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

Posted in****/****, 2015, 2016, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Romance

Anomalisa1

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson

by Walter Chaw Writing about a Charlie Kaufman film, if you do it honestly, is writing about yourself. I’ve said before, and it helps me to repeat it, that I don’t really understand Kaufman’s films, but that they do understand me. Kaufman is the most important, innovative voice in American cinema since Orson Welles, and though he has enjoyed more autonomy in expressing that voice than Welles, I would argue that the seven years separating his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, and this follow-up, a stop-motion collaboration with Duke Johnson called Anomalisa, suggest that it’s not as easy as it should be. Certainly, the journey that Anomalisa has taken is far from conventional, from Kaufman play written under the pseudonym “Francis Fregosi,” through a Kickstarter campaign, through the general challenge of making an adult-themed animation in a country that sees animation as a genre not a medium, to now this tour of festivals, looking for distribution. The play was introduced as part of a Carter Burwell project titled “Theater of the New Ear”. It was a late replacement on a Kaufman/Coen Bros. double-bill when the Coens “dropped out” at the eleventh hour, and this unknown Fregosi’s piece took its place.

Hail, Caesar! (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson

Hailcaesar1

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much, Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Pumpkinhead (1988) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory

Pumpkinhead3

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Lance Henriksen, John D’Aquino, Kerry Remsen
screenplay by Mark Patrick Carducci with Gary Gerani
directed by Stan Winston

by Walter Chaw F/X legend Stan Winston’s directorial debut, Pumpkinhead is a strong piece with a few indelible moments. The first is when a country witch summons the titular bogey using the blood of a dead kid; another is when that same creature stalks past a kitchen window like an early draft of the Alien hybrid from Alien: Resurrection, with a similar miscegenated backstory. Between and around these high points is a boilerplate vengeance intrigue that literalizes the sins of the fathers in a Passion Play surrounding widowed dad Ed (Lance Henriksen), who, in blind grief over the loss of his adorable young son (Matthew Hurley), binds himself psychically, and physically, to the monster he’s raised as his avatar. It’s a Frankenstein story in that way, one with shades of E.T.–the bond between Elliot and his wrinkled flesh buddy is reconstituted in the relationship between Ed and an eight-foot monstrosity that’s a little bit one of those naked cats and a little bit Giger. An impressive shot establishing Pumpkinhead as he strides into the skeleton of an old, broken-down church in blue half-light suggests more than the triumph of practical effects on a low budget and tight shooting schedule: it suggests that the film’s simplicity could–should–be read as pagan folktale, complete with cautionary spiel, brutal exposition, and a surprisingly strong moral grounding. Pumpkinhead is literally about the impossibility of objective violence–every action, no matter how intimate or remote, has a spiritual impact on both victim and perpetrator. It’s a surprisingly rich vein for something like this to mine, and it resonates.

Zoolander No. 2 (2016) [The Magnum Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

Zoolander21

Zoolander 2
**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
starring Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Penélope Cruz
written by Justin Theroux and John Hamburg & Ben Stiller and Nicholas Stoller
directed by Ben Stiller

by Bill Chambers It opens with Justin Bieber taking more bullets than Sonny Corleone. So far, so good. Bieber commemorates his death with an Instagram selfie, which makes me want to purse my lips against my fingertips and blow a kiss to the chef–mwah! News of Bieber’s assassination raises alarms at Fashion Interpol, where his death selfie is compared against those of several other musicians, all of whom died making the same pouty face as Bieber. (Madonna being among them strikes me as more of a production designer’s idea of a joke.) Struggling to decipher the meaning of the pose, Agent Valentina Valencia (Penélope Cruz) finally surrenders to the idea that there’s only one person who might have the insight she needs: Austin Powers! No, wait–Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller)!

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

Xmen8

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac
screenplay by Simon Kinberg
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw I know the sample size is small, but Bryan Singer’s X-Men prequel trilogy (we’ll call it his, since he produced Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class), culminating now in X-Men: Apocalypse, is the far superior prequel trilogy. If you were so inclined, you could find in them–and in all of Singer’s work (just like Victor Salva’s across the genre divide)–assimilation melodramas: tales of the struggle with being born different, complete with abilities and…urges. There’s explanation there of why Singer’s films are always about alienation, best when dealing with teens, and critical of the laws and systems that would condemn things that are natural as criminal. Matt Zoller Seitz recently wrote about the problem with believing that Woody Allen is likely a child abuser/pedophile and still watching, still sometimes enjoying, his movies. I was taken with how the stain of that knowledge on the viewer never really goes away. When I watch Singer’s work, which I tend to like a lot, never more than ten minutes go by without me wondering whether what people have said about him being a serial abuser and statutory rapist is true. If it is, it complicates this reading of his films. He’s a little like Elia Kazan in that respect; I wonder if their message is meant as apologia–if it’s repugnant in its human fascination.

Love & Friendship (2016)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, France, Ireland, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

Lovefriendship

***½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenweil, Chloë Sevigny
based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen
written & directed by Whit Stillman

by Angelo Muredda When Whit Stillman emerged from his thirteen-year sojourn in the wilderness after The Last Days of Disco, it was with the pastel-washed curio Damsels in Distress, practically a radio transmission from a planet of the auteur’s own construction. Where his Metropolitan and Barcelona dropped anchor in immaculately-observed social environs (Manhattan’s waning debutante scene and the European refuge of loquacious Americans, respectively), Stillman’s modestly-budgeted return to filmmaking holed up in a dreamlike and not especially convincing college setting, where Gatsby-esque self-inventors sought to transform their ugly little world through good soap and new dance crazes. A deeply hermetic work even by Stillman’s standards, Damsels in Distress feels in retrospect like a minor but necessary stepping stone back to the better realized but still heightened reality of Love & Friendship, a signature work that is nevertheless Stillman’s most accessible to the uninitiated. Despite marking his first adaptation–of Lady Susan, a short, posthumously-published epistolary novel by Jane Austen, whom he has long worshipped–the film is as pure an expression of the Stillman style and worldview as any despite its largely English cast and the sincerity of its period trappings as a 1790s costume comedy about the machinations of the rich, the formerly rich, and the rich-adjacent.

Manhunter (1986) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Michael Mann, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Manhunter2

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring William L. Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Director Michael Mann’s third film is the remarkable Manhunter, the second cinematic adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel (the first being 1977’s John Frankenheimer-helmed Black Sunday) and the first to feature Harris’s dark serial-killer antihero, Hannibal Lecter (spelled “Lecktor” in Manhunter). It is visually lush and possessed of the attention to craft and detail that has become a hallmark of Mann’s work; to say that it’s superior in nearly every way to the much-lauded and wildly popular The Silence of the Lambs would be something of an understatement.

The Nice Guys (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Theniceguys

***½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black’s The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it’d be painted by Robert McGinnis. It’s California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen’s Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who’s often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it’s a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they’re thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

The Stuff (1985) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi

Thestuff1

**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B
starring Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Patrick O’Neal
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer “Enough is never enough.” So goes a key advertising tagline featured in The Stuff, a bracingly contemptuous critique of consumer culture from Larry Cohen–a man who knows a thing or two about exploiting mainstream tastes. Well regarded among B-movie buffs as a master of high-concept screenwriting coupled with low-budget execution, Cohen was, in his 1970s and 1980s heyday, what auteurists call a smuggler: a writer-director who embeds subversive social commentary in otherwise innocuous genre storylines. The Stuff‘s science-fiction scenario offered some bare-bones corporate intrigue along with a few opportunities for the special make-up effects team, but it also lampooned the businessmen who hawk goods of dubious quality and the haplessly credulous populace that lines up to buy them. The film’s eponymous grocery product is a mysterious but plentiful and apparently tasty substance that burbles up, unbidden, from beneath the earth’s surface. Capitalism being what it is, the distinctive white gloop is quickly productized and monetized by a corporation that doesn’t realize (or doesn’t care) that The Stuff seems to move with a mind of its own.

Sunset Song (2015)

Posted in2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Luxembourg, Theatrical, UK

Sunsetsong

***½/****
starring Agyness Deyn, Peter Mullan, Kevin Guthrie
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Angelo Muredda If ever a film deserved to close with not a modest writing credit but an ostentatious “Adapted by,” it’s Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, a characteristically moving and plaintive take on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel about a young woman riding out the turbulent waves of turn-of-the-century Scotland. Davies has now logged more adaptations than autobiographical works, but it’s frivolous to guess which strand of his filmography is the more personal, given the way he infuses even the most cobwebbed Great Book with his signature melancholy. For all its literary pretensions, Sunset Song is as steeped in domestic, regional, and national reminiscence–both fond and tortured–as Davies’s most ostensibly intimate works, like his acerbic but loving first-person ode to Liverpool Of Time and the City. And though it will surely be deemed minor by some because of its muted register (compared to the more rapturous aesthetic of The Deep Blue Sea), the film is, in its more understated way, as resonant and gutting a statement as any Davies has made about how living means being in thrall to the past.

Hot Docs ’16: No Man is an Island

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016
**/**** directed by Tim De Keersmaecker 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 The white sands and turquoise waters of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost island, have attracted tourists like iron filings in the age of TripAdvisor. It's paradise found, an oasis in the Mediterranean. And it's "the door to Africa," a European outpost at which migrants dock en masse. No Man is an Island alternates between two young refugees who've established themselves there in some capacity. Omar, who fled Tunisia during…

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

Cap3

**½/****
starring Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Brühl
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw The Russo brothers’ Captain America: Civil War (hereafter Cap 3), better titled “Captain America: Gosh, That’s a Lot of Characters” or “Captain America: Spider-Man,” is an hour of dull exposition, an hour of fanboy service, and an absolutely fantastic half-hour of Spider-Man (Tom Holland). It continues storylines of which I have no memory while giving more and better time to women characters after the kafuffle around sterilizing Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) in Avengers 2: Gosh, That’s a Lot of Characters, thus making her a “monster.” Chief benefactor of that largesse is Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), “Wanda” to her friends (not only are there too many characters–most of them have two names), who struggles through a fetishist’s idea of a Russian accent and carries the introspective weight of the 2010s on her shoulders. The film is about two things: Like Batman v Superman: 9/11 Has Made Us Monsters, it’s about the casualties of superpowers waging war with one another over civilian populations; and it’s about the role of Western determinism in our current state. It’s like Skyfall in that way, positing that the West has a moral responsibility to police the rest of the world, whether the rest of the world would like to be policed or not. It’s a theory that only works if the West holds fast to its evergreen ideals of truth and justice. This is different from the solipsistic, Byronic nihilism of BvS, because the character of Captain America (Chris Evans) is so explicitly child-like in his goodness that he becomes the manifestation of an idea every action in the film either runs in conjunction with or in tension against. Superman, too, should have represented that ideal, but alas, on Zack Snyder’s watch, he’s just another emo Spidey.

Green Room (2016)

Posted in****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

Greenroom

****/****
starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw I wonder if Jeremy Saulnier has ever made something that wasn't, in its dark heart of hearts, a comedy. I hadn't considered this before a dear friend suggested it after a screening of Green Room, and it caused me to reassess Saulnier's previous films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin. The labels "hardcore" and "brutal" don't feel exactly right, though his work is certainly both at times. There's a Mel Brooks quote I like that defines tragedy as you getting a paper-cut–it hurts, it's awful, it's terrible–and comedy as somebody else falling into a sewer and dying. Saulnier's films are litanies of horrible, unimaginable calamities befalling generally well-meaning schlubs who are altogether unequipped to deal with them. Murder Party, his feature debut, set the template. Its protagonist is a lonely guy who answers a general invitation to attend a Halloween "Murder Party," where he discovers that he's the only guest and that all of the hosts have decided to murder him. It's the most obviously comic of his pictures, and it ends with a moment of crystal-blue melancholy as it becomes clear that the audience has sutured not just to this guy's guilelessness, but to the loneliness driving him as well. Blue Ruin is a masterpiece of the same sort of mechanics. It's delightful: delightfully funny, delightfully smart, delightfully brutal. The hero of that piece, played by Macon Blair (who has a key role in Green Room), is another nebbish pulled from obscurity to be, briefly, the hero of his own life.

Sonny Boy (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2016, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Sonnyboy1

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring David Carradine, Paul L. Smith, Brad Dourif, Michael Griffin
original screenplay by Graeme Whifler
directed by Robert Martin Carroll

by Bryant Frazer David Carradine wears a dress and nobody says a word about it for the duration of Sonny Boy, a low-budget thriller set in a timeless Panavision desert where the preferred modes of transportation are dirt bikes and dusty pickup trucks. It eschews mainstream cultural signifiers–the one glaring exception is the blonde with tousled music-video hair and ridiculous outfits straight out of Desperately Seeking Susan–and instead dedicates itself to world-building, making its arid small-town environment a microcosm for the cold world outside. So complete is Sonny Boy‘s conception of a cruel universe in miniature that it comes with a downbeat theme song written and performed, right there on screen, by Carradine himself. (A lyric from said song* is engraved, I kid you not, on Carradine’s tombstone.) Carradine is the big name, but the whole cast is better than it needs to be, and that makes a difference. They add a recognizably human element to an otherwise demented scenario and, even more importantly, they keep a film that sometimes feels almost like outsider art from amplifying its self-conscious idiosyncrasies to the point of out-and-out parody.

Hot Docs ’16: Sonita

Posted in2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2016, Iran, Switzerland
***½/****directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami 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 By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's…

Hot Docs ’16: Unlocking the Cage

Posted in2016, 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

Posted in2016, 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)

Posted in2016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

Huntsman2

*/****
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

Posted in1980s, 2016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, DVD, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory

Tcm23

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)

Posted in2016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Road Movie, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Midnightspecial

***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.