misses the mark. Beckett isn’t even a prestige knock-off version à la the Peter Hyams remake of Narrow Margin. Lots of reasons for its failure, chief among them that it doesn’t have a point of view; landing somewhere in the junction between a “wrong man” thriller and a film about a truth-seeker finding more truth than he bargained for makes it all seem arbitrary. To be clear, not arbitrary in the sense that what’s happening to our heroes is meaningless (a capricious universe is the fodder, after all, for great paranoia)–arbitrary in the sense that the film itself has no real reason for being, and that’s a hurdle very little art can overcome. It’s a hurdle that not even great cinematography (by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) and a Ryuichi Sakamoto score can ameliorate. Instead, they underscore how top-heavy it all is. Great cast, too, scenic locales–everything top of the line. But there’s nothing mooring it to relevance, despite all its arched-eyebrow pipe-smoking about the state of Greece and American interventionism.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Giving Birth to a Butterfly

August 13, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Road Movie

Fantasia21givingbirth

*/****
starring Gus Birney, Annie Parisse, Paul Sparks, Judith Roberts
written by Patrick Lawler & Theodore Schaefer
directed by Theodor Schaefer

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Theodore Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly is in love with doubling and other broad metaphors deployed to speak, Kieslowski-like, to the winsome possibilities of unlived lives. Trapped in a loveless marriage with oaf Daryl (Paul Sparks), Diane (Annie Parisse) is mother to wry Danielle (Rachel Resheff) and a dreamer of a boy (Owen Campbell) who has just brought home a girlfriend, Marlene (Gus Birney), pregnant by another. Marlene needs a place to stay, and against Diane’s wishes, everyone’s planning to impose Marlene upon Diane’s household. It’s weird, you know, because Marlene doesn’t even seem to want to be there. That’s the essential premise of Giving Birth to a Butterfly: that women aren’t in charge of their own fate–ever, but particularly when they’re in the process of expressing their biology. That is, when they’re mothers. The best part of this film is the first part establishing a tense family dynamic, with Diane maybe the only adult in the room. The men and the pre-motherhood teen girl are silly and unmoored to the cold realities of existence.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Baby, Don’t Cry

August 11, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Romance, Thriller

Fantasia21babydontcry

*/****
starring Zita Bai, Boni Mata, Vas Provatakis, Helen Sun
written by Zita Bai
directed by Jesse Dvorak

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Zita Bai stars in and scripts Baby, Don’t Cry, a film by Jesse Dvorak that follows a rough few weeks in the life of troubled teen Baby (Bai). Unsuccessfully navigating a dysfunctional home and hostile high-school environment, she meets bad boy Fox (Vas Provatakis) and, in the tradition of stuff like Badlands and Gun Crazy, falls in love and engages in some very bad things–not necessarily in that order. The promise of the piece is that Baby initially seems unfamiliar: a heavily-accented Chinese-American who consoles her loneliness with a habit of filming people and things–perhaps to contextualize them, though more likely to hold them in digital amber, thus negating their immediate threat. The problem is that this promise is largely squandered in a series of repetitive conflicts and resolutions punctuated now and again by hints of magic realism (like her mother sprouting pig ears, or a cartoon fox pacing a car) that, again, are suggestive of a deeper exploration of alienation and loss without the muscle to provide an adequate reckoning with them.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Agnes

August 10, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

Fantasia21agnes

***½/****
starring Chris Browning, Mary Buss, Sean Gunn, Ben Hall
written by Mickey Reece & John Selvidge
directed by Mickey Reece

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Agnes (Hayley McFarland) and Mary (Molly Quinn) are young nuns at the tightly-run convent of Mother Superior (Mary Buss). The two are friends, and they both have terrible stories about their lives before they, separately, sought out this place–less, we think, from a desire to be wed to the Almighty than to find shelter from the sorrows of the big, wide world outside. One night, Agnes calls all of the other sisters “whores” over dinner while the table shakes and a coffee cup hovers around. Of course they strap her to her bed and call Rome, and of course Rome responds by sending an old/young priest pair in Father Donaghue (Ben Hall) and soon-to-be Father Ben (Jake Horowitz). Trouble is, Father Donaghue has been recently accused of being a pederast (a charge he has not denied), while Father Ben has just passed his coordination period as Deacon and is not nearly prepared enough to be in the company of an entire nunnery, much less perform an exorcism. They’re being set up for failure. Perhaps Father Donaghue dying during an exorcism will save the Bishop the trouble of transferring him to an unsuspecting diocese.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

August 8, 2021Posted in2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical

Thesuicidesquad

***½/****
starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Viola Davis
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is weird. It’s explosively, hilariously gory, profane, ridiculous, and, best of all, lawless. As much as I love Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the darkness–the grittiness–he brought to the DC Universe has proven difficult to shake due to its commercial success. In contrast, The Suicide Squad looks and acts a lot like the Adam West “Batman” TV series, a piece fully embracing the elasticity of both its mediums and, though it seems silly to say, one bracingly unafraid of literal colour. I also felt this way about Gunn’s still-dour-but-colorful-by-MCU-standards Guardians of the Galaxy—but this film feels very much like something, from character and production design down to the choice of members for the titular squad, allowed to be whatever it was going to be, damn the torpedoes. Have I mentioned that it’s weird? It’s exquisitely strange, and not just because of the obvious ways in which things are strange, but because it says the bad guys are the colonial-/meddling-minded United States, the military-industrial complex is reliant on the enslavement of the carceral state, and the best test of manhood is not facility with firearms and sociopathy. A billion-dollar IP that isn’t trying to skate the middle line of absolute, frictionless equivocation? Weird, right?

Howard the Duck (1986) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

August 3, 2021Posted in1980s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disability, Romance, Sci-Fi

Vlcsnap-2021-08-03-21h06m35s469Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you’ll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12″ EP of the movie’s title track, performed by Dolby’s Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas “She Blinded Me with Science” Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-‘n’-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly’s mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.

Jungle Cruise (2021)

July 29, 2021Posted in2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Theatrical

Junglecruise

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Michael Green and Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw For a film based on a theme-park attraction without a point of view or anything to say, Jungle Cruise is as good as it could possibly be, i.e.: fine. It reaps whatever benefits one could from the star power of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt without giving them something to do, and it seems to belong to the Aguirre, The Wrath of God cinematic universe, which is, you know, unexpected. There’s a moment somewhere in the middle of it where Blunt’s character, Lily, asks Johnson’s Frank a personal question and then listens. She’s an actor of tremendous empathy and clarity, and although, in these moments after finishing the movie, I can’t for the life of me remember what they were talking about, I do recall thinking how nice it would be if Blunt got more roles in which she might play a human being. For now, she’s a plucky scientist two years into WWI who is denied admission into stuffy scientific societies because she’s not only a woman but a woman who wears pants. What Lily wants to do most is find a mythical tree blossom in the Amazon that bestows eternal life, making Jungle Cruise a part of The Fountain‘s cinematic universe, too, which is likewise unexpected. The person she hires to help her is Frank, of course, and the bad guy who wants the blossom but for nefarious reasons is German Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons). Oh, the other bad guy who wants the blossom is Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), a centuries-old conquistador doomed to jungle purgatory. It doesn’t matter.

Siberia (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

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

Vlcsnap-2021-07-27-15h27m16s825

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

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

Old (2021)

July 22, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Old2021

**/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan, based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan is a brilliant filmmaker and an arrogant storyteller, and sometimes that works out pretty well (see: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable). More often, it yields wildly mixed results where his savant-like mastery of the visual wars with the pedantic, childish, even messianic tendencies of his writing. Imagine if Spielberg wrote all his own movies instead of merely tacking his tidy happy endings on them. There's possibly a paper in how the degree of obstreperousness in Shyamalan's cameos has a direct correlation to the film's obnoxiousness. My favourite Hitchcock cameo is in Notorious, where Hitch has himself drinking a glass of champagne at a party at a Nazi's house, thus, through a series of events, accelerating the discovery of our heroic secret agent. But Hitch never cast himself, as Shyamalan has, in extended speaking roles that have found him playing a prophet writing a new Bible (Lady in the Water), delivering key exposition in a protracted flashback (Signs), and serving as the beneficiary of the most complicated camera set-up to deliver the twist in an otherwise transfixing, transporting picture (The Village). Tarantino used to do garbage like that, and, predictably, this was reliably the worst part of a Tarantino movie. For a while, after Shyamalan went through a pronounced humbling (The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth), he cut the shit for a trio of tight, nasty, mostly-glorious, largely career-resuscitating little thrillers (The Visit, Split, Glass). With his latest, Old, he's got his confidence back, and that's…bad.

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

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

00061.m2ts_snapshot_00.06.05_[2021.07.08_02.06.44]Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

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

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

Riders of Justice (2020)

July 9, 2021Posted in2021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical

Ridersofjustice

Retfærdighedens ryttere
***/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Roland Møller
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

by Walter Chaw Dogma 95 vet Anders Thomas Jensen has a particular interest in oddness. Characters, especially, in Jensen’s films as writer and director are given to sometimes-extravagant eccentricity, fueled by traumas Jensen declines to sanitize that are often exacerbated by intelligence worn as an unwelcome birth defect. Consider the menagerie at the centre of Jensen’s Men & Chicken, an updating in a way of The Island of Dr. Moreau reconfigured as a “light” family drama in the Danish countryside. Mads Mikkelson stars in that one, too, playing a chronic masturbator who finds out that his father has been splicing his own sperm with animal sperm in an attempt to… Well, look, it’s an interesting piece about social norms and how an inability to assimilate culturally leads to these islands of misfit boys. Jensen is interested, specifically and obsessively, in what happens when physical and mental mutations stunt emotional and social development. Though no one would want the crown, he is the poet laureate of the incel state.

Life During Wartime #24: AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (Patreon exclusive)

July 5, 2021Posted inPatreon, Werewolf
by Walter Chaw An American Werewolf in London (1981) U.S.: Prime, Fubo, AMC, DirecTV, Shudder, Sling Canada: Hollywood Suite My daughter is 17 and my son is 15, and it was time--past time, if you ask me--for them to see John Landis's An American Werewolf in London. I didn't provide much preamble for the presentation, just that it was one of the "big ones" of the horror genre, a classic that sits in there next to stuff like The Exorcist, Halloween, Psycho, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Jaws, The Thing (1982), A Nightmare on Elm Street, and, for me, The…

Indiana Jones: 4-Movie Collection – 4K Ultra HD + Digital

July 4, 2021Posted in****/****, 1980s, 2000s, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

00294.m2ts_snapshot_00.25.29_[2021.07.01_16.51.25]Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs. Click any image to enlarge.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri
screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
**½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

Mustownby Bryant Frazer Paramount has reissued the first four Indiana Jones films on 4K UHD disc in a box set with vouchers for digital copies of the tetralogy. (For a detailed review of the movies proper as well as their 2012 Blu-ray counterparts, our own Walter Chaw has you covered. (The star ratings above are his, the letter grades are mine.)) The new 4K scans capture the camera negatives in all their Panavision glory. Grain is quite present and the image sometimes goes a wee bit soft, especially in shots that were optically printed (i.e., titles, dissolves, wipes, and the like), but it’s never inappropriate or distracting, and I didn’t notice any obvious compression-induced flaws. Many of the special-effects shots look better than ever, as the original elements have been recomposited digitally to fix thick matte lines, imprecise rotoscopes, and similar technical holdovers from the analog domain.