Film Freak Central

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

*½/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, Finn Little, Jon Bernthal
screenplay by Michael Koryta and Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, based on the book by Michael Koryta
directed by Taylor Sheridan                     

by Walter Chaw A certain déjà vu occurs with movies that feature what Gregory Peck once referred to as an endlessly replicable script. The hero who has endured trauma and, through the auspices of the film's familiar master plot, is given an opportunity to heal. In the parlance of this formula, perhaps there will be surrogate parents and children, replays--whether in the service of a literal time-loop or a figurative one--of inciting events with the opportunity to redress them, or... Look, I'm trying to find a clever way to say that Taylor Sheridan's Those Who Wish Me Dead is a new movie you've seen at least a hundred times before. It is one in every ten films or so. At its best, it's a cozy throwback to deadening programmers like The Client that saw great casts and decent budgets at the mercy of airport-rack bestsellers adapted by rote and delivered on time. At its worst, it's a meta-game of Scream where the instantly-exhausted viewer can nail major plot points based solely on the casting and the style of swooping once-helicopter/now-drone establishing shot. Maybe that's why there are so many superfluous cuts in this film--like how the introduction of one character to her summer home is split into six separate shots, none of them telling anything more than how she has arrived and managed to unlock the door.

The Ten Commandments (1956) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G Robinson
screenplay by Æneas MacKenzie, Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., Jack Gariss, Fredric M. Frank, in accordance with the ancient texts of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, the Midrash, and the Holy Scriptures
directed by Cecil B. De Mille

by Bill Chambers A harbinger of the pageantry to come, Cecil B. De Mille's 1956 The Ten Commandments begins with a pair of ornate drapes. De Mille himself emerges from behind them and steps up to a microphone. Back then, this would've had an uncanny effect on filmgoers, who were used to seeing curtains shield the silver screen from view until the lights went down. (To my recollection, curtains went the way of the dodo in the late-'80s, when they were deemed impractical by the new cookie-cutter multiplexes that would drive the traditional movie palace to extinction.) De Mille, then a name synonymous with "director" to the American public, proceeds to all but invent William Castle as he introduces The Gimmick: What you are about to see will fill in all the gaps in the biblical account of Moses, thanks to an investigative technique seldom used in Hollywood known as research. Well, not all of the gaps: kid Moses and teen Moses, who was surely elected Prom King in De Mille's imagination, still get the short-shrift.

Without Remorse (2021)

Tom Clancy's Without Remorse
***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jamie Bell, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples, based on the novel by Tom Clancy
directed by Stefano Sollima

by Walter Chaw A little less than halfway through Stefano Sollima's Without Remorse, ex-Navy SEAL hotshot John Kelly (Michael B. Jordan), decked out in an orange prison jumpsuit, tells his former commanding officer, Lt. Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith), that they fought for a country that didn't love them for the promise the United States represented--and that, somewhere along the way, a contract was broken. Kelly is the blunt object the Daniel Craig Bond cycle identified Her Majesty's finest as: the spiked ball at the end of a medieval pike, all dressed up in fancy gadgets and ritualized dogma, amounting at the end to savagery in patriotic drag. He's not Odysseus in this construct, he's Achilles; his only weakness is that he believed there was ever a contract in the first place. The message is clear in this re-imagining of one of Tom Clancy's lesser-known bits of military/industrial agitprop that should this become a franchise, the thrust of it will be that its rage is righteous...and righteously Black. Simply the name change for Kelly from the source material's "Clark" speaks to the idea of rejecting one name, given by a white person, in favour of a name one chooses for oneself when specific social contracts have been breached. And the moment of Kelly's radicalization, when his home is violated and his life is stolen, likewise assumes a particular racial resonance.

The Virtuoso (2021)

*/****
starring Anson Mount, Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by James C. Wolf
directed by Nick Stagliano

by Walter Chaw 25 minutes into Nick Stagliano's very serious The Virtuoso, our erstwhile The American assassin, the unnamed virtuoso in question (Anson Mount), receives a note inscribed with what appears to be a child's handwriting (it isn't, which is only one reason why it's funny) telling him who his next target will be. As the Virtuoso, in his own second-person narration, lays out some ground rules in a world-weary, Fight Club-aspiring way, we see him burning what is obviously a different piece of paper in the fireplace. One might wonder about the sleight-of-hand happening here: Is Virtuoso, recently traumatized by a job gone tragically (and hilariously) wrong, looking to screw his mentor The Mentor (Anthony Hopkins) by holding on to the Mission: Impossible message intended for self-destruction? Will this slip of incriminating paper be the "check and mate" of a twisty noir's mind-bending puzzle-box? Or is it a simple continuity error they either didn't notice or figured didn't really matter because the audience will be too dazzled by the clockwork precision of the compulsive, extravagant-to-the-point-of-self-satire script? You're smart. When we're done here, you tell me which one it is.

Nobody (2021)

***/****
starring Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd
written by Derek Kolstad
directed by Ilya Naishuller

by Walter Chaw I spent a lot of my freshman year in college in the shadow of post-trauma from a failed suicide attempt, untreated depression, and what felt like hardwired self-loathing. I looked for fights then and found them sometimes. I am so full of rage and frustration. I am beset by violent fantasies. When I watch videos of people turning the tables on attackers or racists, I wonder if, in the same situation, with the same upper hand, I would be able to stop hitting once I started. Age has mellowed me; my wife and my family have civilized me to some extent, and I don't punch walls anymore, you know? It's just sadness and self-loathing left in the debris, should anyone think to sift through it. I don't think I'm unusual. I think men aren't given the mechanism to express their despair in any way other than through violence and rage, and therein lies the reason everything is broken now and why we're largely beyond repair. We are the pure residue of a vile evolutionary animal. Everything that doesn't make sense makes perfect sense when you consider that we're just shaved apes barely behaving ourselves.

Mortal Kombat (2021)

**½/****
starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada
screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham
directed by Simon McQuoid

by Walter Chaw I saw Paul W.S. Anderson's 1995 Mortal Kombat movie on opening night at a two-screen strip-mall theatre in Seattle with my friends Keith, Sam, and Dan. We knew the catchphrases from endless nights playing the game on a Sega Genesis, and we shouted them in jubilant concert like a Catholic callout and response. Since we were also fans of Highlander, the casting of Christopher Lambert as another ageless super-being felt exactly right. We were assholes. It was the best time of our lives. They were my groomsmen when I got married a few years later. Time has scattered us; Sam killed himself a couple of years ago. It all starts feeling like the framing story for Stand by Me. What's left are memories like this, which seem the easiest way now to get a movie project off the ground--a strip-mining of nostalgia that speaks more to a generational experience of loss than to a real paucity of imagination. If it didn't work, it wouldn't keep happening, and our deathless hunger for polyglot mosaics in pursuit of personal white rabbits is symptomatic of our despair.

Crampton Comes Alive!: FFC Interviews Barbara Crampton

I don't know what I was expecting from Travis Stevens's Jakob's Wife, but it wasn't an at-times-heartbreaking study of a woman in late-middle-age, coming to terms with her mortality and given a second chance at the rest of her life in the unlikeliest of places. I like everyone involved with this project, and there's no question that knowing Barbara Crampton (who plays the eponymous preacher's wife, Ann) and her co-star Larry Fessenden (Jakob) personally has flavoured how I see this film. Sufficed to say that Jakob's Wife is clearly an emotional autobiography for Crampton--an intensely personal picture that's not coincidentally home to her best performance. She kills me in this. I don't know if she knows how good she is; I don't know that she'd ever really been given a chance to show it before this.

Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Eric Stoltz, Mary Stuart Masterson, Craig Sheffer, Lea Thompson
written by John Hughes
directed by Howard Deutch

by Bill Chambers "Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie." John Hughes may have had this famous Jean-Luc Godard quote in mind when he embarked on the screenplay for Some Kind of Wonderful, a gender-swapped version of his heavily-compromised Pretty in Pink that came out less than a year later. But Some Kind of Wonderful did not start out like it ended up: The script that director Howard Deutch originally signed on to direct was about a citywide first date between a social pariah and the prettiest girl in school that notoriously called for the Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron to put on a private show for the couple. A broad comedy, it opened with its hero masturbating into a pillow. If you've seen Some Kind of Wonderful, this will all sound pretty incongruous.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it's not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn't the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world--who's playing an immortal superhero--tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I'm saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Zoom Generation: FFC Interviews Rob Savage & Jemma Moore

Shudder's Host, directed and co-written by Rob Savage, is this peculiar moment's The Blair Witch Project, a landmark film that provides insight into not just these dark times via the technologies that have evolved from our collective woe, but also how we ourselves have evolved, changed in unexpected ways by the products of our hands. Never so much as to lose touch with what scares us, though. Even the genesis of the project--Host was born of a prank a bored Savage devised to scare his friends on a Zoom chat one evening (a prank posted later on social media, where it gained another half-life)--has its roots in how things that are old-hat (the noise in the attic, the jump scare, the Rear Window effect of being a voyeur to the love and death of loved ones without the power to affect them) don't go away as the tools of our existence change. They adapt. What we've always feared, we fear still. And here we are now with this stuff we've Frankensteined into existence (social media, virtual hosting, Bluetooth, the cloud) without a complete understanding of the doors it'll unlock in our relationship with the universe. We're playing with fire, and Host is a warning no less eloquent for being too late.

Me You Madness (2021)

**½/****
starring Ed Westwick, Louise Linton
written and directed by Louise Linton

by Walter Chaw Louise Linton's Me You Madness is a particularly fraught and grim fandango seeking to walk the line between self-parody and self-aggrandizement. It dances along the edge of a blade, this one, with the kind of extraordinary privilege afforded the fabulously wealthy, powerful, and beautiful. On the one hand, you're making fun of your ridiculous luck; on the other hand, or maybe the same hand, you're rubbing everyone's face in it. False modesty is dangerous--and unsuccessful self-satire is the most deluded manifestation of it. Shit, successful self-satire isn't that great, either, because it suggests that one's station is so elevated it can be a target of satire. So is Me You Madness terrible? It's fabulously terrible, calamitously terrible. It's also genuinely fascinating as both symptom and diagnosis of exactly what's wrong with the particular strain of capitalistic excess embodied by Linton and her vile husband, Steve Mnuchin. These are the architects of the end of the world, and this is evidence that they're aware of it but don't quite know what it is that they know.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

½*/****
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.

She's Having a Baby (1988) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image C Sound A Extras B-
starring Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth McGovern, Alec Baldwin, James Ray
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers I rented She's Having a Baby the moment it hit video out of brand loyalty to John Hughes, whose teen movies had had an epic and indoctrinating influence on my peers and me. And I was largely indifferent to it up until the closing-credits montage of celebrities tossing out names for the titular baby, at which point my lack of enthusiasm gave way to dismay.^* At the time, I assumed the film's subject matter was too adult for 13-year-old me (and it was), but 18 years later I didn't like it any better, and after revisiting it with another 15 years' distance--which brings us to 2021--I've decided that when it comes to She's Having a Baby, "it's not me, it's you" suffices. Even though the travails of one Jefferson "Jake" Briggs remain as hypothetical to me as they were when I was a kid, movies, as Roger Ebert was fond of saying, are empathy machines; the cinema would never have flourished if films demanded a 1:1 relationship with the viewer's experiences. (Granted, this is also how they've gotten away with being so lily-white for so long.) Definitive proof of She's Having a Baby's mediocrity came for me when I saw Tamara Jenkins's Private Life, in which a cultured New York couple struggles with infertility as their biological clocks wind down. It was, next to First Reformed, my favourite film of 2018. I've never been on that side of the family equation and I'm not a churchgoer, either.

Body Politics: FFC Interviews Dusty Mancinelli & Madeleine Sims-Fewer

Even among the generally positive responses to Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli's superlative Violation, one finds evidence of the predictable fallout that occurs whenever a woman in horror, particularly in the rape-revenge category of horror, fails to adhere to expectations of victimhood. Surely a woman who reacts to rape with violence is psycho, yes? Violation has as its closest analogues the Greek tragedies involving a woman cruelly wronged who righteously wrongs in return; the final image of the film is as clear a metaphor as I can imagine for how we all, men and women alike, take on the sins of the father in our various acts of consumption, both gustatorial and sexual. I was excited to speak with co-writers/co-directors Ms. Sims-Fewer (who also stars) and Mr. Mancinelli about their film and its positive--if sometimes confused--reception. So often, exhaustingly often, when one seeks to change perception, one instead manages to reveal how unchangeable perceptions can be. We should be beyond this conversation in 2021. In a lot of ways, Violation reveals that we've yet to properly broach the topic. The pair, sitting on a pale blue couch with a Frida Kahlo throw pillow between them--an appropriate totem of gender ambiguity and, indeed, rage, I thought--were engaged and smart about what their film was about. Violation is intentional in a way that very few movies can get away with--and it gets away with it because it's, y'know, brilliant. I started by asking them the perhaps obvious question of why men hate women who reveal themselves as fully human.

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams
screenplay by Chris Terrio
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It opens with soundwaves visualized as ripples in the air--Superman's (Henry Cavill) death cry touching every part of a blasted world as the protection and decency he represents is murdered. I have historically hated Zack Snyder's vision of this universe because it felt grimdark in a weightless way, the posturing of an emo teenager who hasn't earned his weariness and cynicism. It felt like a put-on. Immature. When the worst parts of comic fandom coalesced to demand a director's cut of a genuinely abominable film, Justice League, I, partly out of self-protection from a hateful horde and partly out of a sense of moral superiority, looked upon the project as first impossible, then misguided. I thought myself better than all this, which is unforgivable. I guess I wanted to believe that in a world in which I have figured nothing out, I had at least figured out that anything championed by trolls and incels could have no possible value to someone like me--who, of course, has nothing in common with these troglodytes except, you know, for the loneliness and the self-loathing and the suspicion of corporate-think. Maybe it's just fear that makes me as hateful as they are. And maybe it's just fear that makes them as hateful as they are, too. I think what's most surprising to me about Zack Snyder's Justice League (hereafter ZSJL) is how skillful it is as a diagnosis of the horrific, unfillable void that drives the very population most responsible for its existence. If the messages of the film are internalized, it may even help.

Cherry (2021)

***/****
starring Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, based on the novel by Nico Walker
directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw When you hit someone coming and going, I think that either it's personal or you don't know what you want. For me, when MCU wunderkinds the Russo Brothers decide to make a big-budget, S.E. Hinton meets John Irving via T.S. Garp version of Rush, shit, I'm into it. One can either complain that everything coming out is the product of an algorithm or endeavour to notice when, for good or for ill, one gets exactly the kind of auteurist dream project in all the show-offy, chaotic glory one's been pining for in endless, exhausting thinkpieces. Criticism that the Russos are trying too hard with Cherry sounds to me suspiciously like the sort of unimaginative personal-grievance pieces cropping up around about the time Scorsese was making stuff like New York, New York, or when The Matrix sequels failed entirely to behave, or when Zack Snyder delivers a four-hour Greek God cut of a superhero movie that is distinctly the product of a single voice. I mean, hate it if you want to, but also fuck off.

Crisis (2021)

*/****
starring Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear
written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki

by Walter Chaw Nicholas Jarecki's Crisis is a Stanley Kramer piece, a "means well," ripped-from-the-headlines message flick that hews closer to 3 Needles than to Traffic in terms of effectiveness and humility. In place of dialogue, there is exposition; and in place of performances, there are swollen forehead veins and trembling lower lips, aghast at the injustices of a cold universe. Crisis sheds "importance" from itself like dander from a stressed but beloved pet, and it's unseemly to come down too hard on it when its greatest crimes are that it is middlebrow in its politeness and really doesn't have much to say beyond what's already inherently obvious. It's possible to do stuff like this and make something like The Insider--that is, something powerful, artful, and transformative. More commonly, it turns out like Crisis has turned out: instantly forgettable and mildly embarrassing in the way of your hip dad trying to jam with you about the evils of the sticky icky. Oh, and use a condom, son.