Film Freak Central

Hot Docs '18: Golden Dawn Girls

***½/****
directed by Håvard Bustnes

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The eponymous Golden Dawn girls are three women connected by marriage or blood to Greece's relatively new but steadily growing Golden Dawn party. They've taken centre stage in the absence of the party's male superintendents, who are all incarcerated. (As Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes says at the outset: More on that later.) The Golden Dawn party evolved from a far-right newspaper into a fascist movement, though its affiliates rabidly resist the Nazi stigma. Nazis, they say, were German--this is Greece. Nazis were National Socialists, Golden Dawn-ers are Social Nationalists. My favourite defense comes from Dafni, mother of jailed member Panagiotis Iliopoulos, who insists that her son couldn't be a Nazi because he was born after WWII. In footage from a TV interview, Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris claims complete ignorance of this "Hitler" fellow when questioned about his "Sieg Heil" tattoo--"hail victory" simply seemed like a good message to spread via his arm. Asked why he had it written in German instead of Greek, then, he says the German font was an aesthetic preference. They have an answer for everything--never a good one, but typically one so literal-minded it shuts down discourse. Bustnes valiantly tries, over and over, to get them to budge, to confront their reflection--the image they present to the world.

Hot Docs '18: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

**/****
directed by Morgan Neville

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda It says a lot about the ideological thinness of the Resistance™ against the current American administration that the basic dignity of a lifelong conservative-values Republican gets elevated to the most rarefied heights in Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor?. Though nominally a celebration of the life and storied career of children's broadcaster Fred Rogers, anchored in present-day talking-head interviews with collaborators and friends that threaten at times to bludgeon the delicate and achingly sincere archival footage of Rogers's show "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood", Neville's film has a bit more teeth as a manifesto for how children's educational programming that resists the trends of busyness, noise, and violence can function as a form of public service, instilling values like neighbourly stewardship and mutual respect.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw In the Nineties, DC comics resurrected a bunch of titles under their "Vertigo" aegis, aiming for if not more sophisticated, at least more mature storytelling, like Neil Gaiman's enduring, literary "Sandman" and Grant Morrison's still-unparalleled run on "Doom Patrol" (starting with issue 19). They were a re-entry for me into comics after a childhood collecting all things "Archie" and a few things "X-Men" and "Spider-Man". In the fifth issue of Vertigo's "Animal Man" reboot, Morrison writes a one-off called "The Coyote Gospel" in which Wile E Coyote (essentially) is maimed and murdered in any number of ways, only to painfully regenerate and be maimed and murdered again. I like to imagine sometimes the agony of Peter Parker's Uncle Ben, resurrected in endless franchise reboots for the purpose of being killed, Prometheus-like, over and over again. There's a pathos to it, I think, in the Camus existentialist sense: this emotional detachment where it's sort of impossible to tell if mom died today or, you know, maybe it was yesterday, one can't be too sure. Maybe pathos isn't the right word. Closer to the point is that it's impossible to really feel anything for characters who cannot die; impossible to feel tension or fear for things that cannot be harmed. Superhero comic books and Marvel films by extension broadly simulate the tenets explored by French Existentialism: alienation, the absurd, the lie of freedom, the experience of dread and boredom. The only MCU entry self-aware enough to notice this to date is Scott Derrickson's Dr. Strange. Fitting that Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) features so prominently in Avengers: Infinity War.

The Commuter (2018) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Liam Neeson, Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Sam Neill
screenplay by Byron Willinger & Philip De Blasi and Ryan Engle
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I love a good train movie. Most of them since the publication of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express have combined elements of the drawing-room mystery with comedy, and I guess my problem with The Commuter is that it's more perplexing and silly than intriguing and witty. In addition, by taking place aboard a commuter train, it clarifies why long-distance trains are the genre's preferred setting, because not only do the latter provide, with their dining cars and their sleeping compartments, a richer visual backdrop, but they also don't have to keep stopping every few minutes to let people out, imposing commercial breaks on the narrative. In short, long-distance trains are cinema, commuter trains are TV. That's probably a derogatory and even borderline-meaningless distinction now, yet The Commuter is ephemeral in a way that B-movies often aren't but episodic television of the franchised-to-death sort that keeps networks afloat these days typically is. I have this abstract wish that it was "better," mainly because this is Liam Neeson's purported departure from the action genre, the moribund mainstream division of which he single-handedly revived. He deserves a less anticlimactic send-off.

The Breakfast Club (1985) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers Necessity is the mother of invention, and The Breakfast Club's iconic plot--aped so often it's become a modern myth, like Rashomon--was designed to ease John Hughes into directing and keep the budget low. The script wasn't just a formality, though, proof of that being his refusal to cast Jimmie "J.J." Walker (then in his mid-30s and a frequent passenger on "The Love Boat") as Bender in exchange for financing from Canadian dentists; he was still able to draw a line between artistic compromise--which had given shape to the material--and selling out. Nor was it some cynical "calling-card," unlike those one-and-done horror movies career-minded filmmakers like making to get their foot in the door. Yes, The Breakfast Club wound up capitalizing on a bull market for teen fare, but Hughes had an honest interest in telling stories about youth. Proof of that being his screenplay for National Lampoon's Vacation, doctored by director Harold Ramis to shift the dominant P.O.V. from the kids in the backseat (as in the LAMPOON piece that inspired it, Hughes's "Vacation '58") to the paterfamilias. Through a mixture of savvy and kismet, Hughes had crafted the platonic ideal of a directorial debut for himself, and then something funny happened: the comparatively epic Sixteen Candles became his first feature instead.

Film Freak Central Does the 2018 Ann Arbor Film Festival

by Alice Stoehr "I can't imagine what you must think of me!" laughed Cecelia Condit. The audience had just seen her groundbreaking shorts Beneath the Skin (1981) and Possibly in Michigan (1983 (left)), plus a swath of her 21^st-century work, and she seemed a bit sheepish about her own films' morbid sense of humour. Between the murders, masks, and nursery rhymes, a streak of dark whimsy runs through them, orienting her as a woman in the world. Condit's a garrulous storyteller in life as in her art and was forthright about the layers of autobiography in her work. Annie Lloyd (2008) shows her mother pressing leaves between pages at the end of her life. Within a Stone's Throw (2012) has Condit herself hiking Irish hills in the aftermath of her mother's death. Images of carrying and collecting recur across these films, a motif that suggests both affection and the assertion of control. These are rough-hewn fables that plumb the possibilities of video.

A Quiet Place (2018)

*/****
starring Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck and John Krasinski
directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw John Krasinski's A Quiet Place is exactly the type of inoffensive, about-nothing movie full of beautiful people and empty jumps that is popular for a short while specifically for its yawning blandness. It's a horror film that acts as a security blanket: the world may be over, but aren't they a cute couple? Everything done in this movie has been done before, sometimes better, sometimes worse, meaning essentially that the horror audience has already figured out what the solution is ten minutes in while it takes the idiots in the movie another hour or so. That's too bad. A Quiet Place is so unmoored from anything like subtext or complexity that without a keenly intelligent and efficient script, its seams start to show almost immediately. Yet the instinct is to forgive it for a while because the cast is exceptional; the chemistry between Krasinski's paterfamilias Lee and wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski's real-life wife) is effortless and true, and the kids, Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Wonderstruck's Millicent Simmonds), are attractive enough that it wouldn't be entirely awesome to see them murdered by space mantises. Well, it would, but, despite an early development, A Quiet Place isn't that kind of movie.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

**½/****
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw There's a Sumo-wrestling match in the middle of Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. It doesn't have anything to do with anything else in the movie except that it sets up one of Anderson's whip-pans to another character in attendance, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). The sequence is uncomfortable because it feels like there's about to be a joke at Sumo's expense--Sumo being, of course, a pastime steeped in ritual and history for the Japanese people. It's like if an American football game appeared for a moment in the middle of a Japanese film: we're about to get pissed on, guys, amiright? But then there's not a joke. Or if there is a joke, it's that Sumo itself is largely inscrutable outside a very specific cultural context and that in the United States, it's those giant foam suits they make members of the crowd wear during halftime of basketball games. Many of the film's depictions of Japanese culture--including a series of plays on the best-known Nihonga paintings, such as Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa"--are these punchlines held in pregnant abeyance: we anticipate something off-colour or ill-considered to find that perhaps the only thing happening is a certain blithe, meaningfully meaningless cultural appropriation. It's not "okay," I guess, but saying so lands for me the way that criticism of Sofia Coppola's erasure of a slave narrative from her The Beguiled (or, more to the point, her portrayal of Japan in Lost in Translation) does. I don't think Anderson should have set Isle of Dogs in Japan. And I was never offended that his doing so is the result of his particular brand of twee solipsism. I don't know that anyone like Coppola or Anderson could make anything different. I'm also not Japanese, so my discomfort is complicated by my upbringing in a traditional Chinese household where the Japanese were not held in, shall we say, high esteem.