Film Freak Central

Now in Paperback! "A Walter Hill Film"

A Walter Hill Film, Walter Chaw's critical biography of filmmaker Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48Hrs., Streets of Fire), is now available in paperback at MZS Press. Featuring photos from Hill's personal archives, introductions by James Ellroy and Larry Gross, an afterword by Edgar Wright, and cover art from the acclaimed Ganzeer, it's A Walter Hill Film: Tragedy and Masculinity in the films of Walter Hill. Get your copy here.

Infinity Pool (2023)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda Brandon Cronenberg delivers his own visceral riff on the resort satire trend with Infinity Pool, a high-concept thriller that shares obvious genetic material with its precursor, Possessor (2021), but feels more like the runty kid brother in terms of its ideas. With his third feature, Cronenberg hones his skillsets in grounded sci-fi storytelling and kaleidoscopic montage while continuing to make a meal of the charge that he's merely following in his father's footsteps as a new purveyor of brainy body horror, boldly playing once more with the motifs of inheritance and imitation where less confident nepotism babies might dodge the comparison outright. Yet in the absence of stronger material, these predilections don't ripen into rich artistic fruits so much as they rot, leaving Infinity Pool's success riding largely on the back of its occasionally startling images and self-effacing cast, who, like Cronenberg, are riffing on the roles we expect from them.

Blood (2023)

***/****
starring Michelle Monaghan, Skeet Ulrich, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Skylar Morgan Jones
written by Will Honley
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of the films Brad Anderson's made over the course of a long and varied career, the ones I remember best are his slow-burn haunted-asylum movie Session 9 and his portrait of progressive madness, The Machinist. Both are focused on how a person can get fixated on obsessive thoughts, and how elastic reality might become to conform itself around those fixations. He's the perfect chronicler of this fraught moment where belief has come to be as valued as fact--and more powerful, too, in the defense and inspiration of division and atrocity. His Blood is a queasy folk horror, its title referring to the thickness of it in relation to water as well as the only sustenance, the human variety, a little boy named Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) can tolerate after encountering something that lives in the hole of the dead tree in the woods behind his house. The two, family and its enervating qualities, are inextricable. In one way, Blood is about the evolutionarily proscribed madness of becoming a parent to a parasitic lifeform you love, whether or not it loves you back--that it would devastate you to lose, even as it's born with no ability to survive on its own.

There's Something Wrong with the Children (2023) - VOD

*/****
starring Alisha Wainwright, Zach Gilford, Amanda Crew, Carlo Santos
written by T.J. Cimfel & Dave White
directed by Roxanne Benjamin

by Walter Chaw Roxanne Benjamin's There's Something Wrong with the Children is a tired retread in the folk-horror category of evil children that doesn't break any new ground and certainly doesn't tread any old ground with anything resembling energy or invention. It's just lugubriously competent, cozy in the way of a broken-in boot or a well-loved terrycloth robe--an "I'll be right back, you don't need to pause it" movie. Indeed, one doesn't need to pause it. For what it's worth, the best evil-kid movie is probably Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child?, although my favourite is the repugnant, deeply wrong 1981 Lew Lehman freakout The Pit. In that one, unhinged 10-year-old creeper Jamie (Sammy Snyders) discovers a pit in the middle of the forest behind his house that's swarming with carnivorous troglodytes he thinks are communicating with him through his teddy bear. Between feeding bullies and football players to the pit, Jamie spends his time making passes at his teen cheesecake babysitter and peeping on her while she's in the shower. Yes, that movie has it all. Alas, There's Something Wrong with the Children is aggressively forgettable, even freed of comparisons to films it's so obviously aping: a pair of evil kids, check; a pit in the forest full of evil? Check. Parents too wrapped up in their bougie bullshit to notice their offspring are breaking supernatural bad? Check. You've seen it. We've all seen it. Better versions.

Alice, Darling (2022)

***/****
starring Anna Kendrick, Kaniehtiio Horn, Charlie Carrick, Wunmi Mosaku
written by Alanna Francis
directed by Mary Nighy

by Walter Chaw Not quite the sequel to Alice, Sweet Alice I was hoping for, Mary Nighy's Alice, Darling is actually a principled character piece about a woman named Alice (Anna Kendrick) stuck in an emotionally controlling--indeed, abusive--relationship with manipulative artist Simon (Charlie Carrick). Simon's determined, as these pricks tend to be, to isolate Alice into a codependent situation in which she rejects her best friends, Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn), in favour of a singular fixation on his wants and desires. Ripped, according to Kendrick, from personal experience, Alice, Darling feels, for lack of a better word, real. Real enough that I recognized a few terrible tendencies from the villain in my own dating history as a much younger man--people I've hurt in my past because I was too insecure to be alone, too selfish to be a partner, too stupid to know how to be better. I needed the help of a brilliant and fierce partner to set me straight. It is the work of my life to unlearn the things that were taught to me, and to feel whole enough not to require someone else to complete me. I don't hope to get there; I do hope to get close. No one deserves to be the final piece in an incomplete person's puzzle. It's an uncomfortable thing to see everything you've despised about yourself reflected in a movie character, but there you have it. Simon is a bad guy who doesn't kill people (this isn't a Sleeping with the Enemy thriller), though he's a destructive child who abuses a woman psychologically until she relies on his approval. Alice is through the looking glass, and she knows it.

Till (2022)

*/****
starring Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Frankie Faison, Whoopi Goldberg
written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu
directed by Chinonye Chukwu

by Walter Chaw At once a muddle and overly simplistic, Chinonye Chukwu's Till is told in a broad visual style that signals "prestige picture," replete with slow and stately circular pans and, in one appalling instance, the dolly zoom Hitchcock made famous in Vertigo to dramatize a mother's pain upon confirmation of her son's death. It's handsomely decorated, and its costumes went on a national tour with the film's rolling release, which feels as oblivious as a tie-in fashion show for Schindler's List would have. That the screenplay, by a trio of authors including alleged Till scholar Keith Beauchamp (whose contentions a grand jury partially refuted in 2007), trafficks in debunked accounts of the inciting event in the film is one thing, but Till plays loose in favour of testimonies that eyewitnesses have since recanted, thus leaning towards Carolyn Bryant's account--Bryant being the white store clerk who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) of making verbal and physical passes at her in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Her accusations led to Till's kidnapping, torture, and murder, his body left for boys fishing in the river to discover. Till's mother, Mamie, insisted he be returned home to Chicago, and though the corpse was bloated by its time in the river and mutilated by the attentions of the backwoods crackers who killed him, she held an open-casket funeral that earned national attention.

A Man Called Otto (2022)

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mariana Treviño, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Mike Birbiglia
screenplay by David Magee, based on the novel A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and the film A Man Called Ove written by Hannes Holm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw "Get out of here while you can," the old man snarls to the stray cat. "I'm not your friend." But of course he will befriend the kitty, because you don't introduce a stray cat at the beginning of a manipulative piece of happy-go-fuckery like A Man Called Otto without it becoming one catalyst of many for the objectionable curmudgeon's development of a renewed reason for living. You could say that every character in A Man Called Otto is similarly a collection of adorable quirks and bottomless patience designed exclusively for the redemptive salvation of our man Otto. Otto, who is Tom Hanks's second shot at playing someone on the neurodivergent spectrum, this time landing somewhere just south of the elder Paul Newman, in the neighbourhood of Walter Matthau (at the corner of Richard Russo and Garrison Keillor). On his first date with his dead wife (Rachel Keller), a scene played in flashback by Hanks's other other son, Truman (who is less like a cross between Hanks and Rita Wilson than between Colin and Chet), Otto's asked what he's passionate about and says he's interested in machines and how things work. Forced into early retirement as the picture opens, he's a dedicated engineer obsessed with details--yet he doesn't understand that if he wants to hang himself from a rope looped through a ring hook in his living room, he needs to use a support beam in the ceiling or else what you know is going to happen will happen. Then he blames the hook. I know it's a Better Off Dead gag, but it's also inconsistent writing meant to extort a response like Thomas Newman's emotive/emetic tongue bath of a score. If you turned the concept of "insincere pathos" into a music box, this is the noise it would make. It conjures the images of teddy bears finding a baby next to a river. Look, if Thomas Kinkade paintings came with soundtracks...

M3GAN (2023)

***/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others--and for sex, if possible. No "ifs" about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we're not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland's Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn't even have to resemble Alicia Vikander--it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you're opening an entire hornet's nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers...and prostitutes. Even Spielberg's A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

"The 50 Best Films of 2022" by Walter Chaw

My mom died this year, but I lost her decades ago. Our relationship was radioactive, and I had neither the courage nor the resolve to even begin to repair it--or to investigate whether there was anything left to repair. I lost a mentor this year, too, because I wasn't interesting enough to maintain as an apprentice. I turn 50 in 2023. It's an age that seemed absurd to me as recently as a few years ago. If I live to 54, I'll be how old my dad was when he died. My mom's death brings an end to this season of death for us, my wife and me. We're both orphans now, because everything worked out the way it was supposed to. It's how parents hope it works out. I guess we're lucky that way. Maybe it's just me, yet it felt like there were many films in 2022 dealing with childhood and lost parents, biological or otherwise. Lots of films about ghosts.

White Noise (2022)

*½/****
starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda "Everything was fine, everything would continue to be fine, would eventually get better, so long as the supermarket did not slip," says professor Jack Gladney midway through White Noise, Don DeLillo's satire of contemporary middle-class American family life tested by catastrophe. DeLillo's protagonist is marvelling at the grocery store's capacity to endure unaffected in the face of a transient disaster that's hit his charming town, impressed by how the so-called "airborne toxic event" that's blown through (and now over) his community has, if anything, only enhanced the store's unnaturally perfect wares, which always seem in-season no matter the time of year. He could just as well be marvelling at the elasticity of DeLillo's novel, which holds up in the face of the ongoing global catastrophe it prefigures in many ways, a pandemic that briefly forced westerners to interrogate their insulation from the kind of suffering they normally watch on television.

Babylon (2022)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Walter Chaw If it were only vile, only repulsive, it still would have been a disaster lacking insight and honesty, but at least it wouldn't also be afflicted with bathetic false modesty wet down with spasms of cheap sentiment. Damien Chazelle's back to his old tricks, in other words, with Babylon, a "love letter" to the end of the silent era in Hollywood presented with a child's understanding of history, obviously, not to mention human relationships, aspirations, behaviour, everything. It's a stroke fantasy made by a 13-year-old boy, meaning it's soaked in excreta without much evidence of anything like experience animating it--the movie made by the antagonist of Monty Python's "Nudge Nudge" bit, who, at the end of 10 minutes of naughty entendre, wonders rapturously what it might be like to touch a woman's breast. I loved Chazelle's last film, First Man: Sober and introspective, it found the soulfulness in an engineer's deadening grief over the loss of a child. His other three films, this one included, are a trilogy of desperation to be taken seriously as a great auteur, a great historian of jazz and Hollywood, and an artiste of the first calibre. Alas, he doesn't know the difference between being celebrated for his worst instincts versus fighting for his best ones. At the end of Whiplash, La La Land, and now Babylon, the only thing he's successfully communicated is that he's seen Singin' in the Rain, if not entirely understood it. It should take less than eight hours to accomplish that.

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Commentary B
starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D'Angelo, Randy Quaid, Miriam Flynn
written by John Hughes
directed by Jeremiah Chechik

Updated to correct an embarrassing blunder on 12/28/2022.-Ed.

by Bill Chambers After turning in a subpar first draft of National Lampoon's European Vacation and ghosting the production thereafter, John Hughes made an unexpected return to the franchise by writing and producing National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, loosely basing his screenplay, like that of the first ...Vacation, on one of his short stories for NATIONAL LAMPOON magazine. Both "Vacation '58" and "Christmas '59" are written as a childhood reminiscence and get their humour from the discordant pairing of morbid memories and misty-eyed prose. (Think Jean Shepherd in charge of the police blotter.) There is no Clark Griswold per se in these stories, only a hazy father figure coming unglued. As a result, Hughes butted heads with director Harold Ramis on the original, since Ramis was making a Chevy Chase vehicle, not a coming-of-age flick. By Christmas Vacation, Hughes was at a different place in his personal and professional lives, raising children and turning mogul, and the film finds him identifying with the patriarch almost to the exclusion of the kid characters. His screenplay, in fact, reclaims Clark from Amy Heckerling's aimless and conceptually fuzzy European Vacation, seizing on the pressure cooker of the holiday season as a poignant trigger for Clark's compulsive need to contrive Kodak, nay, Hallmark moments.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet
screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw The discourse leading up to James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water (hereafter Avatar 2) has been largely about how although the first Avatar is the second-highest-grossing film of all time, it hasn't left much of a mark on popular culture. It's a take derided for the evidence of the numbers and the emergence of a theme-park attraction, though I do wonder if its cultural impact isn't like that Song of the South ride "Splash Mountain," which is only just now, finally, closing in early 2023. I don't know that the vile myth of the happy enslaved person made much of a mark on popular culture, either, insomuch as it is, itself, already and essentially popular culture. Maybe Avatar didn't make much of a "cultural impact" because it didn't introduce any new ideas into the ecosystem while profiting from a few antiquated ones. In the interim between Avatar's release in 2009 and this first of four promised sequels, a lot has changed in terms of cultural tolerances--even if, systemically, things have not only not improved but regressed. Maybe the problem with Avatar is the same one that any stories about first contact with a technologically less sophisticated alien culture share, given how our historical templates for these narratives involve genocide and the pillaging of natural resources. When a white person tells a story of a white man saving an indigenous culture from other white men, however, I start to worry about what kind of fetish is being indulged, and to what purpose/at what cost. What's not in doubt is that Avatar 2 will make bank, because whatever kink is being indulged in white-saviour narratives has proven a durable and profitable one in a white nationalist state. That's one way to look at it, anyway.

The Whale (2022)

**/****
starring Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton
screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his play
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw The Whale is the first Darren Aronofsky film that lands for me the way his work often lands for others. It feels like much ado about very little, and though there are obvious things to recommend it, its central message, however well-taken, seems poorly served by the substance and execution. Most of the blame goes to screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, author of the same-named play on which the film is based, for writing a trio of women characters meant to represent the mother, whore, and virgin but who mostly represent a uniform wall of shrill, lacerating rage. The Whale feels like the product of inexperience: a song by The Smiths turned into a movie in all its grandiloquent, hyper-literate (to the point of self-parody) self-pity. It's about the last five days in the life of online English comp teacher Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a morbidly obese, largely couch-bound shut-in suffering from congestive heart failure brought on by years of unchecked food addiction incited by the suicide of his partner. If that were all (and certainly that's enough), we'd have ourselves a classic. But it's not all. There's an evangelical missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) who comes to the door to sit with him as he's popping off the first of what appears to be a series of heart attacks; Charlie's estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), who is quite possibly Satan himself because this film is at some level about how anyone can be redeemed and so provides a demonic straw girl to prove it; pissed-off caregiver Liz (Hong Chau), who--it's weird to say this--has a bit too much backstory; and Charlie's alcoholic ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), who wants to listen to Charlie's breathing for some reason. The Whale is at once overwritten and underwritten, which is not uncommon. What sinks the ship, as it were, is that it's never particularly well-written--something it just can't surmount. I think the real movie is in the five days before the last five days, but what the fuck do I know?

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

****/****
starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kelly, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw I lost a friend this year. Not to death but to no longer having anything of value to offer him, what with time getting short. I understand that. It's happened before for different reasons, and while it's tempting to say it's not my fault, sure, it's my fault. All you need to love in this world unconditionally are your kids, and, well, the last time my late parents told me they loved me, I was nine years old. I remember that because every few years, I've had reason to wonder when it stopped and what exactly I did to deserve it. The myth of family is just that; I think there's a reason people like me build their own families. The only thing unconditional is the love a dog has for you, and people abuse dogs all the time. I have friends who are enervating to me as well, and I wonder if my loyalty to them has everything to do with knowing the pain of being left by the side of the road by the people I have loved--and not wanting to inflict that on anyone else. The fashion of the moment speaks of this as "ending the cycle" of abuse. I'm drawn to artists like Kendrick Lamar who use poetry and what appears to be an extraordinary vulnerability to lay bare their struggles. Even as I write this, I'm noticing the pain I have in the middle knuckle of the third finger on my left hand. I've put down millions of words in the past 20 years, going through multiple keyboards and laptops in that time. I was driven by an obsession not to be forgotten, although I'm losing track of why that matters. The longer I go, the more it seems a blessing to slip beneath the surface, and then it's done. I have a heaviness in my chest sometimes that feels like a stone, worn smooth and round, sitting right there on my sternum. Time is getting short for me. Some days it feels a lot shorter than others. I wonder how small the iris of my perception will become as the possibility of works I'll complete dwindles to not one more. That's it, then someone else closes the cover of your last notebook.