FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’20: MLK/FBI

September 17, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
directed by Sam Pollard

by Angelo Muredda Documentarian and editor Sam Pollard peers into the recently declassified files on the FBI’s aggressive counter-intelligence operation against Martin Luther King, Jr. in MLK/FBI. Pollard’s nonfiction essay is an infuriating and timely document undermined at times by its glossy, cinema-of-quality treatment. It is at once a sobering work of public significance and a slickly produced project that risks overly flattering its hypothetical spectators with too many ironic vignettes, zooming in to an old television set at one point to marvel at Ronald Reagan droning on about heroes and villains in the movies. In its first hour alone, it comes replete with black-and-white animations of vintage tape recorders, microfiche, and superimposed text and solemn voiceovers from a who’s-who of historians, activists, and former agents (whose faces are not revealed until the last act). More curiously, it concedes surprisingly long stretches to Resistance Democratic favourite James Comey, a career agent and former director who offers up nothing more insightful than his recognition that, sure, the Bureau might have been a bit heavy-handed when it came to King.

TIFF ’20: Shiva Baby

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
starring Rachel Sennott, Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Dianna Agron
written and directed by Emma Seligman

by Angelo Muredda Hell is other people waiting in line outside the bathroom at a function where you hate everyone in Emma Seligman's cringe comedy debut Shiva Baby, which impressively sustains something of the fever pitch of the Satanic ritual in the Castevets' apartment from Rosemary's Baby for most of its 77-minute runtime. More proof of concept for future films than a proper knockout, Shiva Baby is at least a nimble showcase for star Rachel Sennott, reprising her role as Danielle, the sullen and pleasantly inscrutable protagonist from Seligman's earlier short of the same name.

TIFF ’20: Notturno

September 15, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Gianfranco Rosi

by Bill Chambers Notturno, meaning “nocturne” or simply “night” in the original Italian, opens with an epigraph stating that the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of WWI left the Middle East vulnerable to violent power-grabs in the decades that followed. What we’re about to see, we are told, was shot over a period of three years in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon, during the recent campaign of terror by ISIS forces, and one of the bones I have to pick with Gianfranco Rosi’s latest observational documentary is the unresolved friction between this pithy summary of how the Middle East became a global blind spot and Notturno‘s conflation of those four Islamic countries on screen into one endless desert. Hypocritical might be too histrionic a word for it, but I can’t think of anything better in that ballpark. The film begins with a cluster of older women garbed in jilbaabs, I believe they’re called, filing into an abandoned, cavernous building and snaking up the stairs in a way that feels ceremonial. Is it a place of worship? The surroundings are difficult to parse. The women reach a small, cell-like room, and one of them cries out for her son, who died there while being held prisoner. Her anguish echoes across the next few passages, including cryptic shots of a guy staked out in the wilderness with a rifle, scenes of soldiers perhaps running drills, and rehearsals for some kind of play that the movie soon adopts as a framing device.

TIFF ’20: Get the Hell Out; Nomadland; David Byrne’s American Utopia

September 13, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Concert Doc, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, Film Festivals, Taiwan, TIFF, Zombie

GET THE HELL OUT
**/****
starring Bruce Hung, Megan Lai, Tsung-Hua To, Chung-wang Wang
screenplay by I-Fan Wang, Shih-Keng Chien, Wan-Ju Yang
directed by I-Fan Wang

NOMADLAND
***/****
starring Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linday May, Swankie
written for the screen and directed by Chloé Zhao

American Utopia
***/****
directed by Spike Lee

by Bill Chambers Have the ticking time bombs the world is sitting on and TIFF’s significantly reduced slate resulted in the 2020 iteration of the festival–the COVID-19 TIFF, the pre-election TIFF, the world’s-on-fire TIFF–being programmed with increased political fervour? Three of the four films I’ve watched at TIFF 2020 suggest that’s the case in their topicality, though I will allow that the silliest of these, Taiwan’s Get the Hell Out, would not resonate nearly as much as it does were it not for these unremovable pandemic goggles I wear now, which transform everything old and new into ironic commentary on this moment in history. Get the Hell Out begins in medias res after a (sigh/jerk-off motion) zombie outbreak in parliament, then backtracks to show how the headstrong Hsiung (Megan Lai) was literally muscled out of office for refusing to endorse a chemical plant that will contaminate the environment with the rabies virus. She manipulates a lovestruck security guard with chronic–and portentous–nosebleeds named Wang (Bruce Ho) into running in her place, hoping to use him as a sock-puppet against her misogynistic former colleagues. Alas, he has his own cock-eyed agenda, and so the plague proceeds apace. Trapped in the parliament building, Hsiung and Wang are forced to fend off hordes of cannibalistic MPs as well as their nefarious rival, Li (Chung-wang Wang), the movie’s nominal Trump stand-in.

TIFF ’20: Inconvenient Indian

September 13, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Michelle Latimer

by Angelo Muredda “You have to watch out for the stories you’re told,” Thomas King dryly intones early in Michelle Latimer’s Inconvenient Indian as he ambles through a repertory-cinema lobby and sits down in his chair in Toronto’s Fox Theatre to take in the film we’re ostensibly watching. Latimer’s unorthodox essay film, which doubles as a curatorial programme on the futures of Indigenous art and life emerging from a history of settler colonialism, is energized by that cautionary note about the high stakes of storytelling, a seemingly benign activity that’s charged with both generative and destructive power. It cuts through the blizzard of whitewashed, endlessly recirculated images of Indigenous people as cultural throwbacks, from Nanook of the North onward, to anchor itself in Indigenous work of the present.

Ghost in the Shell (1995) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

September 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

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

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Kazunori Itô, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow
directed by Mamoru Oshii

by Bryant Frazer I’ll get this out of the way first: the soul is the ghost and the body is the shell. The title is a reference to Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, which itself refers to a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the duality of mind and body. The writer and illustrator Masamune Shirow borrowed and altered the phrase for his serialized 1989 manga “Mobile Armored Riot Police”, which bore the subtitle “The Ghost in the Shell.” I haven’t read the manga, but the animated feature it inspired is positively heady with ideas. Ghost in the Shell is a cop movie about robots with human souls. It’s science-fiction about the human rights of artificial intelligence. And it’s a fantasy about a sexy cyborg who knows how to use a gun. It’s all of those things, and it’s a disquisition on human consciousness, a meditation on urban loneliness, and also, maybe, a poem about unrequited love. It’s extraordinary.

Pretty in Pink (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

September 8, 20201980s, 2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes, Romance, Teen

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Molly Ringwald, Harry Dean Stanton, Jon Cryer, Andrew McCarthy
written by John Hughes
directed by Howard Deutch

by Bill Chambers John Hughes made his mark with screenplays that had straightforward, saleable hooks. National Lampoon’s Vacation is about a suburban family on a cross-country drive to a theme park. Mr. Mom is about a husband and wife switching places as the breadwinner of the family. Sixteen Candles is about a girl turning 16 whose family forgets her birthday. The Breakfast Club is about five high-school students serving detention on a Saturday. Weird Science is about a couple of geeks who Frankenstein themselves the perfect woman. But Pretty in Pink, inspired by though not based on The Psychedelic Furs‘ song of the same name, is an outlier in Hughes’s early filmography in that it’s merely an ode to his muse Molly Ringwald, its collection of feeble pretexts for shining the spotlight on her hardly constituting a premise. It’s a movie that operates on the somewhat shaky assumption that Ringwald, like Anna Karina before her, is cinema, her most mundane gestures becoming iconic through the simple act of photographing them. The ultimate irony, of course, is that when Hughes transposed every non-event that happens in Pretty in Pink onto Some Kind of Wonderful a year later, it resulted in what was arguably his most high-concept project yet: the boy version of Pretty in Pink.

First Cow (2020) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

September 7, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, Ewen Bremner
written by Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond, based upon the novel The Half-Life by Raymond
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Bryant Frazer First Cow states its subtext out loud about a third of the way in, drawing attention to the offered capitalist parable in a conversation between newly-met friends Cookie (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee). They are walking in Oregon Country, gathering trapped squirrel carcasses as they go. “I sense opportunity here,” says King-Lu. “Pretty much everywhere has been touched by now, but this is still new.” Cookie responds, “Doesn’t seem new to me. Seems old.” And King-Lu scolds him, gently: “Everything is old if you look at it that way.” What’s old is new again in Kelly Reichardt’s film, which draws from this early American relationship between an indentured baker and an ambitious Chinese immigrant a metaphor for the eternal working class–cash-strapped artisans struggling to establish their own stake in a national prosperity hoarded by those at the top of the pecking order. “History isn’t here yet,” King-Lu observes from across the two centuries distancing him from the film’s audience. “It’s coming, but we got here early this time. Maybe this time we can be ready for it. We can take it on our own terms.”

Mulan (2020)

September 5, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Disney, Drama, Family, Hong Kong, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee, Jet Li
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Lauren Hynek & Elizabeth Martin
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw You can become an expert in the folk history of Mulan if you do a general Google search. Sufficed to say the story of Mulan is an important one for my people, and when I say “my people,” I mean my parents’ culture, to which I am connected despite a lifetime trying to disentangle myself from it. I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness decades ago and found in it the truest expression for me of…strangeness? Uncanniness? The alienation I’ve felt my entire life? I’m not accepted, I have come to accept, by the only culture (American) I have ever known, and my parents’ culture despises me, and so here I am, an outcast caste without safe harbour. Being Asian-American for me has meant nursing an unquenchable yearning to be something else, and a wish never honoured to be mistaken for wholly acceptable. In my attempts to return to my heritage over the past decade, I’ve found myself discouraged by this chasm I’ve dug in my heart. I don’t know if there’s enough soil left in the world to make it whole again.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Five Rules of Success

September 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

***/****
starring Santiago Segura, Jonathan Howard, Isidora Goreshter, Roger Guenveur Smith
written and directed by Orson Oblowitz

by Walter Chaw X (Santiago Segura) is just out of jail, looking for a fresh start and finding an “essential” entry-level job in the service industry in the employ of restaurant owner Avakian (Jon Skarloff) instead. He cleans up, shows up, refuses drink and drugs, and does his best to steer clear of the malign influence of Avakian’s wayward kid, Danny (Jonathan Howard). Though he’s successful for a while, the system is wired for him to fail. His parole officer (Isidora Goreshter) is corrupt and opportunistic, sure, yet the real problem facing X is that this culture promises happiness in the form of material acquisition and public adulation and nowhere else. So X wants more and goes about getting it the way he’s been conditioned to: by any means necessary.

Tenet (2020)

September 1, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see Tenet in a movie theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw The misbegotten love child of Christopher Nolan’s own Memento and Michael Lehmann’s Hudson Hawk, Nolan’s Tenet is chonky Looper, a bloated, high-concept actioner that, alas, lacks Rian Johnson’s light touch and deftness with moments of genuine wonder and delight. It’s not the Titanic, it’s the iceberg; not a towering example of man’s hubris, but the ironic, frozen engine of its spectacular undoing. Freud liked to talk about how the unconscious was like an iceberg: only the very tip is visible, while the bulk of its mass is subsumed beneath. Freed from metaphor and employed instead as a simile, the hidden depths of an iceberg are more ice, just wetter. Tenet is like the first two Back to the Future movies but longer, not as good, and, uh, wetter.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Wildland

August 30, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

Kød & blod
***½/****
starring Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Elliott Crosset Hove, Besir Zeciri
written by Ingeborg Topsøe
directed by Jeanette Nordahl

by Walter Chaw Opening like a film from the New French Extremity, what with its phantom images of a deadly car accident set as a framing event for everything to follow, Danish director Jeanette Nordahl's Wildland (originally Kød & blod, or "flesh and blood") resolves as a domestic implosion in the vein of David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. The accident has claimed the mother of pretty, taciturn 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), leaving her at the mercy of social services, who deem in their wisdom to place Ida with her Aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Bodil has three grown sons who, at her direction, are involved in a criminal enterprise of sorts, and Wildland's MacGuffin is the collection of a debt from a recalcitrant client. What the game is is never terribly clear, but it's obvious that this is not an ideal environment for Ida following her recent trauma. Neither is it clear whether Ida was complicit in the fatal accident, though her dreams and fantasies–and the claustrophobic way Nordahl shoots her film in general (and Ida in particular) in long, unbroken closeups–certainly suggest Ida feels guilty about something. I don't mention these opacities as a detriment: far from it. Nordahl's picture isn't interested in the sundry details of its MacGuffins because they are MacGuffins.

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)

August 28, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, UK

**½/****
starring Dev Patel, Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Armando Iannucci, Simon Blackwell, based on the book by Charles Dickens
directed by Armando Iannucci

by Walter Chaw I hate Charles Dickens. I hate what I know about him as a human being. I hate how he writes. I hate his books. To be sure I hated them, I read them all. Because I majored in English and then British Romanticism, I even had cause to study his work–sometimes in great, exhausting detail. I have read volumes of critical studies, been subjected to numerous stage, television, and film adaptations, and had the great displeasure of watching a “colour blind” local production of A Christmas Carol a few years ago that filled me with irritation and upset. I have listened patiently to professors, friends, girlfriends who swore by Dickens; their eyes get twinkly when they talk about him, like they were talking about the Beatles or some shit to someone who maybe just hasn’t heard the George Harrison tracks, yet, before forming an opinion. I read David Copperfield on a fancy-bound garage-sale find my parents brought home alongside volumes by Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, and Melville. They were to be my friends through elementary school when I had precious few of the human kind. You could say it was movies and these books that taught me English, and you wouldn’t be far off. I still love those other authors. I still hate Dickens.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Lucky

August 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

*½/****
starring Brea Grant, Hunter C. Smith, Yasmine Al-Bustami, Kristina Klebe
written by Brea Grant
directed by Natasha Kermani

by Walter Chaw When you make the subtext the text, you have text and no subtext. I’m uncomfortable saying that things like Natasha Kermani’s Lucky (from a script by star Brea Grant) are not good, because sometimes that’s taken as a comment on the text rather than the execution of the text. More often, and I’m not even sure this isn’t fair to say, it’s taken as evidence that men can only review films made by women as men would see films made by women. That’s literally true. When I watch something like Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas, the second reboot of Bob Clark’s seminal slasher, I’m starkly confronted by the divorce between what I’m watching and my knowledge of what its messages mean to so many. I think it’s imperative that women speak out about men and have the means to do so. That said, Black Christmas, the reboot of Rabid, and now Lucky move me only as intellectual exercises and not as calls to action. They’re rally speeches, not poetry. At least, they’re not poetry I can understand.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Fried Barry

August 25, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, South Africa

***½/****
starring Gary Green, Chanelle De Jager, Bianka Hartenstein, Sean Cameron Michael
written and directed by Ryan Kruger

by Walter Chaw South African hyphenate Ryan Kruger’s debut Fried Barry is just really fucking delightful, an amalgamation of The Greasy Strangler and John McNaughton’s unfairly-forgotten The Borrower. The glue that seals the grimy, appalling parts together is, of all things, E.T.. It’s in that juncture between the obscene and the profound where Fried Barry finds its singular genius as a creature so foul that when it suddenly, briefly, becomes Save the Green Planet! but with the victim/protagonist/antihero the saviour of a group of girls held in a pedophile’s torture dungeon, what already defied description suddenly becomes… Is it art? At least it’s useful, cogent, maybe brilliant surrealism in that by turning into something familiar, all of the bizarreness racks into focus as a critique of the conventions of our popular entertainments. Why, for instance, is E.T., a film about an alien symbiote attached to a child nearly to the point of killing the child, so beloved a family classic? Look, you’re either with it, or you’re decidedly not. But if you’re in, so is Fried Barry. Oh, mate, Fried Barry is emphatically in.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Crazy Samurai Musashi

August 24, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan

*/****
starring Tak Sakaguchi, Kento Yamazaki
written by Sion Sono
directed by Yuji Shimomura

by Walter Chaw I’m going to be indelicate here in a second; I hope you’ll bear with me. It isn’t when I say that Yuji Shimomura’s Crazy Samurai Musashi is terrible, but when I say that Crazy Samurai Musashi is terrible like those world-record-setting gangbang pornos are terrible. It’s tedious, repetitive, boring almost immediately, and its only purpose as a venal spectacle demeans the participants as it eventually demeans the viewer. When an act is repeated until ground into a quintessence of dust, the act, whatever the act, is demystified utterly. I get it: sex is literally just mechanical pistoning. I would stop short of saying Crazy Samurai Musashi is exploitative in the same way, though it’s perhaps exploitative in maybe not so different a way as you would think. The draw of it is to present, as the bulk of a 90-minute feature, a 77-minute “one take” action sequence featuring legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (Tak Sakaguchi) murdering 488 not-legendary swordsmen in the middle of one of those Japanese woods where things like this happen in their 17^th-century video game way. That sounds amazing, doesn’t it? It does. A lot of things sound amazing. Very few of them are amazing in practice.

The Unholy (1988) [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

August 23, 20201980s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, UK

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ben Cross, Ned Beatty, William Russ, Jill Carroll
written by Philip Yordan and Fernando Fonseca
directed by Camilo Vila

by Bryant Frazer The Unholy, a moderately-budgeted religious horror drama from Vestron Pictures, is notable mostly for its outsized ambitions. Sure, it has the B-movie elements you’d expect from a late-1980s genre outing with Satanic undertones. There’s a troubled, tempted priest, a couple of gory set-pieces, and a phalanx of latex monsters that storm into the final act. But it also boasts moody cinematography, leisurely plot development, and a mini-dream team of character actors. Want to see Ned Beatty and Hal Holbrook play a scene together for the only time in their careers? You want to see The Unholy. How about an elderly Trevor Howard, in his final role, as a blind demonologist? The Unholy is the movie for you. Or the recently-deceased Ben Cross as a Catholic priest with an expiration date of Easter Sunday? You guessed it: The Unholy. It’s an unusually earnest variant on those Catholic-themed horror movies that became A Thing in the 1970s, after The Exorcist and The Omen established an audience for lurid horror dressed up with religious themes and prestige names.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Climate of the Hunter

August 23, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Vampire

***/****
starring Mary Buss, Laurie Cummings, Ginger Gilmartin, Ben Hall
written by Mickey Reece and John Selvidge
directed by Mickey Reece

Fantasia Festival runs from August 20 to September 2, 2020. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Micky Reece’s Climate of the Hunter is a delightful riff on ’70s no-budget grindhouse psychedelia–a take on Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire that unlike, say, The Love Witch, understands The Velvet Vampire as something other than just aesthetics to be aped. Which is not to say Climate of the Hunter isn’t aesthetically spot-on, even beautiful at times, in its filmic, weathered, period-appropriate way, but rather that it additionally captures that specific air of griminess attendant to artifacts like Rothman’s picture: the feeling that it’s not operating under any rules, so all bets are off. There’s a maverick quality to it, and a sly sense of self-knowing humour that stops short of being self-satisfied.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Feels Good Man

August 19, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

**/****
directed by Arthur Jones

by Walter Chaw Evolutionary anthropologist Richard Dawkins was right about a few things. In my limited experience, evolutionary anthropology tends to be right about everything. In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins posited that people, like every other organism, are only self-interested, and that one means through which we propagate is the dissemination of imitated images: that is, “memetics,” or “memes.” Something about the picture of us as deterministic automatons attracted to the simplicity of duplication appeals to me. One problem with the Internet is that it’s the Tower of Babel when it comes to the replication of images and ideas. That’s not a bad thing if the images and ideas foster acceptance; it’s a very bad thing when it breeds a feeling of community and consensus in the trafficking of dangerous-unto-nihilistic philosophies.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Columnist

August 17, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Netherlands

*/****
starring Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Porro, Rein Hofman
screenplay by Daan Windhorst
directed by Ivo van Aart

by Walter Chaw Pity the hot-button Film of the Moment that is still somehow not about very much at all. Such is the fate of Ivo van Aart’s The Columnist, which tackles Twitter and online trolling with style to burn and a game cast with nothing much to do and even less to say. Femke (Katja Herbers) is a widely-read columnist who’s made some enemies by suggesting that Zwarte Piet is racist and that women should be treated as human beings. Addicted to social media, she makes the fatal error of reading the comments, is driven mad, sort of (I think), and starts murdering her trolls after Googling them. There’s something about how she’s blocked until after she kills someone, at which point she’s able to pump out another widely-read piece about some meaningless piffle that keeps her employed. Worse, she’s now under a deadline (haha, see what I did there?) to complete a book–a setup for either escalation or piquant irony, though in the case of The Columnist, it’s setup for tepid social commentary made instantly impotent by the hellscape of our current reality.

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

Snow White (2025)

O’Dessa (2025)