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)
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)
****/****
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)
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
Please 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)
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)
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
Please 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)
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
****/**** 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)
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…
Life During Wartime #12: FARGO (Patreon exclusive)
by Walter Chaw Fargo (1996) U.S.: Starz, DirecTV Canada: rental only My kids have a great deal of experience with the Coen Brothers. Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn't There, True Grit, Hail, Caesar!--all seen by both children. My daughter, the more adventurous moviegoer of the two, has also seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and No Country for Old Men, which she declared to be the most frightening movie she'd ever watched. This is coming from a veteran of The Exorcist, Poltergeist,…
Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother – Books
Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker
FFC rating: 8/10
by Barry Sonnenfeld
by Bill Chambers Barry Sonnenfeld is a renowned cinematographer and a director with more than a few blockbusters on his resume (The Addams Family, the original Men in Black trilogy), but the Sonnenfeld who’s front and centre in his autobiographical Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker is the raconteur who’s honed his craft on talk shows with comic tales from his civilian life as the offspring of overbearing parents and husband of the beloved “Sweetie,” many of which reach their final form here. Cinephiles may consequently find the book to be something of a disappointment compared to, say, fans of humorists like David Sedaris. While Sonnenfeld does touch on his experiences in filmmaking (including a stint in porn), he skips blithely over some milestones on his CV or remembers them for exceedingly idiosyncratic reasons that won’t sate any conventional curiosity one might have about them. For example, Miller’s Crossing, arguably the pinnacle of his three-movie collaboration with the Coen Brothers, is reduced to the production that climaxed with his wedding. On the other hand, there’s value in Sonnenfeld’s somewhat dumbfounded consideration of his unlikely journey up the Hollywood food chain, which shows that fate and, let’s face it, white male privilege can play major roles in launching a film career. His utter lack of sentiment when it comes to his achievements makes for a tonic against the typical showbiz-dreamer’s success story.
It is also a very, very funny book.
Life During Wartime #11: LE GRAND AMOUR (Patreon exclusive)
by Walter Chaw Le Grand Amour (1969) U.S.: The Criterion Channel Canada: The Criterion Channel Jerry Lewis once declared that he learned the meaning of the word "genius" twice: the first time when he looked it up in the dictionary, the second when he met Pierre Étaix. As the story goes, neither spoke the other's language, so they expressed their mutual admiration by pantomiming scenes from each other's films. However accurate the recollection, it's a lovely anecdote, and Lewis and Étaix's friendship was forged quickly and well documented. Lewis even cast Étaix in his still-suppressed Holocaust film The Day the Clown…
Life During Wartime #10: THE TERMINATOR (Patreon exclusive)
by Walter Chaw The Terminator (1984) U.S.: Showtime, Fubo Canada: CTV After making an inauspicious directorial debut with Piranha II: The Spawning, James Cameron hit it out of the proverbial park with The Terminator (1984). I was 11 when the film came out, and figuring out a way to get our parents to let us watch it was an all-consuming project for me and my pals. I was so desperate to be cool that I lied to a buddy about having seen it, declaring that the laser-sight glimpsed in the television teasers was a laser gun cutting clubgoers in half…
Life During Wartime #9: DUCK SOUP (Patreon exclusive)
by Walter Chaw Duck Soup (1933) U.S.: rental only Canada: n/a It's easy to see the Marx Brothers as a relic of their time. The challenge with introducing an American vaudeville comedy team from the turn of the twentieth century is finding a pathway that doesn't rely on condescension. Duck Soup (1933) is about the disastrous toll of a feckless narcissist holding the highest office in the land and how his enablers prop up a useful idiot who will protect their wealth and social position. Duck Soup, as I said, is about the United States in 2020. Vaudeville had its roots in…
1984 (1984) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc
Nineteen Eighty-Four
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Gregor Fisher
written and directed by Michael Radford
by Walter Chaw George Orwell’s 1984 is a fabulously paranoid fantasy in which everything predicted has not only come to pass but proven mild in comparison. Orwell himself failed to foresee how Big Brother’s intrusion into all aspects of our lives would be a privilege we happily facilitated and paid for at a premium through the acquisition of our manifold devices and subscriptions. Cameras and microphones are recording every aspect of our existence…and that’s just the way we wanted it. Capitalism is the most pernicious form of authoritarianism. We are slaves to ease. 1984 is, for all intents and purposes, a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a novel written in 1923 and instantly suppressed in Zamyatin’s native Russia for being ideologically undesirable. It wasn’t published there until 1988 in the temporary spirit of glasnost, though copies of it had been in circulation abroad for decades. Orwell, reviewing We for TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in January of 1947, identified it as one of “the literary curiosities of this book-burning age.” “This is a book to look out for when an English version appears,” he wrote, and suggested that Aldous Huxley had borrowed from it extensively for A Brave New World. (For what it’s worth, Huxley denied the charge vociferously and, having read We, I’d have to agree with him.) Orwell went on to criticize We for lacking political focus in favour of a more general fear of “the machine.” So I like to think of 1984, written three years after this review of We, to be Orwell’s attempt to correct what he identified as that work’s essential flaw rather than a more cynical wholesale lift. I like to think he was driven more by the urgency of the message than by the venality of stolen valour.
Life During Wartime #8: THE SEVENTH SEAL (Patreon exclusive)
by Walter ChawThe Seventh Seal (1957)U.S.: Criterion, Kanopy, FuboTV, Watch TCMCanada: CriterionI showed my wife Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal for the first time in 2003, when we were pregnant with my daughter. As we were watching, we both, separately, decided to name our baby after the Bibi Andersson character, Mia, because Mia in the film is surrounded by loved ones, free from worry, happy, and protected from the death and despair that surrounds her. As a joke, I tell people that our daughter was named after a character in The Seventh Seal: "My daughter's name is Antonius Block." It's…
Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc
**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn
by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.
Life During Wartime #7: SHERLOCK JR. (Patreon exclusive)
by Walter ChawSherlock Jr. (1924)U.S.: Hoopla, Kanopy, IndiePixCanada: HooplaBuster Keaton is one of the "big four" silent comedians--a group that includes Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon--who produced a fascinating body of fraught work that is slyly progressive (especially in regards to gender) and sometimes uncomfortable. While the kids have seen films by all of these guys, I was happy to give them a recap of their personas: Langdon affected a child-like, wide-eyed, powdered, often "feminized" demeanour Chaplin's "Little Tramp" presented as a "hobo" archetype, poor and lovelorn and unfailingly optimistic Harold Lloyd's harried "Glass" persona was all bespectacled,…