Film Freak Central

Paterson (2016)

****/****
starring Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley, Masatoshi Nagase
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw My Pocket Poets edition of William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell: Improvisations has the worn, faded, ineffably-dusty feeling of a paperback printed on low stock from a certain period. The back cover tells me there was once a day it could be had for $1.25. I've read it probably a hundred times, though I can't say I ever read it sequentially. This was the first year, as it happens, that I read The Art of War sequentially. I regard both texts as reference books: for the winning, for the existing. The kind you open to a page and read carefully, and then you put the book down next to you and look at the world differently for a moment. I have favourite passages from each. This is one of them from the Williams:

Slugs (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale, Concha Cuetos
screenplay by Ron Gantman, based on the novel by Shaun Hutson
directed by J.P. Simon

by Bryant Frazer "I recognize terror as the finest emotion," Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, his 1981 book-length rumination on horror and storytelling, "and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud." That's where the late Juan Piquer Simón (or J.P. Simon, as it became anglicized) must have found himself on the set of Slugs. The native Spaniard was only so-so as a director: He was technically competent, with a decent eye for composition, but he wasn't so adept with English-speaking actors and had no real knack for generating suspense or escalating tension. Fortunately, Simón is pretty good with the gory stuff. And that's why, decades later, his Slugs still crawls tall as a minor classic for creature-feature completists.

A Monster Calls (2016)

**½/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Felicity Jones, Lewis MacDougall, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Patrick Ness, based on his novel
directed by J.A. Bayona

by Walter Chaw Tears are easy when the subject is the loss of a loved one. They come even when you don't particularly like the vehicle that inspires them. In the case of J.A. Bayona's A Monster Calls, the tears are for the most part earned by its generally uncompromising nature and the elegance of its animated interludes. They're so good, in fact, that I spent much of the movie's remainder wishing it were all animated in the same style, which is cribbed from artist Jim Kay's watercolour illustrations for the Patrick Ness novel upon which the film is based. The animated sequences are representations of the titular monster's stories. Voiced by Liam Neeson, he has three of them to tell little Conor (though only two are animated), with the expectation that when he's through, the boy will tell one back to him. Conor (Lewis MacDougall) has summoned the monster (a cross between Groot and an Ent), he thinks, so that the monster can heal Conor's ailing mother (Felicity Jones). Alas, the monster serves a different purpose. The animated portions remind in feeling and abstraction of Brad Bird's incomparable The Iron Giant--a film that is itself based around the death of a loved one and the need for the survivors to recover. The live-action portions, the best of them, remind of Bernard Rose's melancholic Paperhouse, but the sum is a bit less than its parts.

Passengers (2016)

*/****
starring Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne
written by Jon Spaights
directed by Morten Tyldum

by Walter Chaw The problem with Passengers isn't that it's appalling. The problem with Passengers is that it doesn't have anything to say about being appalling and so proceeds to do stuff with levers and buttons while the lockstep narrative soldiers through to a weird cameo and a happy ending, sort of. Think The Wizard of Oz if it never pulled back the curtain, leaving Dorothy dead and her friends vivisected by an army of newly under-employed flying monkeys on their next impossible mission. It's an artifact that's more interesting, in other words, as an example of corporate groupthink in matters of consumer art--of how Kathleen Kennedy talked about women being "unready" to direct her blockbusters when Morten Tyldum gets the keys to the kingdom for directing mathematicians running around in The Imitation Game (actually, Passengers kind of makes her point), and how retrograde sexual attitudes are still and always the default panic position. Watching it, I was reminded of a brilliant Nell Scovell article published right before the election about how Trump Tower is in a strange state of disrepair: a broken elevator, empty trophy cases, a public garden eternally under construction. There's something about immense hubris we like to see take on water. It's the premise for Douglas Adams's prehistoric PC game "Starship Titanic", where you find yourself the lone entity on a malfunctioning passenger liner. Adams, needless to say, handled it better.

Editor's Choice: The Year in Blu-ray

by Bill Chambers The reason film and physical media are prematurely pronounced dead every few weeks is that the mainstream keeps narrowing, limiting the visible spectrum of both industries. Studios remain halfheartedly committed to Blu-ray Disc but, as this Top 10 list incidentally shows, it's really become the domain of boutique labels restoring and annotating studio-neglected fare, capitalizing on streaming's short-term memory and populist leanings while inspiring devotion among connoisseurs. Please note that I limited my selection process to titles I've personally audited and would endorse anyway, with or without frills. Some of these may be reviewed in full at a later date.

Fences (2016)

*/****
starring Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Mykelti Williamson
screenplay by August Wilson, based on his play
directed by Denzel Washington

by Walter Chaw Denzel Washington's Fences is movies as medicine. Not the sugar-coated, easy-to-swallow kind--the castor oil/barium enema kind. The toxic-herbal-brew kind my mom used to try to make me drink but, you know, I'd rather be sick. Fences is based on August Wilson's venerated, Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play, which has been in the works as a feature since 1987, when Eddie Murphy bought the rights and then couldn't bring it to fruition after Wilson publicly pronounced that he would be displeased if the material found its way into the hands of anyone but a black director. Paramount was given a list of names that included the person who should have directed this movie, Spike Lee, but ultimately they offered it to a white guy, Barry Levinson. Levinson passed because, among other things, Wilson's own adaptation of his play did not seem to him to successfully bridge the gulf between theatre and cinema. If Levinson was smart enough to pass because the script was ponderous and stagebound, that explains why Lee was never attached to the project: Lee is way smarter than Levinson. It's the impossible errand, this Fences thing. Wilson, being the figure he is, was not the sort of person whose opinion you ignored, nor the sort of person whose work you rewrote. So the project died. And then Denzel Washington was brought on board, insisted on doing a Broadway run to live inside the play for a while, and now, five years after that, here's his Fences. And it's just exactly as godawful as you'd expect it to be.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Rogue One
***½/****
starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk
screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw A deep cut for Star Wars fanatics, Gareth Edwards's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story also happens to be the single most topical fiction of 2016, talking as it does--in bold, melodramatic strokes befitting a space opera--about the importance of rebellion in the face of fascism. "Order," says Empirical stooge Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). "Terror," corrects brilliant weapons engineer Galen (Mads Mikkelsen). And the representative of the fascist regime smiles, as though it were all just a matter of semantics, this idea that terror and order are opposite sides of the same devalued coin. He's engaged in a kind of political double-speak, in gaslighting--things that until this year were the scourge of banana republics and other backwards backwaters. The Empire that Krennic represents needs Galen to help them complete their Death Star superweapon, with the '80s-era Reagan/Thatcher rationale that overwhelming destructive deterrents are the only way to truly keep the peace. Galen is compelled to cooperate to keep his daughter, Jyn (Felicity Jones), safe and anonymous in the protection of violent revolutionary Saw (Forest Whitaker). The rest is Jyn's quest to clear her father's name by stealing plans for the Death Star and delivering them to a fractured resistance that isn't entirely sure if it wouldn't be a good idea to give the Empire a chance. You know, maybe they won't do all the things they said they were going to do?

The BFG (2016) + Pete's Dragon (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Roald Dahl's The BFG
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Rylance, Ruby Barnhill, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement
screenplay by Melissa Mathison, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Steven Spielberg

PETE'S DRAGON
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Robert Redford
screenplay by David Lowery & Toby Halbrooks
directed by David Lowery

by Bill Chambers An inverse E.T. written by that film's screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, The BFG is in some ways archetypal Spielberg. It's another child-led picture to follow E.T., Empire of the Sun, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and The Adventures of Tintin, featuring more of Spielberg's weird hallmark of colourful food and drink (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Hook, Jurassic Park). But Spielberg just isn't that guy anymore, even if he always will be in the public imagination (it happens to actors...and it happens to directors, too), and The BFG has the same 'you can't go home again' quality that plagued Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It would be inexplicable within the recent arc of his career if not for the precedent of Tintin, which gave him an appetite for impossible camera moves that can really only be sated when the sets are virtual, as they are for much of The BFG. I can't help thinking of Spielberg's story about how the alien-abduction sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn't working until he went back and added shots of the screws on a vent cover turning by themselves; he thrives in that margin of error, like when he let a sick Harrison Ford shoot the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark and stumbled upon one of the most iconic moments in cinema. The amount of previsualizing necessary to make something like The BFG shrinks that margin considerably, and all foresight and no hindsight makes Steve a dull boy.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

**½/****
starring Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
screenplay by Tom Ford, based on the novel Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright
directed by Tom Ford

by Walter Chaw It opens with an already-notorious slow-motion consideration of a gallery of morbidly-obese women in tiny cowboy hats, naked and holding sparklers while gyrating to Abel Korzeniowski's moody, derivative score. Not long after, someone will comment how, as an art installation, it's a withering indictment of junk culture, in response to which our ostensible heroine Susan (Amy Adams) intones, "Junk. It's all junk." As self-awareness goes, this is as hollow as the rest of Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, a dirge of shallow introspection and sanctified ugliness that is, as it happens, a pretty trenchant critique of the landscape that would normalize a Trump presidency. Consider that the installation isn't "junk" so much as the kind of conversation people of a certain intuition might have about the limitations of media to sell something biology rejects. It's a tentative salvo into the nature/nurture debate and the extent to which popular culture can influence the innate. The answer? It can, a little. More often, it merely gratifies/reflects the base. Calling it "junk" reveals a specific attitude that the only thing obese women are capable of representing is over-consumption and, in the sparklers and hats, a sad sort of patriotism. Tom Ford has a message. I get it. It's gotten away from you. The signifier is greater than the sign.