FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’13: Devil’s Knot

September 3, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Something is off in Devil’s Knot, the third film about the West Memphis Three in as many years, and it isn’t just the Satanic panic that turned a bereaved community against three wrongfully-accused teenagers. Although its Tennessee setting takes him far from his usual haunt of Toronto, this material seemed like a slam dunk for Atom Egoyan, who’s done his best work in films about parents dwelling in the endless hangover of their children’s premature deaths. It’s a shame, then, that his new film feels like a wheel-spinning exercise rather than a deepening of old themes. Egoyan’s approach to this tapped-out story hits the dramatic and formal beats you’d expect from his filmography: here we get a child’s cryptic, disembodied voiceover about what he’s seen; there, a videotaped testimony that conceals more than it discloses. Ambiguity is the name of the game, just like in The Sweet Hereafter, where everything turns on young Sarah Polley’s poker face as she ushers the adults around her into the topsy-turvy world of the title.

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 1

September 3, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

Cochemere **/****
12 mins., ds. Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski
Gloria Victoria **/****
7 mins., d. Theodore Ushev
Pilgrims ½*/****
8 mins., d. Marie Clements
Remember Me **½/****
15 mins., d. Jean-François Asselin
Subconscious Password ***/****
11 mins., d. Chris Landreth
The Sparkling River **½/****
18 mins., ds. Félix Lajeunesse & Paul Raphaël

by Bill Chambers TIFF 13's Short Cuts Canada programme starts viewers off in the deep end with Cochemere, a bifurcated, CG-embellished mix of puppets and live-action in which a nude, polarized Mother Nature, presumably (Google tells me the title means "mother checkmark" in English), intrudes on a stormy utopia to nourish with milky saliva the uncanny fauna, who then appear to return the favour in outer space, their rapey, goblinlike presence prompting a shapely, flame-haired astronaut to start masturbating in her sleep. Sometimes enchanting–the opening images seem found, like the hidden universes of Microcosmos (and, hey, a little Barbarella kinkiness goes a long way)–but ultimately impenetrable. Perhaps all you need to know is that St. Thomas Aquinas is thanked in the credits.

Telluride ’13: Tim’s Vermeer

September 2, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

**½/****
directed by Teller

by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at
a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer
paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison
as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes
Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his
photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates
the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his
little gizmo-whatsit, then sits down, the consummate non-painter, to produce a
Xerox-accurate replica of Vermeer's masterpiece. Various talking heads
weigh in, day titles depict the passage of time, and by the end it's clear that
the topic isn't so much technology's role in art (there's a proximate reality
problem presented by the film that pushes it near to a place of
science-fiction) as it is Jenison's apparent illness, his meticulousness becoming obsessive and even, at times, frightening, possibly to the point of
self-destruction. For the experiment to work, see, Jenison must be unschooled
in every required discipline of his project: architecture, costume design, construction,
and finally painting. It makes the definitive last image suddenly ambiguous:
how do we measure success, and what price is too steep?

Telluride ’13: The Unknown Known

September 2, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

****/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns
to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a
feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The
Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored
in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael
Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would
be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and
an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld
comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable
self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing
the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an
initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself
speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like
that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't
mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the
popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations.
When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening–an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human
emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick
reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has
made, all the more timely now that the United States–under new leadership, elected
on a platform of hope and change–is on the eve of another act of war.

Telluride ’13: Tracks

September 2, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

*/****directed by John Curran by Walter Chaw Kind of like a dustier Eight Below, in which Mia Wasikowska walks four camels and a dog across the Australian Outback in a whimsical death march that I find, at my age (40), amazingly selfish and borderline sociopathic. Tracks is based on the true story of "camel lady" Robyn Davidson, who, in 1977, walked across a huge stretch of Australia because she really hated being around other people. Davidson says, by way of charming voiceover narration, that she didn't want to be a whiny bitch like the rest of her generation, but she replaces…

Telluride ’13: An Introduction or, The Stand

August 31, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

by Walter Chaw It's a six-and-a-half hour drive from my
home in Arvada, CO to Telluride on the Western Slope, and there are two ways to get
there. One way is all highway; the other way is all beauty. I took the
second route, and it made all the difference. I've been in a dark, difficult
place for a long time now, or, at least, long enough in the parlance of
near-crippling depression. I was caught in eddies; I had become inert. I had
almost completely stopped writing. Not just essays like this one, but reviews,
too, which I used to be able to pump out with I think alarming speed and ease.
Early on, someone asked my editor how I did it; at times over the last couple months, I wondered if I'd ever write like that again. Things are hard when you're dark.
Getting out of bed was a negotiation–getting out to a screening was a near act
of God. The thought of accidentally eavesdropping other people's thoughts was
agony. The times I did, of course, were good, because the guilt I would have
felt had I gone and not written on the privilege would have been untenable.
Would that the guilt of not writing on home-video releases have the same
lubricative effect.

“Shrink-Ray”

August 28, 20132013, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog

Please excuse this self-indulgent post, but the latest episode of my side-project "The Monster Show", "Shrink-Ray," just went live, in glorious 1080p. Thanks for checking it out, I hope it's a pleasant waste of your time. If you like what you see, you can catch up with previous instalments here.

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

August 26, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Q
***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer Writer-director Larry Cohen makes exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar was basically a remake of Little Caesar with a black cast; his mutant-baby flick It’s Alive amplified the generational rift created in families by the social revolutions of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in earnest, into the 21^st century, placing projects like Phone Booth, Cellular, and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection between high-concept appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character, and it never served him better than it did in Q, which is the story of a little criminal in a big city as much as it’s the story of a huge feathered serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes in a screenplay that was being written as the shoot progressed to take advantage of whatever New York locations Cohen was able to secure. The result isn’t quite a great monster movie, but it gets maybe 80 percent of the way there.

The Oxbow Cure (2013)

August 23, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Claudia Dey
screenplay by Yonah Lewis, Calvin Thomas, Lev Lewis
directed by Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas

by Angelo Muredda The latest in a wave of immersive,
formally-sophisticated works from young Toronto filmmakers that includes Kazik
Radwanski's Tower and Igor Drljaca's Krivina, Yonah Lewis and
Calvin Thomas's The Oxbow Cure expresses a bold new vision even as it
fits itself snugly within established Canadian cultural traditions. As a film
about a woman who heads off to an isolated cabin to treat a mystery illness,
you could say it's indebted to David Cronenberg's '70s output, and its
unhysterical depiction of a body in the throes of a profound, if still mostly
imperceptible, transformation make it a more worthy heir to the queasy body
horror of Shivers and Rabid than the baroque flourishes of Antiviral.
Cronenberg echoes aside, for students of Canadian literature, the minimalist
plot might also recall Margaret Atwood's seminal novel Surfacing, which
similarly sends a young woman in crisis off into the woods on a sort of vision
quest, exposing her to the elements of her home country and to the uncivilized
mirror image of herself it offers up.

Prince Avalanche (2013)

August 22, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch
screenplay by David Gordon Green, based on the film Either Way by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson
directed by David Gordon Green

by Angelo Muredda The
standard line out of Sundance on Prince Avalanche, David Gordon Green's
tragicomic stop between the puerility of The Sitter and the Southern
Gothic of his upcoming Joe, was that it was a return to form after some
time spent in the wilderness. That's true enough insofar as its dashed-off
buddy travelogue, a loose adaptation of the Icelandic movie Either Way,
is sweet where The Sitter is cynical, but one has to wonder at this
point whether any of Green's studio trifles can be considered outliers when their worldview
is so consistent with the ostensible real deals. Even the least of his films
shares a thematic interest with the others in redeeming wayward losers; by that
token, Prince Avalanche isn't a triumphant comeback so much as a familiar
motif recapitulated in a more pleasant, minor key.

The Burning (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

August 21, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed by Tony Maylam

by Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam’s The Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an extra-textual conversation about why at the end of the American ’70s there suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a nihilistic gateway into the Reagan ’80s. Really, when you look at the wonderland of ’80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an undercurrent of Friday the 13^ths and Elm Street flicks, of course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps Cheerleader and Sleepaway, Mother’s Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a “geek” show–the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that founded Apple)…all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood rental joint such delicious taboo delight. It’s that thrill that The Burning captures and evokes still–that feeling adolescent boys of a certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they shouldn’t rent with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic tingle as hardcore porn would in a couple years’ time. It’s a movie very much like Tolkien’s writing: if you don’t discover it in junior high, you’ll never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

A Hijacking (2012)

August 16, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Kapringen ***/****
starring Søren Malling, Pilou Asbæk, Dar Salim, Roland Møller
written and directed by Tobias Lindholm

by Angelo Muredda Finely-tuned but incurious about most of what falls outside its blinkered gaze, A Hijacking is about as good as this sort of stripped-down procedural filmmaking gets–Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low reconfigured for a telephonic showdown between Somali pirates and Danish shareholders. Only the second feature from Tobias Lindholm (who proves much more capable as a director than as the author of The Hunt‘s lazy allegorical punts about the concern-trolling parents of small-town Denmark), the film feels like the work of a yeoman who’s in no hurry to be recognized as a visual stylist unless the material should merit such flourishes. Annoying as that no-frills approach can be in countless austere imitations of the Dardennes and Michael Haneke, it’s more than welcome here in a film whose title might otherwise have ended with a gaudy exclamation mark.

In a World… (2013)

August 15, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

***/****
starring Lake Bell, Demetri Martin, Fred Melamed, Rob Corddry
written and directed by Lake Bell

by Angelo Muredda If In a World… seems a bit busy, it’s because it has a lot on its plate. The feature debut from “Children’s Hospital” star, narrator, and sometimes-director Lake Bell, the film displays all the classic calling cards of an under-appreciated multi-hyphenate talent’s break for the mainstream: a plum starring role, punchy dialogue, and a high concept. That conceit, of a female voiceover artist moving up within the ranks of a tetchy, male-dominated industry, comes with its own baggage, instantly reminding us of the relative scarcity of high-profile American comedies shepherded by women. It’s a lot for a first feature to take on, and what most impresses about In a World…, which manages the neat trick of being both funny and thoughtful without tipping into melodrama, is its apparent effortlessness–the impression that Bell is casually navigating complicated territory.

Europa Report (2013)

August 13, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvyst, Sharlto Copley
screenplay by Philip Gelatt
directed by Sebastián Cordero

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Cordero's found-footage sci-fi flick Europa Report tells the tale of the first manned trip to
the titular moon of Jupiter in search of some kind of lifeform lurking there
beneath a thick layer of ice. Never mind that this is a premise Arthur C.
Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two already explored to similar consequence, nor
that Europa Report is essentially an intergalactic The Blair Witch Project: best to focus on an unfortunate framing story that dumbs down the
proceedings, emotionally and intellectually, at the exact moment the picture
appears to be gaining momentum. It's all the more puzzling, given the existence
of something so pandering and condescending, that the group apparently most
enamoured with this movie is the scientific community, who I would
have guessed would have taken more offense at being talked down to. Maybe they're
so beaten into submission by the idiotic things Damon Lindelof passes off as "science"
that they're willing to forgive Europa Report its more minor trespasses.

On the Road (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

August 12, 20132012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Road Movie

Ontheroad1

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac
directed by Walter Salles

by Angelo Muredda “You goin’ some place, or just goin’?” a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley’s Sal Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On the Road, Walter Salles’s handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s hipster Bible. While that’s a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn’t even the most unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes. Consider Sal’s panicked voiceover about the text he’s spinning out, ostensibly the same one we’re trudging through: “And what is there to talk about exactly? The book I’m not writing? The inspiration I don’t feel? Even the beer’s flat.” What, indeed? What’s left to say about a project that insists on reviewing itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration wanting?

Echoes

August 10, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Directors: David Cronenberg, Directors: John Frankenheimer, Echoes

Opening shot of Seconds (1966, d. John Frankenheimer): Opening shot of The Fly (1986, d. David Cronenberg):

The Wolverine (2013)

August 8, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Will Yun Lee, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tao Okamoto
screenplay by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw James Mangold's The Wolverine is lovely, unusual, novel enough that the moments it makes concessions to its genre and comic-book origins are the same moments that feel like a shame. It's not that they don't work, exactly–it's that when a brooding character study offset by a few delightful action scenes introduces an adamantium samurai mecha and a Poison Ivy manqué to bring it all home, well…it's that it works too well at being something the film is otherwise not. It's two movies, really: a unique one about women in tension; and a more common one about a grief-stricken man taking on the responsibility of protecting a surrogate. Both are complex. It's a pity that, by dint of license and expectation, The Wolverine had to be a literal superhero movie and not something more covert like The Caveman's Valentine or The Brave One. At the end, the only place to put the blame is the impossibility of funding a picture like this without the license and expectation: no one would invest, it would seem, in an anonymous story about a man's mute, impotent melancholy and the many females around him engaged in the maintenance of their separate, disintegrating orbits.

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)

August 6, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Logan Lerman, Brandon T. Jackson, Alexandra Daddario, Jake Abel
screenplay by Marc Guggenheim, based on the novel by Rick Riordan
directed by Thor Freudenthal

by Walter Chaw Say this about Thor Freudenthal and Marc
Guggenheim’s Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (hereafter PJ2): you’re more than justified in questioning its existence, but at the
end of the day it’s impossible to make something this bad by accident. No, it
takes genuine inspiration to be this tone deaf, to create something that requires intimate knowledge of the source novel or the first film
in this benighted franchise yet will instantly piss off the teenies who love the
Rick Riordan books and the far fewer souls who liked that first
movie. For me, because I love my 9-year-old daughter with all my heart, I
endured PJ2 and only thought about walking out a half-dozen times
before resigning myself to the murky 3-D and even murkier execution. Yes, it’s awful,
that much is to be expected, but that it’s significantly worse than a
movie that was already terrible by nearly every objective standard is really some
kind of accomplishment. At the end of the day, when a 9-year-old articulates
that what’s wrong with the film is that they took out all the relationship
stuff, cherry-picked crap from other novels to contrive a half-assed
cliffhanger for a sequel that will likely never happen, and basically fumbled the promise of the title, well…at least PJ2 can claim the
distinction of awakening the critical facility in a child who, before this, thought every movie was pretty good.

Oblivion (2013) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

August 6, 20132013, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Romance, Sci-Fi, Tom Cruise

*/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurlylenko, Melissa Leo
screenplay by Joseph Kosinski and Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw If you’re going to see Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, you should see it in IMAX. Oh, who’m I kidding? There’s no good way to see Kosinski’s sci-fi-lite follow-up to Tron: Legacy, starring Emperor Thetan Tom Cruise as a future-Jiffy Lube mechanic jetting around post-bellum Earth circa 2077, fixing automated drones programmed to kill alien “Scavs” that have taken over the empty planet. Following? It doesn’t matter. Via soulful voiceover, Cruise’s Jack Harper informs us that a war has decimated Earth and that all the surviving humans have fled to Titan (that’s a moon around Saturn, Jack explains), leaving behind only Jack and his lady-pal Vika (Andrea Riseborough) to tend to giant sea-water fusion engines that provide energy to our ragtag, fugitive fleet. No, it already doesn’t make much sense, except that it’s sort of like something L. Ron Hubbard would have written–but that’s gotta be a coincidence, right? Anyway, seems that Jack has built a special cabin in the woods despite Earth being uninhabitable due to the nuclear holocaust we unleashed to free ourselves of alien enslavement…or is it? Irradiated, that is. Earth, I mean. And what of these strange memories of the Empire State Building that memory-wiped Jack keeps having, where he and supermodel Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko exchange doe-eyes and sweet nothings? If you’ve seen any science-fiction film worth a crap in the last twenty years, you’ve already seen a better version of Oblivion, I promise you.

Elysium (2013)

August 5, 20132013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga
written and directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw Lost in the hue and cry for meaning in film
is the truism that having a message does not necessarily denote meaning. Case
in point, District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp's left-wing screed Elysium,
which feels, unpleasantly, like having lunch with Sean Penn and all the filthy,
proselytizing, self-martyring glory that implies. It's also like that lunch
Indy forces Willie Scott to eat in Temple of Doom: Mmmm,
condescending! It's unashamedly pushing an agenda, and while it does a better
job of that than Star Trek Into Darkness, it's arguably
more frustrating because so much of it demonstrates a bracing nerd-topia of
tech wonders and genre references. Indeed, Elysium is the closest we've
come to seeing a big-screen adaptation of Ursula K. Leguin's astonishing The
Dispossessed. Which is to say, not very close at all, but there you have
it. A pity, then, that armed with so able an action star as Matt Damon, the
movie finds itself at the end more comfortable in a double-feature with Promised
Land than with The Bourne Identity. Damon's at his best as a hero in
the act of discovering his own potential, see–and absolute bollocks as
political philosopher and activist. Times like these, I think Team America:
World Police was right about him all along.

Heretic (2024)

SDAFF ’24: Bitterroot

Red One (2024)