Film Freak Central

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick (hereafter Maverick) does everything the Tony Scott original did well a little bit better and doesn't bother with the rest. What drives this legacy sequel is the sobriety with which it addresses the passage of time--the existential horror of being the oldest person at the bar, of all those pictures that look like what you think you still look like, of the toll of watching your children outgrow you while every anchor you have to this world withers and dies. It is, in other words, a spectacular action film and a mature character drama whose closest analogue might be Danny Boyle's T2 Trainspotting--a film that, likewise, took its cue from a showy and popular first film and forged from it a work of real substance and surprising pathos. What's most impressive is how balanced Maverick feels. Its action component is plotted out like an elaborate, aerial heist flick with the stakes obvious and the steps delineated cleanly and simply, so that when it finally comes time to set the dominos in motion and things inevitably go wrong, it's clear how they went wrong. The picture's dramatic component is as carefully metered: the love interest and her expectations; the lost father/orphaned son dynamic and how to salvage it; the old rivals-turned-friends and what they owe each other at the end. Maverick is a clockwork, a model of efficiency and effective storytelling; there are multiple avenues to appreciating this movie. I was afraid a sequel to a macho, homoerotic recruitment video bankrolled by the United States military would have no sense of its silliness. I'm happy to be wrong.

Saboteur (1942) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger
screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw When I think of Saboteur, which isn't often, it's as the first American project Hitchcock developed largely without his beloved assistant Joan Harrison, who left after co-writing the first draft (seeing in the opportunity to produce The Phantom Lady her chance to wriggle out from under Hitch's shadow), and, maybe more significantly, without his most essential collaborator, wife Alma Reville, then away in New York with their daughter Pat, who had just won the lead role in a play. They left creative absences Hitch tried to fill--disastrously, I think--with Algonquin Roundtable alumni Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. (If there's a case to be made about the importance of Alma to Hitchcock's career, it may be useful to examine those films where we know she was absent.) I also think of Saboteur, when I do, as an attempt at an "all-American" film of the kind Hitchcock, fearing he'd left Britain trailing with him too much of the old country, was desperate to make. The desire to embrace his adopted culture is so conspicuous it becomes uncomfortably obvious in multiple instances (stops at the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and even the Hoover Dam) that setting has fatally superseded narrative. His follow-up, the Thornton Wilder-penned Shadow of a Doubt, is the all-American Hitchcock that works, locating the country's heart in the introduction of a human stain into a small town and a wholesome family.

Scream (2022) - Blu-ray + Digital Code

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Melissa Berrera, Mason Gooding, Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell
written by James Vanderbilt & Guy Busick
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven's Scream cycle, in terms of its influence on modern film, constitutes the most important metatext of the last 25 years in that it's not only self-referential, it's curious about how self-reference can be an essential ontological tool as opposed to a mere existential exercise. They're better movies, in this respect, than The Matrix and its sequels, and, at least in terms of their popularity, they're more important than even Charlie Kaufman's extraordinary but limited-appeal body of work. The Scream saga, for lack of a better word, matters. Not for nothing does Scream 3, despite being the weakest installment of the original four and the only one of those that didn't involve Williamson in any significant way, take place mainly on a simulacrum of hero Sidney's childhood home and neighbourhood, recreated inside a soundstage like the to-scale streets of Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. If the first film is a watershed, the second is perhaps the series' masterpiece: a phenomenal bit of pop philosophy that sees Sidney (Neve Campbell) as a Cassandra figure, literally forced onto the stage with a pack of masked murderers to re-enact her trauma from and into eternity. It's her role in these Passion Plays to be preyed upon--and through her suffering, the "rules" of engagement between women coming of sexual age and men wanting to possess and punish them for that are forged. She has become an archetype, a thing that is representative of a fundamental truth, and the movies understand that. When she makes her entrance in the new Scream (hereafter Scream 5), standing up in a hospital waiting area to greet a young woman initiated into the abattoir, it is framed and shot as though we are all in the presence of a divine visitation.

Dexter: New Blood (2021-2022) - Blu-ray Disc

Image A- Sound A Extras C+
"Cold Snap," "Storm of Fuck," "Smoke Signals," "H is for Hero," "Runaway," "Too Many Tuna Sandwiches," "Skin of Her Teeth," "Unfair Game," "The Family Business," "Sins of the Father"

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a white buck. Dexter is tracking it through the woods, a regular Natty Bumppo. Though he has a clear shot, something stops him from pulling the trigger, and he falls to his knees in a parody of biblical defeat. A second attempt the following day is foiled when a sharp noise from elsewhere causes the wildlife to scatter, while a third and final try sees him lowering his rifle and surrendering to the beauty of the beast. Dexter and the white buck are kindred spirits--outliers of their species, yet built to blend into their surroundings. Trophies, ultimately, for their rarity. The premiere episode of "Dexter: New Blood", "Cold Snap," might be my favourite of the character's entire television run, because it allows him this brief state of grace. There was a season of "Dexter" where he went searching for signs of a higher power, but it's here that he finds one, and what makes this so different from our serial-killer Pinocchio's previous real-boy epiphanies is that, for once, there's no noise in his head. In fact, this most compulsive of narrators only starts talking to us again after the tranquillity of the moment is shattered, which is a surprisingly understated gambit for "Dexter". It's a crowd-pleasing thing, I suppose, when he finally pipes up (it's Clark Kent ducking into a phone booth, or Popeye squeezing a can of spinach), but it plays to me as bitter commentary on how short-lived inner peace is these days for anyone with a moral compass--even one as faulty as Dexter's.

We're Still Here

Thanks for your patience, folks. Lots of good stuff on the way, asap. In the meantime, check out our Master Review Index, which has ballooned of late as we get closer to fully restoring the archives.-Ed.

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision - Books

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision
FFC rating: 7/10
by Charles Elton

by Bill Chambers Six years after his death, Michael Cimino remains an enigma, shrouded by a swirling mass of rumours and contradictions. A biographer has their work cut out for them. Before reading Charles Elton's Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision, I took stock of everything I knew about the mercurial filmmaker: that he helmed seven movies during a span of 22 years, the second of which he was fêted for (The Deer Hunter), the third of which he went to director jail for (Heaven's Gate); and that he gradually began to look different in ways for which time alone cannot account. I also had some preconceived notions about Cimino--that he was vain, an egotist, one who burned a lot of bridges--that are more or less borne out by Elton's overview, but it's important to note that Cimino was not around to defend himself when the author went rummaging through his past. (I feel fairly confident in saying, again from the picture Elton paints, that he probably would've spent more energy trying to halt the book's publication altogether.) Though Cimino is not one of the great posthumous bios on the order of David Weddle's If They Move...Kill 'Em! or Lee Server's Baby, I Don't Care, it does have unique virtues (which I'll get to) and is reasonably good at preserving Cimino's dignity while countering or outright demolishing his own unreliable narrative.

All at Once: An Interview with the Makers of "Everything Everywhere All at Once"

Walter Chaw interviews "The Daniels," Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writer-directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once

The function--the true function--of art at any time, but particularly in dark times collective and personal, is, I think, to provide evidence of grace. However low, however diminished, however stricken we may find ourselves, here are these artifacts of others who went before us into the breach to retrieve...I don't know: signposts? Breadcrumbs in the wild, overgrown wood; strings in the labyrinth; a way out or a way in. I don't know. Everything Everywhere All At Once returned fragments of myself to me that I had not been aware were missing. It is one of the most meaningful films of my life, appearing at a stage of my experience and movie-obsessed existence where I thought it was no longer possible to feel that way about a movie again. It reminded me of why I, more than love, why I need art to fill the spaces in me.

The Northman (2022)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers's latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There's even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film's settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare's Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers's previous film, The Lighthouse, and it's the first of his movies that doesn't require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.

All the Old Knives (2022)

*/****
starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Olen Steinhauer
directed by Janus Metz

by Walter Chaw Fred Schepisi's The Russia House is a dignified, austere, mature adaptation of John le Carré that feels like a Graham Greene in its colonial exhaustion and resignation. Sean Connery plays "Barley" Scott-Blair, a publisher pulled into a game of international intrigue as the CIA and MI6, from opposite sides of the pond, seek to make him and a young Russian, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), into pawns in a game of Cold War chess. Barley falls in love with Katya, of course; who wouldn't fall in love with Michelle Pfeiffer? And he plays both sides--well, all three sides--against the middle in order to secure a romantic future for himself and his lady fair. It's the best film Schepisi's made outside his native Australia, with a Jerry Goldsmith score (featuring Branford Marsalis on the soprano sax) that treats it as a bit of a chamber piece, like a story told to grandchildren when the danger has faded but the love's continued to bloom. They've heard it a million times, but let the old guy tell it: he seems so happy when he does. I've loved The Russia House ever since seeing it on Christmas in 1990. It's one of my comfort movies, twisty enough to engage with performances that feel lived-in like an old and beloved sweater.

The Contractor (2022)

***/****
starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland
written by J.P. Davis
directed by Tarik Saleh

by Walter Chaw Tarik Saleh's The Contractor reminds me a lot of Michael B. Jordan's recent attempt at a franchise-starter Without Remorse in that both are the sort of workmanlike action pictures that once kept multiplexes afloat but now occupy a mid-budget niche relegated to streaming services. Its closest analogue might be Amazon's "Reacher" series in terms of its clean action, straight-line plotting, and lantern-jawed "all-American" hero trained to kill and prone to angst over his lethal ways. The Contractor adds some wrinkles in using the plight of veterans returning from service with neither financial nor emotional support while also reserving some criticism for the private, for-profit contractors who send mercenaries into conflict zones for the purposes of ratfucking and wetworks. Mostly, though, it's an able showcase for Chris Pine as a sturdy action hero who is also a non-threatening avatar for the Average Joe demographic: handsome but cool, clever not brainy, self-sufficient but loyal to an old buddy, a good dad and good Christian good at tamping down "girl" emotions and, moreover, good at boom-boom stab-stab.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents' story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It's an immigrant story--a typical one, I've come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it's a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn't approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them--they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to "break" my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don't know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I'm broken. I'm working on fixing it.