Oh, no! Two vampires!: Zendaya getting a double hickey in Challengers

Challengers (2024)

May 7, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
written by Justin Kuritzkes
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Challengers feels…what’s the word, is it “coy?” It’s a tease, a jape, a roundelay and a smug one. It promises the world and delivers a quintessence of dust: a movie about tennis where the balls are blue. The best part is near the end, when two once and future lovers consider each other from across a swirling maelstrom–a scene of heightened emotions right there on the verge of magic realism that reminded me of better movies like Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful and Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday and even Bronwen Hughes’s wildly underestimated Forces of Nature. What a pity the resolution to said scene is a heatless tumble in the backseat of a beater. It’s possible that consummation in the sexual sense is meant to take a backseat to ecstatic metaphor–that fucking is secondary to dazzling cinematography and a sweaty clinch in front of an adoring crowd. That would explain why the non-tennis sequences are equally sparkless: the two-thirds of the book you skim to get back to the good bits. Off the court, it’s an irritating, underwritten melodrama played by two fantastic actors and one who purses their lips and concentrates a lot, husky-whispering like late-career J-Lo when trying to convey seriousness. The one who seems altogether unworthy of the attentions of the other two points on this love triangle, so that any hint of romantic suspense has fled. Of course the boys should be together: the boys are the sexy ones in perpetual heat. What are we even doing here?

'Cause I'm the Unknown Blunt-Man: Gosling and Blunt in The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy (2024)

May 4, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham
written by Drew Pearce
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I watched David Leitch’s The Fall Guy the same way I try to spot a particularly well-camouflaged insect in a terrarium: with a little disgust, a little fascination, a little fear of the uncanny. You know when you know something’s there but you can’t see it? Could be the terrarium keepers are playing a trick, though, right? Could be there’s just a stick in there. By all accounts, real people made and executed The Fall Guy, but who can tell these days without some kind of Voight-Kampff detector? The film is ostensibly based on the classic five-season run of a Lee Majors television show I watched religiously as a kid, though I only retained the theme song (“Unknown Stuntman,” performed by Majors himself), so naturally, I rewatched the entire first season of it to rekindle my crush on Heather Thomas and confirm there’s no real connection between it and the film. The movie does seem to share some elements with Richard Rush’s cult classic The Stunt Man (1980), but it eschews the naked paranoia and strident social commentary. It shares some cosmetic elements with Robert Mandel’s F/X (1986) and its underestimated sequel (F/X 2 (1991)), too. Ultimately, the best analogue in terms of how weird it feels is John McTiernan’s meta-movie Last Action Hero (1993), only without the relative cleverness of a concept higher than “stuntmen do stunts.”

Night Swim (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

Night Swim (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

May 1, 2024Posted in2024, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren
screenplay by Bryce McGuire
directed by Bryce McGuire

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Welp, it’s come to this: a haunted swimming pool. There was a slasher movie set in a public pool (2001’s The Pool), and pools have been at the centre of some seriously creepy set-pieces in films ranging from the original Cat People to the remake of Cat People, from Let the Right One In to the remake of Let the Right One In. As far as definitively haunted swimming pools go, however, the only precedent I can think of is in Poltergeist III, and that one came in a package deal with a haunted skyscraper so it’s a bit of a cheat. Swimming was the only form of physiotherapy that didn’t feel like penance when I was growing up. Before my family put a pool in the backyard, I would swim at my next-door neighbour’s place or the rehabilitation centre where I took swimming lessons as a child. At one of those lessons, I broke my arm, but it didn’t scare me off pools–it scared me off swimming instructors. One evening, on vacation with my parents in Florida, I swam in the hotel pool, and every time I went below the surface, a pretty girl followed me down. We would bob there near the bottom, staring at each other within kissing distance through a veil of chlorine. Not a word ever passed between us; it was strange and wonderful. The pool has since become my respite from screens. I don’t know how to meditate, although I suspect that’s what I’m doing in there. Swimming has always seemed to liberate me mind, body, and spirit. I’m sentimental about swimming pools, in other words, and looked forward to Night Swim, the new film from horror megaproducers Jason Blum and James Wan, ruining them for me.

Occupied City (2023)

Occupied City (2023)

April 26, 2024Posted in2023, 2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK, War

***/****
based on the book by Bianca Stigter
directed by Steve McQueen

Now playing in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, the filmmaker’s elliptical, 4.5-hour nonfiction adaptation of co-screenwriter and partner Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945, a speaker at a commemoration for the victims of the Atlantic slave trade looks out into the audience at the Oosterpark and asks, “How do we create room for each other?” The site of that event, disembodied narrator Melanie Hyams tells us, was the storage yard for the occupying Nazi army’s vehicle fleet in the later days of the war, with German soldiers shooting at anyone who dared to steal stockpiled wooden blocks for use in their stoves. McQueen’s project in adapting such a sprawling, non-narrative text about the city he sometimes lives in is similarly anchored in the work of making room–not just for the myriad kinds of people who have lived and died there in the past 80 years, especially during the Second World War, but for the past and present as well.

Nina Hoss in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)

April 19, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Croatia, Esoterica, France, Luxembourg, Romania, Theatrical

Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii
****/****
starring Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pîrșan, Nina Hoss, Dorina Lazăr
written and directed by Radu Jude

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is now playing in Vancouver, Montreal, and Winnipeg. Opens in Toronto on May 4 at TIFF Bell Lightbox and on May 29 at the Carlton Cinemas.

by Walter Chaw I know this film. I know the anger that drives it… No, it isn’t anger, it’s incredulity and exasperation, the kind I’ll hold when I’m led to my pyre for the crime of reading a book, or holding a merciful opinion, or wishing for a reasonable solution. It’s the realization that Yeats was right about the worst and the best of us: the one will summon the will to bend the world while the other will fret and demur until the noose is tight and the platform drops away. I have my wit and am able to dunk on inconsistencies with the best of them, and I will do this even as I know there is no profit from shaming the shameless–from pleasuring stunted masochists who pull strength from their collective humiliation. It is my only defense, so I deploy it. I think about all those horror movies where people empty their guns into things that are not injured by bullets. “Deplorable”? At last a term of derision that can unite them like the “n-word” they pathologically want to wield. They are immune to me. I know this. I am Cassandra. Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is, like his previous Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a nervous breakdown of a movie–a wildly careening meltdown of a tantrum raging against the dying of all our lights, led by a woman who has reached a place of radical callousness where surprise and horror are disguised beneath a cocksureness as thick and sensitive as scar tissue.

Dunst in Civil War

Civil War (2024)

April 5, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw Haskell Wexler’s seminal 1969 film Medium Cool opens on a car accident. A woman in a grey-and-black striped dress has been thrown from the passenger side and is lying in the road. The car horn is stuck and blaring, and in the rearview mirror two figures approach: a man in a tight black T-shirt toting a 16mm camera, and his soundman, trailing behind with a directional microphone. They stalk around the wreckage. They find the best angles. The guy with the camera–the hero of the piece, John (Robert Forster)–spares a moment of pity for the woman after getting his footage. He and the soundman leave, and we hear distant sirens. They’re travelling, John and his colleague (Peter Bonerz), across a country torn by unrest at the end of the last progressive period in the United States–the wasteland our season of assassinations left behind, in which any vestiges of hope would soon curdle into the filth of Altamont and the Manson Family. They’re chroniclers, not participants. What is a single human lifespan compared to the life cycle of the perfectly eloquent photograph? What if you could keep telling your story after you died? What if the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where the party fractured over disagreements about how to handle an unpopular war and sent Chicago’s stormtroopers to beat students and protestors… What if this happened and no one was there to record how far we had fallen? What if the powerful were allowed to operate in the dark?

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

March 29, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry
screenplay by Terry Rossio and Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Maybe this is how it starts, though I know we must be in the middle if not at the end. More to the point, maybe this is when we notice how close we are to the door to the processing house–to the slaughter. I want to be clear, for posterity’s sake, that I believe we are at the very edge of it. I want it to be on record that I’m afraid. I think we may even be inside, in the stench of its fear and blood and shit, pop-eyed with the too-late realization that all this time, we were waiting in this line for this outcome, and we’ve known it all along. We have been conditioned to be surprised every single time it swims to our attention for a few minutes (which used to happen infrequently, first years, then months, then days, then hours apart; soon it will be seconds) that our lives hold no value to the machineries running us save for the material weight of our flesh. We have been conditioned to forget this every time we’re accidentally confronted with it again. They did it by teaching us to question–and discount–the suffering of others. Not completely; not everyone and not yet. But mostly, and some of you are making me a little worried. I feel like Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, although I’m not as sure I’m who I used to be anymore, either.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024)

March 24, 2024Posted in2024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace
written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman
directed by Gil Kenan

by Walter Chaw Walking out of the Westland Twin into the bright June sun in 1984, my best friend and I agreed that Ghostbusters was the best movie we’d ever seen. Just two 11-year-old idiots in the first week of summer vacation, drunk on soda and popcorn and full to the brim with the magic of being young and stupid. It’s a memory I’ll always treasure, this anecdote from the matinee of my filmgoing experience. I wouldn’t love movies as much as I do if not for the films I saw between 1983 and 1989, that period where I was the most receptive, the most vulnerable, the right amount of inexperienced and ignorant. Movies, for a while, were my secret sharer, my parents, my priest-confessor, my first lover. The Blockbuster Age shaped my tastes, and eventually movies pointed a direction for me to pursue in life through their analysis and contextualization. If I could understand them, the thinking went, maybe I could start to understand my childhood. The me watching Ghostbusters 40 years later finds it to be painful. The experience of that first viewing is so different from my reaction to it now, it’s hard to believe they’re the same film. Age provides an interesting parallax. Ghostbusters is a supernatural Caddyshack hang-out flick that shares the misfortune of being curdled by that specific early-’80s, OG SNL/National Lampoon arrogance, sloth, and nastiness. The best part of it is Rick Moranis, because everything Rick Moranis does in it is unforced. The worst part is the rest, in which may-as-well-be Catskills-veterans peddle their cocaine-fueled shtick, which is aging about as well as Henny Youngman’s and Soupy Sales’s were at the time.

SlipStreams Vol. 16 (Patreon exclusive)

SlipStreams Vol. 16 (Patreon exclusive)

March 20, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Patreon, SlipStreams
Three random-ish streaming recommendations from FILM FREAK CENTRAL editor Bill Chambers for the week of March 22, 2024. PICK OF THE WEEK Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007, d. Sidney Lumet (U.S.: Fubo, Peacock, Roku, Vudu, Tubi, Kanopy, Crackle, Pluto, Shout!, Plex; Canada: Prime, Tubi, CTV))Sidney Lumet's swan song brought the prolific director's career to a sudden stop; he lived another four years, making Before the Devil Knows You're Dead feel like a purposeful valediction with surprisingly little positive to say about his time on Earth. He was an old lib in the throes of Bush II, and this…
"What would really get me hot is a ceasefire." K-Stew and Katy O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

March 16, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris
written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska
directed by Rose Glass

by Walter Chaw Love is like a lamb and love is like a sledgehammer. Love crawls into your head and fills the empty spaces, the canyons and tunnels and holes in between, making it so full of noise it makes you fucking nuts. It’s too big, but it keeps growing. It kills you, but it won’t let you die. Love makes every love story a tragedy. Everyone writes about love, but the only person to ever do it right was Maurice Sendak, who wrote a survival guide for the fury called Where the Wild Things Are. Therein, a little boy named Max threatens to leave his friends, monsters on an island where they all jamboree. They beg him to stay: “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.” And they will, you know, because they have fangs and dangerous desires and horrible appetites. Love growls and gnashes its teeth. Love’s claws rattle like castanets. Love roars. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a love story about two terrible women and two terrible men who do bad things to one another and for one another because love is the fire in which, happily, we burn.

Watch this space

Spaceman (2024) + Sometimes I Think About Dying (2024)

March 15, 2024Posted in2024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Streaming

SPACEMAN
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Colby Day, based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař
directed by Johan Renck

SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING
**/****
starring Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena, Marcia DeBonis
written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead
directed by Rachel Lambert

by Walter Chaw Its basic set-up is like Duncan Jones’s Moon: a lone astronaut, far from home and tethered only by occasional contact with the partner he’s left behind on Earth, finds some solace in conversations with an alien/artificial intelligence. But this genre of listless Rocket Men and their internal melodramas traces back to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, right? Or that 1964 episode of the original “Twilight Zone”, “The Long Morrow”? Apocalypse-tinged futureworlds centred around Byronic heroes. Where its antecedents rarely showed the strain of their creation, however, Johan Renck’s Spaceman (an adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfař’s Spaceman of Bohemia) often does. It has good taste, and maybe even the right idea in putting a man in isolation in order to Altered States him into a cleaner understanding of his essential self, but it’s better at pounding out the notes than it is at hearing the music. While I didn’t hate it, I am, I suspect, squarely in its target audience of pretentious, sad, The Fountain-loving Proust-readers, so it never drowned me like I hoped it would. Me, whose pockets are always filled with the smooth rocks I picked along the shore.

Dune Part Two (2024)

Dune Part Two (2024)

February 29, 2024Posted in****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw

“And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of they life:”
–Genesis 3:14

Fanaticism is a closed circle, maddening because it’s impregnable, maddening because it destroys everything in the process of building itself. It’s a riddle without a solution, and once you’ve drunk deep the plasma spring, it’s a long way back–if you ever get there. There are people who “deprogram” cult members, but I don’t buy it, you guys. I’m of the belief that when you’re gone, you’re gone. You went by choice, after all. You denied your ears the beeswax but didn’t tie yourself to the mast. My mom bought into a cult for the last several years of her life. She held on to it tightly, and it gripped her right back. I suppose that’s one of the appealing things about cults: when you find the right one, you join the company of a great many people who agree with you. If you’re broken in some way, if your awareness of that has made you lonesome and alone, that must feel good. I take a little bit of the blame for her susceptibility to such things. I was a terrible son to her. Maybe she needed something to hold that would hold her back; I did, too. I found it in a wonderful wife and kids. She found it, some of it, in a cult that finally accepted her. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know what I believe. Maybe this is just narcissism–mine or hers, I don’t know either. But she’s dead now, and I’m the only one left to wonder about what happened between us.

SlipStreams Vol. 14

February 21, 2024Posted inPatreon, SlipStreams
Three random-ish streaming recommendations from FILM FREAK CENTRAL editor Bill Chambers for the week of February 23, 2024.PICK OF THE WEEKWaking the Dead (2000, d. Keith Gordon (U.S./Canada: Criterion))Criterion Channel's "Interdimensional Romance" slate is a treasure trove of bittersweet love stories, but I want to single out this underseen gem from director Keith Gordon, which has only grown more poignant in the 24 years since its release. Fielding Pierce (Billy Crudup) is a clean-cut, all-American kid putting himself through law school with a stint in the Coast Guard. Visiting his brother Danny's publishing outfit, he meets the magnetic Sarah Williams…

Madame Web (2024)

February 17, 2024Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

Madameweb

**½/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor
screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
directed by S.J. Clarkson

by Walter Chaw S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a rare and specific variety of disaster, which is interesting because it’s largely centred around a rare and specific variety of spider. That is to say, not “interesting” so much as unintentionally ironic or something. Rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, you know? The mass-appealing, notes-driven, “for dummies,” not-entirely-accurate pop-cultural definition of a literary conceit. This reminds me of the swoony, heartthrob moment where Ethan Hawke defines “irony” perfectly in Reality Bites. I don’t actually remember what he says, though, because I haven’t seen that movie since its 1994 release–about ten years before the events of Madame Web, the screen debut of Marvel mutant Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who’s named after the Greek archetype who can see the future but no one listens to her and Marc Webb, director of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. Just kidding. She’s named Webb because spiders spin them, with an extra “b” to throw you off the trail but not so violently that you don’t know it’s fucking with you. Madame Web (one “b,” because the picture is more invested in making sure you know it’s related to the lucrative Spider-Man franchise than in being such a tedious asshole) opens in 1973, with Cassandra’s super-pregnant mom Constance (Kerry Bishé) tromping around the South American rainforest like Sean Connery in Medicine Man in search of a super-spider when…okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, 30 years later, Cassandra is a paramedic who can sometimes see the future, but nobody believes her. You might have deduced that by her name is all I’m saying.

SlipStreams Vol. 13

February 14, 2024Posted inPatreon, SlipStreams
Three random-ish streaming recommendations from FILM FREAK CENTRAL's Walter Chaw for the week of February 16, 2024. PICK OF THE WEEK Cujo (1983, d. Lewis Teague (U.S.: Max, DirecTV; Canada: Paramount+)) It's time for a serious reconsideration of Lewis Teague's Cujo, which was arguably buried in the steady stream of Stephen King adaptations from this period. Find in this middle-American noir a career-defining performance from Dee Wallace as Donna, a mother doing her best to shield her young son Tad (Danny Pintauro) from the ugliness of their shared reality. When a St. Bernard, after poking his head in a hole…

SlipStreams Vol. 12

February 7, 2024Posted inPatreon, SlipStreams
Three random-ish streaming recommendations from FILM FREAK CENTRAL editor Bill Chambers for the week of February 9, 2024. PICK OF THE WEEK The Bedroom Window (1987, d. Curtis Hanson (U.S.: Criterion, Kanopy; Canada: Criterion, Hollywood Suite)) Curtis Hanson wrote and directed this page-turner of a movie, which fleshes out the plot of Anne Holden's slim pulp novel The Witnesses. Married Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert) is having a fling with yuppie Terry (Steve Guttenberg). When she sees an assault from Terry's bedroom window he thinks might be linked to a nearby murder, Terry urges her to go to the police. But because…

Perfect Days (2023)

February 1, 2024Posted in****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Japan

Perfectdays

****/****
starring Kôji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Tomokazu Miura
written by Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
directed by Wim Wenders

by Walter Chaw Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) notices little things. Like the sunlight dappling the trees. Or the doomed sproutling, too close to its mother to survive, pushing its way out of the ground. He gestures at the park’s caretaker, asking if it would be all right for him to rescue the plant, and carefully transplants it to a piece of newspaper he’s folded into a cup. Hirayama works for Tokyo, cleaning its network of public toilets. He listens to his collection of ’60s and ’70s music on cassette tapes in his municipal van–dark blue, same as his jumpsuit, the colour playing counterpoint to The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” which provides the soundtrack for our first ride home with him during magic hour. (I have to imagine the character of Niko (Arisa Nakano) was not accidentally named.) Once he returns to his spartan flat, he plants the sapling in a pot and puts it in a room full of its spiritual brothers and sisters at various stages of thriving. Hirayama goes to his favourite restaurant stall in the subway, then a bathhouse, where he soaks and listens to other men converse. Then it’s off to bed reading Faulkner. The first lesson of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is that it is possible to live a full and beautiful life, at least for a while, in a small space: watered, fed, warm, cared for…and wanted, though it isn’t clear at first that anyone is thinking about Hirayama.