FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Hot Docs ’16: Unlocking the Cage

April 26, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016

**½/****directed by Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers As an idealistic young lawyer, Harvard law professor Steven Wise went looking for the biggest "underdog" he could possibly represent and realized that animals were it. He founded the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to aid any and all "autonomous" wildlife in cases of abuse, but Unlocking the Cage, the latest from the prolific team of Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, zeroes in on his…

Hot Docs ’16: The Pearl of Africa

April 26, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016, Sweden

***/****directed by Jonny von Wallström Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details. by Bill Chambers Cleopatra Kambugu and her husband Nelson Kasaija board a train. Although the seats in their sleeping car are discouragingly narrow, Nelson consults the passenger guidelines and sure enough sex is not explicitly forbidden. It's sitcom-cute that he checks, but his impulse to do so also creates a palpable unease; the accumulation of ominous imagery at the start--a barbed-wire fence; a front door, open though not beckoning; the word…

The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

April 22, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain
written by Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin
directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

by Walter Chaw It’s not offensive, or provocative, or particularly funny, or especially exciting. It doesn’t do anything very well, but neither does it do anything very poorly. It has a ridiculously overqualified cast game for anything in the way that good sports are when engaged in a losing battle against poor pacing and essential silliness; frankly, I don’t have anything against silliness per se. In that spirit, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War (hereafter Huntsman 2) reminds a lot of pleasant disasters like Ladyhawke and Krull, with its biggest crime maybe being that it’s not ridiculous enough, given how the fantastic commitment of Charlize Theron, reprising her role from the previous film (which I’m sure I saw and probably reviewed), seems ultimately squandered. A shame that she’s in the movie for about five minutes, spending some of that as a CGI phantom and a lot of that screaming. It’s telling that she still manages to be the most interesting thing in it.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) [The Gruesome Edition] – DVD + The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

April 18, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
***/****
BD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A
DVD – Image B+ Sound B- Extras B
starring Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Jim Siedow, Bill Moseley
screenplay by L.M. Kit Carson
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If the first film is about living with malevolent ghosts–the sins of the father made flesh and leather, if you will–then the second is a cunning piece about the Reagan ’80s: the fantasia, the nostalgia, the delusions of grandeur, the inflationary monomania, and, finally, the decay of actual values in a society believing itself to be the illusory City on the Hill. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is also a highly sexualized film, the American Psycho of its day, mixing sex with money until the two are indistinguishable from the great gouts of blood, bluster, and designer suits used in their acquisition. The picture’s smart enough to be a commentary on its time while its time is still unspooling. Undeniably, there’s something bankrupt about the morality of this story told in this context–the rise of corporations in the McDecade skewered as the monster Sawyer clan of the original launches a successful man-meat chilli business with affable, no-longer-reluctant Cook (Jim Siedow) as its clown pitchman. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 can be read as every bit the product of its era as the following year’s Wall Street and Predator–a science-fiction of regression and animalism that is not entirely unlike its star Dennis Hopper’s Blue Velvet, also from 1986. It feels like the twelve years separating source and sequel (just like the ten that separate the first two George Romero “Dead” movies) mark director Tobe Hooper as a sharp sociologist when painting with this very specific brush, evolving the tumor of the Vietnam War manifested as a pair of lumpen bogeys on a young girl’s back into this florid bloodbath erected on those conservative tent poles of mass media, mass consumerism, and misguided phallic projection. No accident, either, one supposes, that its central avenging angel is a dim-witted, swaggering cowboy figure, ambling in from the 1950s to win fights we’ve already lost.

Midnight Special (2016)

April 15, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Road Movie, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special is beautiful. It’s a film about aspiration and sacrifice. It believes that the world is still a mysterious place anchored by love and hope and devotion to simple ideas about how hard it is to be a parent–and how important. It’s about nurturing a thing with all your heart and letting it go when it’s strong enough. It’s about listening when it’s the last thing you want to hear; it’s about believing there’s a future for your kids even if all evidence seems to suggest the opposite. It’s like Tomorrowland in many ways, but mostly in its suggestion that there’s a place maybe where things feel like they used to feel when you were a kid and everything was still possible. Even though nothing made sense, things would make sense one day when you were big. Midnight Special deserves its comparisons to films like E.T. and Starman and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It works in the same small places with ordinary characters who grow to fill larger, echoing spaces. Nichols puts us in medias res with Roy (Michael Shannon) and his best friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) on the run from cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), having fled at some point before the movie starts with Roy’s son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). We learn it was around Alton’s oddities that the cult largely formed. We learn that Alton’s oddities are perhaps supernatural, or extraterrestrial, or interdimensional. It doesn’t really matter. They’re profoundly strange, and there are times it appears that he’s able to tell a little of the future.

Bitter Rice (1949) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

April 10, 2016****/****, 1940s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Riso amaro
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vittorio Gassmann, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone
screenplay by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani,Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini
directed by Giuseppe De Santis

by Bryant Frazer Bitter Rice is a heck of a film. It’s the story of a couple of refugees from an American film noir who stumble into a grindhouse showing an Italian social-issues drama. The beautiful losers are Walter and Francesca (Vittorio Gassman and Doris Dowling), a pair of small-time crooks on the run following the heist of a lifetime. The social conscience is personified by a class of peasant women who have for hundreds of years travelled from all over the country to work hard days in the rice fields of northern Italy, and also by, to some degree, ethical, committed soldier Marco (Raf Vallone), who lingers in the rice fields after his discharge because he has come to care about the fate of the women there. And the sex appeal is provided, in spades, by Silvana Mangano, a bombshell and a half. When producer Dino de Laurentiis and director Giuseppe De Santis cast the 18-year-old in the role, she had already appeared in a few films and had been the teenaged girlfriend of young Marcello Mastroianni. But her performance in Bitter Rice–a role that had her shaking her tits, swinging her hips, and hiking her skirt up to here–made her an overnight sensation.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + DigitalHD

April 3, 20162015, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Sci-Fi, Star Wars

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I’d seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I’d seen, period. I didn’t speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I’m discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn’t afford to buy me when I was a kid–the ones I played with at friends’ houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper’s helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging–and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

April 1, 20162016, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Richard Linklater, Theatrical

**/****
starring Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda It’s easy to underestimate Richard Linklater, America’s nice-guy filmmaker par excellence. If his chill aura more or less kept him out of the prestige-film sweepstakes until Boyhood, it also made the formal dice rolls of Waking Life and the Before trilogy land more impressively–and contrary to expectations–than they might have coming from a more bullish director. But Linklater’s genial Texas cool proves a liability in Everybody Wants Some!!, a calculated, unambitious return to the rhythms of Dazed and Confused that picks up with a new crew in the next decade. Riding a wave of good vibes from cinephiles clamouring for another shaggy-dog hangout movie, Everybody Wants Some!! never quite earns either its Van Halen-cribbed exclamation or its status as a presumptive critical and audience favourite, settling for aw-shucks likeability and shopworn familiarity where Linklater’s best work sneaks anthropology in through the backdoor.

The Hateful Eight (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 28, 20162015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller, Western

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, features eight hateful people trapped in a small space during a blizzard. The hullabaloo surrounding its release has to do with the production shooting in an extinct widescreen format (70mm anamorphic) and putting up a lot of money so that it can be screened accordingly in select theatres. A few critics have misidentified its vistas as belonging to Wyoming (it was filmed in Telluride, Colorado), which is understandable given that only about five minutes of the 187-minute running-time is spent outside. There hasn’t been a Tarantino feature until this one that I haven’t loved; I believe he is our finest working film critic. He understands things about the movies he pulls from–that certain traditions of Japanese and exploitation filmmaking are strongly feminist, that blaxploitation was initially empowerment before it was instantly gentrified, that the best slave narratives involve legacies of violence, which is why Lalee’s Kin and Django Unchained have a biological connective bridge. I’ve learned more about movies from watching Tarantino than I have from watching Godard, who’s actually trying to teach me something. I think the Kill Bill saga is a remarkable statement about motherhood. I find his dialogue to be distinctive and sometimes exhilarating. I struggled with disliking The Hateful Eight for each of its 187 minutes. It’s the first time I’ve ever understood the popular criticism of Tarantino as self-indulgent, nihilistic, misogynistic, even racist. I don’t agree with every charge, but I do get it now. It’s the first time, too, that I was troubled by a plot point in his film: there’s someone in the piece who hates Mexicans, see, but when we get a flashback to this person engaging with a Mexican, we see that this is a fallacy. I can’t figure out if this was intentional; I fear that it wasn’t. I fear, more, that this is evidence that, for the first time, Tarantino has lost control of his screenplay. I also finally felt the loss of Sally Menke, who was his Marcia Lucas. I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

March 23, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg
written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw This is what I know: that the first time I saw Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, a friend had to acquire it from some disreputable dealer and send it to me, unmarked, in a brown box. When I watched it, I thought to myself that the United States would never suffer something like this in the popular conversation. Not long after 9/11, The Hunger Games became a YA phenomenon capped with a run of blockbuster adaptations. I know that immediately after 9/11, witnesses on the scene could only compare it to something they would have seen in a movie. I know that the United States started remaking the nihilistic horror films that Japan had been churning out for decades, and I know that this is because after 9/11, we became the second modern, industrialized nation to experience the effects of weapons of mass destruction detonated over a civilian area. The other thing we had in common is the arrogance to believe that something about our island status left us immune to that type of offense; I know that most other nations on the planet don’t live under any such illusions. If we accept the premise that film, as all art, is sociology and history, then 9/11 is the inciting event that brought us closer as a culture, cinematically, to Japan. The myth of indomitability, whether it be that your Emperor is the descendant of the “living god” (rescinded in 1946 at the request of Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur) or that you are the island “nation” of Manhattan and your priapic symbols of financial power stood as gatekeepers to the world, suddenly dispelled by an alien power. Poof. Justlikethat. And suddenly you’re a citizen of a different place where gods are capricious and maybe not on your side, and terrible things happen for no reason. The world didn’t get more dangerous, the mainland just lost its virginity.

Jack’s Back (1988) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

March 21, 20161980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, DVD, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring James Spader, Cynthia Gibb, Jim Haynie, Robert Picardo
written and directed by Rowdy Herrington

by Walter Chaw A quintessential dirty ’80s thriller, Rowdy Herrington’s frankly fantastic Jack’s Back follows a Jack the Ripper copycat killer circa 1988 who, it appears, is interrupted during his last murder by earnest, likeable med student John (James Spader), who’s quickly dispatched for his erudition. When I saw Jack’s Back on VHS in ’88, I was shocked by the brutality of John’s murder and that it happens about fifteen minutes into the film. Rick (also Spader), John’s twin, has a dream of his brother’s murder and appears on the scene–to the consternation of John’s grieving coworkers–to investigate the circumstances of his death. It’s a fascinating conceit, or a silly one made fascinating by Herrington’s execution of it and by a dual performance as subtle and compelling, in its way, as Jeremy Irons’s turn in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers from the same year. Spader manages the neat trick of being two different people who aren’t two easily distinguishable types. You see the rebellion nascent in the “good” brother; you see the vulnerability in the “bad” one. Silly to say, maybe, but you see elements of one in the other. Spader’s interactions with Cynthia Gibb, playing John’s co-worker at a free clinic, are radically different from brother to brother, though not theatrically so. More than a thriller, Jack’s Back is a brilliant character study.

Allegiant (2016)

March 18, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

The Divergent Series: Allegiant
½*/****
starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Jeff Daniels, Naomi Watts
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim and Adam Cooper & Bill Collage
directed by Robert Schwentke

by Walter Chaw Remember those gauzy, halcyon days of youth spent playing “imagination” with your buddies on the schoolyard? Starting nowhere, ending nowhere, structureless? Child-development gurus would say something about how formless mucking-about is the way we first begin to socialize. Dungeons & Dragons made it into something like a communal form of spontaneous storytelling while offering a degree of gameplay and structure. Now Allegiant–the third or fourth (who knows?) film in the Divergent series, based on the third- or fourth-generation YA spin-off trying to capitalize on the Hunger Games-cum-Twilight phenomenon of smushing sci-fi/fantasy together with tween angst–has arrived to make manifest the endless exposition of developmental social psychology. In this one, Tris (Shailene Woodley, with her constantly-surprised blankness) and Four (Theo James) find themselves in a dystopian Chicago, I think, except that later they’re taken to a place I believe is also Chicago, or at least Future O’Hare, thus as the characters repeatedly referred to “going to” Chicago, I was never for a moment not confused. I even checked Wikipedia, which confirmed for me that O’Hare is in Chicago. It is. Over the last few movies, which I’ve seen but don’t remember except as a confusion of several franchises identical in my mind, Tris and Four have apparently discovered they’re pawns in a game–A GAME, I tell you–involving their genes. THEIR GENES. It’s Aldous Huxley, don’t you get it?

Living in Oblivion (1995) – DVD|[20th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

March 17, 20161990s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Esoterica, Satire, Scream/Shout! Factory

***/****
DVD – Image B Sound B Extras B-
BD – Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, Danielle Von Zernick
written and directed by Tom DiCillo

by Walter Chaw A film carefully structured in three parts, Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion demands tired adjectives like “offbeat” and “quirky” while dancing dangerously close to hyperbole along the lines of “brilliant” and “incisive.” What it is, though, is its own beast–a meta-structure of dream sequences (the first two segments “are,” the third is “about”) concerning six takes of scene six–the devil’s number applied to the trials of filmmaking, including technical accidents, the egos of the stars, and behind-the-scenes relationships that threaten professionalism. With those plates spinning, DiCillo layers in elements of fantasy bleeding into reality (the second section ends with the oft-repeated scene sloughing into “reality,” then into dream), the final segment integrating spoof symbols (an apple, a little person) with a real symbol (the mother).

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 14, 20162015, 2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disaster Movie, Drama, DVD

Intheheartofthesea1

*/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Charles Leavitt, based on the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
directed by Ron Howard

by Bill Chambers In the Heart of the Sea is Ron Howard’s water movie, just like Backdraft is his fire movie, Far and Away is his earth movie, and Apollo 13 is his air movie. It’s also his first fish movie since Splash, suggesting that Howard is retracing his steps in a career reboot that began with Rush, his first car movie since his directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto. But one waits for history to repeat itself with some sign of accrued wisdom beyond obvious markers like technical proficiency. In fact, in its show-off-iness and ersatz emotionalism, In the Heart of the Sea seems the less mature film next to Splash, which has a formal self-control and hints of real pathos despite a fantastical premise that sees a landlubber falling in love with a woman who’s secretly a mermaid. (It’s the first film to seize on Tom Hanks’s Jimmy Stewart quality, as well as the rare one to tap into his anger.) There’s hardly a genuine moment in In the Heart of the Sea, and a framing device only exacerbates the problem by adding another layer of dramatization to something that already plays like a big-budget History Channel re-enactment.

Knight of Cups (2016)

March 11, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Wes Bentley
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups is an obvious companion piece to Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and Fellini’s 8½, and a less obvious spiritual companion to the Coens’ Hail Caesar!, Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, and even Fosse’s All That Jazz. Its most direct influence is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, with Malick borrowing phrases entire from its text along with its sense of wandering, seeking, and the pilgrim meeting various incarnations of sin and redemption on the road to salvation. Malick, as has become his hallmark, places people against images of eternity. In Los Angeles, the only external nature he can find is the ocean, and so he sends his “Christian” (Bale), playing a film director named “Rick,” to the shore repeatedly with a succession of women who are incarnations of Bunyan’s “Evangelical” and “Faithful” and “Mercy,” including his wife (Cate Blanchett), whom he rejects and, if Malick follows form, who will be the centre of another story all her own. Rick wanders through streets, studio lots, highrise suites that are Bunyan’s City of Destruction and Vanity Fair and, in a sequence where one guide (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant with either Rick’s child or her husband’s, Slough of Despond, before finally discovering peace of sorts alone in the Delectable Mountains of Joshua Tree.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

March 11, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr.
screenplay by Josh Campbell & Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw I don't believe that art ever occurs in a vacuum. I believe that movies, no matter their relative quality, speak to the time in which they were created, eloquently or accidentally–sometimes both. In that context, Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane, the follow-up to Matt Reeves's badly-underestimated Cloverfield (which itself pairs with Spike Lee's 25^th Hour as the best elegies for 9/11 New York (Reeves's film even more in some ways, in its emulation of Japan's kaiju cycle)), is about the way the frightening underbelly of paranoid American fanaticism has suddenly gained legitimacy and voice in the mainstream. When speaking mournfully of his estranged daughter and how his wife has taken her away from him, survivalist Howard (John Goodman) mutters that some people just can't understand what's in the best interest of their survival. He's shut himself in an underground bunker with the bunker's architect, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), like some Egyptian Pharaoh, girding himself against an apocalypse that may or may not be personal. He's also "abducted" a young woman passing by, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), though Howard would say he saved her from the end of the world. His plan, see, is that the three of them wait out the fallout from whatever seismic event did or didn't happen, as a makeshift family. No touching.

The Guardian (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

March 9, 20161990s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jenny Seagrove, Dwier Brown, Carey Lowell, Brad Hall
screenplay by Stephen Volk and Dan Greenburg and William Friedkin, based on the novel The Nanny by Greenburg
directed by William Friedkin

by Bryant Frazer The Guardian, made in 1990 as an apparent attempt to cash in on director William Friedkin’s reputation as the man behind The Exorcist, is one of those terrible movies by a powerful director working at the low ebb of his career. The wildest thing about The Exorcist–one of the greatest horror movies–is that despite its defining influence on his career, Friedkin has never shown much interest in horror. (That’s one of the things that makes The Exorcist work so well: Despite the requisite special-effects outlay required to depict demonic possession, on one level The Exorcist is just the story of a problem and the professionals who are dispatched to address it; on another level, it’s a family drama about a single parent dealing with adolescent rebellion.) So while it’s understandable that either Friedkin or the studio bankrolling The Guardian would see commercial potential in a return to genre filmmaking, any attempt at out-and-out horror was probably ill-fated from the start. That the story being attempted (loosely adapted from a novel by Dan Greenburg) was so very woolly–the supernatural villain the title references is a sexy, polymorphous druid who takes jobs as a live-in nanny to steal babies from their parents–would have been an advantage in, say, a potboiler out of Charles Band’s Empire Pictures. In the hands of a no-nonsense craftsman like Friedkin, alas, it was a blueprint for disaster.

Zootopia (2016)

March 5, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.

Creed (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 2, 20162015, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Sports, Stallone

Creedblu1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It’s not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed’s son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it’s essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone’s willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises not to spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don’t feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I’m sold.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 20161960s, 2016, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

Braindie1

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Herb Evers, Virginia Leith, Leslie Daniel
screenplay by Joseph Green
directed by Joseph Green

by Bryant Frazer “I remember fire,” murmurs Jan Compton, a disembodied head resting in a surgical pan, at the end of the first act of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The moment comes about 20 minutes into a movie that’s conspicuous in its cheapness (stiff performances, unconvincing sets, that particular lethargic pace that pads a Z-grade feature out to a bookable running time), and still it’s chilling. There’s a kind of poetry in the words–which refer to a car accident in the previous reel–that generates the shiver. “Burning,” she whispers to the mad scientist (her lover) who has preserved and reanimated her head. “Let me die. Let me die.” Naturally, he ignores her plea. And it’s the tension between her wishes and his actions that generates the horror in this technically inept but effectively weird fright show.

SDAFF ’24: Bitterroot

Red One (2024)

SDAFF ’24: A Traveler’s Needs + By the Stream