FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Telluride ’17: Darkest Hour

September 10, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2017, UK

***/****
starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ben Mendelsohn
screenplay by Anthony McCarten
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Joe Wright’s propulsive, compelling, awards-season prestige biopic Darkest Hour finds Gary Oldman in fine fettle, delivering a rousing performance as WWII-era Winston Churchill, from the moment of his usurpation of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) for the Prime Minister-ship through to the beginning of the evacuation of Dunkirk. It’s a film about the suddenly-controversial position of not appeasing Nazis and the importance of rhetoric as a skill in our leadership. (Churchill uses Cicero as reference material.) It’s about principles and erudition. A shame that both seem suddenly in such short supply. When Churchill addresses Parliament in his famous “We will never surrender” speech, chief political rival Viscount Halifax (Stephen Dillane) mutters that Winston’s just mobilized the English language. Trapped as we are now as a nation under an illiterate, sub-human moron and Nazi sympathizer who is some combination of demented and narcissistic, I confess I got emotional a time or two imagining there were once leaders in the world of whom we could be proud and behind whom we could rally. A shame that it seems so much like quaint science-fiction as we work through our forever-war scenarios and jockey for battle against Southeast Asia again. Darkest Hour, in other words, feels aspirational rather than historical, finding its greatest tensions in the disagreement within Churchill’s war council over whether or not the British Empire should “hear out” the Nazis in order to avoid conflict, or whether they should make a stand and, should they be defeated, at least be defeated knowing the empire stood for something. Churchill says that great civilizations that fought and were conquered tend to rise again–but civilizations that capitulate tend to be swallowed by history. Call Darkest Hour a warning about the poison diminishing the United States, though I doubt we’re listening.

TIFF ’17: Suburbicon + Bodied

September 10, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Satire, Thriller, TIFF

SUBURBICON
*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

BODIED
*½/****
starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen
directed by Joseph Kahn

by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens’ and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov’s. Trouble is, the best parts aren’t that great and the worst parts…yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn’t just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie’s pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-user wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them’s blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin’ Cousins.) One night, while Jupe’s Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge’s system can’t handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can’t figure out why his father won’t positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers’ casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they’re always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.

Telluride ’17: Wonderstruck

September 9, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Mystery, Telluride, Telluride 2017

**½/****
starring Oakes Fegley, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Millicent Simmonds
screenplay by Brian Selznick, based on his book
directed by Todd Haynes

by Walter Chaw I like the way Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck moves. It glides from one vignette to the next, one setting to another, one era to a previous one. It shifts from a 1977-set Times Square scored by that Deodato disco remix of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (the one Hal Ashby used for Chauncey’s first stroll in Being There) to a silent movie where a deaf/mute girl (Millicent Simonds) looks for her mother (Julianne Moore), a silent film star who’s apparently left her behind for the bright lights, big city. Based on Brian Selznick’s children’s novel, just like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Wonderstruck suffers from the same problem as Scorsese’s film: mainly, that it’s based on a kid’s book that’s mostly pictures and therefore plotted around a central twist neither surprising nor instructive. It is simultaneously too much for what it is, and not enough. I still like the way Wonderstruck moves, though, as Haynes stakes his claim again as the king of winsome nostalgia, telling the story of poor little Ben (Oakes Fegley), who’s just lost his mother, Elaine (Michelle Williams), but not before (in flashback) she’s refused to tell Ben who his father is. She does, however, make him interested in David Bowie before she goes, so it could be worse.

It (2017)

September 7, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

It: Chapter One
****/****
starring Jaeden Lieberher, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Chase Palmer & Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw There’s a girl, Beverly (Sophia Lillis), she must be around thirteen or so, she’s standing in front of a wall of tampons at the drugstore, trying to make a decision on her own because her dad (Stephen Bogaert) is alone, and a creep, you know, a little scary in how he keeps asking her if she’s still his “little girl.” So she has to do this by herself, even though it’s embarrassing–but she’s doing it. The next aisle over, a few boys, they call themselves “The Losers” because why not, everyone else does, are gathering medical supplies to help the new kid, Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), who’s been cut up pretty bad by bully Henry (Nicholas Hamilton). They need a distraction because they don’t have enough money to pay, so Bevvie provides one, and now she’s a “Loser,” too. I read Stephen King’s It in September of 1986, when I was thirteen. Thirteen exactly the age of its heroes in the “past” of the book, the flashback portion that’s paralleled with the kids, as adults, called back to the Derry, ME of their youth, where they had forgotten that, once upon a time, they fought a thing and won. There is nothing better when you’re thirteen than Stephen King. It was my favourite book for a while, although I didn’t entirely understand why. I think I might now. Better, I believe Andy Muschietti, director of the underestimated Mama, and his team of three screenwriters, Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, understand that what works about It isn’t the monster, but the fear of childhood as it metastasizes into the fear of adulthood–and how those two things are maybe not so different after all.

TIFF ’17: Euthanizer

September 7, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Finland, TIFF

Armomurhaaja **½/**** written and directed by Teemu Nikki by Bill Chambers Veijo (Matti Onnismaa) kills pets for people who can't afford to have them euthanized by a vet: Gas for the small ones, a bullet for the larger varieties. He feigns a mystical connection with animals to exact a steep price, though, shaming owners for being the potential cause of their furry friend's misery, like the young woman he chides for keeping her cat locked up in a tiny apartment. This doesn't stop some of his clients from using him as a glorified hitman, and when his dying father's nurse…

Telluride ’17: The Shape of Water

September 6, 20172017, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Horror, Romance, Telluride, Telluride 2017, Thriller

***/****
starring Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I watched Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water in a packed auditorium in Telluride, CO as a torrential rainstorm pounded the roof of what is, outside of the festival, an ice-skating rink, perched there with a park in front of it, the headwaters of the San Miguel to one side and the mountains to the other and all around. As the main character, cleaning lady Eliza (Sally Hawkins), turned on water for her bath, the cascading cacophony in the theatre joined in with a warm insularity I always equate with the Mandarin term for "cozy": two words that mean, or at least sound like they mean, "warm" and "noisy." The Shape of Water is like that, too, a gothic romance in the new del Toro style (after Crimson Peak, which, for me, was more noisy than warm, but mileage varies), which del Toro introduced as the evocation of a fantasy he had as a child upon watching Creature from the Black Lagoon in which the Creature falls in love with the girl and they live happily ever after. That's it, and were that truly it, The Shape of Water would be an instant classic rather than an acquired taste, perhaps–a future cult classic, certainly, that is forgiven for its odd digressions while justly-celebrated for its audacity. It's a triumph when it focuses in on the essential loneliness of misfits (the melancholic, Romanticist engine that drives del Toro's Hellboy movies), but in a subplot involving Russian spies, it becomes for long minutes time spent away from what works in favour of time spent with what doesn't. When del Toro has allowed intrusions like this in the past (see: his early masterpieces The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth), it's been up to us to infer the connection between his dark fables and his political concerns. Here he brings the subtext into text at a cost to the "warm/noisy" coziness of his work. For del Toro, insularity is a strength.

Telluride ’17: Battle of the Sexes

September 5, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2017

½*/****
starring Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman
written by Simon Beaufoy
directed by Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton

by Walter Chaw A movie that will make no one uncomfortable while reassuring the most blinkered that they’ve given at the office, Battle of the Sexes could be directed by anyone, star anyone, and it would still be exactly the same edgeless, meaningless, obsequious, instantly-obsolete artifact, desperate to be loved, expecting to be feted come awards season. It’s the casserole recipe that won in 1950, and Emma Stone continues her terrifying run as Audrey Hepburn’s career by ticking off her Children’s Hour/LGBTQ-sensitivity check-box. Stone’s blank, not “effortless” but rather “not trying” and “under-written” performance, is essentially a black wig, glasses, and a half-open pucker. Her Billie Jean King is a cipher who mouths platitudes about “equality” when what she really means is that she’s a vacuous narcissist who steamrolls everyone trying to help her in a movie that is, in fact, as woman-hating as the men it sets up as straw…well, men. To be clear, Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in an exhibition match does not mean that women and men are “equal.” It doesn’t mean they’re unequal, either. It actually means nothing. Indeed, that King, at the age of 29, in peak condition and at the pinnacle of her profession and training hard, beat a 55-year-old former world champion whom the film takes pains to reassure is not only not training, but also drinking and womanizing and popping mysterious pills while doing a full-blitz promotional campaign (he played the entire first set in a branded windbreaker), says the opposite, I think, of the intended message. Understand that at this point in the sport, in 2017, it’s not controversial that women and men do not compete at the same level. You’re getting mad, I can tell. This is Serena Williams, the undisputedly greatest woman tennis player in the history of the sport, in 2013 on “Late Night with David Letterman”:

Telluride ’17: downsizing

September 3, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Satire, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2017, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Hong Chau, Christoph Waltz
written by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Imagine if Tracy Flick, the energetic, demonic high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne’s brilliant Election, were a Vietnamese exchange student, heavily and hilariously accented. That’s one of the things wrong with Payne’s excruciating downsizing, a film that takes his now-trademark twee misanthropy and mashes it up against this pretense of Swiftian social satire that sets the Sisyphus-like struggle of the bedraggled Everyman against a fatalistic backdrop of environmental apocalypse. It’s a broad discourse on a lot of things: poverty and the failure of capitalism; the United States tearing itself apart along arbitrary class distinctions politicized into dramas of dominance and oppression. It’s also about a filmmaker using science-fiction as a cudgel, swinging it about as disrespectfully as he does extreme racial caricaturing and destined to hold it up as a shield when whatever opposition comes rolling in to protest a film that mainstream publications out of Venice are already proclaiming some kind of contemporary masterpiece. It’s like George Lucas all over again, but imagine if it were like Charlie Kaufman instead. For me, when you have an Asian character as problematic as Vietnamese refugee Ngoc Lan (Hong Chau), a figure set up as both an object of derision and a holy relic, everything else is drowned out in that noise.

Check – Telluride 2017 Intro

September 2, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2017

by Walter Chaw

Things to do in Telluride:

Go to the thrift store on the main street. There’s always something there–old festival gear, glass-framed posters, sweatshirts (because it’s never not colder here than you expect it to be). Especially go there at night after the trams stop running and you’re walking in the pitch black on the side of a mountain. I’ve done this without a flashlight and with a dead cell phone and it’s terrifying. Also, there’s no air. Also, there are bears.

Alien: Covenant (2017) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

August 31, 20172017, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bryant Frazer It’s rare that a perfect film is also financially lucrative. Ridley Scott’s Alien is one such title–a scary movie that really cuts across demographic boundaries. Think of it as a science-fiction slasher flick or a deep-space old-dark-house thriller with a crew of likeably blue-collar mopes facing off against a shape-changing menace that’s part axe murderer, part wild grizzly, and part serial rapist. It works because it’s non-specific. But in the space of its 117 minutes, it finds what frightens you. Alien stands as a singular achievement. Still, because it was released in the age of the sequel, studio 20^th Century Fox eagerly founded a franchise on it, and the series immediately began deconstructing itself. James Cameron’s Aliens was downright reactionary, replacing the first film’s working-class heroes with a bunch of Heinlein-esque space marines, transforming its boogeyman into an opposing army of boogeymen, and saddling Ripley with motherly duties, blithely undoing Alien‘s celebrated subversion of such tropes. In Alien³, the game was truly on: Director David Fincher straight-up murdered Ripley’s new nuclear family before powering the film’s narrative towards a climactic conflagration depicting a Christ-like sacrifice and unalloyed abortion metaphor. This was much more in keeping with the subtextually rich original–but it was decidedly audience-unfriendly. It took another five years for Joss Whedon and Jean-Pierre Jeunet to stick a fork in the franchise; Alien: Resurrection was the first Alien movie that genuinely didn’t seem to give a shit about Alien movies.

What Happened to Monday (2017) – Netflix

August 18, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belgium, France, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

Seven Sisters
**½/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Glenn Close, Pål Sverre Hagen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Alice Stoehr The bad news manifests itself in a flurry of stock footage and newscasters' voices. "Too many people, not enough food," declares one near-future pundit. "It is the biggest crisis in human history," adds another. Dr. Nicolette Cayman, a politician so Thatcher-esque that Glenn Close plays her in pearls and a navy blue suit, helps Europe's now-federalized government institute a strict one-child policy. Her Gestapo-like Child Allocation Bureau (or "CAB") patrols city streets, threatening hidden siblings with indefinite cryogenic stasis. So far, so familiar. It's much like Soylent Green or Children of Men or any of a dozen other dystopian thrillers. But What Happened to Monday's knotty premise continues: What if, say, seven identical sisters grew up in this political climate? They could each leave the house exactly one day a week, each time assuming the same collective identity. And what if one of these sisters, while out and about, happened to disappear?

Logan Lucky (2017)

August 17, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Disability, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig
written by Rebecca Blunt
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Steven Soderbergh returns from a self-imposed retirement of all of four years with Logan Lucky, a heist movie so steeped in its maker’s creative and commercial history that it casually makes time in its climactic moments for a newscaster to dub its working-class heroes’ shenanigans “Ocean’s 7/11.” Begging to be read as an unnecessary but enjoyable victory lap from a filmmaker who hasn’t gone away so much as temporarily opted out of the rat race of alternating between formalist exercises, crowd-pleasers, and prestige pictures, Logan Lucky sees Soderbergh working in his most amiable register–and for the most part doffing his aesthetic predilection for piss-yellow lighting–while still cycling through his pet interests of late. A polymath by nature, as evidenced by his annual viewing logs, Soderbergh more or less successfully wields Logan Lucky into a charming sampler platter of his tastes, from hitting genre story beats faithfully to realizing the smallest procedural details and celebrating sincere Americana while bemoaning its toxic corporatization.

Detroit (2017)

August 10, 20172017, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie
written by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Alex Jackson Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is painfully afraid of controversy. It’s as though Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were given the assignment to make a film about the 1967 Algiers Motel incident and cringed their way through it, trying their best to alienate neither black nor white audiences. Hilariously, the end result has now become one of the most controversial films of the year. An essay by Jeanne Theoharis, Say Burgin, and Mary Phillips (a trio of academics in political science, history, and African American studies, respectively) recently published on the HUFFINGTON POST denounced it as “the most irresponsible and dangerous movie of the year.” Angelica Jade Bastien of ROGEREBERT.COM states that she left the theatre in tears, not because of the violence so much as the “emptiness” behind the violence. And, of course, Armond White had to get his licks in, concluding, “Watching black people being brutalized seems to satisfy some warped liberal need to feel sorry.” Looks like I was wrong! Black film critics, at least, seem to fucking hate this movie.

The Dark Tower (2017)

August 6, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Theatrical, Western

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman & Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen & Nikolaj Arcel
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Walter Chaw If I cared or knew one thing about Stephen King’s revered Dark Tower series, I’d probably really hate this movie in exactly the same way I initially hated Francis Lawrence’s Constantine. I was a devotee of the Vertigo sub-line of DC comics through the early-’90s–the one that produced titles like Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”, Jamie Delano’s “Animal Man”, Grant Morrison’s “Doom Patrol”, and Delano/Garth Ennis’s “Hellblazer”, which of course formed the basis for Lawrence’s picture. But I don’t. Care about The Dark Tower, that is. For all that King once meant to me as a kid, it and The Stand were two of his epics I could never get into. I missed the window on Tolkien, too. And in not caring and in my complete ignorance, I like Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower about as much as I like Constantine now, not needing the four or five years to come to terms with how it doesn’t jibe with images and rhythms I’d conjured in my jealous nerd-dom. (I maintain, however, that if they were going to make Constantine a Yank, they should’ve cast Denis Leary.) In The Dark Tower, the main hero is a kid named Jake (Tom Taylor) who, one day, discovers that all those crazy dreams he’s been having, which have led to all those creepy-kid drawings plastering his bedroom walls, are TRUE. Why won’t you listen to Jake, adults? Obviously modelled after the kid in Last Action Hero, Jake dreams of a dark tower that is not Idris Elba that is under attack by the evil Man in Black, who is not Johnny Cash but is named Walter and is played by Matthew McConaughey. My favourite moment in the film is when Walter shows up in Jake’s parents’ kitchen, frying something on the stove, explaining apologetically that where he’s from, there’s no chicken.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

July 30, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones
screenplay Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, written by Antony Johnson and illustrated by Sam Hart
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Essentially No Way Out with less hot sex but better action sequences, David Leitch's Atomic Blonde is a lot of truly dreary Cold War spy intrigue interrupted periodically, but not often enough, by the good stuff. It proposes the antiquated notion that collusion with the Russians is treason in having heroic MI6 agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron–Mr. F after all, all this time) take ice baths and try to figure out who mysterious mole "Satchel" is in the last days of East Berlin. Her contact there is skeezy Percival (James McAvoy) whose handlers fear has gone a bit "feral" in the field. We're introduced to him trading Jim Beam and blue jeans for information and waking up with two girls (two!) to pick up Lorraine at the airport. There's also a French spy named Delphine (Sofia Boutella) who offers up a Sapphic love interest for Lorraine and ends up the way that lovers end up in spy movies. Leitch, an uncredited co-director on John Wick, brings the same style of kinetic, close-in martial arts and, eventually, gunplay of that film, but missteps badly by, among other things, making this about more than avenging a dead dog. Without an emotional charge–and there isn't enough of one generated by the loss of two of Lorraine's lovers–there's no real sense of emotion or energy in the action scenes. They're super cool, don't get me wrong (at least they are until Leitch decides at the very end to overuse slow motion), but they lack motivation and investment. But that's the least of Atomic Blonde's problems.

Madhouse (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

July 27, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

There Was a Little Girl
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Trish Everly, Michael Macrae, Dennis Robertson, Morgan Hart
screenplay by Stephen Blakley, Ovidio G. Assonitis, Peter Shepherd and Robert Gandus
directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis

by Sydney Wegner The final frames of Madhouse are a title card with a George Bernard Shaw quote: “…life differs from the play only in this…it has no plot, all is vague, desultory, unconnected till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved.” In that instant, in one of the most beautifully-executed “middle-finger to my haters” moves in cinema, criticism of Ovidio G. Assonitis’s 1981 clusterfuck is rendered irrelevant. Sneaking that in at the end rather than putting it at the beginning is doubly hilarious, as you’ve just spent an hour-and-a-half trying to grasp onto this ungraspable thing, only to have all your hard work flushed away in a second. If your movie doesn’t make sense, it’s because living doesn’t make sense; case closed. Our own plots are never resolved, people flit in and out of our lives without us ever truly knowing them, our familial relationships are tangled and it’s sometimes impossible to figure out where any animosity began. We think we understand people, but it’s rare that we truly do.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 24, 20172017, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, China, Crime, Drama, DVD, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mystery, New Zealand, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii’s seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won’t have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country’s post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it’s basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It’s puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there’s something worth excavating here.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

July 22, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer
written for the screen and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw Effortlessly, almost guilelessly sexist in the way that only a 12-year-old with lacklustre breeding can be, Luc Besson’s latest opus of antsy expressionism, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (hereafter Valerian), is so relentlessly puerile, so unapologetically awful, that there’s absolutely no chance it won’t become a midnight masterpiece. Not one of the good ones, like Besson’s own The Fifth Element or The Professional (or The Messenger, curiously the most historically accurate Joan of Arc film), but one of the ones that are the feature-length equivalent of that repetitive noise your 9-year-old son makes when you’re driving him to a friend’s house. It’s an interminable adaptation of the Ruby Rhod sequence from The Fifth Element, an endurance test of unusual cruelty and imagination. If you’re sensing some grudging admiration for it, you’re not wrong. It’s like going to a torture museum and marvelling at the level of invention and craftsmanship dedicated to the methods to which humans go to discomfit one another. Some of that sadistic shit is worth millions–priceless, even.

Dunkirk (2017)

July 21, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Drama, France, Netherlands, Theatrical, UK, War

*½/****
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I’m a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don’t like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there’s a real heart in there. It’s a bad science-fiction movie, but it’s a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it’s puffed-up full of itself, and it’s about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It’s going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It’s like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Outfest LA ’17: Something Like Summer

July 18, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Romance

*½/****
starring Grant Davis, Davi Santos, Ben Baur, Ajiona Alexus
screenplay by Carlos Pedraza, based on the novel by Jay Bell
directed by David Berry

by Alice Stoehr Musicals bloom from effusive emotion. When Catherine Deneuve strolled down the streets of Cherbourg, when Judy Garland hopped on a St. Louis trolley, their yearnings were too intense to merely be spoken. They had to be sung. In Something Like Summer, newcomer Grant Davis stars as Ben Bentley, a Texan teen and aspiring singer who’s heartsick (like Deneuve and Garland) over a boy. But his sweetheart Tim, played by Davi Santos, is a “good-looking jock,” as Ben puts it–closeted, Catholic, and deeply ashamed. After a few sub-rosa liaisons, the two bitterly part ways. The film cuts to a dim, empty theatre, where Ben sublimates his sorrows into a cover of the break-up song “Barely Breathing”: “I know what you’re doing,” he warbles. “I see it all too clear.” While Deneuve had Jacques Demy and Garland had Vincente Minnelli, Davis has first-time director David Berry, who stages the handful of musical numbers with minimal panache. No dancing, some haphazard camera movement, the actor emoting on a stage. Later, handheld close-ups will peer at Davis during his halting rendition of “La Vie en rose.” (He sings it in a Parisian café, the Eiffel Tower shining through a nearby window.) The soundtrack includes a couple of new compositions alongside songs originally by Regina Spektor and Ne-Yo, many of them intercut with bland montage, none of their lyrics especially salient to the story. Cohesion and spectacle both receive low priority versus the endless reams of plot.

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