TIFF ’18: Blind Spot
Blindsone
***/****
written and directed by Tuva Novotny
by Bill Chambers I'm dense; I hadn't read anything about Blind Spot in advance, and it was a while before I realized I was watching a film that not only hadn't cut yet but was likely never going to. The picture opens with two adolescent girls getting dressed after gym class, scrolling through apps ("Look!" Thea (Nora Mathea Øien) says, waving her phone at her friend, who distantly acknowledges whatever it is she's supposed to see), and walking home from school together, which involves 11 uninterrupted minutes of mindless chatter. While admiring the awesome banality of it all, I somehow failed to notice that the film's form was dictating its commitment to verisimilitude. Maybe that's one of the blind spots to which the title refers–it seems to have a few meanings, both within the story being told and more metatextually. For instance, Thea returns to her family's apartment, has a little supper in front of the teevee while her stepmother, Maria (Pia Tjelta), tends to her baby brother, brushes her teeth, jots something in her diary, checks her phone, and then, for the first time, escapes our gaze, stepping out of frame into a literal blind spot, manufacturing a mystery out of those pivotal seconds before Thea, evidently, tries to kill herself by jumping out the window.
Telluride ’18: Roma (2018)
***½/****
starring Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta
written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón
by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón retreats from the noisy silliness of Gravity to produce something more in line with his A Little Princess–a touch of Children of Men thrown in for topical relevance and actual gravity. It’s all in black-and-white, no less, with a non-professional lead and Cuarón himself operating the camera, shooting in 65mm. What results is the slow but dulcet, small but sometimes impossibly large Roma, capturing the microcosm of the immigration question in one wealthy family’s interactions with their native servants, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) and Adela (Nancy Garcia), and what happens when the small tragedies of the day-to-day intersect with the larger tragedies of a world that doesn’t care about them. The mistress of the house, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), her inconstant husband, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), and the couple’s four small children live in a posh house in Mexico City sometime in the late-1960s. (An event in the film that is probably the Tlateloco Massacre sets the events somewhere around October of 1968.) Cuarón has called Roma his most personal film, and so it is as he continually directs attention away from the larger events at play, back to the intimate upsets of this upper-class family and their subsistence-class help. The largest scene of the film, a riot that led to a deadly confrontation between students and the military, immediately reverts to Cleo and Sofia’s aged mother-in-law, Teresa (Veronica Garcia), interrupted in the middle of a shopping trip.
TIFF ’18: A Star is Born (2018)
**½/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Elliott
screenplay by Eric Roth and Bradley Cooper & Will Fetters
directed by Bradley Cooper
by Angelo Muredda It says a lot about A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper's directorial debut, that the most emotionally cathartic stuff pours out as freely in the incredible trailer and its savviest meme offspring, where diva Pokémon Jigglypuff croons the entrancing opening bars of Lady Gaga's big stage debut for a rapt audience, than it does in the actual film, a polished first-act pitch in search of a payoff. That everything after the titular birth seems like apocrypha, weirdly playing both too long and as if it's running at 1.5x speed, is disappointing given the first act's charm offensive, though you can't put the blame squarely on the multi-hyphenate's already-overtaxed shoulders. It's probably asking too much of this third official crack at material first made into a vehicle for Janet Gaynor in 1937 to expect it to offer a wholly fresh take on a vaguely eugenic premise about how one half of a creative power couple can only thrive while the other languishes in obscurity. A first-time helmer with a stake in how his character's tragic narrative trajectory plays out, Cooper seems at once fired up by the meet-cute potential of the premise, which he nails, and stuck at a creative crossroads with the more melancholy, sepia-toned stuff that probably first drew the previously-attached Clint Eastwood's attention.
TIFF ’18: One Last Deal
Tuntematon mestari**½/****written by Anna Heinämaadirected by Klaus Härö by Bill Chambers Olavi (Heikki Nousiainen) looks like Michael Haneke and projects about the same cuddly warmth as an art dealer whose basement shop has never done better than break even. One day at the auction house he frequently trolls, Olavi is caught in the tractor beam of an unsigned portrait of Christ by an unidentified artist, perhaps seeing a vision of his younger self in the bearded figure. He has a hunch the piece is a bigger deal than the viperous auctioneer (Jakob Öhrman) knows, and decides to bid on it…
TIFF ’18: Monrovia, Indiana
***½/****
directed by Frederick Wiseman
by Angelo Muredda To anyone who might still be labouring under the delusion that Frederick Wiseman’s method is simply to point a camera at a bunch of bureaucrats and watch the policy talk and human foibles fly, there’s now Monrovia, Indiana, one of the nonfiction master’s fleetest, funniest, and most conspicuously structured films in some time. Though you could read it as a purposefully timely attempt to dig deep into the earth of a so-called flyover state that the so-called coastal elites attending slam-poetry readings at the New York Public Library might deride, the film more accurately suggests a minor B-side to the loftier work of its predecessor, Ex Libris, which, among other things, considered the library as a necessary and all-too-vulnerable point of contact between the working poor and a wider world that grows increasingly out of their reach. Monrovia, Indiana revels instead in the earthier pleasures of local institutions like Hot Rod’s Barber Shop, where everyone gets the same military-grade haircut, and the surreal space of a grocery store that stocks Donald Duck’s orange juice and lights its lemons, limes, and tomatoes like pop art.
TIFF ’18: Consequences
Posledice**/****written and directed by Darko Štante by Bill Chambers A young woman escorts Andrej (Matej Zemljič) into the bedroom at a party but when the layers of clothing start coming off, he balks. She calls his manhood into question, and the next thing you know she's running out the door with a bloody mouth while he wraps his knuckles in a towel. Andrej, who looks mature but is apparently still a minor, appears in court, where his mother (Rosana Hribar) throws him spectacularly under the bus for his recent history of delinquency, emasculating him yet again. Back at home awaiting…
Telluride ’18: The Favourite
****/****
starring Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Nicholas Hoult
written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
by Walter Chaw Imagine, if you can, that the leader of the country is ineffectual at best–an invalid, maybe, surrounded by vipers and sharks who do the real business of leading, feeding forever wars to enrich themselves, beholden to the monied upper classes who dictate advantageous-only-to-them policies around taxation. Imagine that this ruling class were devoted to nothing except their own leisure: besotted by firearms and obscure pastimes, throwing lavish parties, while the less fortunate (everyone else) died in wars that could be stopped if only they weren't so profitable. Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite is hilarious, but it would be even funnier if it weren't so absolutely spot-on about this mess we're in here in the United States–which is, apparently, spreading. The only comfort Lanthimos offers is that we're probably not in much worse shape than mankind has ever been. Cold comfort, indeed. The Favourite is not just one of the best movies of the year, it's the most topical, too, and the most hopeless as a result.
Telluride ’18: White Boy Rick + Shoplifters
WHITE BOY RICK
***/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jonathan Majors, Richie Merritt
written by Andy Weiss and Logan & Noah Miller
directed by Yann Demange
Manbiki kazoku
****/****
starring Lily Franky, Ando Sakura, Matsuoka Mayu, Kiki Kilin
written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
by Walter Chaw Yann Demange's follow-up to his bruising, brilliant '71 is this ersatz Donnie Brasco true-crime epic. White Boy Rick details the rise and fall of underage drug kingpin/FBI informant Richard Wershe, Jr. (Richie Merritt–excellent), dubbed "white boy" by the black Detroit gang into which he inculcates himself as first a sort of mascot, then trusted lieutenant, then deep-cover betrayer, then ultimate usurper. White Boy Rick establishes Demange firmly as a formidable technical director. A scene set in a roller disco circa 1984 is as beautiful, lyrical, and effortless an evocation (and affectionate amplification) of time and space as the Cornelius Bros and Sister Rose dance sequence from BlacKkKlansman. A sudden spinout on an icy road later on carries with it the harsh kinetic immediacy and strong knowledge of space of Demange's '71. The film looks right and feels right. There's a scene at a drive-in where Rick takes a date to watch Footloose: a film that couldn't possibly be more alien to Rick's reality. Crucially, White Boy Rick behaves in the right way, too, demonstrating restraint when appropriate, naturalism where appropriate, and expressionism, especially in a sequence where Rick's junkie sister Dawn (Bel Powley, also excellent) is taken from a crackhouse against her will down a red-lit corridor strobed with shadows.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ken Ogata, Kenji Sawada, Yasosuke Bando, Toshiyuki Nagashima
written by Paul Schrader and Leonard Schrader (Japanese screenplay by Cheiko Schrader)
directed by Paul Schrader
by Bryant Frazer A little more than halfway through Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a fragmented, multifaceted cinematic biography of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Mishima expresses nostalgia for an afterlife that existed only in the distant past. “The average age for men in the Bronze Age was 18 and, in the Roman era, 22,” Mishima reckons aloud, in voiceover. “Heaven must have been beautiful then. Today it must look dreadful.” Like the rest of the film’s narration, the passage is quoted from Mishima’s published work, in this case an article he wrote in 1962, eight years before his death at the age of 45 by seppuku. “When a man reaches 40, he has no chance to die beautifully,” Mishima continues. “No matter how he tries, he will die of decay. He must compel himself to live.” In 1984, when he made this film, Paul Schrader was 38 years old. He had just come off the commercial misfire that was 1982’s Cat People, a straightforward studio assignment he tailored to address his signature concerns about sex and death, putting them in the context of a dark fairytale with intimations of incest and bestiality. It wasn’t a good experience. Coked out of his mind for much of the shoot, Schrader fell into a dead-end affair with Nastassja Kinski that he hoped was something more; she wanted nothing to do with him after the movie wrapped, and Cat People‘s disappointing box-office receipts closed the door on his Hollywood career. He thought of suicide. He scurried away from Hollywood, heading first to New York and then to Japan, in search of a life change. That’s where Mishima came in.
Telluride ’18: Destroyer
**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Tatiana Maslany, Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell
written by Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi
directed by Karyn Kusama
by Walter Chaw A laconic noir that promises for a while to be fierce before settling into being familiar, Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer drips with style and atmosphere even if its destined-to-be-lauded central performance by Nicole Kidman lacks the same mystique. She plays LA Detective Erin Bell, a woman beset by demons of alcohol and regret that have left her looking cadaverous: rotted gums and hollow eyes. Most of the performance is fright make-up, the rest Kidman speaking breathily, heavily, and maybe overdoing the drunk swaying and slurring a tad. Erin’s daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) hates her, of course, and has taken to hanging out with much-older street tough Jay (Beau Knapp), probably just to piss her off. Erin’s estranged husband Ethan (Scoot McNairy) seems nice, though, if scarred by her ferocious temper and penchant for vomiting and passing out, usually in that order. Kidman has been extraordinary in small, personal films like this. Her work in Birth is generational; Dogville, too. But Destroyer is too programmatic to make much of an impact. This kind of image-slumming is too familiar by now, and there’s not one moment where it’s not Nicole Kidman doing a performance up there. Pity.
Telluride ’18: Non-Fiction
**½/****
starring Guillaume Canet, Juliette Binoche, Vincent Macaigne, Nora Hamzawi
written and directed by Olivier Assayas
by Walter Chaw The questions asked in and by Olivier Assayas's Non-Fiction are slippery and at times satisfying for that. This is his Hong Sang-Soo following a pair of Apichatpong Weerasethakuls (though he would say his films owe a bigger debt to Bresson)–a movie, in other words, involving the intricacies of relational dynamics, shot on what appears to be a shoestring and a lark over a long weekend among friends. Probably it's what one of his characters calls "auto-fiction," a blurred line between memoir and pure fiction, with the tension being that maybe there's not much of a difference after all between what's true and what's made up in the pursuit of truth. It's one of those movies that seems like a defense of concept, a response or an invitation to conversation for critics. (Assayas himself was one, once upon a time.) Even more, the picture suggests an auto-critical confession of sorts, yet I'm not sure of what. Past or present infidelities? A declaration that he's found peace at last? An apologia for indiscretions and a pathway to a more authentic life? Whatever Non-Fiction is, it's maybe just a little too clever for its own good.
Telluride ’18: The Front Runner
ZERO STARS/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina
written by Matt Bai & Jay Carson & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman
by Walter Chaw In 1988, Gary Hart, the democratic former senator from my home state of Colorado, was the front runner for the Presidency of the United States. About a week before the primary, which would have cemented his ascendancy to a post seemingly all but preordained, this guy–classically handsome, tall, masculine, progressive–did what powerful men in privileged positions sometimes do: he slept with a young woman who wanted a job with his campaign. That’s a problem, but the problem is he dared the WASHINGTON POST to follow him; he touted his ethics and morals as a foundational plank to his platform, and when the MIAMI HERALD took him up on his dare, they discovered that he was maybe a serial philanderer who in those last halcyon days before the Internet, hadn’t learned the voracious appetite the public has for a good, sleazy story concerning the tragic fall of kings. It’s hardly ever the crime–it’s almost always the cover-up. And in 1988, Jason Reitman’s The Front Runner says, politicians weren’t very good at the cover-up. Largely because the press was complicit in helping politicians, athletes, and other powerful men in powerful spheres keep sexual dalliances and abuses quiet. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, after all.
Telluride ’18: The Old Man & the Gun
½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Danny Glover, Sissy Spacek
written and directed by David Lowery
by Walter Chaw David Lowery follows up his enigmatic A Ghost Story with this slobbery, open-mouthed kiss to Robert Redford, in his alleged swan song to screen acting. Redford plays real-life bank robber Forrest Tucker, who, in a blue suit and stupid hat, resumes his long career of traumatizing tellers and imparting folksy aphorisms after escaping from San Quentin. Seeing this life as his calling, Tucker was oft-described as seeming "happy," and so that's the tactic Lowery and Redford take towards this material, presenting everything as this bucolic Americana bullshit of the variety the elderly and the elderly-at-heart, especially, get off on and which Redford has made his stock-in-trade in his dotage. The only thing missing is an early-bird buffet as patrons enter the theatre. Tom Waits and Danny Glover play Tucker's sometime-partners in crime and poor Sissy Spacek is enlisted as his gal Jewel ("Well, y'sure look it!") to deliver "good-natured" to the assembled. Yes, Redford, one of the most exceptional and brilliant actors in film history, is now delivering the patented Robert Duvall elderly performance: repeating phrases, smiling in a non-specific way, and patting people's hands as they talk, complete with a wired hearing aid dangling from his ear.
Telluride ’18: First Man
***/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Pablo Schreiber, Christopher Abbott
screenplay by Josh Singer
directed by Damien Chazelle
by Walter Chaw Damien Chazelle’s First Man is the Super 8 shrine for Terrence Malick that Oscar voters never knew they needed. It’s a mutant clumping-together of The Tree of Life (all the sad Texas scenes) and Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (all the astronaut stuff), mixed in with a few scenes that are gritty and true (most of them involving a frankly extraordinary Claire Foy), even if Chazelle remains overly fond of snap zooms and the handheld aesthetic in long shots. It’s best, even exceptional, when it’s not hagiography and passing fine when it’s doing what it “ought” to be doing. Like playing a classical music waltz when stoic-to-the-point-of-deranged astronaut/engineer Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) initiates the first-ever orbital docking manoeuvre, because 2001: A Space Odyssey; or doing a little riff on Bill Conti’s amazing score for The Right Stuff right before the first closed-cabin testing. Could be homage. Could be the movie just doing what seems right as a shorthand for emotional engagement. If that’s the case, more’s the pity, as Chazelle proves in the first thirty minutes or so of his film–which revolve around an orbital “bounce” for a test plane and the death of Armstrong’s toddler daughter to cancer–that he’s capable of evoking real emotion, and employing smart contrasts in style and action, if he would only let go of the desire to impress.
Telluride ’18: An Introduction
by Walter Chaw After a decade's absence, give or take, I started coming up to the Telluride Film Festival again six years ago at the urging of good friends whom I otherwise hardly see. I was in a bad place and they knew it. They didn't offer platitudes, they offered a challenge, and so one year I accepted it. The hardest thing to do for someone who's depressed sometimes is to accept help. I have come to find that the best gift you can give your friends who worry about you is to ask for help. The problem with depression is it tells you that you are a burden. It's exhausting.
FrightFest ’18: A Young Man with High Potential
***/****
starring Adam Ild Rohweder, Paulina Galazka, Pit Bukowski, Amanda Plummer
written by Anna de Paoli & Linus de Paoli
directed by Linus de Paoli
by Walter Chaw The storyline goes like this: Rey, the young woman in the new Star Wars trilogy, is a "Mary Sue"–a term used to describe a female character who is born fully-formed and, therefore, undeserving of her status as the hero of the story, any story. It's an argument made by mediocre men, usually mediocre white men, who have gathered together over social media to share their frustrations about how, essentially, their own worthiness has never been recognized by a world designed, now, to overlook and disdain them. It wasn't supposed to be this way. The parallel storyline is that women are usually murdered by men they know–ex-lovers or spurned would-be lovers–and that the best indicator for murderous gun violence is a history of domestic violence. We hold these truths now to be self-evident. And suddenly these mediocre men who used to get pushed into lockers and demeaned for their solitary interests are the masters of our culture, our industry, our government. There were warnings about this in films like The Last American Virgin and Revenge of the Nerds, remembering that the triumphant happy ending of the latter entailed one of the nerd heroes raping the girlfriend of the lead jock…and the girlfriend liking it a lot. Masculinity has always been this mash of the tragic and the toxic. It's irresolvable, though at least there can be better awareness.
FrightFest ’18: “‘Night’ Moves” – FFC Interviews ‘The Night Sitter’ Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn & John Rocco
by Walter Chaw The Night Sitter is awesome indeed. Partially crowdfunded via Kickstarter, it represents the feature debut of writing-directing duo Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco and their filmmaking collective Roller Disco Massacre. Just a couple of guys who love '80s horror and know how to use it in a sentence, Bruhn and Rocco were kind enough in the heat of this year's FrightFest to answer a few pressing questions. We started off talking about practical details of shooting The Night Sitter:
FrightFest ’18: The Night Sitter
***/****
starring Elyse Dufour, Jack Champion, Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum
written and directed by John Rocco and Abiel Bruhn
by Walter Chaw From the first synth chords of Rob Himebaugh's awesome '80s-inspired score; from the first glimpse of DP Scotty G. Field's gorgeous, neon-soaked lighting schemes; from the first look at world-weary heroine Amber (Elyse Dufour), herself a feat of lighting and colour coordination, The Night Sitter announces itself to be a major player. Filmmakers Abiel Bruhn and John Rocco's feature debut, it covers one really bad night in the life of poor, terrified Kevin (Jack Champion). His dad (Joe Walz) a wannabe reality-show host of one of those paranormal shows, hires Amber to sit for him and his girlfriend's (Deanna Meske) horrible kid, Ronnie (Bailey Campbell), leaving them alone with a locked door, behind which are all the demonic artifacts dad's been hoarding throughout his misspent career. That he's a loser is never a question (he times his reel to "accidentally" play for the benefit of pretty Amber), but he's a rich loser–meaning that as soon as dad is gone on his date, Amber calls her friends (Jermaine Rivers, Amber Neukum, J. Benedict Larmore) to come help her loot the place. Unfortunately, Ronnie has found where dad keeps the key to the demon room.
FrightFest ’18: The Golem
***½/****
starring Hani Furstenberg, Ishai Golan, Brynie Furstenberg, Lenny Ravich
written by Ariel Cohen
directed by Doron Paz & Yoav Paz
by Walter Chaw Hanna (Hani Furstenberg, The Loneliest Planet) is listening in while a council of elders gives her husband Benjamin (Ishai Golan) the option of leaving her for being unable to provide a son for years after the loss of their child. It's 1673 Lithuania. There's a plague, so there's a lot of death, and there's palpable fear in the air. Fear, among the other things it attracts, is irresistible to religion, and one day in this small Jewish community in the middle of a wilderness, the villagers discover that the plague has returned to the countryside and is encroaching on their isolation. Naturally, they retreat into religion. Ted Chiang has a short story called "The Seventy-Two Letters". It takes Hebrew mythology and wonders what it would be like if religion were treated as science. (And maybe, you know, it is.) The seventy-two letters are the name of God. You write them on a small piece of paper and roll that tightly into a little scroll. Insert it in the mouth of a mud effigy to infuse it with life. What materializes is a guardian, a protector, a golem that can be guided to the extent your id can be guided. Dario Argento played with a version of this in Phenomena; George Romero did, too, with Monkey Shines. The Golem is the true fana.