Film Freak Central

Old (2021)

**/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff
screenplay by M. Night Shyamalan, based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters
directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw M. Night Shyamalan is a brilliant filmmaker and an arrogant storyteller, and sometimes that works out pretty well (see: The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable). More often, it yields wildly mixed results where his savant-like mastery of the visual wars with the pedantic, childish, even messianic tendencies of his writing. Imagine if Spielberg wrote all his own movies instead of merely tacking his tidy happy endings on them. There's possibly a paper in how the degree of obstreperousness in Shyamalan's cameos has a direct correlation to the film's obnoxiousness. My favourite Hitchcock cameo is in Notorious, where Hitch has himself drinking a glass of champagne at a party at a Nazi's house, thus, through a series of events, accelerating the discovery of our heroic secret agent. But Hitch never cast himself, as Shyamalan has, in extended speaking roles that have found him playing a prophet writing a new Bible (Lady in the Water), delivering key exposition in a protracted flashback (Signs), and serving as the beneficiary of the most complicated camera set-up to deliver the twist in an otherwise transfixing, transporting picture (The Village). Tarantino used to do garbage like that, and, predictably, this was reliably the worst part of a Tarantino movie. For a while, after Shyamalan went through a pronounced humbling (The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth), he cut the shit for a trio of tight, nasty, mostly-glorious, largely career-resuscitating little thrillers (The Visit, Split, Glass). With his latest, Old, he's got his confidence back, and that's...bad.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Alexander Skarsgård, Demián Bichir
screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Godzilla is a reaction to America's attack on two civilian targets with nuclear weapons in the same way the current American superhero cycle is a reaction to 9/11. King Kong is an offshoot of Edgar Wallace's sledgehammer racist "Sanders of the River" tales, which he parlayed into early drafts of the screenplay that eventually became 1933's King Kong. Though it's possible to make a Godzilla or a King Kong movie without these ghosts of American war crimes, colonialism, and racism haunting it, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong (hereafter GvK) ain't it. Not when these two giant metaphors for the poison of American exceptionalism destroy Hong Kong, a Chinese city the British only recently returned to the Chinese, before banding together to fight a Mexican-American's Japanese-piloted robot dinosaur. The film is a mess, an ideological jumble and a disaster of narrative that reduces its able cast to half exposition dump, half glazed reaction shots. It doesn't have anything to say and even in the worst of its predecessors, this was never the case. GvK isn't interested in ecology, in arms proliferation, in sociopolitical struggles--and failing all the big things it's not about, it's also free of parental issues, a romantic subplot, a compelling villain, or, indeed, a compelling hero. It's a giant nothing-burger. And that's without mentioning this new craze of writing a perfect minority child to teach the growed-ups how to get in touch with their better natures.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer It's obvious from the beginning that Stanley Kubrick loves R. Lee Ermey. Loves him. Though Ermey is only the fourth-billed actor in Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman may as well be the star of the show. He's described in Gustav Hasford's source novel as "an obscene little ogre in immaculate khaki." His barked insults and obscenities dominate the first section of the film--a tour de force showing how Hartman wears down (and, supposedly, toughens up) a barracksful of U.S. Marine draftees, blasting away at their natural aversion to aggression and reprogramming them as soldiers. Kubrick was lucky to find him; a Vietnam War vet and former Marine Corps drill instructor, Ermey brings an irresistible combination of outrageousness and authenticity to the part. Hartman could have come across as an unlikely caricature but for Ermey's ferociousness.

Riders of Justice (2020)

Retfærdighedens ryttere
***/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Roland Møller
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

by Walter Chaw Dogma 95 vet Anders Thomas Jensen has a particular interest in oddness. Characters, especially, in Jensen's films as writer and director are given to sometimes-extravagant eccentricity, fueled by traumas Jensen declines to sanitize that are often exacerbated by intelligence worn as an unwelcome birth defect. Consider the menagerie at the centre of Jensen's Men & Chicken, an updating in a way of The Island of Dr. Moreau reconfigured as a "light" family drama in the Danish countryside. Mads Mikkelson stars in that one, too, playing a chronic masturbator who finds out that his father has been splicing his own sperm with animal sperm in an attempt to... Well, look, it's an interesting piece about social norms and how an inability to assimilate culturally leads to these islands of misfit boys. Jensen is interested, specifically and obsessively, in what happens when physical and mental mutations stunt emotional and social development. Though no one would want the crown, he is the poet laureate of the incel state.

Indiana Jones: 4-Movie Collection - 4K Ultra HD + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs. Click any image to enlarge.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri
screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
**½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bryant Frazer Paramount has reissued the first four Indiana Jones films on 4K UHD disc in a box set with vouchers for digital copies of the tetralogy. (For a detailed review of the movies proper as well as their 2012 Blu-ray counterparts, our own Walter Chaw has you covered. (The star ratings above are his, the letter grades are mine.)) The new 4K scans capture the camera negatives in all their Panavision glory. Grain is quite present and the image sometimes goes a wee bit soft, especially in shots that were optically printed (i.e., titles, dissolves, wipes, and the like), but it's never inappropriate or distracting, and I didn't notice any obvious compression-induced flaws. Many of the special-effects shots look better than ever, as the original elements have been recomposited digitally to fix thick matte lines, imprecise rotoscopes, and similar technical holdovers from the analog domain.

The Tomorrow War (2021)

**½/****
starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin
written by Zach Dean
directed by Chris McKay

by Walter Chaw Not to be confused with Joe Haldeman's classic 1974 novel The Forever War, Chris McKay's super-stupid The Tomorrow War doesn't bear up under the slightest prodding yet demonstrates an admirable agreeability to "sciencing the shit out of" part of its solution while dealing, however rotely, with its father/son and father/daughter abandonment themes. Pratt, whose Q-meter stock has fallen because of a few public missteps, proves an affable presence as science teacher-cum-future soldier Dan Forester, enlisted by future soldiers into fighting the tomorrow war against thorn-tossing, bugbear monster things dubbed "White Spikes." See, in 30 years or so, humans are down to their last half-million and need people from the past to bolster their ranks. But doesn't that create some temporal anomaly problems? I'm very glad you asked. Yes, it does. That's why they only recruit people who are going to die within a decade anyway, which is either an incredibly stupid plan in its looseness or an incredibly cynical plan that presumes none of these people will procreate again within the next 10 years--or, you know, otherwise do something that will fuck with the future in an unexpected way. Maybe they've accounted for all that and simply don't share. Or maybe it's like that Mark Hamill anecdote about how his hair should have been filthy and wet for a scene shot out of sequence but meant to follow the trash-compactor escape in Star Wars: As Harrison Ford sagely informed him, "Kid, it ain't that kind of movie."

Black Widow (2021)

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz
screenplay by Eric Pearson
directed by Cate Shortland

by Walter Chaw You know it's gritty because of the gritty cover song interrupting the bucolic prologue--Think Up Anger ft. Malia J's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" this time instead of Rose Betts's "Song to the Siren." Too on the nose, perhaps, although they're both pretty on the nose, let's be honest. Another clue is a montage under the opening credits that shows rows of little girls abducted not for sex trafficking (because Marvel is more comfortable suggesting sex trafficking than, you know, consensual adult eroticism), but for the purpose of creating a Whedon-fantasy team of Dollhouse assassins. I spent most of my childhood reading comics and have watched and reviewed almost all of the MCU films to this point. I've seen none of the TV/streaming shows and don't intend to remedy that because life is incredibly short and also full to bursting with things I desperately want to see that I still won't be able to, no matter how smart I am at managing whatever time I have left. I have no idea what's going on in Black Widow, and I think that once you get bucked off this horse, there's no getting back on. So here's Cate Shortland's Black Widow, the 24th MCU flick, if only the second centred around a female protagonist--one we know has sacrificed herself for the sake of the least interesting/worthy of her male counterparts, meaning this one takes place in either the past or an alternate timeline or something. It doesn't matter. In the comic-book world, there are new #1s every few cycles that are reboots or speculative storylines or something. It's how they get you to keep buying them. What matters is, the more you humanize this character you've already made abundantly clear you don't really care about, the worse her already-loathsome sacrifice feels.

My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (2021)

****/****
starring Patrick Fugit, Ingrid Sophie Schram, Owen Campbell
written and directed by Jonathan Cuartas

by Walter Chaw The reason Dwight (Patrick Fugit) goes to diners is to eat a little toast, drink some coffee, and listen to other people go about their lives. His sister, Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), waits tables at one where she suffers the indignities of the service industry with pallid, resigned despair. Between them, the extent to which they can empathize with people beyond their bubble will drive their existence to a crisis. Cut from the same cloth as Jim Mickle's exceptional We Are What We Are and destined to be compared to Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In, My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (hereafter My Heart), the hyphenate debut of Jonathan Cuartas, finds its closest analogue in Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, which is similarly about the brutal banality and biological horror of caring for a terminally-ill loved one. Dwight and Jessie look after their brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell--so good in Super Dark Times), who needs to drink blood to survive. Sunlight burns him badly and instantly. Well into puberty, he still acts like a child--not for any sort of mental disability, but rather, we surmise, because of a lifetime spent in a handful of the same rooms, his brother and sister as his sole companions.

Lisa (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Cheryl Ladd, D.W. Moffet, Staci Keanan, Tanya Fenmore
written by Gary Sherman & Karen Clark
directed by Gary Sherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's cheesy, right? He stakes out beautiful women, breaks into their apartment while they're out, and decorates their place with enough candles for a Meat Loaf video. When they return home and check their messages, they hear one from him: "Hi, this is Richard. I'm in your apartment. I'm going to kill you." Then he pounces, doing exactly what he promised to do. I went to see Gary Sherman's Lisa with a friend on opening weekend in May of 1990; we had planned on going to Ernest Goes to Jail but were late for the matinee. We were late for everything, in fact, except Lisa, and the only competition for a seat was the tumbleweeds--a reflection of the skeletal marketing budget and maybe Siskel & Ebert's downcast thumbs. Anyway, my buddy and me, both 15 at the time, were snorting derisively at Richard's M.O.--the media has christened him the Candlelight Killer--as Lisa got underway, mainly because it involved the type of aesthetic jive we put up with for a flash of nipple on late-night cable. (Did I mention the saxophone music?) Then came the introduction of the title character, a 14-year-old girl who lives with her florist mother Katherine in a cozy little womb of a loft, and any residual laughter took on a nervous edge. Safe to say that Scooby-Doo-ish frisson of siccing a sociopath on the territory of Apple Paperbacks worked like a charm: We were on tenterhooks for the next 90 minutes or so, like air-traffic controllers monitoring the progress of Lisa and Richard's inevitable, inexorable collision.

Luca (2021)

**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews, Mike Jones
directed by Enrico Casarosa

by Walter Chaw Enrico Casarosa's Luca is a gentle love letter to the Miyazaki-verse set in a small, coastal Italian town called "Porto Rosso" in an obvious nod to Porco Rosso. The body of it, meanwhile, is parts of Ponyo, parts of Kiki's Delivery Service, bits and pieces of shots and sequences from Spirited Away, and even the scavenging scenes from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Luca's message of acceptance is general and loose enough to allow for a couple of innocuous interpretations, the obvious one being the Depeche Mode-ism of how people are people and shouldn't, therefore, get along so awfully, the more potentially impactful one a coming-out tale in which the residents of a cloistered community realize their friends and neighbours harbour secrets about their identities that they're afraid to reveal, lest they be ostracized, even murdered. It's tempting to go here, not just because the central drama revolves around the friendship between little Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) and his buddy Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but also because of the late-film reveal that a pair of elderly spinsters in town are identically coupled. There are also moments where it's clear that Alberto, without being interested in her, is jealous of the relationship blooming between Luca and Giulia (Emma Berman), the little girl who takes them in when they find themselves needing a place to stay. It's there if you want it.

Spiral (2021)

Spiral: From the Book of Saw
½*/****
starring Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols, Samuel L. Jackson
written by Josh Stolberg & Peter Goldfinger
directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

by Walter Chaw It's so familiar it's fatiguing, another one of these projects that begins with passion and the best of intentions and ends up chewed to paste and regurgitated as this thin, masticated gruel. Is Darren Lynn Bousman's Spiral (a.k.a. Spiral: From the Book of Saw) the product of too many notes from too many people, or simply the wrong people? Or maybe there weren't enough voices in the room to challenge accepted wisdom, which tends to be unreliable more often than not. Spiral occupies a weird space where it's both desperate and cocksure. In moments of duress, one tends to revert to the familiar and the comfortable, so when things are obviously going south for Chris Rock, still-aspiring movie star, Chris Rock, legendary stand-up comic, tries to assert himself. The script is a mess, and the grafts meant to save the patient have been rejected. Spiral probably should've been killed at inception.

Infinite (2021)

*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sophie Cookson, Toby Jones
screenplay by Ian Shorr, based on the book The Reincarnationist Papers by D. Eric Maikranz
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw At the root of it all is the Cloud Atlas suggestion that any number of spiritual roads end in a white-saviour persona. Which is offensive, of course, a non-starter in the modern parlance, one would hope (if one were an optimist not paying attention), made that much more offensive for said white person being convicted felon Mark Wahlberg. It was a long time ago; he served 45 days of a 3-month sentence, he was amped-up on PCP and racism, and, hey, the only people he wronged were Black children and an Asian man he beat blind with a stick. Wahlberg made a nice career for himself as an ass model despite this and got popular enough to become the butt of one of the most exquisite pop-cultural takedowns in recent memory as Andy Samberg formulated Wahlberg's entire persona into a single sketch. Wahlberg, of course, doesn't owe me anything, but when you reach a certain level of success, it's not enough to make apologies--it's time to make amends. He did try to get the felony assault wiped from his record in the hopes that he could secure a liquor license for his hamburger restaurant, though, so there's that. The American Dream.

Cruella (2021)

***/****
starring Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Mark Strong
screenplay by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw It's better to think of Craig Gillespie's Cruella as a riff than as a prequel--a variation on a theme rather than the puzzle-box predecessor to a beloved intellectual property. In fact, one's ability to do so informs the extent to which this film is not merely enjoyable but indeed good. Cruella is a mindfuck of a construct, a postmodern exercise in which nothing of it could cohere without knowledge of, and experience with, other cultural artifacts--but even there, it occupies two spaces simultaneously: the Disney side, where the references are all to 101 Dalmatians, against the Gillespie side, where the references are to pop-cultural movements in music, fashion, even literature. Early on, a young Cruella (Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), born "Estella," is urged by her saintly mother Catherine (Emily Beecham) to contain Estella's exuberant, sometimes-violent and "evil" side by dubbing her "Cruella" and, in so naming it, caging it. The suggestion, then, is that "Estella" is the polite-if-constricting requirement that Cruella be a prequel to a Disney "vault" classic, while "Cruella" is the Something Wild barely contained that, like Michelle Pfeiffer's resurrected Catwoman in Batman Returns, is a creature born of violence returned as the avatar for perversity and chaos. Imagine how great this good film would have been were it just the one with none of the other.

A Website Turns 24...

FILM FREAK CENTRAL turns 24 this month and I became curious what our 24 most-read reviews might be. Unfortunately, we didn't sign up for Analytics until 2014, and any record of our traffic before then has evaporated from the Internet. So, uh, here's a countdown of our 24 most-read reviews since, um, 2014. Few surprises on here (longtime visitors to the site can probably guess what took the #1 spot, with 147,457 reads), but definitely a head-scratcher (#6) or two (#20). Perhaps the biggest takeaway? No Marvel. DC is another matter entirely, though. Thanks again for reading and supporting us!-Ed.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) - Blu-ray + Digital Code

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King

by Walter Chaw Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma's moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, '80s emblem of white, "compassionate" conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King's film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma's indisputably powerful piece, King's film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever's embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton's cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.