A Waning Desire to Blow S–t Up: FFC Interviews Pete Travis

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Interviews, TIFF, UK

PtravistitleI was five minutes late because I’m a chronic screw-up but Pete Travis couldn’t have been more patient or forgiving. I’m doubly impressed by his zen calm when he tells me he starts shooting another feature in four days. I assume out loud that doing press at a film festival is the last thing he needs, but he says he’s grateful for the respite from a constantly-ringing phone. Later Travis, who gives off a major Ben Mendelsohn vibe in person, will compare big-budget filmmaking to lying on the beach; if we’d ordered drinks, I would’ve had what he’s having.

Travis came to this year’s TIFF with his follow-up to the sensational Dredd, the London-set City of Tiny Lights, in tow. Starring the charming, ubiquitous Riz Ahmed, it’s about a detective (Brits, including Travis, favour the term “gumshoe”) whose search for a missing prostitute brings him in touch with his own tragic past. It’s a conventional hard-boiled whodunit–the genre has survived by being incorruptibly formulaic, allowing it to comment on modern times by throwing into relief our changing mores and values–with one glaring exception: only one of the main characters is white. It’s fascinating how deceptively fresh this makes it feel. My major complaint after the movie was over was that it retreats from those Chinatown places that would give it resonance beyond its enlightened casting (screenwriter Patrick Neale, adapting his own novel, scaled back on his book’s doom and gloom considerably), but upon spending some time with Travis, I came to see the optimism of City of Tiny Lights as deeply personal to a serene and hopeful man.

We spoke on September 15, 2016 at the Azure Restaurant & Bar in the InterContinental Toronto Centre.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

Posted in2016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Tim Burton, Family, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Fantasy, Time Travel

Missperegrine

*/****
starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O’Dowd, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Jane Goldman, based upon the novel by Ransom Riggs
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw The right material and collaborator can bring out the best in Tim Burton, but it’s mostly a one-way street. Before it soured, his work with Johnny Depp compelled because of the pathos Depp imported into projects like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. When Burton lands the right material, as he did with Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, he’s capable of masterpieces. I would argue that his most personal picture by far, the only one that plumbs the exquisite gulfs of loneliness and disconnection suggested by his other pieces, is Batman Returns. There’s a scene in it where Bruce Wayne drinks soup, recoils that it’s cold, then digs in again without hesitation when told by his long-term keeper that it’s supposed to be. Bruce is a broken clockwork and wholly dependent; it’s a fascinating read of the Batman character. Burton’s Catwoman is the purest representation of the gender injustice that results in her mania and rise to power. The film is a spiritual predecessor to Burton’s poetry collection The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, the contents of which speak of misbegotten births, misunderstood childhoods, and unimaginable betrayals that lead to lonesome deaths. These themes are always on the periphery of Burton’s films. I wonder if as he’s gotten more monolithic whether they don’t become commensurately more difficult to tease out.

Fantastic Fest ’16: Salt and Fire

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Thriller

Ff16saltandfire

½*/****
starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael Garcia Bernal, Volker Zack Michalowski
written by Werner Herzog, based on the story “Aral” by Tom Bissell
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw There’s an early moment in Werner Herzog’s misbegotten Salt and Fire where three scientists wander through an abandoned terminal in a Bolivian airport, scored by a cacophonous, disturbing Ernst Reijseger composition, that finds Herzog on comfortable, familiar ground. His films are at their best when they combine this kind of displacing, disquieting music against scenes of the mundane. Later, as his DP Peter Zeitlinger pans across the flaking spines of an ancient book collection, and again when Zeitlinger takes in the staggering scope of Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flat, Herzog finds his rhythm as chronicler of unknowable mysteries and philosopher of intimations of immortality. The film would have been better without dialogue. A scene right around the mid-point where scientist Laura (Veronica Ferres) and mad industrialist Matt Riley (Michael Shannon) have a conversation about children in front of a crackling fire would have been transcendent silent. The planes of Shannon’s and Ferres’s faces, lit by flickers of orange, are suggestive of extraordinary depths and tensions. When they’re forced to say things like “the tragedy is when men are afraid of the light,” it tends to make it all gravid and unintentionally hilarious. When Michael Shannon is incapable of landing a weird line, imagine how the others fare.

Goats Crossed, Bridge Closed

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog

by Walter Chaw We've decided to get rid of our comments section here at FILM FREAK CENTRAL. We kept it for longer than we should have, I think. Our world isn't getting any better. It's getting a lot worse. I stopped engaging with our commenters a while ago. I've come back a couple of times in the last few years, but for the most part it's just been this thing that festers, this thing in the basement that gibbers to itself. I've asked friends to not tell me what's being written about me in there. I'm a lot happier not knowing.

The Magnificent 7 (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Western

Mag7

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Vincent D'Onofrio, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw That there isn't more of a conversation around Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent 7 beyond the usual wag-talk about the relative merits of sequels and remakes speaks to something like cultural progress, for what it's worth. The popular criticism of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it's derivative and took "no chances." My response is that the heroes of the film are a young woman, a young black man, and a Guatemalan–all in a franchise that set back the racial conversation by about thirty years with its astonishingly tone-deaf prequel trilogy. The Force Awakens, in other words, took a hell of a lot of chances, particularly in consideration of the vile blowback Paul Feig's Ghostbusters suffered for having the temerity to recast a well-remembered bro-fave with women. The Magnificent 7 takes a few chances as well by recasting John Sturges's well-remembered bro-fave Kurosawa remake with Denzel Washington (in the Yul Brynner lead), Byung-hun Lee (possibly the biggest star in Asia), Tlingit/Koyukon-Athabascan actor Martin Sensmeir, and Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. The press junket made a lot of this multi-culturalism and there's a passing reference to it in most reviews of the picture, but like The Force Awakens, the prevailing attitude is that The Magnificent 7 is derivative and that's that. It is that, but that's not all it is.

TIFF ’16: Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Italy, TIFF

Tiff16waterandsugar

Acqua e Zucchero: Carlo Di Palma, i colori della vita
***/****
diretced by Fariborz Kamkari

by Bill Chambers This is an illuminating if less than revolutionary documentary about a cinematographer who’s more of a DP’s DP than a consensus Great among film buffs. (Google “greatest cinematographers” and Carlo Di Palma doesn’t even number among the sixty thumbnails in the banner at the top.) Perhaps the reason is because he spent so long in the weeds with Woody Allen (from 1986 until his retirement from fiction features in 1997), whose movies are statistically ephemeral; perhaps it’s because Di Palma is a key figure specifically in Italian cinema, which seemed to exhaust its cultural cachet as art films became outmoded there. Inspired by an exhibit devoted to Di Palma curated by his widow, Adriana Chiesa Di Palma, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life–a title derived from a late-film anecdote about Carlo as a young boy that packs an emotional punch I wasn’t quite expecting–sees Adriana poring over his papers and videos, interviewing her husband’s colleagues and admirers, and wistfully recalling their marriage. Surprised herself by the vitality of his contribution to the cinematic arts (it sounds like he didn’t talk shop much at home), she makes for an ideal entrée into the filmmaker’s oeuvre: she knows the titles and the people involved (sometimes personally), but not well enough to be disenchanted with them.

TIFF ’16: A Quiet Passion

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

Tiff16quietpassion

****/****
starring Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Jodhi May, Keith Carradine
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Walter Chaw Terence Davies doesn’t make a lot of movies but he does make masterpieces fairly regularly. A Quiet Passion, a biopic of the notoriously reclusive Emily Dickinson, is his latest. His portrait of the “Belle of Amherst” captures the poet (Cynthia Nixon, transcendent) as a woman who finds no succour in the petrified pieties of her rigid New England society, turning inwards instead to the dubious pleasures of family and verse. She looks for approval from both. Her father (Keith Carradine) suffers her streak of rebellion. There’s the sense that he sees in her the continuation of his own modest progressivism, indicated by the quiet approval he gives to his children’s mockery of his silly sister (Annette Badland), his acceptance of Emily’s rejection of a religious education, and his indulging of Emily’s desire to write in the small hours of the night. One senses that these witching hours are her room of one’s own. The tableaux of Emily swaddled in the purple cocoon of night is not just a romantic notion, but evocation, too, of Davies’s deep consciousness of colour in his pictures, pointing to how these early, idealistic moments are contrasted by the sick yellows, whites, and browns that populate the period after her father’s death. He breaks that mourning with an impressionistic interlude that opens upon a green bower, then Emily bathed in firelight in something like the physical/spiritual ecstasy that would be denied her–that she perhaps denied herself for fear and self-loathing–all her life. He closes a door on her, slowly. It’s a passage that expresses the tension of the film’s title: Emily finds deliverance only upon a deeper metaphysical implosion.

TIFF ’16: Sadako vs. Kayako

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Japan, TIFF

Tiff16sadako

**/****
directed by Kôji Shiraishi

by Bill Chambers A professor (Masahiro Komoto) teaching a course on urban legends beseeches his class to get him a copy of the cursed video that summons Sadako, the vengeful spirit of Ringu and its sequels/prequels (this is the seventh film in the Japanese iteration of the series)…and also to buy his book. Not long after, the tape surfaces, and a young woman who watched it dies in the midst of joking with her co-workers about all the inexplicably terrifying things that have happened to her since. Needless to say, Sadako vs. Kayako has a sense of humour about itself–how could it not, given that what its title promises is like herding cats: Sadako only visits those with a working VHS player and Ju-on: The Grudge villainess Kayako never leaves the house. In parallel storylines, the professor and one of his students (Aimi Satsukawa) inherit the Sadako curse and the Grudge place beckons a teenage girl (Tina Tamashiro) who's moved in next door, although Sadako is the de facto star of this show. While the film might not be a conventional entry in either franchise, it's very much in a Japanese tradition, that of kaijū eiga movies featuring experts who sic monsters on other monsters, old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly-like, when their other defenses prove ineffectual. No cities are levelled here, though.

Telluride ’16: Short Films

Posted in2016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Iran, Mystery, Short Films, Telluride, Telluride 2016, Thriller

Tell16shorts

by Walter Chaw

Dirt */**** (d. Darius Clark Monroe) One of those time-loop conceits that opens with a guy burying a body and ends with…no, not telling. Dirt has an issue with editing and looping, the fallout being that image overlaps noise, confusing function. It’s possible to do this meaningfully; it’s also possible to junk it up so completely that every transition begins with unnecessary obfuscation. That’s what’s happened here. Dirt isn’t promising, but it is brief.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, Prison, Thriller

Scorpion1

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Natsuyagi Isao, Rie Yokoyama, Fumio Watanabe
written by Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Kayoko Shiraishi, Fumio Watanabe, Eiko Yanami
written by Shunya Itô, Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Mikio Narita, Koji Nanbara, Yayoi Watanabe
written by Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song (1973)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Masakazu Tamura, Toshiyuki Hosokawa, Sanae Nakahara
written by Fumio Kônami, Hirô Matsuda and Yasuharu Hasebe, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Yasuharu Hasebe

by Bryant Frazer One of the most audacious debuts in cinematic history is rookie Shunya Itô’s expressionist rape-revenge saga, the Female Prisoner Scorpion trilogy. These three films, released in the 11-month period between August 1972 and July 1973, elevate Japanese studio Toei’s series of “pinky violence” sexploitation films with daring, theatrical visuals reminiscent of the bold work that got Seijun Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu and a subversive sensibility that could be described as genuinely feminist. Of course, Itô’s studio bosses didn’t have art in mind. Loosely adapted from a popular manga, the first Scorpion was conceived as a gender-swapped take on Teruo Ishii’s popular Abashiri Prison film series, on which Itô had worked as assistant director. Moving the story from a men’s prison to a women’s prison accommodated sensationalized images of nudity and sexual violence, which even major Japanese studios were relying on in the early 1970s as a way to compete with American imports. But Itô talked his screenwriters into throwing out their derivative original script and starting anew. He also convinced Meiko Kaji, a rising star thanks to her appearances in the popular Stray Cat Rock movies about Japanese youth street culture, to take on the title role. (Kaji arrived at Toei from Nikkatsu after the latter studio diverted its production resources to so-called “Roman porno” softcore in an attempt to compete with the popularity of television.) The results are singular. Itô’s flamboyant visuals created florid showcases for Kaji’s riveting screen presence, especially her oft-deployed 1,000-yard stare–a stone-cold, daggers-to-your-eyeballs glare of the type seen elsewhere in only the most unnerving of horror films. Itô and Kaji turned out to be an electrifying combination.

TIFF ’16: Carrie Pilby

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
*/****directed by Susan Johnson by Bill Chambers True story: Carrie, dining alone, catches eyes with a handsome stranger across the restaurant. He confidently strides up to her table and she starts rambling on about how she's flattered but not interested, after which I said, in perfect unison with the handsome stranger on screen, "I was just going to ask if I could borrow your chair." Am I psychic? No, I'm just fluent in Sitcom. Incidentally, this cheap bit of embarrassment humour scored laughs instead of groans at my screening, which suggests that a generation throwing TV away has blinded them…

Telluride ’16: The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2016

Tell16bside

**½/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Towards the end of Errol Morris's fitfully-fascinating portrait of legendary large-format Polaroid photographer Elsa Dorfman, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography, Dorfman, looking at one of the dozens of snapshots she's taken of the late Alan Ginsberg, says that maybe the true life of a photo isn't revealed until the subject has died. It's the emotional fulcrum of this brief piece, as the now-79-year-old Dorfman looks back on a lifetime of pictures taken while she went from being a single "New York Jew" without direction to a hob-nobber among the Greenwich Village crowd. Ensconced at Morris's bequest in her studio's backroom, she's dwarfed by a cluttered drafting table on the one side and rows and stacks of archived portraits on the other. As she opens each cabinet, Morris captures the delight and surprise of her rediscovering the "discards" of her customers (they pick one to keep; the other she dubs "the B-side" and ferrets away), reading the detailed captions she's left on them.

TIFF ’16: Prank

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Film Festivals, Teen, TIFF
**½/****directed by Vincent Biron by Bill Chambers The retainer, the indifferent pompadour, the Cookie Monster table manners--it's obvious that Stefie (Étienne Galloy) doesn't have an image to protect. When two older-looking teens, Martin (Alexandre Lavigne) and Jean-Se (Simon Pigeon), invite him to participate in a bit of "Jackass" performance art (they need his phone to film it), Stefie discovers something about himself, I think: that he was lonely. Joining them on subsequent pranks, he has nothing to offer creatively but does assume the voice of the group's conscience, however muted. Often he himself is persuaded to ignore it by his…

Telluride ’16: Wakefield

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2016

Tell16wakefield

½*/****
starring Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Garner, Jason O'Mara, Beverly D'Angelo
screenplay by Robin Swicord, based on the story by E.L. Doctorow
directed by Robin Swicord

by Walter Chaw Angry businessman Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) tunes in and drops out when, after chasing a raccoon into the unused attic of his garage, he decides to live there for a few months, spying on his wife Diana (Jennifer Garner) and their twin "budding adolescent" girls (as E.L. Doctorow, author of the story upon which this is based, calls them). There's a 1990 Jan Egleson film called A Shock to the System that sees a Howard Wakefield type played by Michael Caine mordantly, hilariously deciding to take control of his life through a series of carefully-planned murders. Robin Swicord's Wakefield aspires to be an updating of this but is hampered by the fact of Robin Swicord. Take the moment where Howard watches his long-suffering spouse dump his dinner on top of a bag of garbage in their driveway. Cut to the next day, with Howard opening the lid and looking down at it. Flashback to Diana dumping the dinner on top of a bag of garbage in their driveway. Yes, Swicord is so literal-minded and inept that she has offered gaffed viewers a flashback to a scene that just happened.

Telluride ’16: Manchester by the Sea

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2016

Tell16manchester

****/****
starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Walter Chaw Kenneth Lonergan is a brilliant writer who specializes in small interpersonal moments. His plays are extraordinar­­y. The two previous films he directed, You Can Count on Me and Margaret, are masterful portraits of human failure and weakness. He is a poet of imperfection and imperfect resolution. Margaret gained attention for the lengths to which Lonergan fought for a cut that exceeded a contracted-upon two-and-a-half-hour running time. Martin Scorsese, with whom Lonergan collaborated on the script for Gangs of New York, helped facilitate a 165-minute cut that to my knowledge has never been screened. When Margaret finally hit home video after a swell of support from online advocates, the long version had inflated to 186 minutes. I’ve only seen the theatrical and extended cuts of the film. I love them both. I rarely wish movies were longer; Lonergan’s are the exception. That has something to do with his writing, of course, and something to do with his casts, who, to a one, have contributed extraordinary work–perhaps the best work of their careers. Crucially, Lonergan trusts them to deliver his words. He doesn’t garnish them with gaudy camera angles, or underscore them with expository soundtrack cues. Mark Ruffalo once said of Lonergan, affectionately, that the playwright was only playing at being humble. For me, however Lonergan is with other people, his humility comes through in the extent to which he allows his actors to do their job.

TIFF ’16: Certain Women

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Tiff16certainwomen

***/****
starring Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone
screenplay by Kelly Reichardt, based on stories by Maile Meloy
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Bill Chambers I hate miserablism. I decided Kelly Reichardt wasn’t for me after seeing Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and a few minutes of Meek’s Cutoff, because even though they’re about deeply unhappy people, their total void of humour bothered me. Relentless self-seriousness is teen angst, and incredibly unbecoming when the people on screen are adults and the filmmakers are, too. There’s a moment near the beginning of Certain Women where Jared Harris sobs “Nobody understands how fucking miserable my life is!” (or something to that effect) that could be a panel from the MAD MAGAZINE parody of Reichardt’s work, and I nearly fled the theatre until Laura Dern’s reaction to Harris’s wailing produced some titters in the audience, alerting me to the possibility that I had missed something crucial by not watching Reichardt’s movies in public. Perhaps solitude blinds one to any levity in films about gloomy guses and lonesome outcasts. Be that as it may, Certain Women is definitely not as grim or hopeless as Old Joy et al., despite its absence of anything resembling a conventional happy ending.

Sully (2016)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Theatrical

Sully

**/****
starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney
written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book Highest Duty by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw An elderly film by an elderly filmmaker for an elderly audience, everybody’s favourite says-appalling-things old bastard Clint Eastwood directs the guy everyone can agree on, Tom Hanks, in a rah-rah hagiography of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the most uncomplicatedly heroic figure in the United States in the last…how long ago was Abraham Lincoln? 151 years? If you don’t know, Sully landed an airplane with 155 passengers on it in the Hudson River when bird strikes disabled both of the plane’s engines. Multiple dream sequences have Sully imagining what would’ve happened had he turned his plane over populated areas. 9/11 is referenced often–explicitly and obliquely. An applause-geeking closing title card informs that lots of New Yorkers helped rescue the passengers from the water after the splashdown because New Yorkers are good and America is great, raising the question, Mr. Eastwood, if it needs to be “great again.” Maybe it’s all gone to hell since 2009. The timing is interesting. Let’s call it that.

TIFF ’16: Elle

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff16elle

***/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The first thing you hear in Elle, after Anne Dudley’s giallo-worthy (and, thus, slightly misleading) overture, are some violent sex noises, but the first thing you see is a cat, a good ol’ Russian blue, who is watching his owner get violated with daunting ambivalence. Meet the director. Migrating from his native Holland to France this time, Paul Verhoeven has made a movie fascinated with rape at either the best or worst cultural moment he could have chosen. Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) is depicted being raped several times over the course of the film by the same ski-masked stranger; my own reaction was a complicated gnarl of disgust and desensitization that led to more disgust. Eventually, I think, Michèle’s relationship with her attacker becomes S&M in all but name, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Michèle is a well-to-do Parisian with a videogame company that seems to specialize in hentai (meaning you also get to see tentacle rape, Verhoeven-style). Family members–including a mother (Judith Magre) who’s into much-younger men and a layabout son (Jonas Bloquet) who’s fallen under the spell of a pregnant gold digger (Alice Isaaz)–orbit in close proximity despite her abrasive candour, which at one point finds her telling her friends and puppyish ex-husband (Charles Berling) about her rape over cocktails after work. They worry, but because she’s the alpha dog, they probably don’t worry enough.

Posted inBlog
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