You Hurt My Feelings (2023) + No Hard Feelings (2023)

June 30, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

Nohardfeelings

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS
**½/****
starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Jeannie Berlin
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

NO HARD FEELINGS
***½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick
written by Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips
directed by Gene Stupnitsky

by Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings belongs, alongside stuff like Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life and Lynn Shelton’s Sword of Trust, to a very specific sub-genre of comedy. They’re talky, WASP-y, verging on the cusp of self-awareness at all times without ever quite slopping over from solipsistic, and clearly courting an educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class (white) audience. I like them, for the most part, with their hangdog protagonists, weary of idiots and drowning in debt to therapists and assorted medical specialists–none of whom seem capable of solving their own existential blues, much less their clients’. I know that emotional quagmire. I’ve made maps of it. This is the playland to which Zach Braff and Alison Brie bring their gnarled cinematic projects as well, slumming them up in quotidian drag so that their appeals to melancholy ring hollow, manipulative, and self-serving. They lack authenticity; their troubles aren’t lived-in but instead theoretical put-ons–the fake stories successful people tell at champagne brunches to appear afflicted by the same disappointments as you or me. You Hurt My Feelings doesn’t feel natural, either, I have to say, although that’s more to do with saturation than disingenuousness. I feel like I just saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus doing this in You People; I feel like indie comedies on indie budgets are all doing variations of the “talking in different found sets” thing. I feel like this is the third or fourth time this year I’ve been caught in a dense conversation with the same people complaining about the same problems in the same tone. It’s that phenomenon where you try to give your baby a novel name, and when they reach school-age, it turns out everyone in their class is named the same thing.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

June 27, 2023Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spielberg, Theatrical

Indianadialofdestiny

*/****
starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, Mads Mikkelsen
written by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp and James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (hereafter Indy 5) is sad and tired. Some of that is on purpose, essaying a lonesome old man who has lost everything he cared about, is terrible at his day job, and is retiring in any case; and some of that is decidedly not on purpose, as the action sequences are simultaneously bloated and flaccid–pale imitations of past glories in a revered franchise whose first two installments are so extraordinary, it hardly matters it hasn’t done anything great for three films now across almost 35 years. Indy 5 tries to infuse some life into itself with the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose Helena Shaw introduces herself as a young woman Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) knew at some indeterminate point in the past. Given that Indy’s reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark drops the nugget that she was likely a victim of statutory rape (“I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it”), I spent a few minutes wondering if Indy had molested a child Helena. But while Helena–the daughter of new character Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), the obvious replacement for Marcus Brody (the late Denholm Elliott)–remains blissfully clear of one of the darker intimations of the Indiana Jones character, she does function as a hollow doppelgänger for Marion, just as Basil is a hollow shade of Marcus. Meaning that for as bad as the de-aging effects are in this picture, its sparkless attempts to recapture some of the chemistry of the original films are somehow worse.

Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 25, 2023Posted in****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

Superman 78-1Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs

SUPERMAN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Richard Donner

SUPERMAN II (1981)
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN II – THE RICHARD DONNER CUT (2006)
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN III (1983)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by David and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
*½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras B
starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Walter Chaw The split in Superman–his faultline where he’s the weakest, the most vulnerable to attack–is there from the beginning. He is a Zen kōan whose existence represents the essential riddle at the heart of any mythology for an infallible, omniscient, omnipotent being. He is an eggshell’s impregnable yet permeable surface: incredibly strong and prone to shatter; seamless but filled with life; unknowably alien and a reflection of everyone’s secret self. An incubator and vessel, the source and the end. He is the immovable object and the irresistible force, the “eternal boy scout,” branded at various times by the terminally unempathetic as “boring”–the rejoinder to which is that he’s been the centre of thousands of stories (tens of thousands?) in uninterrupted serialized adventures since his first appearance in Action Comics on April 18, 1938. Superman has persisted through every era of the United States from the Great Depression to now and every war since WWII, through the fall and rise again of the Ku Klux Klan and every form of mass media, in endless rejuvenating cycles bleeding into each other until their borders become a meaningless melange coalescing into a logo that is as archetypal in the West as the outline of a mushroom cloud. He is the literal “super” man, and somehow he means the most to the bullied and the broken–not as a fantasy of retribution, but as hopeful indication that even the most perfect of us are beset by doubt and alienation. He is the essential shining metaphor for post-modern existentialism.

The Flash (2023)

June 16, 2023Posted in2023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

Theflash2023

*½/****
starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Christina Hodson
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti’s jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that’s extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree–caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on–and some of it is due to Miller’s performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav’s anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller’s name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I’m not equipped to judge people who won’t watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.

Elemental (2023)

June 14, 2023Posted in****/****, 2023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Elemental

****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn

by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early ’70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master’s in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English–if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled “Chaw” when it was more common to go by “Chow” or “Cho” or “Chou.” My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don’t know if it was his dream to do this, but it’s what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.

Story Time: FFC Interviews Bomani J. Story

June 4, 2023Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews
Storytimetitle

Walter Chaw interviews Bomani J. Story, writer-director of
THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER

I love writer-director Bomani J. Story’s feature debut, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. I love it for its verve, its intimidating intelligence, its righteousness. It’s one of the few Frankenstein adaptations that actually takes Mary Shelley’s presence in the novel into consideration, serving as a very fine horror film on the one side and a sharp social commentary on the other. Story is the rare young filmmaker unafraid of subtext, and he has a genuine humility about him that, to me, is a predictor of future life success. He’s said that going back to Frankenstein the book was, essentially, a bolt of lightning for him, and indeed, I think it takes a minority read of it to fully grasp its revolutionary quality. I was similarly galvanized my first time reading it, too. It probably, by itself, led to my interest in studying British Romanticism once upon a time.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

June 2, 2023Posted in****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

Spidermanacrossthespiderverse

****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can’t believe you’re seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway’s work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It’s a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they’re told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they’re fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.

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

Img014

*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.