Film Freak Central

Atomic Blonde (2017)

*½/****
starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones
screenplay Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, written by Antony Johnson and illustrated by Sam Hart
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Essentially No Way Out with less hot sex but better action sequences, David Leitch's Atomic Blonde is a lot of truly dreary Cold War spy intrigue interrupted periodically, but not often enough, by the good stuff. It proposes the antiquated notion that collusion with the Russians is treason in having heroic MI6 agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron--Mr. F after all, all this time) take ice baths and try to figure out who mysterious mole "Satchel" is in the last days of East Berlin. Her contact there is skeezy Percival (James McAvoy) whose handlers fear has gone a bit "feral" in the field. We're introduced to him trading Jim Beam and blue jeans for information and waking up with two girls (two!) to pick up Lorraine at the airport. There's also a French spy named Delphine (Sofia Boutella) who offers up a Sapphic love interest for Lorraine and ends up the way that lovers end up in spy movies. Leitch, an uncredited co-director on John Wick, brings the same style of kinetic, close-in martial arts and, eventually, gunplay of that film, but missteps badly by, among other things, making this about more than avenging a dead dog. Without an emotional charge--and there isn't enough of one generated by the loss of two of Lorraine's lovers--there's no real sense of emotion or energy in the action scenes. They're super cool, don't get me wrong (at least they are until Leitch decides at the very end to overuse slow motion), but they lack motivation and investment. But that's the least of Atomic Blonde's problems.

Madhouse (1981) - Blu-ray Disc

There Was a Little Girl
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Trish Everly, Michael Macrae, Dennis Robertson, Morgan Hart
screenplay by Stephen Blakley, Ovidio G. Assonitis, Peter Shepherd and Robert Gandus
directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis

by Sydney Wegner The final frames of Madhouse are a title card with a George Bernard Shaw quote: "...life differs from the play only in this...it has no plot, all is vague, desultory, unconnected till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved." In that instant, in one of the most beautifully-executed "middle-finger to my haters" moves in cinema, criticism of Ovidio G. Assonitis's 1981 clusterfuck is rendered irrelevant. Sneaking that in at the end rather than putting it at the beginning is doubly hilarious, as you've just spent an hour-and-a-half trying to grasp onto this ungraspable thing, only to have all your hard work flushed away in a second. If your movie doesn't make sense, it's because living doesn't make sense; case closed. Our own plots are never resolved, people flit in and out of our lives without us ever truly knowing them, our familial relationships are tangled and it's sometimes impossible to figure out where any animosity began. We think we understand people, but it's rare that we truly do.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic "The Ghost in the Shell" by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii's seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won't have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country's post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it's basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It's puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn't know what to do with the images it's appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there's something worth excavating here.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

*½/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Clive Owen, Rutger Hauer
written for the screen and directed by Luc Besson

by Walter Chaw Effortlessly, almost guilelessly sexist in the way that only a 12-year-old with lacklustre breeding can be, Luc Besson's latest opus of antsy expressionism, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (hereafter Valerian), is so relentlessly puerile, so unapologetically awful, that there's absolutely no chance it won't become a midnight masterpiece. Not one of the good ones, like Besson's own The Fifth Element or The Professional (or The Messenger, curiously the most historically accurate Joan of Arc film), but one of the ones that are the feature-length equivalent of that repetitive noise your 9-year-old son makes when you're driving him to a friend's house. It's an interminable adaptation of the Ruby Rhod sequence from The Fifth Element, an endurance test of unusual cruelty and imagination. If you're sensing some grudging admiration for it, you're not wrong. It's like going to a torture museum and marvelling at the level of invention and craftsmanship dedicated to the methods to which humans go to discomfit one another. Some of that sadistic shit is worth millions--priceless, even.

Dunkirk (2017)

*½/****
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I'm a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don't like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there's a real heart in there. It's a bad science-fiction movie, but it's a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it's puffed-up full of itself, and it's about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It's going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It's like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Outfest LA '17: Something Like Summer

*½/****
starring Grant Davis, Davi Santos, Ben Baur, Ajiona Alexus
screenplay by Carlos Pedraza, based on the novel by Jay Bell
directed by David Berry

by Alice Stoehr Musicals bloom from effusive emotion. When Catherine Deneuve strolled down the streets of Cherbourg, when Judy Garland hopped on a St. Louis trolley, their yearnings were too intense to merely be spoken. They had to be sung. In Something Like Summer, newcomer Grant Davis stars as Ben Bentley, a Texan teen and aspiring singer who's heartsick (like Deneuve and Garland) over a boy. But his sweetheart Tim, played by Davi Santos, is a "good-looking jock," as Ben puts it--closeted, Catholic, and deeply ashamed. After a few sub rosa liaisons, the two bitterly part ways. The film cuts to a dim, empty theatre, where Ben sublimates his sorrows into a cover of the break-up song "Barely Breathing": "I know what you're doing," he warbles. "I see it all too clear." While Deneuve had Jacques Demy and Garland had Vincente Minnelli, Davis has first-time director David Berry, who stages the handful of musical numbers with minimal panache. No dancing, some haphazard camera movement, the actor emoting on a stage. Later, handheld close-ups will peer at Davis during his halting rendition of "La Vie en rose." (He sings it in a Parisian café, the Eiffel Tower shining through a nearby window.) The soundtrack includes a couple of new compositions alongside songs originally by Regina Spektor and Ne-Yo, many of them intercut with bland montage, none of their lyrics especially salient to the story. Cohesion and spectacle both receive low priority versus the endless reams of plot.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

**½/****
starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Amiah Miller
written by Mark Bomback & Matt Reeves
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw There are two problems that plague War for the Planet of the Apes. The first is that this far along into a franchise, it becomes a real burden to deal with the lore of eight (is it eight?) previous instalments; the second is that Rise... and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, this sequel's two immediate predecessors, are so subtle and intelligent that there's a real danger now of being too "on the nose" in trying to keep up with them. That co-writer/director Matt Reeves is able to wrangle both tigers to the extent that he does speaks to his skill. That he's not able to entirely avoid a mauling speaks to the near-impossibility of the task. What was before an elegant parable of race and tribalism, dehumanization and Turing empathy tests, is now well and truly a blockbuster franchise product. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's obvious, transitioning from a very fine, elegiac western like a late Ford or an any-time Anthony Mann into, by the end, first a broad and winking take on Apocalypse Now, then a carefully-narrated Moses allegory. Consider a moment where the ersatz Kurtz, The Colonel (Woody Harrelson), speaks to our chimp hero Caesar (a motion-captured Andy Serkis) about the cost of vengeance and the sacrifices made during war that allow him to paint himself as Abraham even as he transitions into Pharaoh. Everyone's fantastic in the scene; the problem is that its expository payload is mainly meant to set up the Charlton Heston film that started it all. Too, it confuses the characters of its parables in such a way as to suggest, uncomfortably, a connection between Jews and their persecutors, and a concentration camp/Egyptian slave narrative involving the persecution of apes for cheap labour only adds to the confusion. Oh, also, they're building a wall that Caesar calls "madness" that will solve nothing.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr.
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Jon Watts & Christopher Ford and Chris McKenna & Eric Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw A painfully adequate entry in the ever-expanding MCU, Spider-Man: Homecoming has the benefit of a brilliant young lead in Tom Holland and a fantastically-layered villain turn by Michael Keaton, but it bears the burden of all the films that came before it and all those yet to come. There's a lot of checking-off of boxes, in other words, with Homecoming reminding most of Ant-Man in that there seems to be a good standalone movie in here somewhere that keeps getting diverted into looking backwards and forwards. There was an episode of "St. Elsewhere" where a patient believed himself to be Mary Richards of the "The Mary Tyler Moore Show". Midway through, he spots Betty White, who had a recurring role on "St. Elsewhere", and calls out "Sue Ann!," the name of her character on "Mary Tyler Moore". Both programs were produced by MTM, by the way, the company founded by Moore and ex-husband Grant Tinker. To enjoy that episode of the show completely would require knowledge of the "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and its production company. It's a living example of the concept of post-modernism: a product based on nothing but itself and reliant entirely on the insular knowledge of a small group of fetishists. Such is the fire in which fandom is born, and Spider-Man: Homecoming is the natural product of that: an origin story that doesn't provide an origin because the previous incarnations of this story have provided it already; and film number 19 or 20 or something in a series that includes television shows and comic-book runs that, at this point, would require someone with absolutely nothing else to do to keep track of it. That's another fire in which fandom is born.

CHIPS (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Dax Shepard, Michael Peña, Rosa Salazar, Vincent D'Onofrio
written and directed by Dax Shepard

by Bill Chambers I can't say I was surprised to see another movie based on a television series flop when CHIPS failed to earn back its meagre $25 million budget last spring. 21 Jump Street is the only recent one that's stuck, and that had star power behind it, as well as a stubborn presence in pop culture thanks to Johnny Depp. Plus--and this is important--it was good. CHIPS is driven by career supporting actors, and, like Baywatch after it, perhaps, is based on a show that people remember like the candy of their childhood: wistfully, but with reflex revulsion. And unlike when, say, The Flintstones came out (1994, the heyday of the TV-to-film adaptation), there's no rerun culture cultivating "new" fans of "CHiPS". If the title still produces a look of recognition in younger viewers, it's probably as a synecdoche for cop shows the way that "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza" are synonymous with westerns. The specifics--was there a guy named Porch or Punch or something?--have long since evaporated from the collective conscious. Such is the fate of most pre-prestige television in the age of cord-cutting and so-called "YouTube stars," but studios today lack the courage to be originators, preferring even the elusive clothing of a brand's ghost to sending a movie out into the world naked.