Hot Docs ’18: McQueen

May 5, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

Hotdocs18mcqueen

**½/****
directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s McQueen opens, as any look at Alexander McQueen, the queer, working-class, Stratford-raised ruffian turned couturier might well be expected to, with an aesthetic contradiction. The opening credit sequence, which unfolds as a series of smooth pans and tilts across extreme close-ups of baroque, CG-kissed headgear and flower-enmeshed skulls, soon gives way to ratty old videotape of the designer in his pre-Givenchy days, punning on “haute couture” and looking more like a hired hand than like one of the most influential designers of the late twentieth century. The contrast arguably makes for an easy rhetorical move and a reductive treatment of a mercurial man. But in McQueen’s case, the clichéd approach to the departed artist as a divided self–a schlubby guy who made impossible clothes for people who might never have been in his orbit in another life–feels appropriate and true, and marks a fair introduction to the equal attention the filmmakers pay to Lee, the unassuming and devoted family member, friend, learner, and tailor, and McQueen, the image-maker who channelled his own dark history and mental-health struggles into his creations.

Hot Docs ’18: 306 Hollywood

May 4, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

306_Hollywood_2

**/****
directed by Elan Bogarín & Jonathan Bogarín

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Grief becomes an occasion for pontificating about the nature of memory and archives in 306 Hollywood, Elan and Jonathan Bogarín’s surprisingly aloof portrait of their charming grandmother’s trash palace of a home in the months and years after her death. Following an academic talking head’s advice that “Physical evidence helps to preserve a memory”–and a less convincing authority’s insistence that a dead person’s soul lingers in their newly-vacated home for about eleven months after their death–the filmmakers take it upon themselves to turn their grandmother’s house inside-out, the better to immortalize her through the spectral traces they log on camera. The Bogaríns, who appear onscreen in both archival and present-day footage and who take turns narrating the more essayistic stretches of the film, insist upon framing their project as a work of archaeology, library science, and grief work at various points. Too often, though, the result feels like a pair of talented visual and film artists’ distant elevator pitch for a feature, a portfolio of their respective aesthetic inclinations and intellectual influences rather than a cohesive text with something pressing to say about loss and detritus.

Hot Docs ’18: We Could Be Heroes

May 4, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Morocco, Qatar, Sports, Tunisia

We_Could_Be_Heroes_1

**½/****
directed by Hind Bensari

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Oy, that title. It thankfully proves somewhat ironic, although disability docs would be wise going forward to avoid sentimental trigger words like “heroes,” Bowie homage or not, if they don’t want to be stigmatized as inspiration porn. The problem with We Could Be Heroes is that it’s easier to peg what it isn’t than what it is. Director Hind Bensari follows Moroccan athlete Azzedine Nouiri as he trains for the 2016 Rio Paralympics. He’d already set a world-record for shot put at the 2012 games, but some extracurricular research tells me that Englishman Scott Jones bested him just a year later. Bensari prefers an elliptical, direct-cinema approach that forgoes these expositional niceties, which I think is a misstep when we see wheelchair user Nouiri ambulatory without any sort of elucidation. There are spectrums of disability that transcend the naked eye, but try telling that to the idiots who memed a woman in a wheelchair standing up to reach a bottle up high in a liquor store with jokes about her faking it. Nouiri is not faking it–classified as an F34 athlete (meaning he has “moderate to severe hypertonia in both legs”), he credits his disability, in a rare autobiographical aside, to keeping him off drugs in his junkie neighbourhood, though that begs the intervention of a filmmaker follow-up question, too. (“Why?”) Bensari respects her subjects’ reserve to the point of seeming incurious to a near perverse degree. As a conspicuously-disabled individual who’s subjected to 20 Questions pretty much every time he leaves the house, I wish more people were like her; as someone tasked with reviewing We Could Be Heroes, I wish she were less reverential. She has a habit of lingering long enough to normalize her subjects, which some may find suitably profound, but not a Frederick Wiseman length of time, which would allow the idiosyncratic details of the challenges they face to emerge organically.

Hot Docs ’18: Transformer

May 1, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

Transfomer_1

***/****
directed by Michael Del Monte

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Bodybuilder and ex-marine Janae Marie Kroczaleski’s negotiation of the gender-fraught world of weightlifting after coming out as trans is given a refreshingly straightforward, fly-on-the-wall treatment in Michael Del Monte’s Transformer. The story of a world-championship-winning power builder, affectionately nicknamed “Kroc,” taking some critical early steps in presenting herself socially and professionally as a woman after a long and successful career in two of the most masculinist professions possible reads on paper like the stuff of an exploitative human-interest story. But Del Monte resists the temptation to amp up the inherent drama of a perfectly well-adjusted and engaging person’s life, or to linger, as other woke cis appropriators of trans stories have done, on the metaphorical dimensions of his subject’s transformation by fixating on either her past or the moment of transition. Instead, he recruits Janae as a collaborator in her story in the present, allowing her frank voice and the particular issues she faces today–about whether to maintain or tweak her muscular frame through clothes and exercise regimes, for instance, or whether to undergo vocal-cord surgery–to steer him in more fruitful directions.

Hot Docs ’18: Golden Dawn Girls

April 30, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018, Norway

Hotdocs18goldendawn

***½/****
directed by Håvard Bustnes

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The eponymous Golden Dawn girls are three women connected by marriage or blood to Greece’s relatively new but steadily growing Golden Dawn party. They’ve taken centre stage in the absence of the party’s male superintendents, who are all incarcerated. (As Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes says at the outset: More on that later.) The Golden Dawn party evolved from a far-right newspaper into a fascist movement, though its affiliates rabidly resist the Nazi stigma. Nazis, they say, were German–this is Greece. Nazis were National Socialists, Golden Dawn-ers are Social Nationalists. My favourite defense comes from Dafni, mother of jailed member Panagiotis Iliopoulos, who insists that her son couldn’t be a Nazi because he was born after WWII. In footage from a TV interview, Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris claims complete ignorance of this “Hitler” fellow when questioned about his “Sieg Heil” tattoo–“hail victory” simply seemed like a good message to spread via his arm. Asked why he had it written in German instead of Greek, then, he says the German font was an aesthetic preference. They have an answer for everything–never a good one, but typically one so literal-minded it shuts down discourse. Bustnes valiantly tries, over and over, to get them to budge, to confront their reflection–the image they present to the world.

Hot Docs ’18: Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

April 29, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2018

Wont_You_Neighbour_2

**/****
directed by Morgan Neville

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda It says a lot about the ideological thinness of the Resistance™ against the current American administration that the basic dignity of a lifelong conservative-values Republican gets elevated to the most rarefied heights in Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Though nominally a celebration of the life and storied career of children’s broadcaster Fred Rogers, anchored in present-day talking-head interviews with collaborators and friends that threaten at times to bludgeon the delicate and achingly sincere archival footage of Rogers’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”, Neville’s film has a bit more teeth as a manifesto for how children’s educational programming that resists the trends of busyness, noise, and violence can function as a form of public service, instilling values like neighbourly stewardship and mutual respect.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

April 25, 2018Posted in2018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Avengers3

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw In the Nineties, DC Comics resurrected a bunch of titles under their “Vertigo” aegis, aiming for, if not more sophisticated, at least more mature storytelling, like Neil Gaiman’s enduring, literary “Sandman” and Grant Morrison’s still-unparalleled run on “Doom Patrol” (starting with issue 19). They were a re-entry for me into comics after a childhood collecting all things “Archie” and a few things “X-Men” and “Spider-Man”. In the fifth issue of Vertigo’s “Animal Man” reboot, Morrison writes a one-off called “The Coyote Gospel” in which Wile E Coyote (essentially) is maimed and murdered in any number of ways, only to painfully regenerate and be maimed and murdered again. I like to imagine sometimes the agony of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, resurrected in endless franchise reboots for the purpose of being killed, Prometheus-like, over and over again. There’s a pathos to it, I think, in the Camus existentialist sense: this emotional detachment where it’s sort of impossible to tell if mom died today or, you know, maybe it was yesterday, one can’t be too sure. Maybe pathos isn’t the right word. Closer to the point is that it’s impossible to really feel anything for characters who cannot die; impossible to feel tension or fear for things that cannot be harmed. Superhero comic books and Marvel films, by extension, broadly simulate the tenets explored by French Existentialism: alienation, the absurd, the lie of freedom, the experience of dread and boredom. The only MCU entry self-aware enough to notice this to date is Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange. Fitting that Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) features so prominently in Avengers: Infinity War.

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

April 23, 2018Posted in2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Thriller

Commuter1Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill
screenplay by Byron Willinger & Philip De Blasi and Ryan Engle
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I love a good train movie. Most of them since the publication of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express have combined elements of the drawing-room mystery with comedy, and I guess my problem with The Commuter is that it’s more perplexing and silly than intriguing and witty. In addition, by taking place aboard a commuter train, it clarifies why long-distance trains are the genre’s preferred setting, because not only do the latter provide, with their dining cars and their sleeping compartments, a richer visual backdrop, but they also don’t have to keep stopping every few minutes to let people out, imposing commercial breaks on the narrative. In short, long-distance trains are cinema, commuter trains are TV. That’s probably a derogatory and even borderline-meaningless distinction now, yet The Commuter is ephemeral in a way that B-movies often aren’t but episodic television of the franchised-to-death sort that keeps networks afloat these days typically is. I have this abstract wish that it was “better,” mainly because this is Liam Neeson’s purported departure from the action genre, the moribund mainstream division of which he single-handedly revived. He deserves a less anticlimactic send-off.

The Breakfast Club (1985) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 12, 2018Posted in1980s, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, John Hughes, Teen, The Criterion Collection

Tbc5

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers Necessity is the mother of invention, and The Breakfast Club‘s iconic plot–aped so often it’s become a modern myth, like Rashomon–was designed to ease John Hughes into directing and keep the budget low. The script wasn’t just a formality, though, proof of that being his refusal to cast Jimmie “J.J.” Walker (then in his mid-30s and a frequent passenger on “The Love Boat”) as Bender in exchange for financing from Canadian dentists; he was still able to draw a line between artistic compromise–which had given shape to the material–and selling out. Nor was it some cynical “calling-card,” unlike those one-and-done horror movies career-minded filmmakers like making to get their foot in the door. Yes, The Breakfast Club wound up capitalizing on a bull market for teen fare, but Hughes had an honest interest in telling stories about youth. Proof of that being his screenplay for National Lampoon’s Vacation, doctored by director Harold Ramis to shift the dominant P.O.V. from the kids in the backseat (as in the LAMPOON piece that inspired it, Hughes’s “Vacation ’58”) to the paterfamilias. Through a mixture of savvy and kismet, Hughes had crafted the platonic ideal of a directorial debut for himself, and then something funny happened: the comparatively epic Sixteen Candles became his first feature instead.

Film Freak Central Does the 2018 Ann Arbor Film Festival

April 11, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Blog, Documentary, Film Festivals

Annarborff2018

POSSIBLY+IN+MICHIGAN+by Alice Stoehr “I can’t imagine what you must think of me!” laughed Cecelia Condit. The audience had just seen her groundbreaking shorts Beneath the Skin (1981) and Possibly in Michigan (1983 (left)), plus a swath of her 21st-century work, and she seemed a bit sheepish about her own films’ morbid sense of humour. Between the murders, masks, and nursery rhymes, a streak of dark whimsy runs through them, orienting her as a woman in the world. Condit’s a garrulous storyteller in life as in her art and was forthright about the layers of autobiography in her work. Annie Lloyd (2008) shows her mother pressing leaves between pages at the end of her life. Within a Stone’s Throw (2012) has Condit herself hiking Irish hills in the aftermath of her mother’s death. Images of carrying and collecting recur across these films, a motif that suggests both affection and the assertion of control. These are rough-hewn fables that plumb the possibilities of video.

A Quiet Place (2018)

April 10, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

Quietplace

*/****
starring Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck and John Krasinski
directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place is exactly the type of inoffensive, about-nothing movie full of beautiful people and empty jumps that is popular for a short while specifically for its yawning blandness. It’s a horror film that acts as a security blanket: the world may be over, but aren’t they a cute couple? Everything done in this movie has been done before, sometimes better, sometimes worse, meaning essentially that the horror audience has already figured out what the solution is ten minutes in while it takes the idiots in the movie another hour or so. That’s too bad. A Quiet Place is so unmoored from anything like subtext or complexity that without a keenly intelligent and efficient script, its seams start to show almost immediately. Yet the instinct is to forgive it for a while because the cast is exceptional; the chemistry between Krasinski’s paterfamilias Lee and wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s real-life wife) is effortless and true, and the kids, Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Wonderstruck‘s Millicent Simmonds), are attractive enough that it wouldn’t be entirely awesome to see them murdered by space mantises. Well, it would, but, despite an early development, A Quiet Place isn’t that kind of movie.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

April 9, 2018Posted in2018, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Germany, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Isleofdogs

**½/****
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw There’s a Sumo-wrestling match in the middle of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the movie except that it sets up one of Anderson’s whip-pans to another character in attendance, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). The sequence is uncomfortable because it feels like there’s about to be a joke at Sumo’s expense–Sumo being, of course, a pastime steeped in ritual and history for the Japanese people. It’s like if an American football game appeared for a moment in the middle of a Japanese film: we’re about to get pissed on, guys, amiright? But then there’s not a joke. Or if there is a joke, it’s that Sumo itself is largely inscrutable outside a very specific cultural context and that in the United States, it’s those giant foam suits they make members of the crowd wear during halftime of basketball games. Many of the film’s depictions of Japanese culture–including a series of plays on the best-known Nihonga paintings, such as Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”–are these punchlines held in pregnant abeyance: we anticipate something off-colour or ill-considered to find that perhaps the only thing happening is a certain blithe, meaningfully meaningless cultural appropriation. It’s not “okay,” I guess, but saying so lands for me the way that criticism of Sofia Coppola’s erasure of a slave narrative from her The Beguiled (or, more to the point, her portrayal of Japan in Lost in Translation) does. I don’t think Anderson should have set Isle of Dogs in Japan. And I was never offended that his doing so is the result of his particular brand of twee solipsism. I don’t know that anyone like Coppola or Anderson could make anything different. I’m also not Japanese, so my discomfort is complicated by my upbringing in a traditional Chinese household where the Japanese were not held in, shall we say, high esteem.

Ready Player One (2018)

March 31, 2018Posted in2018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

Readyplayerone

*/****
starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance
screenplay by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, based on the novel by Cline
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Ready Player One is the first Spielberg film I can remember that feels contemptuous. It is at its heart self-abnegation–an indictment of playing to fandom from a filmmaker who hasn’t met a pander he couldn’t indulge, whether it be giving Philip K. Dick a happy ending or over-explaining the horrors of war/slavery/the Holocaust in condescending monologues. Taken as an auteur piece, the picture is sort of stunning: Hollywood’s Peter Pan savant pissing on Neverland and the Lost Boys. If it’s a remake in intent of Mel Stuart’s perverse Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (as its trailers suggest), it at least captures the rage and self-violence at the heart of that film. Adapted from Ernest Cline’s terrible novel, Ready Player One dials down the book’s self-satisfied checklisting but, disastrously, tacks on a “gather ye rosebuds” message about how reality–without all the intellectual property worship and dork one-upmanship–is ultimately preferable to virtual reality. It is literally the movie version of the William Shatner sketch on SNL from 1986 where he tells Star Trek conventioneers to “get a life” and, you know, maybe kiss a girl and, most viciously, how these idiots gathered before him have turned an “enjoyable little job I did as a lark for a few years into a colossal waste of time.” Consider that the solutions to the “quests” in the movie are to go backwards, to ask someone to dance, to fuck around for a while instead of trying to hit a target. It’s nostalgia defined traditionally rather than through the lens of action figures, cartoons, and videogames. It’s almost Proustian.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 26, 2018Posted in2017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

Lastjedi4Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Benicio Del Toro
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Walter Chaw I wrestled for a long time with this review. Not what I would write but whether I should write it at all. I consider director Rian Johnson to be a friend. He’s kind, smart, true, and unaffected despite having been handed the reins to the most revered American mythology–save for becoming somehow more humble during the course of it. In the middle of a period in which everyone in the business, it seems, is being outed as a cad, Rian is something like hope that there are good and decent men left. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (hereafter The Last Jedi) is every inch his movie. It’s about hope, see, and hope is the word that’s repeated most often in his script. By the end of it, he suggests that hope can even grow from salted earth. It’s a beautifully-rendered image as open, guileless-unto-corny, and genuine as Rian is. I don’t love everything in the film, but I do love Rian and The Last Jedi as a whole. In a franchise this venerated and valuable, it’s ballsy as fuck that he decided to do his own thing and that Disney let him. Now they’ve decided to invest another $600M or so in letting him do his own thing some more.

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 20, 2018Posted in****/****, 2017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mystery

Murderorient3Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tom Bateman, Kenneth Branagh, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Michael Green, based on the novel by Agatha Christie
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If he wants two hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, they must be the same size or he can’t eat them. It’s how he is. He steps in shit and then has to step in it with his other foot so his feet don’t feel uneven. He has an illness, some rage for order and symmetry, you see, and while it makes him alone and miserable (though not unpleasant), it also makes him the best detective in the world. Agatha Christie’s enduring creation Hercule Poirot, when portrayed in the past by actors like David Suchet, Albert Finney, and, most famously, Peter Ustinov, has been a figure of some mirth: a cheery hedonist, someone at home in books by a legendary (and all-time best-selling) author mostly legendary for being an artifact of another generation. Christie’s books were already growing elderly, I imagine, as they were being written. Her Murder on the Orient Express, published in 1934, has about it the musty upright fortitude of something from the 19th century. It should be no surprise that Kenneth Branagh, whose Shakespeare adaptations represent the first time I understood those plays completely (that “Hamlet” is a political drama, for instance, or that “Henry V” is a coming-of-age piece triggered in part by the tragedy of a mentor relationship long lamented), has interpreted Poirot as a man tortured by the chaos of modernity, and made him ultimately relatable not as a hedonist, but as a man who recognizes that the wellspring of great art is also the mother of justice. “I can only see the world as it should be… It makes most of life unbearable, but it is useful in the detection of crime.” Teleos. Balance. And nothing in between.

Justice League (2017) – 4K Ultra HD|Justice League 3D – Blu-ray 3D + Blu-ray + Digital

March 13, 2018Posted in2017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero


Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/****
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A- Extras B
Blu-ray 3D – Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams
screenplay by Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw Marrying the worst parts of Zack Snyder with the worst parts of Joss Whedon (who stepped in to complete the film after Snyder had a family tragedy), DC’s superhero team-up dirge Justice League shambles into unnatural half-life with a message of apocalyptic doomsaying presented now without puke filters, so that it looks like a movie my mom watches on her television with the motion-smoothing turned on. The same trick has been attempted with a script burdened by Whedon’s patented hipster-ese, which went stale about halfway through “Buffy”‘s run, let’s face it. The Flash’s non-sequiturs (Whedon’s suggesting he’s autistic (which isn’t funny)), Aquaman’s hearty, get-a-haircut bro-clamations (“I dig it!” and “Whoa!” and so on)–all of it is so poorly timed that it’s possible to become clinical about what happens when a punchline is grafted onto a piece at the eleventh hour, and it doesn’t help that no one in this cast is known for being even remotely funny or glib. Jason Momoa is a lot of things; Noël Coward ain’t one of them. When Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) shakes her head bemusedly (I think) and says warmly (I guess), “Children. I work with children,” you get that sick, embarrassed feeling that happens when you’re watching a person you want to like succumb to flop sweat and overrehearsal.

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

March 11, 2018Posted in2018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Wrinkleintime17

*/****
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.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017) [Cinematic Universe Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 5, 2018Posted in2017, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Thor3-1Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins
written by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw I’ve reached a limit with facility, I think–a point at which things that are professionally executed and entirely meaningless just slide off into a kind of instant nothingness. I’m talking about machine-tooled product, a brand like Kleenex or Kellogg’s, where the only time there’s any awareness of consumption is when the experience of it is unexpected in some way. There’s a reason people see the Virgin Mary in potato chips sometimes. Variation in extruded products is so exceedingly rare that it’s akin to holy visitation: some accidental proof of the supernatural; a glitch in the Matrix. Marvel films are akin now to your daily lunch. You can remember the stray meal. Mostly, it’s something you do knowing you’ve had one yesterday and are likely to have one tomorrow. If you’re like most of us, you could probably eat better.

Red Sparrow (2018)

March 2, 2018Posted in2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Redsparrow

*/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the book by Jason Matthews
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw “Degenerate,” a young woman says during class in self-described Russian Whore School, turning away from a surveillance image in which a middle-aged diplomat is seen snuggling a younger man in a car. “Why do you say that,” asks her teacher, a frightening harridan out of a Wertmüller fandango played by Charlotte Rampling (who else?), “is it because he’s homosexual?” It is. And here he is, dragged into the classroom by scary Soviet guards. The young woman is brought to the front of the class and instructed to fellate him, since what’s “between [her] legs” is obviously of no interest to the degenerate homosexual. For his part, the prisoner grunts like an animal as he wrestles his dick out of his pants and does his best to force the girl’s mouth onto it. Let’s take a moment to consider that Francis Lawrence’s ugly, punishingly violent, ultimately despairing Red Sparrow has characterized this gay guy as a sub-vocal animal interested in getting a hummer from this barely-adult woman–and the Russians as subhuman operators interested in training their youth in the art of fucking for the Motherland. It’s not despicable to depict bigotry; it’s despicable to be bigoted.

All the Sins of Sodom/Vibrations [Joseph W. Sarno Retrospect Series] – Blu-ray Disc

March 1, 2018Posted in1960s, 2018, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery

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ALL THE SINS OF SODOM (1968)
***/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B
starring Maria Lease, Sue Akers, Cherie Winters
written and directed by Joe Sarno

VIBRATIONS (1968)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound C Extras B+
starring Maria Lease, Marianne Prevost
written and directed by Joe Sarno

by Bryant Frazer Sex and cinema have a complicated relationship, and sex-film director Joe Sarno understood this better than most. In the U.S., nudity and simulated sex are generally understood as appeals to prurience–and, often, commercially exploitative gestures–but they can be more than that. They have to be, if they are part of a serious film. A filmed sex scene may be arousing, sure, but it’s also a vehicle to express character. Depending on performance and visual approach, screen sex can demonstrate frustration and restlessness as easily as romantic contentment; an actor can convey self-loathing instead of, or in addition to, satisfaction. That dicey territory–the sex film that turns you on while treating the action as problematic–was Sarno’s turf. Sarno’s arrival on the exploitation circuit came during the 1960s, at a time when sex movies were becoming more bold and explicit but before hardcore pornography destroyed the market for simulated sex on screen. A former World War II airman who learned his trade directing training films for the U.S. Navy, Sarno made a name for himself with films purporting to reveal how suburban New York housewives responded to the sexual revolution. By 1967, he had travelled to Sweden to make the first in a series of titles that influenced the direction of that country’s erotic film market. Shortly after his debut on the Swedish scene, he made All the Sins of Sodom, Vibrations, and The Wall of Flesh, which were shot back-to-back in the New York studio of photographer Morris Kaplan, whose generosity earned him a producer credit. The first two of those films are included on the Blu-ray release reviewed herein.