Guest of Honour (2020)

Posted in2020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, VOD

Guestofhonour

**½/****
starring David Thewlis, Laysla De Oliveira, Rossif Sutherland, Luke Wilson
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda “He sounds like one of those people you hear about but don’t see,” Luke Wilson’s pastor Greg tells bereaved daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) early on in Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour, laconically cutting through an exposition dump as only Luke Wilson can. Greg is drafting his eulogy for Veronica’s father, the recently departed health inspector Jim (David Thewlis), for whom the film itself is a kind of prickly eulogy. A cold fish with inscrutable motives (he claims he’s just working to protect the public from contamination, even as he wields his badge with extreme prejudice), Jim is the quintessential Egoyan protagonist. He’s a moral question mark in a suit, like the tax auditors and insurance adjusters who have served the somewhat dimmed star of English-Canadian cinema so well in The Adjuster and Exotica. Imbued with a puckish meanness by Thewlis, Jim is the lynchpin to a modestly successful exercise that epitomizes Egoyan’s annoyingly self-serious puzzle-box style, as well as, thankfully, his playfulness.

The Beach House (2020) – Shudder

Posted in2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming

Beachhouse

**/****
starring Liana Liberato, Noah Le Gros, Maryann Nagel, Jake Weber
written and directed by Jeffrey A. Brown

by Walter Chaw What’s the conversation to be had around William Eubanks’s Underwater, Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever, and now Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Beach House? How all three, released within six months of each other, foreground a young, capable, female protagonist who understands better–and sooner–than anyone else the nature and intent of an all-consuming calamity. How all three are set in and around the ocean, that archetype of the unconscious for poets and philosophers. And how all three end with what is essentially a return–is it a reunion?–for their unheeded, uncelebrated triumvirate of seers. Indeed, they seem more like heralds than criers. The timing of the films is curious, certainly, and although H.P. Lovecraft seems the denominator for all three, in truth the better archetypal thread to pull here is the vagina dentata: the Charybdis, to be avoided for her indiscriminate thirst. They are fables of a very particular apocalypse, where a masculine impulse towards colonization, exploration, and industrialization has led to the Earth pushing back in pursuit of some sort of equilibrium. In that context, of course, it’s a woman, particularly a young woman, who would recognize both the affront of a full-frontal violation and the retributive rearguard solution. These movies are violent in the way childbirth is contextualized as violent. Lots of shit goes down inside a chrysalis, too.

Life During Wartime #22: THE THING (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw The Thing (1982) U.S.: Starz, DirecTV Canada: Crave Starz The rule my wife and I have for our kids about what they can watch is that there are really no restrictions, but the price is they need to have a conversation with us about content before and after. They'll have all the information they could possibly want going in, and then they can make their own decisions as to whether or not they still want to see it. We've taught them there are things they can see in a film that they can never un-see. We're also…

Life During Wartime #20: THE BIRDS (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw The Birds (1963) U.S.: DirecTV Canada: Crave Starz With a strong foundation in classic Hitchcock and growing up surrounded by Hitchcock paraphernalia, my kids are, somewhat by osmosis, already fans. I didn't bother with a lot of background, in other words, before The Birds. What I did say was that Vertigo was Hitchcock confessing his most secret self, only to have it popularly rejected. How does it make you feel when you say something important to you, that's hard for you to say, only to have the person you're telling it to minimize or dismiss it? The…

Gladiator (2000) [20th Anniversary] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Posted in2000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Morocco, UK

Vlcsnap-2020-06-30-20h07m01s374Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Franzoni and John Logan and William Nicholson
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bill Chambers

“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
-Captain Clarence Oveur (Peter Graves), Airplane!

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is good now. I suppose it was always good, if money and Oscars are indicators of quality, but for me, it was a late bloomer whose virtues have seemingly become more visible since the tide of its success receded. I remember Roger Ebert’s review of the film, which he called “Rocky on downers,” as one I felt a kinship with. In print and on television, he was especially dismayed by the “shabby” computer-generated Colosseum. The year before, George Lucas had set The Phantom Menace against digital cityscapes, but Gladiator marked one of the first times CGI was used extensively in a non-fantastical setting. (Harping on the Colosseum is a compliment, really, as in all likelihood it means the other products of the mainframe–the flaming arrows, the crowds, the patchwork performance of Oliver Reed–didn’t draw attention to themselves.) In a currently-offline article published in 2001, I wrote that “Gladiator provokes meatier discussion as the computer age’s first fully dehumanized non-sci-fi film: the late Oliver Reed became a mere mediator for his technologically aided performance, the stony streets of Rome bear an anachronistic (and soulless) patina, and Maximus is the most passive bloodlust-er Hollywood has ever seen, a video game hero on the fritz.” Some context: that was me trying to hex Gladiator‘s chances at the Academy Awards. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Andrei Rublev (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Soviet Union, The Criterion Collection

Vlcsnap-2020-06-22-17h42m12s349

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Anatoly Solonitsin, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko, Nikolai Sergeyev
screenplay by Andrei Konchalovsky (as Andron Mikhalkov), Andrei Tarkovsky
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Despite the fact that little is known about the man’s life, Andrei Rublev is considered one of the greatest Russian painters of orthodox Christian icons. Only a single work has been attributed entirely to Rublev with certainty, but it’s a doozy, subtly reconfiguring an earlier, more pedestrian icon drawn from the Book of Genesis into a visually sophisticated meditation on the Holy Trinity. Though this work is generally dated to 1411, Rublev’s elevation to master status is a 20th-century phenomenon. After a 1918 restoration revealed Rublev’s Trinity to be more brightly coloured and delicately imagined than previously thought–which some experts interpreted as a departure from Byzantine influences in the direction of a more specifically Russian sensibility–Rublev’s reputation soared. The Russian Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky famously put it this way: “There exists the icon of the Trinity by Saint Andrei Rublev; therefore, God exists.”

Irresistible (2020)

Posted in2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, VOD, ZERO STARS

Irresistible

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Carell, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Rose Byrne
written and directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart’s Irresistible hates you, absolutely loathes you. It can’t believe it has to talk to you and so it’s smug and dismissive, and then at the end of it all, it offers up three different but equally repugnant endings that give the viewer a variety of shit sandwiches to choose from, though you do have to pick one. As a metaphor for what’s going on in the world right now, it’s on-the-nose. As a movie, it’s an assault more objectionable than any Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke miserabilist exercise, because it clothes itself in an affable sheaf of menial, liberal equivocation–but underneath it’s this boiling, nihilistic condemnation of every single one of you fucking idiots who let it get so bad. It brings to mind nothing so much as George Sanders’s suicide note expressing boredom with the very notion of you to the very last. Everything is terrible. The experiment is over. We failed. There’s no hope. And Irresistible is precisely the kind of asshole who offers a utopian social solution he clearly thinks is a hopeless fantasy but pretends is advice given earnestly so you don’t think he’s the other kind of asshole who just complains about how stupid people are all the time. It’s a film about the mortal tone-deafness of liberals that is itself mortally tone-deaf.

Life During Wartime #19: ROMAN HOLIDAY (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw Roman Holiday (1953) U.S.: Prime, FlixFling Canada: FlixFling William Wyler is a titan. He had a twenty-some year run of hits, among them films like The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Mrs. Miniver (1942), and Wuthering Heights (1939). My daughter loves the Brontë novel and asked who starred in Wyler's. (We're both avowed fans of Andrea Arnold's version.) I said, "Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier." "Does that one end at the halfway point?" "It does." It's good, though. Before the Arnold version, I'd say it was the best one in an admittedly weak field. My son wanted to…

A Keeper of Flocks: FFC Interviews Abel Ferrara

Posted in2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

Abelferraratitle

Lemme break it down:

I’ve grown up with Abel Ferrara’s films and they’ve grown up with me. His Driller Killer and Ms. 45 were on my exact wavelength when I first sought them out during illicit trips to the video store. I didn’t see it until much later, but his directorial debut, the porn flick 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, would’ve been my vibe back then, too. Watching it now, it’s a prep course for his later work, having the same grindhouse appeal and, as it happens, the same ineffable sense of intimacy that still informs his incomparable sex scenes. Movies for adults in the United States used to be nasty like this sometimes, and no one is nastier than Mr. Ferrara when he sets his mind to it.

Posted in2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog
With everything going on in the world right now, it's difficult to find the mental bandwidth to think and write about movies. Nevertheless, they're still coming out--on various platforms and streaming services and on Blu-ray and DVD--and I want to assure our readers and patrons that while our coverage has slowed, we have no plans to abandon the site, which turned 23 (!) in May. Partly in celebration of that and partly just to brighten your day, we recently made the first five entries in Walter Chaw's Patreon column "Life During Wartime" available to all. (See links below.) In each…

Life During Wartime #18: THE WICKER MAN (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw The Wicker Man (1973) U.S.: Netflix Canada: rental only If it seems like we talk about religion a lot as a family, well, I guess we do. Not organized religion, per se, but belief, spirituality, and most of all morality. My kids need to be curious. Curiosity is a requirement. And if you're curious enough and ask "why" enough, you eventually get to the ultimate questions. Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man would play beautifully in a double feature with Matthew Robbins's Dragonslayer, as both are movies about the intersection of fundamentalist Christianity with the pagan religions it's absorbed, supplanted,…

Tommaso (2020)

Posted in****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Greece, Italy, UK

Tommaso

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara, Maricla Amoriello
written and directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw There’s something about the late careers of musicians that has, in the middle of all this static Sturm und Drang, moved me in ways I don’t know that anything’s ever quite moved me before. The new Bryan Ferry, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithful… So much longing and wistfulness. What’s that quote by who’s that poet who said something along the lines of how the sum of pain, loss, and time is wisdom? I feel more mortal now than I’ve felt since I was a suicidal teen–and even then, I believed my tragic surcease of sorrow would feed a grand, romantic storyline. Now that the world has enacted its apocalypse, I don’t believe my death would be much more than a bump, a tickle, the noise a bird makes when you hit it with your fender. You don’t even slow down if you notice it, but you won’t notice it. Even grief, I’ve found, for all its profundity, is only a caesura in a toneless cacophony. We rumble forward, heedless, encumbered, until the weight of it all crushes us and our decaying bodies are allowed to come to rest at last. That’s all. That’s all there is.

Life During Wartime #17: SHAUN OF THE DEAD (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw Shaun of the Dead (2004) U.S.: DirecTV, Starz Canada: Netflix Zombie movies are complicated, and that complication is itself complicated. Is there something intrinsically metaphorical about cannibalism? Catholics would say so--or, rather, they wouldn't. The ingesting of the Host, after all, isn't a metaphor. For the rest of us, though, the ingestion of another carries with it an innate taboo: the essence of society is threatened when one member of a group is consuming another. There's a sense of "dirtiness" that translates, I think, into zombie mythology as a form of contagion that can be passed through…

The Invisible Man (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Posted in****/****, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Vlcsnap-2020-05-25-20h09m18s855Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen
screenplay and screen story by Leigh Whannell
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a masterpiece–an adaptation not so much of H.G. Wells’s book or the James Whale film of it, but of Gavin De Becker’s indispensable The Gift of Fear, a guide for how women can learn to trust their intuition, overcome their denial, and identify signs of men on the verge of becoming violent. Men murder the women they want to possess every day and often bring harm to others in the process. As Margaret Atwood infamously summarized, a man’s greatest fear is that a woman will laugh at him and a woman’s greatest fear is that a man will kill her, and this has shaped our behaviours as a society. Men, as it happens, tend to support other men who are brought to answer for their actions, while women who speak out are castigated, cast out, and blamed for their own victimization. Virtually the only thing the “me too” movement has brought about is false confidence that it’s safe for women to speak out without fear of losing their position or reputation. The world is a foul sty and the bad sleep well.

Life During Wartime #16: OUTRAGE (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw Outrage (1950) U.S. & Canada: YouTube Ida Lupino was tough, smart, resilient, and talented. The inheritor of a centuries-old legacy of stage performers, she was only reluctantly an actress and nominal star before parlaying her reputation into a career behind the camera as producer and director. During Hollywood's so-called "Golden Age," she was something of a unicorn for the power she held as a woman in an industry dominated, then as now, by men. As an actress, her big break after years of playing some variation of prostitute/bad girl with a heart of gold came in Raoul…

Life During Wartime #15: DO THE RIGHT THING (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw Do the Right Thing (1989) U.S.: Starz Amazon Canada: Crave Starz I introduced Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing to my kids as the defining film of arguably the most important American director of the past forty years, Spike Lee. I've had a strange relationship with Lee's films, one I compared to my kids to my relationship with Neil Young. I didn't always understand Neil Young's music as a kid or, even, in truth as a younger man who should've known better--but in the last twenty years or so, his genius has become inescapable for me. In…

Days of Thunder (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital; Top Gun (1986) + War of the Worlds (2005) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Posted in1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tony Scott, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Sports, Tom Cruise

Vlcsnap-2020-05-18-20h31m34s612Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version of Days of Thunder

DAYS OF THUNDER
**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras D+
starring Tom Cruise, Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Robert Towne
directed by Tony Scott

TOP GUN
**/**** Image B Sound A+ Extras A
starring Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards
screenplay by Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Tony Scott

WAR OF THE WORLDS
***/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins
screenplay by Josh Friedman and David Koepp, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bill Chambers Days of Thunder was not a crapshoot; the dice were loaded. Almost the entire creative team that made Top Gun a hit–the illustrious Robert Towne filled in for the screenwriting duo of Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., and none of the soundtrack artists were invited back–was reuniting to do for NASCAR what the earlier film had done for the U.S. Navy’s Fighter Weapons School. Star Tom Cruise had become even more popular in the intervening years, earning an Oscar nomination for Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer had such an unparalleled track record, having shepherded Flashdance, Top Gun, and the first two Beverly Hills Cops to commercial success, that Paramount confidently renewed their contract at the start of production. As recounted in Charles Fleming’s unsparing High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Cultures of Excess, under the terms of their renegotiated deal (a “visionary alliance,” as Simpson-Bruckheimer insisted it be called in the trades), they would receive $300M for five pictures–any five pictures–over five years, as well as a host of unprecedented perqs, including creative autonomy and fully-furnished home theatres installed at the studio’s expense. Days of Thunder would be the first production of this visionary alliance. It would also, quite ludicrously, be the last.

Life During Wartime #14: UN CHIEN ANDALOU (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw Un chien andalou (1929) U.S.: IndieFlix, Flix Fling Canada: Flix Fling My kids were raised on The Pixies and for as long as they can remember, I've mentioned that the words to "Debaser," in which lead singer Frank Black screams that he's "Un chien andalousia," is a reference to a great surrealist film I would show them one day. Today was that day. The quick way to explain "surrealism" to the only moderately-interested is to ask them to imagine introducing something strange into the middle of something completely ordinary. Dreams operate on principles of surrealism: you could…

The Virgin Spring (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ingmar Bergman, Drama, Sweden, The Criterion Collection

Vlcsnap-2020-05-03-12h09m28s208

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson
screenplay by Ulla Isaksson
directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer A pivotal film in Bergman’s corpus, The Virgin Spring is also perhaps the most disreputable. Borrowing the basic frame of a story from the 13th-century ballad “Töre’s Daughter at Vänge,” and set, to gloomy effect, during Sweden’s transition from paganism to Christianity, it chronicles the brutal rape and murder of a teenaged girl carrying candles to church, her father’s equally violent vengeance against the culprits, and (critically, because this is Bergman) his subsequent anguish at the silence of an apparently cruel and uncaring God. Considering the film offers what feels like a concentrated dose of the director’s pet themes, it’s interesting that Bergman has no writing credit on the picture. Instead, he hired the Swedish novelist Ulla Isaksson for the adaptation. Isaksson developed a colourful cast of characters and some background to bolster the material included in the ballad, but her biggest alteration was moving the miraculous appearance of the spring that gives the picture its title to the very end of the story.

Life During Wartime #13: THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN + LA CIGARETTE (Patreon exclusive)

Posted inPatreon
by Walter Chaw The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) U.S. & Canada: YouTube La cigarette (The Cigarette) (1919) U.S. & Canada: YouTube Germaine Dulac was a filmmaker (and a great one), but that may be the least of what she was. A theorist, photographer, journalist, and critic, her interests were varied, canted towards the experimental and the surreal. As a film programmer, she was elected president of the Federation de cine-clubs and presided over the introduction of at least one certifiable genius, Jean Vigo. Her masterwork, The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), came out the year prior to Luis Buñuel's…