Flashdance (1983) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

May 31, 2023Posted in1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

Flashdance (1983) (2160p BluRay x265 10bit HDR Tigole).mkv_snapshot_00.05.54_[2023.05.29_22.00.26]Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Jennifer Beals, Michael Nouri, Belinda Bauer, Lilia Skala
screenplay by Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas
directed by Adrian Lyne

by Bill Chambers "FLASHDANCE." It's hardly a coincidence the Rocky movies started this way, with the title scrolling horizontally across the screen like a ring girl's sign for the upcoming round. Then we fade up on our heroine, mythologized via obscured features, cycling confidently through the city to the anthemic strains of the late Irene Cara's "Flashdance… What a Feeling"–a montage that riffs on the iconic opening titles of Saturday Night Fever. And that, in a nutshell, is Flashdance: Rocky meets Saturday Night Fever, albeit with a female lead and considerably less dramatic tension than either. It is perhaps more that referencing these pop-culture juggernauts at the outset establishes a vernacular, translating a movie for the masses that only half-heartedly yields to formula. Flashdance is weird with a beard. It's elliptical and largely free of plot, featuring a modern-day fairytale heroine navigating an urban jungle awash in mimes and breakdancers (but curiously few cars), which is captured voyeuristically with long lenses and natural light like cinéma vérité­­ on Mars.

The Little Mermaid (2023)

May 30, 2023Posted in2023, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

Littlemermaid2023

*/****
starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Melissa McCarthy
screenplay by David Magee
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw I have long, disquieting thoughts about Ursula the Sea Witch’s anatomy in the live-action version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. As I understand it, with octopi, the centre of their body cavity, ringed by tentacles, is a beak. Ursula is a mermaid whose top half is human and whose bottom half is octopus–but her face doesn’t emerge from the centre of her ring of tentacles. Rather, the tentacles function as an expressive, sentient dress–like Dr. Strange’s cloak, I suppose, if we’re keeping it in the Disney family. This didn’t bother me when Ursula was a cartoon of a drag queen, but it’s bothering me now because it’s Melissa McCarthy, and what the hell is happening down there? Nightmare fuel is what’s happening down there. There’s a moment during her big number where she, like Bruce Springsteen during his Super Bowl halftime show, teabags the camera–and, friends, I was craning to catch a glimpse. What did I imagine? A chthonic, Lovecraftian horror of luminous tentacles and vagina dentata in a horror film’s ink-murk deep of shipwrecks and sharks. The scene where the title heroine, Ariel (Halle Bailey), goes to sell her voice to Ursula even begins with a hall of grasping pink “hands” springing from the walls. It’s insinuating like one of the post-rape hallucinations from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Is The Little Mermaid good? I have no idea how to answer that question.

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

May 20, 2023Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Romance, Streaming, Thriller, ZERO STARS

Ghostedthemother

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they’ve lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It’s that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn’t been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron’s Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn’t a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners–but the rest of me feels like I’d rather be watching something that doesn’t suck. It’s the eternal struggle.

Air (2023)

May 16, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Streaming

Air

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis
written by Alex Convery
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw The irony of a film celebrating the taking of chances being so absolutely afraid to take any chances is so conspicuous it feels a little like bullying to point it out, but here goes: Ben Affleck’s Air is the flabby, out-of-shape version of Moneyball, aspiring only to appease the narcissists it essays and the billion-dollar corporations with which they have developed disturbing symbiotic relationships. It’s not boring, exactly, though it is like that story your grandfather has told you a dozen times already: you listen patiently for the climax you know is coming in order to time your surprise and delight appropriately. Some movies in this vein, like Miracle, are pretty good. Others, like Hoosiers, are pretty awful. All of them are watchable pabulum, pre-chewed and partially digested. It goes down without much swallowing and goes out without much noise–and every six months, there’s another one. Interviews with Affleck and his muse Matt Damon have found them breathlessly recounting how scripter Alex Convery was watching an ESPN “30 on 30” documentary when he had the “eureka” that the story of Nike guy Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) would “make a great movie!” An uncredited rewrite by Affleck/Damon incorporated notes from roundball legend Michael Jordan hissownself, elevating the roles his mother, Deloris (Viola Davis, whom Jordan cast), and Olympics coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans) played in Jordan’s decision to sign a sponsorship deal with Nike. Et voilà! Not a “great movie,” let’s say, but definitely a movie.

Hot Docs ’23: All You See

May 13, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Netherlands

Hotdocs23allyousee

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar’s All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited “all Charlie Kaufman films” and Lars von Trier’s Dogville as key influences on the picture’s design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies’ offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.

Hot Docs ’23: Food and Country

May 8, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Hotdocs23foodandcountry

**/****
directed by Laura Gabbert

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve spent my whole life working on this project,” NEW YORK TIMES food critic and memoirist Ruth Reichl says late in Laura Gabbert’s Food and Country, a well-researched but muddled look at the changing nature of food in America that considers how an already precarious food system buckled under the additional weight of COVID in the early months of 2020. Reichl’s statement is one of many big promises not quite fulfilled by Gabbert’s tentative approach to her subject, which is also hazily defined: at various points, it’s either Reichl’s research or the author herself. The result is an amiably rambling but overcooked, arms-length essay–partly Reichl’s and partly Gabbert’s–about no less than three major topics: Reichl’s biography in food writing; the state of corporate agriculture and farming in America, which stiffs farmers and shoppers alike and benefits only four major packing conglomerates; and the myriad ways in which the early days of the pandemic caused irreparable damage to both restaurateurs and their providers.

The Curator: FFC Interviews Brian Hu

May 7, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews
Brianhuinterviewtitle

Walter Chaw interviews Film Programmer Brian Hu

Brian Hu picked me up from San Diego International in 2019. I was a guest of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, for which Brian is the artistic director, and he took me directly to a little Mexican joint that served the best menudo I’ve ever had, cafeteria-style, in a bustling, air-conditioner-free space. For dinner, he and his staff introduced me to a dumpling place on San Diego’s 5th Street, sandwiched between a wealth of used-record shops and vintage stores. They served things there that made me cry, for the first time since my father’s death, for the memories I was surprised with of the food he used to make us when I was a kid. Brian is as good a host, in other words, as he is a programmer, educator, and curator of cultural memory. The first room he showed me during my quick tour of the Pacific Arts Movement campus was a library lined, floor-to-ceiling, with shelves holding VHS tapes and DVDs of all the submissions the SDAFF had shown in its then-nearly 20-year history. I think of this image whenever I think of Brian.

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

May 6, 2023Posted in2023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Finland, Horror, Theatrical, VOD, War

Renfield

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn’t an embarrassing high concept. His years on “Robot Chicken” and “Moral Orel” demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far–between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield–McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter (“splat-stick?”) flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There’s a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

Hot Docs ’23: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

May 5, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Estonia, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Hotdocs23smokesaunasisterhood

Savvusanna sõsarad
**½/****
directed by Anna Hints

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda “The soul cannot be cut away,” a woman says of her cancer surgery early in Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, an evocative and visually striking look at a group of women finding resilience in the face of trauma through community, storytelling, and ritual at a smoke sauna deep in the forest, somewhere in the south of Estonia. Hints’s film makes a timely companion piece of sorts to Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, another dialogue-centred chamber drama about generations of women’s pain and endurance set in a single, remote space. Where Polley’s film is a heavily scripted actors’ showcase reminiscent at times of a talky Stanley Kramer social-issues picture, Hints’s is a more tentative affair. The unnamed women’s stories drip out of them not in crackling monologues but in halting improvised anecdotes–about being perceived as women (first by their mothers, then by men), about their taboo feelings on sexuality and reproductive rights, and about their bare survival against the vagaries of illness, social repression, and sexual violence.

Hot Docs ’23: Praying for Armageddon

May 4, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Norway

Hotdocs23prayingforarmageddon

**½/****
directed by Tonje Hessen Schei

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Praying for Armageddon is about the mobilization of Christian evangelicals, who, according to on-screen statistics, now make up 30% of American voters. That’s scary, but as the movie makes clear, no number is too small to set off alarms. We meet Pastor Gary Burd of the Mission M25 Ministry/motorcycle club, who says, “I don’t want you to think that I am raising a militia,” but holds his sermons in a bunker and knights his congregants so they may take up swords against whatever windmills the evangelicals are tilting at this week. “Swords” is uttered often in Praying for Armageddon, for what it’s worth. Jesus was a war hawk, according to Burd, who quotes Him in Luke 22 as saying, “Yeah, if you don’t have a sword, go sell your coat and buy one, because the time is coming when you’re gonna need a sword.” But the word has an elastic meaning in Christian evangelical-ese, even though influential figures like Christians United for Israel founder John Hagee insist the Bible–which the odious Hagee fashions into an acronym for “Basic Information Before Leaving Earth”–is “literal from cover to cover.” (Burd’s Jesus sounds like Mark Wahlberg, Hagee’s like Gary Busey.) Swords are swords, but they’re also guns, they’re also nuclear weapons. That’s why the so-called Armageddon Lobby (shudder) has concentrated its resources on indoctrinating U.S. soldiers to its religious crusade, which begins with proselytizing new recruits and baptizing them at the end of Basic Training. Presto! A Christian national is born–a perfect mirror image of the ostensible enemy, incidentally. Michigan-based company Tijicon went so far as to supply the Marines with rifle scopes engraved JN8:12, referring to the passage from John that reads, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” This way, you’re aiming Jesus at your targets.

Hot Docs ’23: Angel Applicant

May 4, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

Hotdocs23angelapplicant

***/****
directed by Ken August Meyer

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

By Angelo Muredda Swiss-German surrealist Paul Klee becomes a guardian angel for a chronically ill artist in search of a disabled ancestor in Ken August Meyer’s documentary Angel Applicant, a playful and affecting memoir of the filmmaker’s progress with systemic scleroderma–the same rare autoimmune disease with which Klee was posthumously diagnosed. Self-deprecating and puckish, Meyer walks us through the indignities and aesthetic possibilities of his bodily transformation with a mix of observational footage of himself in and out of hospitals and clinics and magical-realist dramatizations that see him replaced with a lifelike doll whose rigid body stands in for his stiffening skin and joints. He weaves an examination of Klee’s late style into these diaristic musings on illness, pain, and creation in spite of both, drawing inspiration from the artist’s prolific output in his final years living with scleroderma. In the process, Meyer openly wonders if Klee’s turn from intricate to bold lines and surrealist images of disjointed bodies in pain–modernist pieces deemed “degenerate art” by Hitler–might serve as a model for his own uncertain path forward.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

April 30, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD

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*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ayub Khan Din, Vicki Pepperdine
written by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Bill Chambers Loosely based on star and co-scenarist Channing Tatum’s exotic-dancer past, Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike was a pleasant surprise for treating the world of male strippers seriously–if finally too seriously, as the buoyant first half gives way to a heavy-handed moralizing reminiscent of Soderbergh’s Traffic in the second. Sex work in Magic Mike is something to transcend through drugs or a trade skill. Gregory Jacobs’s terrific follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, washed away the Afterschool Special aftertaste of the original by taking shame out of the equation: A road movie that finds Mike and the remaining “Kings of Tampa” travelling to a stripping convention in Myrtle Beach, it’s a celebration of a certain esprit de corps. Despite the instantly iconic scene of Joe Manganiello dancing to “I Want It That Way” for the amusement of a supermarket cashier, Magic Mike XXL wasn’t zeitgeist-defining like its predecessor, but it nails the hangout-movie vibe Soderbergh was chasing in his Ocean’s sequels, and will no doubt endure as the Godfather Part II/Empire Strikes Back of Magic Mike movies. And what will Magic Mike’s Last Dance go down as? Something like the Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo of the trilogy is my best guess. I have no idea if Soderbergh’s longtime AD Jacobs was merely a figurehead on Magic Mike XXL, which was made in that weird period of Soderbergh’s “retirement” from feature filmmaking (though he still served as the picture’s cinematographer), but in returning to the helm for Magic Mike’s Last Dance, Soderbergh directs like someone who’s been shown where the g-spot is and can’t for the life of him remember, so he’ll have to bluff his way through it.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

April 26, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Ireland, New Zealand, Theatrical

Evildeadrise

***/****
starring Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise is mean. It’s that scene from The Exorcist (1973) where little Regan McNeil masturbates with a crucifix and then shoves her mom’s face into her crotch mean. Vicious. But it’s not Ari Aster mean, where you infer it hates its characters and/or its genre. Rather, it’s mean in the sense that demons are mean, and it makes people we like do terrible things to other people we like. Evil Dead Rise is the line separating a horror film from a horrible film. It’s closer in tenor to its immediate predecessor, Fede Alvarez’s similarly vicious–brutal, really–Evil Dead (2013), than to Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, though more to the point, it’s exactly as mean as the first two entries in that trilogy but without Raimi’s sillier visual affectations and Bruce Campbell’s beloved caricature of a hambone persona. Indeed, most of the “fun” of those Campbell/Raimi pictures is the amount of humiliation and abuse heaped upon Campbell, with Campbell’s physical resemblance to a cartoon character becoming the central gag of the third film, Army of Darkness, as his features are stretched and multiplied, shrunken and deformed to fit whatever comic-strip setup is required of him in that moment.

A Good Person (2023)

April 15, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, VOD, ZERO STARS

Agoodperson

ZERO STARS/****
starring Florence Pugh, Molly Shannon, Chinaza Uche, Morgan Freeman
written and directed by Zach Braff

by Walter Chaw The answer to a question no one asked (what would happen if you smushed misery porn into eldersploitation and had Zach Braff do it?), A Good Person is, on a scale of 28 Days to Less Than Zero, somewhere in the Bright Lights, Big City neighbourhood of Girl, Interrupted. That’s not fair–it’s not as good as any of those movies. I don’t know if this trainwreck caused Miss Flo to come to her senses and leave her two-decades-older beau, but I like to think so, because then at least something good came out of this self-pitying 15-year-old’s adaptation of The Bell Jar. The hope that catastrophic events can lead to positive outcomes is the engine driving A Good Person, too, as Braff’s patented manic pixie dream construct, Allison, a girl who sings and plays the piano at her own engagement party, gets high and complains about not being able to feel her ankles, and tells her dull-as-dishwater fiance, Nathan (Chinanza Uche), about how a creepy doctor at work is maybe hitting on her. So effervescent! So full of life! Look at how she puts her foot in his face to underscore her ankle’s numbness! Look how she does a silly interpretive dance that Braff only shoots from the chest up, for some reason, before Allison wants to make out under a top sheet. Anyway, Allison is in the middle of a riff when she drives her future sister-in-law into a backhoe, killing her and sending Allison into a shame spiral as she faces the consequences of her quirkiness for the first time in her life. Apparently, she’s killed her future brother-in-law as well, though no one seems to care. I mean, both of her victims appear for all of 20 seconds before they become tragic devices inaugurating an irritating white girl’s redemption arc. They make so little impact that for the film’s first hour, I thought the brother-in-law (Toby Onwumere) was Nathan and that Nathan was a ghost.

If you think you’re exhausted, imagine how I feel.

Showing Up (2023)

April 14, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

Showingup

***½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro, Judd Hirsch
written by Jon Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Angelo Muredda “You’re ruining my work day,” Michelle Williams’s sculptor Lizzy whines to her cat Ricky early in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, which might be the most incisive portrait of the artist working from home to date. Its mundane, thoroughly lived-in depiction of Lizzy’s domestic puttering among companions, both animal and human, under the clouds of an upcoming show, a slow-burning family crisis, and a few weeks without hot water, hits particularly hard post-COVID, even as Reichardt takes pains to emphasize the comforts and support that Lizzy enjoys as compared to the more precarious outsiders in films such as Wendy and Lucy. Originally co-imagined with frequent collaborator Jon Raymond as a film about post-impressionist Canadian artist Emily Carr becoming a landlord to pay the bills (before Reichardt realized Carr’s outsized fame in Canada was roughly equivalent to Andy Warhol’s in the U.S.), Showing Up has been retooled as, improbably, a contemporary comedy–a mordantly funny look at the myriad push-pull interactions between art, commerce, and communal obligation. That tangled mess, Reichardt’s assured film suggests, makes it a wonder that any art gets made at all, let alone that anyone shows up to honour either the work or the people who make it.

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

April 13, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Thepopesexorcist

½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero
screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Julius Avery

by Walter Chaw Right off the bat, I feel I must warn you that no popes are exorcised in this film. The prospect of Russell Crowe reading the rites over a levitating, pea-soup spewing Franco Nero, shuttled in to play the Pope in Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist, is incredibly juicy, so I get why they would attempt to mislead audiences in this way, but it’s terribly dishonest. The cruellest blow, however, is that in place of Franco Nero in his dotage doing a spider-walk downstairs and pissing himself in his papal robes before a drunken astronaut (which, let’s face it, once I hit 82, I can’t promise that won’t just be a Tuesday), we get Crowe, as real-life exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome, no doubt in search of an espresso, a gelato, spaghetti, and his portly, Vespa-riding twin for the Guinness Book photo shoot. It bears mentioning, too, how Crowe straps on the world’s most offensive Mario Bros. accent to free poor little Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) from demonic possession. Why is Henry in Rome? Because his mom, Julia (Alex Essoe), is renovating a building, which happens to be the primary reason anyone moves to Italy. (See also: Donald Sutherland’s character in Don’t Look Now and Genevieve Bujold’s character in Obsession and Diane Lane’s character in Under the Tuscan Sun.) There’s probably a piece to be written about how our perception of Italy is of a beautiful place the Italians have neglected, but now that P.J. O’Rourke, who once wrote, “Italy is not a third world country but nobody told the Italians,” is dead, I don’t know who’ll write it.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

April 8, 2023Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Iceland, Sports, Theatrical, UK, VOD

Dungeonsdragonshonor

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron’s pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill–a personal Chekhov’s Gun, if you will. It’ll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly’s Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne’er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend’s sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD|4K Ultra HD

April 4, 2023Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, Disability, FFC Must-Own, Horror

The.Texas.Chain.Saw.Massacre.1974.REMASTERED.2160p.US.BluRay.REMUX.HEVC.DTS-HD.MA.TrueHD.Atmos.7.1-FGT.mkv_snapshot_00.35.24_[2023.04.02_21.44.22]Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
4K UHD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country’s history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman’s Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn’t about what it’s ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we’re not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we’re glad that he’s dead, too.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Smoking Causes Coughing

March 29, 2023Posted in2022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Buff23smokingcausescoughing

Fumer fait tousser
***/****
starring Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw French provocateur Quentin Dupieux’s eleventh film Smoking Causes Coughing is an anthology picture organized around a framing device in which five costumed idiots forced to go on a team-building retreat tell each other horrifying tales around a campfire. I’ve been decidedly lukewarm on Dupieux’s films. They’re the very definition of an acquired taste, and I suspect they’re hit-or-miss even if you’re dialled into their frequency. His best-known film is probably Rubber (2010), a creature-feature about a car tire that causes folks’ heads to explode using “telepathy.” That’s the punchline to the long setup of a tire rolling around to tense music, which Dupieux punctuates with dialogue that’s knowingly campy, dedicatedly stupid, and ramped up with vein-bulging sincerity. It’s the kind of conceit that attracts viewers who like to laugh at movies. I think Dupieux’s sense of humour relies a lot on exaggeration and repetition, with the former landing like grossly performative sarcasm and the latter like the most irritating person you know milking a joke until the doggedness itself becomes the joke. For the most part, Dupieux’s movies don’t think much of the genres they’re mocking and, by extension, they don’t think much of the audiences for them, either.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster

March 28, 2023Posted in****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror

Buff23angryblackgirl

****/****
starring Laya DeLeon Hayes, Chad L. Coleman, Denzel Whitaker
written and directed by Bomani J. Story

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is a 17-year-old STEM wunderkind who has a theory–one she shares with the mad oncologist of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain–that death is a disease and, as such, can be cured. It’s her favourite topic, and she tries to expound upon it during chemistry class, but her teacher, Mrs. Kempe (Beth Felice), doesn’t want to listen. Mrs. Kempe expresses her distaste through microaggressions like mispronouncing Vicaria’s name, then offering to call her “Vicky” because it’s easier to remember. When that fails to intimidate Vicaria, she summons the school’s security officer to forcibly remove Vicaria from the classroom. It’s dangerous when white folks call the cops on Black folks, and Vicaria, sure enough, is thrown from her desk–breaking her glasses–and cuffed for the crime of, essentially, being smarter than expected in a situation where her white teacher feels threatened. The first thing Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is about is the chips and how they’re stacked against women and minorities, especially in the sciences. In just this one scene, he addresses different types of racism (internalized, subtle, overt, systemic), builds a character in the outspoken and unbowed Vicaria, and sets up a confrontation in which Vicaria’s dad, Donald (Chad L. Coleman), demonstrates what it looks like when a father has his daughter’s back. In five minutes, we know everything we need to know. This is exceptional storytelling.