Fantasia Festival ’18: Knuckleball

August 2, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Horror, Thriller
**/****screenplay by Kevin Cockle, Michael Petersondirected by Michael Peterson by Bill Chambers In the wintry Knuckleball, 12-year-old Henry (Luca Villacis) is sent to stay with his maternal grandfather, Jacob (Michael Ironside, looking huskier these days), while his parents (Kathleen Munroe and Chenier Hundal) attend a funeral. I don't entirely understand why Henry can't go with them, but it's an opportunity for him to spend time with Jacob, who hasn't, up 'til now, met the boy, owing to his mother's estrangement from her father. Ironside is as imposing as ever, and if you've followed his career at all the first third…

Fantasia Festival ’18: Tokyo Vampire Hotel

July 31, 2018Posted in2018, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, Vampire
**½/****written and directed by Sion Sono by Bill Chambers This feature-length truncation of a 6½-hour Amazon Japan TV series finds kitsch provocateur Sion Sono presiding over another apocalypse, as gun-crazy vampire clan the Corvins trap young Japanese singles inside their Technicolor hotel "for one-hundred years" while the world outside allegedly becomes ash. Tokyo Vampire Hotel is unconventional, to say the least, though what struck me as its most audacious flourish--Sion's credit and the movie's title appearing 42 minutes into this 142-minute film--might just be an overlooked remnant of an individual episode. Believe it or not, shearing over four hours from…

Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

July 28, 2018Posted in2018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

Fallout

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw As the title flatly states, Mission: Impossible: Fallout (hereafter Fallout), the sixth instalment in our very own Jackie Chan’s signature series, will be about Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) emotional baggage, earned over twenty-plus years of saving the world from threats foreign, domestic, and auteur. The main personal casualty for Hunt is the disintegration of his marriage to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who must remain a “ghost” so that she doesn’t suffer the, yes, fallout from Ethan’s hero work. She checks in every once in a while, Hunt’s teammate Luther (Ving Rhames) tells Ethan’s new flame, former MI6 agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson). It’s what keeps Ethan going. Accordingly, Fallout starts with an apocalyptic dream of Julia in the hands of maddog terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)–the type of dream James Cameron used so effectively in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where everyone turns to charcoal and flies apart. It’s important to focus in on all of this because Fallout is about a very specific element of the myth of masculinity, this romanticizing of sacrifice and suffering that men must go through in order to protect the women in their lives. The best part of Martin Campbell’s extremely good Casino Royale is when fatale Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) brings Bond (Daniel Craig) back from the dead and his first sentence is spent asking if she’s okay. There’s a scene like that at the end of Fallout as well when Hunt, back from the dead, apologizes to Julia for everything. It’s the sentiment and the situation that makes men in the audience spring a manly leak. Hunt–even his name is a primordial gender assignation–is the avatar for male expectation, which casts his heroics in an odd light, I think: fantasies of male heroism played against grandiose, extravagant, paranoid delusions. I don’t know now if I’m talking about Cruise or Hunt. Same, same.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Rondo

July 27, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Thriller, ZERO STARS
ZERO STARS/**** written and directed by Drew Barnhardt by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt's sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it's so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field's Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill's (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party…

The Equalizer 2; The First Purge; Superfly (2018)

July 26, 2018Posted in2018, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Revenge, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Equalizer2

THE EQUALIZER 2
**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Melissa Leo
written by Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

THE FIRST PURGE
**/****
starring Y’lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by James DeMonaco
directed by Gerard McMurray

SuperFly
**½/****
starring Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Michael Kenneth Williams, Lex Scott Davis
written by Alex Tse, based on the screenplay by Phillip Fenty
directed by Director X

by Walter Chaw McCall (Denzel Washington) is Batman. He has a tragic past and a tortured rationale, a sense of morality in a fallen world that aligns him with the hardboiled detectives proliferating American popular culture in the immediate aftermath of WWII. He was Dirty Harry Callahan or Paul Kersey in the late-’70s-into-’80s. No coincidence Death Wish has already gotten its own remake. No coincidence, either, a series interested in a theoretical near-future in which a day of mayhem is sanctioned by the government in order to facilitate a “purging” of intra-cultural aggression has received four instalments and an upcoming television series. The latest, The First Purge, serves as a “prequel” to the events of the first film. It’s also, full confession, the first of these movies that I’ve seen. I thought the premise was interesting, don’t get me wrong, I just didn’t really have the stomach for it. I feel the same way about that new Mr. Rogers documentary, or The Cove. The world is awful. I get it. There’s a limit to how often I want to be reminded of what we’ve lost. What’s curious about The First Purge (and the Superfly reboot) is not that all its heroes (save one) are Black and all its villains are white, but rather that its relationship to something like The Equalizer 2 mimics the relationship between “The Cosby Show” and “A Different World”. One provides a kind of cross-cultural reassurance that minorities are interested in the restoration of the ruling culture; the other understands the ruling culture was never threatened in the first place. Sure, subcultures evolve in the shadow of the social order, but the social order itself remains implacable and immutable.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Lifechanger

July 25, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Christmas, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Fantasia18lifechanger

**/****
written and directed by Justin McConnell

by Bill Chambers Emily (Elitsa Bako) lies naked in bed next to her own desiccated corpse. She returns home to a fretting boyfriend (Adam Buller) who says she's been missing for days. Against her wishes he calls the police to tell them she's returned, so she sticks a corkscrew in his neck. She's already beginning to decay, though. When Detective Freddie Ransone (Steve Kasan) pops 'round to see whether she's turned up yet, she takes the opportunity to snatch herself a new meat-cage: his. It's a lather-rinse-repeat pattern the movie soon establishes, as unidentified lifeform "Drew" identity-hops around the city at Christmastime. Lifechanger is a bit like The Hidden without anyone on screen trying to hunt down the alien, whose materialist appetites are here replaced by lovesickness. Drew retains his personal memories in addition to inheriting those of his hosts, although he doesn't really have any use for the latter. We know this partly due to Drew's narration (read by horror mainstay Bill Oberst Jr.)–a cue perhaps taken from Peter Watts's fabulous short story "The Things," which gives voice to the shapeshifter of John Carpenter's The Thing. By virtue of this innovation and all the mortal angst he expresses Drew becomes the most human character on screen, but then again his thoughts do tend to be dismayingly prosaic and expository for something not of this earth.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 24, 2018Posted in1990s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Vlcsnap-2018-07-24-02h22m08s362Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong
screenplay by James Cameron & William Wisher
directed by James Cameron

by Bryant Frazer I remember the summer of 1991, when Terminator 2: Judgment Day landed in movie theatres with all the fuck-you noise, power, and momentum of a Ford Freightliner crashing from an L.A. thoroughfare overpass into a concrete spillway below. It was the year of Operation Desert Storm and the ending of the Cold War, the year LAPD officers were videotaped beating Rodney King. With the release of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” still a few months away, latter-day cock-rocker Axl Rose still led the most popular band in America. It had been a pretty good year for women in film, even if the material was grim–Jodie Foster helped open The Silence of the Lambs at #1 in February and Davis/Sarandon kick-started a thousand feminist (and anti-feminist) thinkpieces when Thelma & Louise arrived in May. But the main movie event of the summer was the testosterone-laden sequel to The Terminator. Serenaded by a hit single from Axl’s Guns N’ Roses, heralded as the most expensive movie ever made, and stuffed with apocalyptic imagery, T2 roared onto screens, smacked you upside the head, and stole your lunch money, then smirked about it as it strolled away.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Cam

July 21, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller
**/****screenplay by Isa Mazzeidirected by Daniel Goldhaber by Walter Chaw Daniel Goldhaber's e-take on the doppelgänger mythos via Harlan Ellison's "Shatterday," Clive Barker's "Mortal Remains," and that second-season episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" called "The Case of Mr. Pelham," asks what could happen if the Internet developed the ability to clone anyone once they uploaded enough extant video footage. Of course this is already mostly possible, and of course this new technology's main utility has been creating celebrity-fakes porn--which Cam addresses, though not well. It looks good and hero Lola ("She was a showgirl") is game, but while it threatens…

Fantasia Festival ’18: The Vanished

July 21, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Mystery, Revenge, South Korea, Thriller
**½/****written and directed by Lee Chang-hee by Bill Chambers A hit in its home country of South Korea earlier this year, The Vanished is a nominal ghost story in which a high-profile corpse disappears from the morgue. On the case is Detective Woo Jung-sik (Kim Sang-kyung), a washed-up alcoholic with the requisite Tragic Past (his fiancée was killed a decade earlier in a hit-and-run), which has put a pretty big chip on his shoulder for perps who might be getting away with murder. Like, say, college professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo), the "trophy" husband of the missing dead woman (Kim…

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)

July 20, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

Dontworryhewontgetfar

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Kathy Driscoll-Mohler
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the book by John Callahan
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Angelo Muredda "I'm a sucker for quadriplegic movies," VARIETY critic Peter Debruge wrote of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot from Sundance, before criticism from disabled activists apparently inspired his editors to do some quiet and uncredited post-publication editing. Whatever its merits as a biopic of an outsider artist–dubious, given the cuddliness offensive of Danny Elfman's insistent score–or a "quadriplegic movie" (minimal, given that its subject, Oregon cartoonist John Callahan, was actually a paraplegic), Van Sant's return to movies people might conceivably care about is at least not so homogenous and tired as that backhanded praise suggests. It's hard to shake the feeling that the film is the belated two-birds-with-one-stone fulfilment of a business deal with Callahan, who died in 2010, and Robin Williams, who first optioned the story and once intended to play Callahan himself. Despite the whiff of old Tupperware leftovers that hangs about it, the film is pleasantly rumpled in the tradition of Van Sant's more interesting work–predictably boring in its rehashing of disability clichés, from casting to writing, yes, but formally unusual, and committed to the repetitive and potentially un-cinematic bootstrap work of self-improvement and forgiveness that movies about addicts and accident survivors tend to sail through.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Blue My Mind

July 19, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coming of Age, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Switzerland, Teen
**/****written and directed by Lisa Brühlmann by Bill Chambers 15-year-old Mia (Luna Wedler) is struggling to fit in at a new school, feeling suffocated at home, and hormonal in the usual ways--physically lashing out at her mother (Regula Grauwiller), smoking, flirting on the Internet with men who should know better. She manages to break the ice with the cool kids by seconding their idea to take the school field trip to Switzerland's version of Coney Island, and earns the respect of pack leader Gianna (Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen) with a thrill-seeking attitude that in fact portends a self-destructive streak. Mia's body…

You Were Never Really Here (2018) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 16, 2018Posted in****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Thriller, UK

Youwerenever2

****/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Lynne Ramsay, based on the book by Jonathan Ames
directed by Lynne Ramsay

by Walter Chaw It opens with a child’s voice saying that he must do better. It’s dark. The first image is of a man trying to breathe inside a plastic bag. This is your everyday Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), and this is how director Lynne Ramsay lets us know that he’s disturbed. We know he’s dangerous, too, because she shows him cleaning the head of a ball-peen hammer and flushing bloody towels down a hotel-room toilet in a visceral call-back to the nightmare’s resolution in The Conversation. All of You Were Never Really Here is a nightmare: a vision of the United States presented by a foreign artist who sees America in the truest way since Wim Wenders’s pictures about violence, Edward Hopper (whom Ramsey uses as a touchstone, too), and the state of the American dream state. When she evokes “Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1” (a.k.a. Whistler’s Mother), capturing Joe’s mother (Judith Roberts) in profile through a window as her son goes to collect some bounty, it’s sad in the ineffable way that great art can be in just a pass, a glance. Ramsey’s picture is about the toll of violence on the violator and the victim in equal measure. In moments, she recreates Michael Mann’s urban veneers–nowhere more so than during the title sequence, whose soundtrack evokes not only that halcyon period in the ’80s when Tangerine Dream seemed to be scoring all the best movies, but also the band specifically in how their best scores were about the repetitive urgency of work. Jonny Greenwood’s music for You Were Never Really Here provides subtext, texture, and emotional geography. It reminds of Jon Brion’s work on Punch-Drunk Love. In a lot of ways, that PT Anderson film, in its discussion of a disturbed and volatile young man finding purpose and acceptance, is this picture’s closest analogue.

Fantasia Festival ’18: An Introduction

July 14, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

DZePZNhX0AAj6jl

by Bill Chambers While I was composing this “curtain-raiser,” a fellow critic tweeted that she’d been offered press credentials for an upcoming film festival but didn’t see the point of accepting them, since travel and lodging would inevitably cost more than she would make reporting on the festival. Montreal’s venerable genre-film festival Fantasia, now in its 22nd year, has attempted to solve this kind of dilemma and broaden awareness of its brand by inviting online outlets to view the majority of its slate remotely via streaming links. Obviously “screeners” are not a new concept and have for the last few years helped sites like ours round out our coverage of various festivals, but nothing has ever been attempted on this scale, with most of the films accessible via a centralized hub. We’re proud to have been invited to participate in this experiment, because with Telluride and TIFF hitting so soon after, and with travel being a challenge even for those of us who live relatively close to Montreal, it’s improbable that we’ll ever get the chance to attend Fantasia in person. It’s something that had always given me, personally, a bigger case of FOMO than Cannes, because if we have a niche, Fantasia fulfills it.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

July 7, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Sorrytobotheryou

***½/****
starring Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Armie Hammer
written and directed by Boots Riley

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Boots Riley’s hyphenate debut Sorry to Bother You–it happens in the last third of the picture–that rang so pure and true to me I felt adrenalized, known, inspired. The best art does that: locates that juncture between expression and activism. I felt it during Get Out as I began to recognize the parties where I’d been the only minority guest and somehow also the guest of honour; I hope to feel it one day while watching something about the Asian-American experience. I’d always wondered about the black community coalescing around bootlegs of Seventies kung fu movies, but now I understand it as I find myself vibing to Janelle Monae’s and Childish Gambino’s energetic, pithy counterculture activism. Sorry to Bother You belongs to this moment of crisis. It’s a withering indictment of capitalism and the white ruling class in the United States as it’s metastasized into a machine that’s only ever interested in consuming its weakest, most underrepresented members. The running joke involves prison/work programs dressed up as a way for entire subsistence, formerly middle-class families to sell their lives to the proverbial “company store.” “WorryFree” promises freedom in endless toil. The sign over the entrance to Auschwitz and on the gate at Dachau promised something similar with “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”). In this way, the for-profit prison system in the land of the free is presented for mockery and shame. The idea that the corporate structure in the United States is akin to a prison is raised, too. If films are an empathy machine, this one is the “uncomfortable recognition generator” piece of it. These past eighteen months have been sobering for a lot of my white friends. Sorry to Bother You is a summary of what, until Trump, was easy to sweep under the carpet.

The Year of Spectacular Men (2018)

June 23, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, VOD

Yearofspectacularmen

**½/****
starring Madelyn Deutch, Avian Jogia, Nicholas Braun, Zoey Deutch
written by Madelyn Deutch
directed by Lea Thompson

by Alice Stoehr Movie star Sabrina Klein sits in a bathtub, distraught. She bawls at her companion: “Can you try to be my big sister for one second of your life, please?” Her big sister Izzy is a wannabe actress who relies on Sabrina for housing and cushy work as an assistant; emotional maturity is not her métier. Nonetheless, she tries. “We should do a song,” she says, so they call up their mom and sing her “Give My Regards to Broadway.” They both perform with such gusto that this must be a tradition for them, a holdover from their shared childhood. These may be women in their mid-twenties, yet as they dance around the bathroom they seem momentarily like a couple of kids.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

June 23, 2018Posted in2018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

Jurassicworld2

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by J.A. Bayona

by Walter Chaw The first time I remember seeing the news crawl at the bottom of a TV screen used as a satirical device in a film was in Jonathan Demme’s still-exceptional, suddenly-current remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Spanish director J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (hereafter Fallen Kingdom), after a grim opening sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film, a news ticker declares that the “U.S. President” questions the existence of dinosaurs in the first place. It’s a well-placed barb in the flank of the white evangelical monster that’s swallowed the United States in a dystopia founded on equal parts massive ignorance and fear of an angry white god–one that has installed a demented con-man, and possibly the worst human being in a country teeming with bad human beings, as its golden calf. Hidden away in this pricey fifth instalment of a billion-dollar franchise is a Spanish Gothic fairytale of the titular “fallen kingdom”–the United States, n’est-ce pas?–that owes a lot more to Bayona’s debut The Orphanage than to any of the previous films in the Jurassic series. It plays like Cronos, and it serves the same immediate function as George Romero’s Day of the Dead, up to porting over the “Bub” subplot on the back of a sentient dino named “Blue.” Where its immediate predecessor was a misogynistic funhouse paced to the story/action structure of a porno, Fallen Kingdom is stately to the point of reserved; immensely weird; and overtly critical of the current state of affairs. I’m not sure it’s a good dinosaur movie, but it’s an angry, swollen-red metaphor. All things being equal, I guess I’ll take angry.

Hereditary (2018)

June 15, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Hereditary

**½/****
starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne
written and directed by Ari Aster

by Walter Chaw There’s a feeling nagging at the back of my head that writer-director Ari Aster doesn’t have another round in his chamber–that Hereditary, his feature-length debut, is a canny Frankenstein’s monster of great horror moments sewn together expertly onto the trunk of Ordinary People. What I’m saying is that it literalizes the familial demons of Ordinary People, and in so doing diminishes them. It’s a cheap, mean cop-out. It’s an altogether ignoble thing for supernatural horror to be the literal, not metaphorical, explanation for familial dysfunction. There’s a definite lack of ownership involved here, and the tremendous cast is thus betrayed by the film in which they find themselves. Reckless, feckless, the very definition of nihilistic, Hereditary is a marvellous technical achievement that feels too much like a calling card and too little like the cri de cœur I think it’d like you to believe it is. Even in the middle of its harrowing ending (and it is harrowing, don’t get me wrong), there was a moment I stepped out of the film for a second to admire how “clean” it felt: a movie about the worst things you can ever imagine that I’d feel pretty good recommending to people. I was reminded of an interview with the late Jonathan Demme conducted around the time of The Silence of the Lambs where he talks about finding the line beyond which you’d lose the audience for being too frank in your depiction of atrocity. Hereditary is calculated in the same way. It’s the movie about the unspeakable that everyone can agree on; the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland, renamed “My Mother Never Loved Me.” It’s a fun ride, but it leaves a weird aftertaste. In many ways, Hereditary is the quintessential horror film of the Trump administration.

Incredibles 2 (2018)

June 15, 2018Posted in2018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Superhero, Theatrical

Incredibles2

***/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Around the midpoint of Brad Bird’s fantastic Incredibles 2, Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) catches his son Dash (Huck Milner) on Dash’s way to the bus and pointedly tucks his homework in his backpack. Yes. This happens. This happens every day of the school-year with my 11-year-old son, who is bright, funny, and kind, and can’t for the life of him remember to put his completed homework in his freaking backpack. There are dozens of moments in Incredibles 2 like this. They’re small, throwaway character bits that would’ve taken hours or days to animate and voice correctly, and the real thrill of a movie like this–of any Pixar or Miyazaki when they’re clicking–is little moments like these. In Princess Mononoke, for instance, the prince crouches to take a drink from a stream, but before he does so, he loops his bow over his head and under his arm in a completely natural gesture that would be invisible but for its meaningful utility: this guy has spent a lot of time in the woods, drinking from springs and using his bow. It’s biography conveyed almost subliminally in under a second. In Incredibles 2, a breathless Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) calls from a hotel room upon getting “reinstated” as a superhero in this universe where being super is illegal, after which she bursts excitedly into the story of her day while stay-at-home dad Mr. Incredible makes the right noises and turns on the television. The film is wise to cultural/gender issues that can arise when the woman is the breadwinner; to teen girls in daughter Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) efforts to get a boy to notice her (I have a teen girl, too; it’s spot on); and to an American’s unique social programming, which says that anyone can be anything through the power of belief and effort. Not for nothing, the villain of the first film is the manifestation of toxic fandom in the schlubby body of a white guy calling/diagnosing himself “Syndrome.”

The Hurricane Heist (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

June 10, 2018Posted in2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Thriller

Hurricaneheist2Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras B
starring Toby Kebbell, Maggie Grace, Ryan Kwanten, Ben Cross
screenplay by Scott Windhauser and Jeff Dixon
directed by Rob Cohen

by Bryant Frazer The Hurricane Heist gets down to business from the moment the opening credits appear on a dark screen and we hear the rumble of thunder on the soundtrack. It’s 1992, and Hurricane Andrew is slamming the fictional town of Gulfport, Alabama, making orphans of two young boys named (no kidding) Will and Breeze, who watch helplessly through the windows of a farmhouse as their papa is flattened by debris. As the storm clouds recede, they clearly resolve the features of a demonic face, laughing at the children from the heavens. (I think I said this out loud in my living room: “Wow.”) Fast-forward to the present day, where a guilt-racked Breeze (Ryan Kwanten) is sleeping his way through days and nights as a handyman (and ladies’ man) while semi-estranged brother Will (Toby Kebbell) has earned himself a job as a synoptic meteorologist–that is, he drives around in a weather-nerd Batmobile, analyzing storm fronts and predicting their impact, determined that the skies will mock him no more. Bringing the high concept to this pity party is new-in-town treasury agent Casey Corbyn (Maggie Grace), who happens to be charged with protecting $600 million of U.S. currency earmarked for destruction at a government facility. Unfortunately for her, the paper shredder is temporarily offline, and there are villains about who plan to use the cover provided by an incoming hurricane to make off with the cash before it can be destroyed. It gets a little complicated–the money ends up locked in an impenetrable vault inside the compound and Casey ends up outside, tooling around with Will. Together, they need to foil the robbery and rescue the hapless Breeze, who is being held hostage inside as the winds grow stronger and stronger.

A Wrinkle in Time (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 6, 2018Posted in2018, 4K Ultra HD, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Wrinkleintime1Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pine
screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle
directed by Ava DuVernay

by Walter Chaw In Beyond the Lights, another, much better film featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (directed by another woman of colour, Gina Prince-Bythewood), there is a moment where her character decides to un-straighten her hair and own who she is, damn the torpedoes, and it lands like what a revolution feels like. Or, at least, it lands like what a personal epiphany feels like. In Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, a little white boy named Calvin (Pan‘s Levi Miller), with whom heroine Meg (Storm Reid) is creepily smitten, tells her, twice (twice), that he likes her hair, getting an awkward brush off the first time and a shy “thanks” the second. This is what passes for empowerment in a film fixated on empowerment. I think it’s probably a mistake to have Meg’s sense of self-worth hinge on the approval–at least in this cultural moment–of a white dude. There are fraught politics around a black woman’s hair, and A Wrinkle In Time uses it as a cruel tease again when there’s talk by the evil IT (voiced by David Oyelowo) of Meg straightening her locks before being presented with a “perfect” doppelgänger, free of her nerd glasses, glammed up, hair un-kinked, as one possible outcome for her. It’s the key visual metaphor in a film garnering some measure of praise mainly for how it’s not for anyone who is “cynical” (or an adult). That, and its visual audacity–which in any other context would be derided for its overreliance on the same, along with the picture’s anachronistic amateurishness. Turning Reese Witherspoon into a smug piece of salad is probably not the best use of all those millions of dollars.