Walter Chaw reviews Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

July 7, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Armie Hammer
written and directed by Boots Riley

by Walter Chaw There’s a moment in Boots Riley’s hyphenate debut Sorry to Bother You–it happens in the last third of the picture–that rang so pure and true to me I felt adrenalized, known, inspired. The best art does that: locates that juncture between expression and activism. I felt it during Get Out as I began to recognize the parties where I’d been the only minority guest and somehow also the guest of honor; I hope to feel it one day while watching something about the Asian-American experience. I’d always wondered about the black community coalescing around bootlegs of Seventies kung fu movies, but now I understand it as I find myself vibing to Janelle Monae’s and Childish Gambino’s energetic, pithy counterculture activism. Sorry to Bother You belongs to this moment of crisis. It’s a withering indictment of capitalism and the white ruling class in the United States as it’s metastasized into a machine that’s only ever interested in consuming its weakest, most underrepresented members. The running joke involves prison/work programs dressed up as a way for entire subsistence, formerly middle-class families to sell their lives to the proverbial “company store.” “WorryFree” promises freedom in endless toil. The sign over the entrance to Auschwitz and on the gate at Dachau promised something similar with “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”). In this way, the for-profit prison system in the land of the free is presented for mockery and shame. The idea that the corporate structure in the United States is akin to a prison is raised, too. If films are an empathy machine, this one is the “uncomfortable recognition generator” piece of it. These past eighteen months have been sobering for a lot of my white friends. Sorry to Bother You is a summary of what, until Trump, was easy to sweep under the carpet.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

April 25, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw In the Nineties, DC comics resurrected a bunch of titles under their “Vertigo” aegis, aiming for if not more sophisticated, at least more mature storytelling, like Neil Gaiman’s enduring, literary “Sandman” and Grant Morrison’s still-unparalleled run on “Doom Patrol” (starting with issue 19). They were a re-entry for me into comics after a childhood collecting all things “Archie” and a few things “X-Men” and “Spider-Man”. In the fifth issue of Vertigo’s “Animal Man” reboot, Morrison writes a one-off called “The Coyote Gospel” in which Wile E Coyote (essentially) is maimed and murdered in any number of ways, only to painfully regenerate and be maimed and murdered again. I like to imagine sometimes the agony of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, resurrected in endless franchise reboots for the purpose of being killed, Prometheus-like, over and over again. There’s a pathos to it, I think, in the Camus existentialist sense: this emotional detachment where it’s sort of impossible to tell if mom died today or, you know, maybe it was yesterday, one can’t be too sure. Maybe pathos isn’t the right word. Closer to the point is that it’s impossible to really feel anything for characters who cannot die; impossible to feel tension or fear for things that cannot be harmed. Superhero comic books and Marvel films by extension broadly simulate the tenets explored by French Existentialism: alienation, the absurd, the lie of freedom, the experience of dread and boredom. The only MCU entry self-aware enough to notice this to date is Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange. Fitting that Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) features so prominently in Avengers: Infinity War.

A Quiet Place (2018)

April 10, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck and John Krasinski
directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw John Krasinski's A Quiet Place is exactly the type of inoffensive, about-nothing movie full of beautiful people and empty jumps that is popular for a short while specifically for its yawning blandness. It's a horror film that acts as a security blanket: the world may be over, but aren't they a cute couple? Everything done in this movie has been done before, sometimes better, sometimes worse, meaning essentially that the horror audience has already figured out what the solution is ten minutes in while it takes the idiots in the movie another hour or so. That's too bad. A Quiet Place is so unmoored from anything like subtext or complexity that without a keenly intelligent and efficient script, its seams start to show almost immediately. Yet the instinct is to forgive it for a while because the cast is exceptional; the chemistry between Krasinski's paterfamilias Lee and wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski's real-life wife) is effortless and true, and the kids, Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Wonderstruck's Millicent Simmonds), are attractive enough that it wouldn't be entirely awesome to see them murdered by space mantises. Well, it would, but, despite an early development, A Quiet Place isn't that kind of movie.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

April 9, 20182018, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Germany, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw There's a Sumo-wrestling match in the middle of Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. It doesn't have anything to do with anything else in the movie except that it sets up one of Anderson's whip-pans to another character in attendance, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). The sequence is uncomfortable because it feels like there's about to be a joke at Sumo's expense–Sumo being, of course, a pastime steeped in ritual and history for the Japanese people. It's like if an American football game appeared for a moment in the middle of a Japanese film: we're about to get pissed on, guys, amiright? But then there's not a joke. Or if there is a joke, it's that Sumo itself is largely inscrutable outside a very specific cultural context and that in the United States, it's those giant foam suits they make members of the crowd wear during halftime of basketball games. Many of the film's depictions of Japanese culture–including a series of plays on the best-known Nihonga paintings, such as Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa"–are these punchlines held in pregnant abeyance: we anticipate something off-colour or ill-considered to find that perhaps the only thing happening is a certain blithe, meaningfully meaningless cultural appropriation. It's not "okay," I guess, but saying so lands for me the way that criticism of Sofia Coppola's erasure of a slave narrative from her The Beguiled (or, more to the point, her portrayal of Japan in Lost in Translation) does. I don't think Anderson should have set Isle of Dogs in Japan. And I was never offended that his doing so is the result of his particular brand of twee solipsism. I don't know that anyone like Coppola or Anderson could make anything different. I'm also not Japanese, so my discomfort is complicated by my upbringing in a traditional Chinese household where the Japanese were not held in, shall we say, high esteem.

A Wrinkle in Time (2017)

March 11, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

*/****
starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Chris Pine
screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle
directed by Ava DuVernay

by Walter Chaw In Beyond the Lights, another, much better film featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (directed by another woman of colour, Gina Prince-Bythewood), there is a moment where her character decides to un-straighten her hair and own who she is, damn the torpedoes, and it lands like what a revolution feels like. Or, at least, it lands like what a personal epiphany feels like. In Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, a little white boy named Calvin (Pan‘s Levi Miller), with whom heroine Meg (Storm Reid) is creepily smitten, tells her, twice (twice), that he likes her hair, getting an awkward brush off the first time and a shy “thanks” the second. This is what passes for empowerment in a film fixated on empowerment. I think it’s probably a mistake to have Meg’s sense of self-worth hinge on the approval–at least in this cultural moment–of a white dude. There are fraught politics around a black woman’s hair and A Wrinkle In Time uses it as a cruel tease again when there’s talk by the evil IT (voiced by David Oyelowo) of Meg straightening her locks before being presented with a “perfect” doppelgänger, free of her nerd glasses, glammed up, hair un-kinked, as one possible outcome for her. It’s the key visual metaphor in a film garnering some measure of praise mainly for how it’s not for anyone who is “cynical” (or an adult). That, and its visual audacity–which in any other context would be derided for its overreliance on the same, along with the picture’s anachronistic amateurishness. Turning Reese Witherspoon into a smug piece of salad is probably not the best use of all those millions of dollars.

Red Sparrow (2018)

March 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the book by Jason Matthews
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw “Degenerate,” a young woman says during class in self-described Russian Whore School, turning away from a surveillance image in which a middle-aged diplomat is seen snuggling a younger man in a car. “Why do you say that,” asks her teacher, a frightening harridan out of a Wertmüller fandango played by Charlotte Rampling (who else?), “is it because he’s homosexual?” It is. And here he is, dragged into the classroom by scary Soviet guards. The young woman is brought to the front of the class and instructed to fellate him, since what’s “between [her] legs” is obviously of no interest to the degenerate homosexual. For his part, the prisoner grunts like an animal as he wrestles his dick out of his pants and does his best to force the girl’s mouth onto it. Let’s take a moment to consider that Francis Lawrence’s ugly, punishingly violent, ultimately despairing Red Sparrow has characterized this gay guy as a sub-vocal animal interested in getting a hummer from this barely-adult woman–and the Russians as subhuman operators interested in training their youth in the art of fucking for the Motherland. It’s not despicable to depict bigotry; it’s despicable to be bigoted.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

November 1, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins
written by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw I've reached a limit with facility, I think–a point at which things that are professionally-executed and entirely meaningless just slide off into a kind of instant nothingness. I'm talking about machine-tooled product, a brand like Kleenex or Kellogg's, where the only time there's any awareness of consumption is when the experience of it is unexpected in some way. There's a reason people see the Virgin Mary in potato chips sometimes. Variation in extruded products is so exceedingly rare that it's akin to holy visitation: some accidental proof of the supernatural; a glitch in the Matrix. Marvel films are akin now to your daily lunch. You can remember the stray meal. Mostly, it's something you do knowing you've had one yesterday and are likely to have one tomorrow. If you're like most of us, you could probably eat better.