Film Freak Central

Alien: Covenant (2017) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bryant Frazer It's rare that a perfect film is also financially lucrative. Ridley Scott's Alien is one such title--a scary movie that really cuts across demographic boundaries. Think of it as a science-fiction slasher flick or a deep-space old-dark-house thriller with a crew of likeably blue-collar mopes facing off against a shape-changing menace that's part axe murderer, part wild grizzly, and part serial rapist. It works because it's non-specific. But in the space of its 117 minutes, it finds what frightens you. Alien stands as a singular achievement. Still, because it was released in the age of the sequel, studio 20^th Century Fox eagerly founded a franchise on it, and the series immediately begin deconstructing itself. James Cameron's Aliens was downright reactionary, replacing the first film's working-class heroes with a bunch of Heinlein-esque space marines, transforming its boogeyman into an opposing army of boogeymen, and saddling Ripley with motherly duties, blithely undoing Alien's celebrated subversion of such tropes. In Alien³, the game was truly on: Director David Fincher straight-up murdered Ripley's new nuclear family before powering the film's narrative towards a climactic conflagration depicting a Christ-like sacrifice and unalloyed abortion metaphor. This was much more in keeping with the subtextually-rich original--but it was decidedly audience-unfriendly. It took another five years for Joss Whedon and Jean-Pierre Jeunet to stick a fork in the franchise; Alien: Resurrection was the first Alien movie that genuinely didn't seem to give a shit about Alien movies.

What Happened to Monday (2017) - Netflix

Seven Sisters
**½/****
starring Noomi Rapace, Glenn Close, Pål Sverre Hagen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Alice Stoehr The bad news manifests itself in a flurry of stock footage and newscasters' voices. "Too many people, not enough food," declares one near-future pundit. "It is the biggest crisis in human history," adds another. Dr. Nicolette Cayman, a politician so Thatcher-esque that Glenn Close plays her in pearls and a navy blue suit, helps Europe's now-federalized government institute a strict one-child policy. Her Gestapo-like Child Allocation Bureau (or "CAB") patrols city streets, threatening hidden siblings with indefinite cryogenic stasis. So far, so familiar. It's much like Soylent Green or Children of Men or any of a dozen other dystopian thrillers. But What Happened to Monday's knotty premise continues: What if, say, seven identical sisters grew up in this political climate? They could each leave the house exactly one day a week, each time assuming the same collective identity. And what if one of these sisters, while out and about, happened to disappear?

Logan Lucky (2017)

***/****
starring Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig
written by Rebecca Blunt
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Steven Soderbergh returns from a self-imposed retirement of all of four years with Logan Lucky, a heist movie so steeped in its maker's creative and commercial history that it casually makes time in its climactic moments for a newscaster to dub its working-class heroes' shenanigans "Ocean's 7/11." Begging to be read as an unnecessary but enjoyable victory lap from a filmmaker who hasn't gone away so much as temporarily opted out of the rat race of alternating between formalist exercises, crowd-pleasers, and prestige pictures, Logan Lucky sees Soderbergh working in his most amiable register--and for the most part doffing his aesthetic predilection for piss-yellow lighting--while still cycling through his pet interests of late. A polymath by nature, as evidenced by his annual viewing logs, Soderbergh more or less successfully wields Logan Lucky into a charming sampler platter of his tastes, from hitting genre story beats faithfully to realizing the smallest procedural details and celebrating sincere Americana while bemoaning its toxic corporatization.

Detroit (2017)

**½/****
starring John Boyega, Will Poulter, Algee Smith, Anthony Mackie
written by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Alex Jackson Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit is painfully afraid of controversy. It's as though Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal were given the assignment to make a film about the 1967 Algiers Motel incident and cringed their way through it, trying their best to alienate neither black nor white audiences. Hilariously, the end result has now become one of the most controversial films of the year. An essay by Jeanne Theoharis, Say Burgin, and Mary Phillips (a trio of academics in political science, history, and African American studies, respectively) recently published on the HUFFINGTON POST denounced it as "the most irresponsible and dangerous movie of the year." Angelica Jade Bastien of ROGEREBERT.COM states that she left the theatre in tears, not because of the violence so much as the "emptiness" behind the violence. And, of course, Armond White had to get his licks in, concluding, "Watching black people being brutalized seems to satisfy some warped liberal need to feel sorry." Looks like I was wrong! Black film critics, at least, seem to fucking hate this movie.

The Dark Tower (2017)

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Jackie Earle Haley
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman & Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen & Nikolaj Arcel
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Walter Chaw If I cared or knew one thing about Stephen King's revered Dark Tower series, I'd probably really hate this movie in exactly the same way I initially hated Francis Lawrence's Constantine. I was a devotee of the Vertigo sub-line of DC comics through the early-'90s--the one that produced titles like Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman", Jamie Delano's "Animal Man", Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol", and Delano/Garth Ennis's "Hellblazer", which of course formed the basis for Lawrence's picture. But I don't. Care about The Dark Tower, that is. For all that King once meant to me as a kid, it and The Stand were two of his epics I could never get into. I missed the window on Tolkien, too. And in not caring and in my complete ignorance, I like Nikolaj Arcel's The Dark Tower about as much as I like Constantine now, not needing the four or five years to come to terms with how it doesn't jibe with images and rhythms I'd conjured in my jealous nerd-dom. (I maintain, however, that if they were going to make Constantine a Yank, they should've cast Denis Leary.) In The Dark Tower, the main hero is a kid named Jake (Tom Taylor) who, one day, discovers that all those crazy dreams he's been having, which have led to all those creepy-kid drawings plastering his bedroom walls, are TRUE. Why won't you listen to Jake, adults? Obviously modelled after the kid in Last Action Hero, Jake dreams of a dark tower that is not Idris Elba that is under attack by the evil Man in Black, who is not Johnny Cash but is named Walter and is played by Matthew McConaughey. My favourite moment in the film is when Walter shows up in Jake's parents' kitchen, frying something on the stove, explaining apologetically that where he's from, there's no chicken.