FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

December 10, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Disney, Drama, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Paul Giamatti, Colin Farrell
screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith
directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw Oh, I get it, haha, this is some kind of joke, right? Because no one in their right mind would remake Finding Neverland as this twee bullshit. …Wait, really? Okay. Because I’m assured that this happened, presented for your approval is (snicker) Saving Mr. Banks, directed by (haha) John Lee Hancock from a screenplay by a team one half of which (bwahaha) is currently writing the Fifty Shades of Grey adaptation. This is rich–are you serious? Okay, okay. So Saving Mr. Banks is based on the adorable true story of how everyone’s favourite union-busting, HUAC finger-pointing anti-Semite Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) convinced brittle British bitch P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson, the “I’m so veddy cross” ‘elevens’ crease between her eyes upstaging her in nearly every scene) to sell him the rights to her creation, Mary Poppins. He all of practiced, televisual charm and she all of powder and crumpets; how will Walt ever batter down the barriers that Ms. Travers has erected from the hell of her Andrew Wyeth flashback childhood, complete with (snigger) Colin Farrell as her fatally-flawed (and handsomely alcoholic) da, Robert. Who gives a shit? More rhetorical questions: Who really likes–I mean really likes–garbage like this? Is there anyone at this point who thinks it a great idea to peanut-butter a shameless Thomas Newman score over every exposed nook in a movie aimed at cat ladies in Mickey Mouse sweatshirts? Saving Mr. Banks is dribble of the first order. What I wouldn’t give to see Hanks play Disney’s 1931 nervous breakdown, moreover to have our very own Jimmy Stewart choose the same late-career path as the actual Stewart and begin playing darker roles in less conventional films. Admittedly, Captain Phillips is mostly crap, but it’s not drool, and Hanks is great in it.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

December 8, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw I love the Coen Brothers, despite my suspicion that most of their movies don’t think much of me at all. What’s often read as disdain for their characters I’ve read mainly as antipathy for their audience: I believe they like their characters just fine, it’s just that they could give a shit about your opinion of what happens to them. I love the Coens for their literary acumen, for their fine ability to understand not simply the form of genre–and, in their adaptations, of authors–but the entire function as well. They don’t just adapt Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis novels, they adapt those writers’ entire bodies of work. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a remarkable retelling of The Odyssey, for instance, because in addition to following the outlines of the poem, it adapts its themes and storytelling strategies; it’s a dissection and a representation and glorious, of course. They return now to The Odyssey–or, at least, to the character of Odysseus–in Inside Llewyn Davis, a picture set in 1961, among the bohos and coffee shops of a Greenwich Village on the verge of Bob Dylan and the counterculture, and it’s populated with lost souls in overlapping underworlds. Transpose that passage from Homer where Odysseus fills troughs with sheeps’ blood to draw the undead (and finds his poor deceased mother there at her drink) to scenes in Pappi’s (Max Casella) infernal nightclub as proto-hipsters and neo-beatniks assemble blandly on the edge of a trembling something while performers bleed out before them. In rituals for new gods, after all, there must be lambs to slaughter.

Frances Ha (2013) [The Criterion Collection] – Dual-Format Edition

December 5, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Charlotte D’Amboise, Adam Driver
screenplay by Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There’s a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her “galumphing radiance.”) You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender’s miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song’s abrupt stop, from Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant’s Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film’s ambling structure: a lovely, headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.

Curse of Chucky [Unrated] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

December 3, 20132013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller

Curseofchucky1

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Fiona Dourif, Danielle Bisutti, Maitland McConnell, Brad Dourif
written and directed by Don Mancini

by Bryant Frazer Say what you will about the Child’s Play movies, but don’t accuse franchise creator Don Mancini of being a hack. Sure, his Chucky, a walking-and-talking “Good Guy doll” possessed by the soul of a serial killer, is a steal. Nothing original about it. Chucky is a foul-mouthed iteration of creepy Toys “R” Us killers from any number of horror films–most of them dating to Cavalcanti’s famous segment from 1945’s Dead of Night, though another key influence was the notoriously pants-wetting 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, with its murderous Zuni fetish doll sharing the screen with a terrified Karen Black. But something about Mancini’s formulation clicked with Fright Night director Tom Holland, and the 1988 Child’s Play, which detailed Chucky’s origin story and pitted him against a young boy, was a low-budget success that naturally demanded sequels. Mancini remained on board as screenwriter as two more directors took on two more Child’s Play entries. After 1991’s Child’s Play 3, the character seemed played-out, but Mancini successfully resurrected him with the tongue-in-cheek Bride of Chucky, which brought Jennifer Tilly into the fold along with director Ronny Yu, and Mancini finally took the directorial reins himself with the even more broadly comic Seed of Chucky, which numbered Britney Spears and Martha Stewart among its victims.

SDFF ’13: Borgman

November 26, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thriller

****/****
starring Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen
written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam

by Walter Chaw Screening at the SDFF and now travelling with the Alamo Fantastic Fest, Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman gets the Yorgos Lanthimos Award for Most Devastating Absurdist Metaphor for Familial Dysfunction. Smart as hell and unapologetically surreal, its central motivating image is a tableaux vivant of Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare,” tipping off not just the ethos of the film, but also that there may be running threads concerning mothers (Fuseli was Mary Wollstonecraft’s lover), monsters (Mary being the mother of Mary “Frankenstein” Shelley), the empowerment of women (the mother again), nightmares, of course, and maybe Romanticism, if only in the picture’s awareness and perversion of nature. Demanding a specific kind of active spectatorship, Borgman is a complex film with heat, and somewhere in the middle of it there’s a performance within a performance that ends with a declaration of intent that stands as one of the most existentially chilling things in cinema this year.

A Perfect World (1993) – Blu-ray Disc

November 25, 2013****/****, 1990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Road Movie, Thriller

****/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern, T.J. Lowther
screenplay by John Lee Hancock
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Time and distance have conspired to replace Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven with A Perfect World in my mind as his best film and one of the best movies of the ’90s. The two occur within a year of each other and mark, with In the Line of Fire between them, a renaissance of the Eastwood brand that had taken a few licks of late with embarrassments like Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, City Heat, Heartbreak Ridge, and on and on. While I was growing up, Eastwood was a Dirty Harry joke and the guy who acted with Orangutans. The first time I saw him in anything was in Bronco Billy, which, frankly, isn’t the first time you want to see anyone in anything. What Unforgiven did for me was inspire a curiosity about Sergio Leone and, with that, a new reason to respect Eastwood’s legacy; my first time through A Perfect World disturbed my notion of who Kevin Costner was (baseball player/cowboy) at the height of his power and sway in Hollywood, and I was distracted. Every time I’ve revisited A Perfect World since (and I’ve been compelled to revisit it at least once every few years), as Costner’s star has faded and Eastwood’s elder statesmanhood behind the camera has somehow dwarfed his iconhood in front of it, I feel the melancholy nostalgia of the film more and more. It’s an American masterpiece. I make that distinction because it’s distinctly American; and I mean it when I say that it’s as fine an essay of the dying of an age as anything in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.

SDFF ’13: I Used to Be Darker

November 24, 20132013, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music

***/**** directed by Matthew Porterfield by Walter Chaw Matthew Porterfield's quiet and humane I Used to Be Darker provides an interesting contrast to Richard Linklater's talkier improvisations while covering the same interpersonal landscapes of how people speak to one another, react to one another, and interact physically within a space. One of the first images is of a little Irish girl, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), taking a knife to a couple of paintings. It's a rejection of many things, as well as a declaration. I Used to Be Darker will privilege the cinematic (i.e., showcase the complexity and eloquence of communication…

Nature Calls: FFC Interviews Denis Côté|Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013)

November 22, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Not long into Denis Côté’s equal parts unnerving and affecting Curling, we get a taste of what might charitably be called the social life of its cloistered central characters, stolid dad Jean-François (Emmanuel Bilodeau) and his taciturn daughter Julyvonne (Philomene Bilodeau): When Julyvonne does her chores, her father grants her a rare glimpse of the world beyond their home in the chilly Quebec countryside, courtesy of the living-room stereo. Father and daughter quietly tap their fingers and rock their knees to songs like Tiffany’s improbably upbeat “I Think We’re Alone Now”–pop hits from a bygone era that, for all the unschooled Julyvonne knows, could be the present. The irony of that reveal, which is perhaps unsurprising to anyone familiar with Côté’s filmography, is that Jean-François and Julyvonne have their own, perfectly private lives outside this sheltered world, him through his work as a repairman whose job necessitates roaming into hotels and bowling alleys, her through a number of clandestine trips to the forest that put her in touch with a tiger and its possible prey.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

November 20, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Philip Seymour Hoffman
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Portentous, eagerly anticipated, ending on an abrupt cliffhanger aboard a spaceship… Yes, I’m talking about The Matrix Reloaded–I mean, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (hereafter Catching Fire), which, for all the conceptual visual improvements inherent in moving from The Hunger Games director Gary Ross to director Francis Lawrence for this instalment, still suffers from hilarible, unspeakable dialogue and a scenario seldom honoured by the execution. Those who haven’t read the books (myself included), fair warning that you’ll not be able to follow a moment of this one without revisiting the first film–again like The Matrix Reloaded. From what I could glean based on the fragments of The Hunger Games I haven’t blocked out is that this girl, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence, earnestly dreadful), has won a televised deathmatch sponsored by a monolithic government to keep control of twelve impoverished, racially- and class-coded districts. I get it, it’s a metaphor and, um, a satire of some sort.

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

November 19, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto, Denis O’Hare
screenplay by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Walter Chaw Agreeable, well-meaning horseshit in the Lorenzo’s Oil vein (but horseshittier), Jean-Marc Vallée’s really bad Dallas Buyers Club is saved to some extent by a couple of fine, showy performances from a skeletal Matthew McConaughey and a skeletal Jared Leto in drag, but ultimately defeated by the standard straw-man activist biopic formula. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s this fall’s Promised Land: another liberal movie that injures the credibility of the liberal platform by being so shrill and didactic as to play like melodrama of the worst kind–that is, the self-important kind. All of which is not to say that I didn’t sort of enjoy it in the moment (it’s fun to marvel at how close to death McConaughey looks, and how pretty Leto is), but to say that the act of writing about it means taking the time to think about it, and that Dallas Buyers Club doesn’t suffer much thinking-about.

“Are Movies Breaking Bad?”: See Walter Chaw in Person

November 16, 20132013, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals

Our own Walter Chaw will be speaking on a panel tomorrow (Sunday, November 17th) at the Starz Denver Film Festival. From the Denver Film Society website: Are Movies Breaking Bad? Happening: Sunday, November 17, 12:15 PM Duration: 120 Minutes Venue: SDFF Sie FilmCenter Lines along various parts of the entertainment/arts continuum seem to be blurring on a daily basis. Long gone are the days when watching a movie meant buying a ticket and sitting in a theater. But over the past decade or so, series—most aired on premium cable channels—have accomplished what many criticize the movies for not doing: focusing…

Short Term 12 (2013)

November 14, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Brie Larson, John Gallagher Jr., Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek
written and directed by Destin Cretton

by Angelo Muredda Of all the specious arguments thrown around during awards season, the most enervating may be the contention, popular among early champions of films that are near-universally acclaimed on the festival circuit, that the first negative reactions to said films are simply backlash. Backlash, the logic goes, is a latecomer’s insincere negative reaction to a title he or she did not have the opportunity to praise when it was still hip to do so–lateness presumably being the only reason a person might have problems with a critical darling. Let it be said, then, that while I could not shake my own feelings of belatedness while recently watching Destin Cretton’s routine Short Term 12, which came out of festivals as diverse as SXSW and Locarno relatively unscathed, my response owes less to my unseasonable viewing conditions than to the film’s own curious belatedness, its tendency to rehash old-fashioned 1950s moralism about family-planning and Dangerous Minds-derivative solemnity about underprivileged teens in a faux-authentic new package.

SDFF ’13: The Fifth Season

November 13, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Netherlands

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they’re stunning at times, and it’s easy to be mesmerized by them–by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other’s faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick’s movies do, certainly Bela Tarr’s: it makes its form comment on its function.

Monsters University (2013) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 12, 20132013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

Mu2

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Daniel Gerson & Robert L. Baird, Dan Scanlon
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Bill Chambers On a school trip to Monsters, Incorporated, young cyclops Mike Wazowski, the kind of pipsqueak who gets saddled with the teacher when his classmates choose partners, sneaks onto the scaring platform and follows an octopus-like creature through one of the closet-door terminals. Rather than reprimand him, the monster tells Mike he might have what it takes to become a scarer and gives him his cap, Mean Joe Green-style. That hat bears the logo of the Scarer’s alma mater, Monsters University (better than Fear Tech!); an undergrad is born.

Snuff (1976) – Blu-ray Disc

November 11, 20131970s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Horror, Thriller

*½/**** Image B+ Sound C+ Extras B+
starring Liliana Fernández Blanco, Ana Carro, Enrique Larratelli, Mirtha Massa
written and directed by Michael Findlay (with additional footage directed by Simon Nuchtern)

by Bryant Frazer For the majority of its running time, Snuff is pretty standard grindhouse fare. Shot on the cheap and loosely based on the Manson cult murders, which were still big news when the film was being shot in 1971, it’s a potboiler about a serial-killing biker gang of women in thrall to a presumably charismatic, self-styled guru calling himself Satán. Shootings, stabbings, softcore groping, and general toplessness ensue. But it’s not your ordinary South American Satanic nudie cult film à clef. Among dime-a-dozen exploitation films, Snuff is special.

SDFF ’13: Blue Ruin

November 10, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Thriller

****/****
starring Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves, Kevin Kolack
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw Six years after his surprisingly poignant, unexpectedly deft, and, of course, funny debut Murder Party, multi-hyphenate Jeremy Saulnier (he writes, directs, and photographs his movies) returns with something very much like a genre masterpiece with Blue Ruin, the best Coen Bros. noir since they were making them. Grim in exactly the way that can be delightful, it’s paced beautifully, written beautifully, and performed, that’s right, beautifully. Saulnier’s intelligent script is a model of restraint and a strong sense of humour. Macon Blair’s reluctant avenging angel Dwight is someone I’ve never met before in a movie, and when Dwight seeks out old pal Ben (Devin Ratray) for help at some point, well, I’d never met him before, either. It’s fair to say that nothing that happens in Blue Ruin happens the way I thought it would happen, if it happens at all. Note an early moment in the picture where Dwight sets up an ambush and doesn’t pay it off, or that standard thing in movies now where the hero goes to a drugstore to pick up the supplies they need to perform self-surgery, which here ends with…that would be telling. All the requirements are there for a grand satire, it’s true, yet Blue Ruin isn’t that. Instead, it’s a film that understands exactly what it is and what space it occupies, and at the end it’s not merely an extraordinary character piece (Blair’s turn would be star-making in a just universe), it’s also a nimble thriller full of outrageous fortune and stunning reversals meted out perfectly between its breathless moments and the moments where it breathes.

SDFF ’13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

November 7, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Romance

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it’s exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents–how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film’s central event, then, isn’t the child’s fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise’s (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier’s band’s songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once–even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.

SDFF ’13: Soft in the Head

November 6, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals

**½/**** directed by Nathan Silver by Walter Chaw Nathan Silver's second film in less than two years (he reports he now has four in the can) is the surprisingly affecting Soft in the Head, which works as a detailed study of lives of loud desperation. Natalia (Sheila Etxeberria) is a drunk, makes bad object choices, and is an all-around loser who also has the misfortune of being really pretty, making her the target of just about everyone she comes in contact with. Exteberria, the sister of an ex-roommate of Silver's, is a true find, as is Ed Ryan as kind,…

SDFF ’13: Go Down Death

November 5, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals

½*/**** written and directed by Aaron Schimberg by Walter Chaw Okay, I'm gonna take a stab at this one. Aaron Schimberg's aggressively pretentious Go Down Death is an attempt to speak to the idea that communal storytelling is the key way in which humans communicate culture. Ostensibly based on a lost folklorist's collected works, it acts like a Guy Maddin, looks like early Jim Jarmusch, and really doesn't work at all, because if the film is a variation on a theme, it's a riff that goes on way, way too long. I spent an evening once watching mushroom prints, stained…

SDFF ’13: Tricked

November 4, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thriller

Steekspel */**** directed by Paul Verhoeven by Walter Chaw Its title maybe referring to the audience, Paul Verhoeven's newest is a pain-in-the-ass gimmick piece done by a filmmaker I used to really admire and maybe don't so much anymore. The first third is dedicated to a built-in, manic "making-of" featurette that essays, in deadly, deadening detail, how Verhoeven posted four pages of a script online, then invited anybody with a laptop and a Starbucks to submit the next five pages, and the next, and so on and so forth, thus pushing Verhoeven out of his comfort zone and inspiring him…

Nobody Does It Better: FFC Interviews Martin Campbell

The 4:30 Movie (2024) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

The Monkey (2025)