FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Fantastic Fest ’15: In Search of the Ultra-Sex

October 3, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, France, Satire, Sci-Fi

A la recherche de l'Ultra-Sex½*/****directed by Nicolas Charlet & Bruno Lavaine by Walter Chaw I saw a hacked anime once--pre-Adult Swim and projects of that ilk--that took place on a flying aircraft carrier and had been re-dubbed so that all the characters were offering different euphemisms for flatulence. My favourite was, "I can't seem to take a step without introducing Mr. Wetty." It lasted about four minutes and I enjoyed a good three-and-a-half of it. Nicholas Charlet and Bruno Lavaine's In Search of the Ultra-Sex is a full hour of R-rated excerpts from classic porn, dubbed to be a Plan 9…

Mississippi Grind (2015)

October 2, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn, Sienna Miller, Analeigh Tipton
written and directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

by Walter Chaw Completely adequate from start to finish, Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck's Mississippi Grind is essentially California Split without the stylistic innovation or sense of sadness and danger. In it, down-on-his luck gambling addict and self-proclaimed "not a good guy" Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) runs into bon vivant gambling addict Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), who Cheap Thrills Gerry into a series of escalating gambles before whisking him away on a journey to the Big Game. There's a tremendous scene right in the middle with a loan shark played by the great Alfre Woodard that showcases both her immense warmth and her sudden steel. There's also a whore with a heart of gold (Sienna Miller) and a winsome epilogue that suggests, The Wrestler-like, that this big, lovable, broken-down lug just can't get out of his own way, gosh darn it–isn't that a shame? It is. It's a terrible shame.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Yakuza Apocalypse

October 2, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Horror, Japan, Vampire

**½/****directed by Takashi Miike by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike makes one, sometimes two, sometimes three movies a year, which is not so remarkable as the fact that they're often exceptional. He's as fecund as a Fassbender and hasn't shown signs of the same catastrophic burnout. Even his middling projects have moments in them to recommend--no less so his latest, Yakuza Apocalypse, a return to the Yakuza genre that gave him mainstream credibility (such as it was) and the supernatural horror genre that gave him cult immortality. This one isn't about anything that I could ken, really, but it is technically…

Fantastic Fest ’15: Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler

October 1, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Documentary, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, Italy, Japan

**½/****directed by Andrew Seklir & Tim Kinzy by Walter Chaw This is a well-mounted documentary about videogame geek Tim McVey (no, not that Tim McVeigh), who, as a carbuncular teen, once scored a billion points on little-known stand-up game Nibbler--a symbolic victory for its marathon nature (typically a 40-hour run is required for such a feat) and for the rarity of having a machine that would actually tally a ten-digit score. Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler is ultimately best when it diagrams the essential decency of Tim and especially his impossibly kind and supportive wife, Tina. The film…

Fantastic Fest ’15: February

September 30, 2015****/****, 2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

****/****
starring Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar
written and directed by Oz Perkins

by Walter Chaw Osgood Perkins's hyphenate debut February is haunted. It plays like a boarding-school version of Rob Zombie's extraordinary Lords of Salem, coloured by the same sadness and sense of inevitability and doom. Like it, February features a female protagonist cast adrift in a mostly-empty building, waiting for something to take her away–to Heaven or to Hell, it's not clear. Not clear, either, if there's much of a difference at the end of the journey. Here it's Kat ("Mad Men"'s Kiernan Shipka), who has a terrible dream one night that her parents aren't going to arrive to take her home from school over the mid-winter break and then wakes to find it come true. She's marooned there with two guardians and a Heather, the beautiful Rose (Lucy Boynton), who's engineered her own abandonment, the better to spend an extra week with a boy who may have knocked her up. February is obviously about young female sexuality, locating its girl heroes right there, teetering on the cusp of still calling out to their mothers when they're hurt. And it's about grief. Grief for the passing of innocence to experience, literalized in the loss of parents and the desire for their surrogates. It wonders what would happen if Rosemary's baby were a girl, and met her real father for the first time as a young woman going through puberty. It's a lovely metaphor for the sensual horror of that transformation, for the little deaths that separate children from their parents, literally or figuratively.

Sleeping with Other People (2015)

September 30, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Adam Scott, Amanda Peet
written and directed by Leslye Headland

by Walter Chaw Massively over-written, smug, baselessly self-assured, and world-weary in the way that people who watch a lot of "Sex and the City" and "Girls" are world-weary, Leslye Headlund's rank, unwatchable Sleeping with Other People is like that date that Death goes on "Family Guy" with the girl who tells Him you can't hug your kids with nuclear arms. To say it's awful is unfair; better to say it's tedious as shit. It's a chronicle of insufferable, half-wit narcissists and, given the success of stuff like Obvious Child, hell, it's worth a try, right? Honestly, though…and no one's asking, but…wouldn't it be better to not have a career than be tied to great white albatrosses like this? Sleeping with Other People is like Diablo Cody on steroids, complete with an entire album's worth of soft-alt rock and Lilith Fair covers on the soundtrack. And much like Cody's script for Juno that has references to Soupy Sales flying from the mouths of babes, this gem has a college girl in 2002 warning a prospective beau not to reference The Graduate on learning that her name is "Elaine" when, you know, "Seinfeld". Jesus, c'mon.

Fantastic Fest ’15: Gridlocked

September 29, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dominic Purcell, Stephen Lang, Trish Stratus, Danny Glover
screenplay by Rob Robol & Allan Ungar
directed by Allan Ungar

by Walter Chaw Danny Glover's been too old for this shit for over thirty years now, making it all the more tragic to find him in Allan Ungar's dipshit remake of The Hard Way that nobody wanted, Gridlocked, which magnifies its crimes by also being the second remake of Assault on Precinct 13 that nobody wanted. A desk jockey checking IDs at the police station, Glover's Sully advises about 45 minutes in that he is, yes, too old for this shit. The only thing missing is a wry saxophone riff when he says it. At least Gridlocked, as it's pissing on the corpse of the literally dozens of better movies it's ripping off, had the decency to let Michael Kamen rest in peace, if nobody else. It's uniquely awful.

TIFF ’15: Full Contact

September 27, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Croatia, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
starring Grégoire Colin, Lizzie Brocheré, Slimane Dazi
written and directed by David Verbeek

by Walter Chaw Brilliant if often a bit too on-the-nose, Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek's Full Contact takes on the state of modern man by detailing America's drone war. I heard a thing on NPR a while back talking about how the traditional metric of tracking a battle group's efficiency by tallying its loss-to-kill ratio has been blown of late by drone groups that have thousands of kills to zero losses. It's an existentially frightening situation in which Nintendo skills not only predict military success, but also potentially engender the same sort of desensitization regarding the tactile obscenity of murder. The movie's title is a clue to its intentions, then: Verbeek follows drone captain Ivan (Grégoire Colin), sequestered away in a bunker somewhere in Nevada where he pilots drone aircraft, bristling with munitions, into somewhere in the Middle East, the better to assassinate tagged targets. He communicates via live messaging and a headset (the way a kid on an Xbox 360 might, essentially), and one day, though he suspects better, he hits a target that turns out to be a school. Outside, he befriends a stripper, Cindy (Lizzie Brocheré), telling her he's impotent although he's not.

TIFF ’15: The Family Fang

September 27, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, TIFF

**½/****
directed by Jason Bateman

by Bill Chambers David Lindsay-Abaire is the poor man's Tom Stoppard and Jason Bateman smothered whatever vulgar charms his directorial debut Bad Words may have possessed in an incongruous autumnal burnish, but they have a neutralizing effect on each other: Together, the strained seriousness of the former and the preposterous seriousness of the latter (Bateman shoots this one like The Godfather) create a curiously palatable harmony. The Family Fang is every inch The Skeleton Twins or some other brother-sister Sundance yarn but with a wonderfully specific source for the siblings' dysfunction: raised by performance artists, they were from a young age incorporated into their parents' notorious act, which tended to prey upon the sympathies of innocent bystanders. (In a very funny early flashback, for example, they stage a mock bank robbery that ends in the alleged shooting death of matriarch Camille Fang (Kathryn Hahn here, Maryann Plunkett in present day).) As adults, Buster (Bateman) and Annie (Nicole Kidman, looking supernaturally restored to her Peacemaker days) have distanced themselves from their past and channelled any lingering impulses towards exhibitionism into the more legitimate avenues of writing and acting, respectively. When Buster is shot in the head with a potato (don't ask), he is summoned home and drags Annie with him to serve as a buffer. Back in the family nest, father Caleb (Christopher Walken) immediately tries to rope them into a "piece," but not only have they moved on–so has society at large, now too insular to be a viable canvas for the Fangs' art. Walken's fury as he quits a prank involving counterfeit coupons is poignant; one senses a touch of the actor's own frustration with the world no longer appreciating his unique genius.

The Martian (2015)

September 22, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristin Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor
screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The riposte, and it’s a fair one, is: What would make you happy? And the frustrating response is, “I don’t know.” The problem is this (and in a movie about solving problems, it’s germane to raise one): The Martian, Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard’s faithful adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestseller, is essentially a bwana story in which smart and resourceful black and Chinese people band together to save a white explorer who declares himself both “colonizer” and “pirate” at various points in the movie. It’s a summary of a certain kind of film, too, the space opera that used to be all the rage in the 1950s–a decade actually interested in exploration rather than defunding NASA and rabid anti-intellectualism. The only thing missing is a spacechimp and a space lady with rockets in her brassiere. I confess that I probably wouldn’t have even been thinking much, or perhaps as quickly, about the racial politics of this film had Matt Damon, the bwana in question, not “whitesplained” to a black producer (a female black producer) what diversity means as regards his wish-fulfillment reality series “Project Greenlight”. Or if it weren’t directed by Ridley Scott, whose last film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, required volumes of whitesplaining itself as to why the principals of his Middle Eastern/African tale were white.

TIFF ’15: Downriver

September 22, 20152015, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**½/****written and directed by Grant Scicluna by Walter Chaw Joining Snowtown as Aussie films about sublimated desire, murder, perversion, and cults of personality, Grant Scicluna's feature debut Downriver is beautifully-lensed, patient, bleak. It reminds of another debut, Jacob Aaron Estes's 2004 Mean Creek, where, as in Downriver, the mute disinterest of Nature is used to highlight the struggle of individuals--especially children--to impose meaning on it. The title and central image of a river evoke Heraclitus's aphorism that it's impossible to ever enter the same river twice. Tied to the film's central conceit of James (Reef Ireland), a young man released…

Nomads (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

September 21, 20151980s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Lesley-Anne Down, Pierce Brosnan, Anna-Maria Monticelli, Adam Ant
written and directed by John McTiernan

by Bryant Frazer Director John McTiernan’s film debut is a true ’80s oddity. Pierce Brosnan sports an ersatz French accent in his first big movie role. He’s billed opposite Lesley-Anne Down, riding the downhill slope of her post-Sphinx career, but the two have only one scene together. McTiernan’s script, to date his only screenwriting credit, is some superficial fluffernutter about restless inuat (spirits of Inuit mythology) haunting the L.A. living–except when it’s a diffuse meditation on the stateless qualities of Angelenos and California in general. Even the score, an improvisational guitar-and-synth freakout by Bill Conti and (I shit you not) Ted Nugent, is genuinely weird.

TIFF ’15: Freeheld

September 21, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**½/****directed by Peter Sollett by Bill Chambers Based on the Oscar-winning documentary short of the same name, Freeheld is the true story of policewoman Laurel Hester and mechanic Stacie Andree, who in the recent past, before the legalization of gay marriage, waged a public battle against Ocean County, NJ legislature when it denied the dying Hester the right to leave her pension to domestic partner Andree. Julianne Moore, enduring a protracted screen death for the second year in a row, plays Laurel beneath a cloche of Farrah Fawcett hair and Ellen Page, who produced, plays Stacie, and, um...when Back to…

TIFF ’15: Mr. Right

September 19, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

½*/****directed by Paco Cabezas by Bill Chambers Max Landis follows up his American Ultra script with another action comedy about slick killing machines but abandons the Manchurian Candidate backstory in a grotesquely cynical fashion: When Sam Rockwell throws knives at new girlfriend Anna Kendrick to prove she can catch them, his conviction is based on nothing more substantial than her being the star of this particular show. Over and over, Mr. Right acknowledges that it's a cartoon, and not in an enjoyably meta, Duck Amuck sort of way--more in a "you don't care, so why should we?" sort of way.…

Weltschmerz

September 18, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015

by Walter Chaw On my way back down on US 50 to 285 to C470 and I70 and home, I pulled off at someplace carved into the side of a mountain, a lagoon fortified all around with rock and shattered wood and sand. I let out a breath and wondered how long I'd held it. I listened to the lap of water and the air and the spaces inside my head. I took my shoes off. I waded a little way in and schools of fry shoaled away from my feet in black clouds. The water? Frigid. Snow run-off. I could see the white of it, dotting the peaks around me, even now in early September where, still five hours away, it was over 90° in the shade–the last gasps of Colorado's brutal Indian summer.

TIFF ’15: The Girl in the Photographs

September 18, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

*/****directed by Nick Simon by Bill Chambers Written by the son of Norman Bates and directed by a protégé of the late Wes Craven, The Girl in the Photographs is an illusorily-pedigreed resurrection of the slasher genre featuring scattered compositional glories courtesy of legendary DP Dean Cundey, returning to horror for the first time since, what, Psycho II? The picture opens with its Janet Leigh (horror muse Katharine Isabelle)--literally named Janet--being abducted from her home by a pair of masked fiends (one's a harlequin, the other a Trash Humper) who eventually leave a photo of her corpse on the bulletin…

TIFF ’15: The Ones Below

September 16, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF, UK

*½/****written and directed by David Farr by Walter Chaw Another entry in the baby-in-peril subgenre of white-collar paranoia thrillers (see most recently Hungry Hearts), hyphenate David Farr's closed-room Polanski shrine The Ones Below is well-intentioned fluff that meanders around exhausted until it finally finds a place to sit. It's a literal upstairs/downstairs affair as upstairs couple Kate (Clémence Poésy) and Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore), expecting their firstborn, meet-cute their downstairs neighbours: bombshell Teresa (Laura Birn), also pregnant, and her older husband Jon (David Morrissey). A dinner party, an Inside accident, and suddenly Kate is either insane or insane like a fox…

Telluride ’15: Rams

September 15, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Iceland, Telluride, Telluride 2015

Hrútar
***½/****
starring Sigurður Sigurjónsson, Theodór Júlíusson, Charlotte Bøving, Gunnar Jónsson
written and directed by Grímur Hákonarson

by Walter Chaw There's a little of Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat in Grimur Hákonarson's Rams. Something of the formal beauty of La cinquième saison and the deadpan absurdity of Aki Kaurismaki's films as well. It is a story of brothers in conflict. More-functional recluse Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and less-functional recluse Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) are both hidden away in remote cabins in Iceland, tending to herds of sheep bred from a legendary stag whose lovingly-taxidermied head decorates Gummi's hovel's entryway. The picture opens in tension at a sheepherder's competition, where the prize stock is prodded and judged. And it ends in tension, as the two brothers, who haven't spoken in 40 years, must deal with the loss of everything while, just outside, an allegorical–but literal–storm obliterates the petty concerns of mortal men.

TIFF ’15: Where to Invade Next + Ninth Floor

September 14, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

Where to Invade Next. (pictured)
**½/****
written and directed by Michael Moore

NINTH FLOOR
**/****
written and directed by Mina Shum

by Bill Chambers The narrative pretext for Michael Moore’s globetrotting that lends Where to Invade Next its title is so low-concept, jokey, and finally immaterial as to be the documentary equivalent of the cable repairman arriving at the beginning of a porno. After a solid five minutes of trolling the Right with an inventory of recent conflicts that makes the United States look at once war-happy and, despite its exorbitant military spending, not very good at the whole war thing, Moore satirically sets off on a mission–shabby haircut, gummy smile, and Tigers cap (sometimes in camo green) intact–to find a good place for America’s next big skirmish. What he’s really doing is touring the world in search of proven ideologies his own tailspinning country would do well to adopt. In Italy and Germany, he discovers a happy, fruitful middle class in factories, of all places. In France, he encounters a gradeschool cafeteria where the chef opts for fruit-and-cheese platters over burgers and fries and the children regard Moore’s can of Coke dubiously. In Slovenia, he can’t find a single university student in debt until he happens on an American transplant who owes money back home. In Iceland, he becomes enamoured of an emergent matriarchy, which might be why he recedes as an on-camera presence: to curb the irony of his film mansplaining women in leadership to us.

Telluride ’15: Beasts of No Nation

September 13, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2015, War

**½/****
starring Idris Elba, Richard Pepple, Ama Abebrese, Abraham Attah
screenplay by Cary Fukunaga, based on the novel by Uzodinma Iweala
directed by Cary Fukunaga

by Walter Chaw A couple of days removed and I'm still not able to shake the scene where child soldier Agu (the amazing Abraham Attah) thinks he's been reunited with his mother, finds out he's mistaken, and metes out mercy/justice/betrayal in a sequence of events that ends with him standing on a box to peer out a window. He's a child. One of many in a roving platoon of fighters led by red-eyed Commandant (Idris Elba) through a nameless African country, wreaking havoc in a nameless conflict. Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of Nigerian-born Uzondinma Iweala's debut novel is less politics than survey history of the transcendental war film. It's more wise about how something like this should look, in other words, than how it should feel, and the epiphany one has while watching it isn't that this kind of thing happens in the world all the time, across centuries and continents, but that Beasts of No Nation looks a lot like Come and See before it looks a lot like The Thin Red Line before, finally, it looks a lot like Apocalypse Now. Since we're comparing things, Kim Nguyen's War Witch (Rebelle) is the more powerful child-soldier film–mainly because it's about something other than the abomination of using children in war. Children in war as an abomination isn't a controversial stand. If that's all you have to say, well, it's not like I'm not listening, but I'm not impressed.

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

Snow White (2025)

O’Dessa (2025)