Film Freak Central

Fantasia Fest '18: Tokyo Vampire Hotel

**½/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Bill Chambers This feature-length truncation of a 6½-hour Amazon Japan TV series finds kitsch provocateur Sion Sono presiding over another apocalypse, as gun-crazy vampire clan the Corvins trap young Japanese singles inside their Technicolor hotel "for one-hundred years" while the world outside allegedly becomes ash. Tokyo Vampire Hotel is unconventional, to say the least, though what struck me as its most audacious flourish--Sion's credit and the movie's title appearing 42 minutes into this 142-minute film--might just be an overlooked remnant of an individual episode. Believe it or not, shearing over four hours from the running time doesn't seem to have helped clarify an epic and obviously convoluted narrative, in which the centuries-long feud between the Corvins and the, yes, Draculas comes to a head in 2021 (a significant year in that it will either make or break America) on the 22^nd birthday of Manami (Ami Tomite), who was fed eternal blood or some such at birth, making her a delicacy among vampirekind hotly pursued by members of both clans--including K (fashion model Kaho), a kind of Terminator vampire whose "come with me if you want to live" proposition does not put the hysterical Manami at ease. Sion distils all this grade-A nonsense to its exploitable elements (sex and violence, not necessarily in that order), resulting in an almost totally sensory experience; an opening title card beseeches the viewer to play it loud, "even if you're using headphones," which is great advice if you want the sustained feeling of an ice-cream headache. Yeah, I don't know what to say about Tokyo Vampire Hotel, and I'm disappointed that Manami's backstory, exemplified by the culturally-loaded image of her shaving off her long black hair in an act of rebellion, never really merges with her present-day damsel-in-distressdom to create a whole person. Perhaps the picture's masterstroke is that it turns into a painstaking homage to Brian De Palma's Scarface--albeit one set subversively in a vagina--so gradually you don't even notice until it's almost in the rearview. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Selection 2018

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

***/****
starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin
written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw As the title flatly states, Mission: Impossible: Fallout (hereafter Fallout), the sixth instalment in our very own Jackie Chan's signature series, will be about Ethan Hunt's (Tom Cruise) emotional baggage, earned over twenty-plus years of saving the world from threats foreign, domestic, and auteur. The main personal casualty for Hunt is the disintegration of his marriage to Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who must remain a "ghost" so that she doesn't suffer the, yes, fallout from Ethan's hero work. She checks in every once in a while, Hunt's teammate Luther (Ving Rhames) tells Ethan's new flame, former MI6 agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson). It's what keeps Ethan going. Accordingly, Fallout starts with an apocalyptic dream of Julia in the hands of maddog terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris)--the type of dream James Cameron used so effectively in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where everyone turns to charcoal and flies apart. It's important to focus in on all of this because Fallout is about a very specific element of the myth of masculinity, this romanticizing of sacrifice and suffering that men must go through in order to protect the women in their lives. The best part of Martin Campbell's extremely good Casino Royale is when fatale Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) brings Bond (Daniel Craig) back from the dead and his first sentence is spent asking if she's okay. There's a scene like that at the end of Fallout as well when Hunt, back from the dead, apologizes to Julia for everything. It's the sentiment and the situation that makes men in the audience spring a manly leak. Hunt--even his name is a primordial gender assignation--is the avatar for male expectation, which casts his heroics in an odd light, I think: fantasies of male heroism played against grandiose, extravagant, paranoid delusions. I don't know now if I'm talking about Cruise or Hunt. Same, same.

Fantasia Fest '18: Rondo

ZERO STARS/****
written and directed by Drew Barnhardt

by Walter Chaw Hypehante Drew Barnhardt's sophomore feature Rondo is vile, amateurish garbage that fails largely because it's so pleased with itself. It features narration ripped off in style and intent from Todd Field's Little Children, of all things, giving its set-up a kind of arch distance, but what begins as moderately clever reveals itself to be a desperate way to provide exposition when dialogue, character work, and camera movement have failed. Rondo follows Boone (Grant Benjamin Leibowitz), a junkie crashing on his sister Jill's (Breanna Otts) couch, visiting a sex party presided over by Lurdell (Reggie De Morton), who carefully enunciates his Pornhub-menu monologue to the participants before it's revealed that this sex party is, wait for it, actually a murder party. Jill gets involved. Jill and Boone's former vet dad (Michael Vasicek) gets involved, albeit briefly. And then there's some crap cribbed from that old Tom Savini book about doing gore effects on the cheap before Jill strips down to her underwear and starts acting like one of those models in an NRA video. Rondo is a particularly low form of exploitation that asks two different women to talk about fetishes before being summarily objectified, murders two women in particularly fetishized ways, and pushes the proposition that black men are violent and scary. It might want to argue that having one of the scary black men married to a white woman alleviates that charge--except that said white woman is psychotic. That it's poor in every technical regard (add the editing, which renders the physics of a bathtub murder nonsensical) is no crime in and of itself; the real problem is the movie's aggressive no-nothing attitudes towards what it's putting in front of an audience. It will argue that it has nothing to say and means only to entertain--which, nowadays especially, is a red flag to pay very close attention to what it's saying. Dispiriting, enervating stuff. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Fantasia Underground

The Equalizer 2; The First Purge; Superfly (2018)

THE EQUALIZER 2
**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Melissa Leo
written by Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

THE FIRST PURGE
**/****
starring Y'lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade, Marisa Tomei
screenplay by James DeMonaco
directed by Gerard McMurray

SuperFly
**½/****
starring Trevor Jackson, Jason Mitchell, Michael Kenneth Williams, Lex Scott Davis
written by Alex Tse, based on the screenplay by Phillip Fenty
directed by Director X

by Walter Chaw McCall (Denzel Washington) is Batman. He has a tragic past and a tortured rationale, a sense of morality in a fallen world that aligns him with the hardboiled detectives proliferating American popular culture in the immediate aftermath of WWII. He was Dirty Harry Callahan or Paul Kersey in the late-'70s-into-'80s. No coincidence Death Wish has already gotten its own remake. No coincidence, either, a series interested in a theoretical near-future in which a day of mayhem is sanctioned by the government in order to facilitate a "purging" of intra-cultural aggression has received four instalments and an upcoming television series. The latest, The First Purge, serves as a "prequel" to the events of the first film. It's also, full confession, the first of these movies that I've seen. I thought the premise was interesting, don't get me wrong, I just didn't really have the stomach for it. I feel the same way about that new Mr. Rogers documentary, or The Cove. The world is awful. I get it. There's a limit to how often I want to be reminded of what we've lost. What's curious about The First Purge (and the Superfly reboot) is not that all its heroes (save one) are black and all its villains are white, but rather that its relationship to something like The Equalizer 2 mimics the relationship between "The Cosby Show" and "A Different World". One provides a kind of cross-cultural reassurance that minorities are interested in the restoration of the ruling culture; the other understands the ruling culture was never threatened in the first place. Sure, subcultures evolve in the shadow of the social order, but the social order itself remains implacable and immutable.

Fantasia Festival '18: Lifechanger

**/****
written and directed by Justin McConnell

by Bill Chambers Emily (Elitsa Bako) lies naked in bed next to her own desiccated corpse. She returns home to a fretting boyfriend (Adam Buller) who says she's been missing for days. Against her wishes he calls the police to tell them she's returned, so she sticks a corkscrew in his neck. She's already beginning to decay, though. When Detective Freddie Ransone (Steve Kasan) pops 'round to see whether she's turned up yet, she takes the opportunity to snatch herself a new meat-cage: his. It's a lather-rinse-repeat pattern the movie soon establishes, as unidentified lifeform "Drew" identity-hops around the city at Christmastime. Lifechanger is a bit like The Hidden without anyone on screen trying to hunt down the alien, whose materialist appetites are here replaced by lovesickness. Drew retains his personal memories in addition to inheriting those of his hosts, although he doesn't really have any use for the latter. We know this partly due to Drew's narration (read by horror mainstay Bill Oberst Jr.)--a cue perhaps taken from Peter Watts's fabulous short story "The Things," which gives voice to the shapeshifter of John Carpenter's The Thing. By virtue of this innovation and all the mortal angst he expresses Drew becomes the most human character on screen, but then again his thoughts do tend to be dismayingly prosaic and expository for something not of this earth.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Edward Furlong
screenplay by James Cameron & William Wisher
directed by James Cameron

by Bryant Frazer I remember the summer of 1991, when Terminator 2: Judgment Day landed in movie theatres with all the fuck-you noise, power, and momentum of a Ford Freightliner crashing from an L.A. thoroughfare overpass into a concrete spillway below. It was the year of Operation Desert Storm and the ending of the Cold War, the year LAPD officers were videotaped beating Rodney King. With the release of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" still a few months away, latter-day cock-rocker Axl Rose still led the most popular band in America. It had been a pretty good year for women in film, even if the material was grim--Jodie Foster helped open The Silence of the Lambs at #1 in February and Davis/Sarandon kick-started a thousand feminist (and anti-feminist) thinkpieces when Thelma & Louise arrived in May. But the main movie event of the summer was the testosterone-laden sequel to The Terminator. Serenaded by a hit single from Axl's Guns N' Roses, heralded as the most expensive movie ever made, and stuffed with apocalyptic imagery, T2 roared onto screens, smacked you upside the head, and stole your lunch money, then smirked about it as it strolled away.

Fantasia Festival '18: Cam

**/****
screenplay by Isa Mazzei
directed by Daniel Goldhaber

by Walter Chaw Daniel Goldhaber's e-take on the doppelgänger mythos via Harlan Ellison's "Shatterday," Clive Barker's "Mortal Remains," and that second-season episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" called "The Case of Mr. Pelham," asks what could happen if the Internet developed the ability to clone anyone once they uploaded enough extant video footage. Of course this is already mostly possible, and of course this new technology's main utility has been creating celebrity-fakes porn--which Cam addresses, though not well. It looks good and hero Lola ("She was a showgirl") is game, but while it threatens at one point to do something like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, it ends up not doing very much with its premise at all. I did like the idea of Lola (Madeline Brewer) getting more viewers by doing snuff porn, but then her identity is stolen by a sluttier A.I. and the rest of the movie neglects to delve too deeply into existential issues, the ins and outs of human kink and what exactly it is that drives these young women into this particular line of work. Cam is ultimately only really interesting for how well it replicates the prurience of the live-chat experience. In that sense, it inspires the same sort of questions that actually watching and participating in a live chat would inspire: are these girls "real"? Are they available? What relationship does this have to the old Paris, Texas peep-show environment? And just what is it about my male wiring that makes watching a girl sit on her bed, pretending to be interested in me, erotic? Cam owes a lot to Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion, down to the play-acting and aspects of the production design, but it doesn't share much of its underneath. There's a good short film here trapped in the body of this feature. For his part, Goldhaber demonstrates some serious chops, and Brewer, armed with an already long list of television credits, is fantastic. I'm curious to see what they do with a more ambitious project. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Cheval Noir Competition

Fantasia Festival '18: The Vanished

**½/****
written and directed by Lee Chang-hee

by Bill Chambers A hit in its home country of South Korea earlier this year, The Vanished is a nominal ghost story in which a high-profile corpse disappears from the morgue. On the case is Detective Woo Jung-sik (Kim Sang-kyung), a washed-up alcoholic with the requisite Tragic Past (his fiancée was killed a decade earlier in a hit-and-run), which has put a pretty big chip on his shoulder for perps who might be getting away with murder. Like, say, college professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo), the "trophy" husband of the missing dead woman (Kim Hee-ae), who was the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Woo thinks Park killed his wife--which he did, using a fantasy anaesthetic untraceable after death--and has a reason to hide the body. Park, meanwhile, secretly fields taunts from his late wife that convince him she somehow survived. Because Park has connections, Woo is working against the clock to prove his guilt, and what unfolds does so over the course of one dark and stormy night in something resembling real time. The Vanished looks to be a fairly straightforward remake of a Spanish thriller unseen by me, Oriol Paulo's 2012 The Body, which is surprising since its increasingly byzantine revenge plot feels uniquely South Korean (think Oldboy lite), as does the fluid mix of tones and genres. It's also fairly engrossing and unpredictable, the satisfying albeit more pretentious version of John McTiernan's forgotten whodunit Basic, in which John Travolta tries to solve a murder on a Panama military base during a hurricane: Like a lot of SK cinema, it gets a bit bathetic in the homestretch with its distended mourning of fictional characters who don't really represent anything other than pieces on a chessboard. That being said, the whole thing might have more gravity if baby-faced Kim Sang-kyung better matched his character's shabby profile. Some time's gone by since he played the hotshot young partner in Bong Joon-ho's police procedural Memories of Murder, but evidently not enough. A simple solution might've been not to ascribe so much world-weariness to him and instead show that the grief driving Woo isn't something that's made him old, but rather frozen him heartbreakingly in amber. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Selection 2018

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (2018)

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, Kathy Driscoll-Mohler
screenplay by Gus Van Sant, based on the book by John Callahan
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Angelo Muredda "I'm a sucker for quadriplegic movies," VARIETY critic Peter Debruge wrote of Gus Van Sant's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot from Sundance, before criticism from disabled activists apparently inspired his editors to do some quiet and uncredited post-publication editing. Whatever its merits as a biopic of an outsider artist--dubious, given the cuddliness offensive of Danny Elfman's insistent score--or a "quadriplegic movie" (minimal, given that its subject, Oregon cartoonist John Callahan, was actually a paraplegic), Van Sant's return to movies people might conceivably care about is at least not so homogenous and tired as that backhanded praise suggests. It's hard to shake the feeling that the film is the belated two-birds-with-one-stone fulfilment of a business deal with Callahan, who died in 2010, and Robin Williams, who first optioned the story and once intended to play Callahan himself. Despite the whiff of old Tupperware leftovers that hangs about it, the film is pleasantly rumpled in the tradition of Van Sant's more interesting work--predictably boring in its rehashing of disability clichés, from casting to writing, yes, but formally unusual, and committed to the repetitive and potentially un-cinematic bootstrap work of self-improvement and forgiveness that movies about addicts and accident survivors tend to sail through.

Fantasia Festival '18: Blue My Mind

**/****
written and directed by Lisa Brühlmann

by Bill Chambers 15-year-old Mia (Luna Wedler) is struggling to fit in at a new school, feeling suffocated at home, and hormonal in the usual ways--physically lashing out at her mother (Regula Grauwiller), smoking, flirting on the Internet with men who should know better. She manages to break the ice with the cool kids by seconding their idea to take the school field trip to Switzerland's version of Coney Island, and earns the respect of pack leader Gianna (Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen) with a thrill-seeking attitude that in fact portends a self-destructive streak. Mia's body is changing; it starts with her toes growing together and a sudden appetite for the tropical fish in her mother's tank. Whether to feel desirable or because she senses that time is running out, she becomes promiscuous, but when she finally meets up with her Humbert Humbert (Nicola Perot) he shows a paternal concern about the mottling on her legs that sends her fleeing, while a subsequent "bounce" (the movie's--and, presumably, Swiss German millenials'--slang for sex) with a popular boy (David Oberholzer) leaves her unsatisfied. Though Blue My Mind is bound to alarm parents of modern teenagers, like David Cronenberg's gruesome remake of The Fly it's less a horror movie than it is a drama about prematurely waking up to one's mortality--although the bittersweet finish is more hopeful and casts an even wider metaphorical net. (I suspect the picture will resonate with trans viewers, or at least that it aims to.) Wedler and Holthuizen mature convincingly on screen together, their lovely chemistry filling out and filling in a relationship that is all too typical of director Lisa Brühlmann's sketchy screenplay. There are ambiguities, for instance, concerning Mia's provenance and how much her mom and dad know, but when her parents discreetly depart from the narrative, despite the unlikelihood that they'd abandon a daughter so clearly in the throes of a depressive episode (this part seems like it was concocted by an actual bitter teenager), it reduces those unanswered questions to so much pointless teasing. Perhaps, like its obvious inspiration The Metamorphosis, Blue My Mind was only meant to be a short story, and ironically endured growing pains of its own. Brühlmann has enough stunning images in her, including an especially striking one of a flooded apartment, that it's a shame she defaults to a muted, pseudodocumentary European aesthetic, which exposes some feeble writing to the harsh light of interrogation instead of safely locating the film in the realm of dream logic. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Camera Lucida

You Were Never Really Here (2018) - Blu-ray + Digital

****/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Lynne Ramsay, based on the book by Jonathan Ames
directed by Lynne Ramsay

by Walter Chaw It opens with a child's voice saying that he must do better. It's dark. The first image is of a man trying to breathe inside a plastic bag. This is your everyday Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), and this is how director Lynne Ramsay lets us know that he's disturbed. We know he's dangerous, too, because she shows him cleaning the head of a ball-peen hammer and flushing bloody towels down a hotel-room toilet in a visceral call-back to the nightmare's resolution in The Conversation. All of You Were Never Really Here is a nightmare: a vision of the United States presented by a foreign artist who sees America in the truest way since Wim Wenders's pictures about violence, Edward Hopper (whom Ramsey uses as a touchstone, too), and the state of the American dream state. When she evokes "Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1" (a.k.a. Whistler's Mother), capturing Joe's mother (Judith Roberts) in profile through a window as her son goes to collect some bounty, it's sad in the ineffable way that great art can be in just a pass, a glance. Ramsey's picture is about the toll of violence on the violator and the victim in equal measure. In moments, she recreates Michael Mann's urban veneers--nowhere more so than during the title sequence, whose soundtrack evokes not only that halcyon period in the '80s when Tangerine Dream seemed to be scoring all the best movies, but also the band specifically in how their best scores were about the repetitive urgency of work. Jonny Greenwood's music for You Were Never Really Here provides subtext, texture, and emotional geography. It reminds of Jon Brion's work on Punch-Drunk Love. In a lot of ways, that PT Anderson film, in its discussion of a disturbed and volatile young man finding purpose and acceptance, is this picture's closest analogue.

Fantasia Festival '18: An Introduction

by Bill Chambers While I was composing this "curtain-raiser," a fellow critic tweeted that she'd been offered press credentials for an upcoming film festival but didn't see the point of accepting them, since travel and lodging would inevitably cost more than she would make reporting on the festival. Montreal's venerable genre-film festival Fantasia, now in its 22^nd year, has attempted to solve this kind of dilemma and broaden awareness of its brand by inviting online outlets to view the majority of its slate remotely via streaming links. Obviously "screeners" are not a new concept and have for the last few years helped sites like ours round out our coverage of various festivals, but nothing has ever been attempted on this scale, with most of the films accessible via a centralized hub. We're proud to have been invited to participate in this experiment, because with Telluride and TIFF hitting so soon after, and with travel being a challenge even for those of us who live relatively close to Montreal, it's improbable that we'll ever get the chance to attend Fantasia in person. It's something that had always given me, personally, a bigger case of FOMO than Cannes, because if we have a niche, Fantasia fulfills it.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

***½/****
starring Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Armie Hammer
written and directed by Boots Riley

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in Boots Riley's hyphenate debut Sorry to Bother You--it happens in the last third of the picture--that rang so pure and true to me I felt adrenalized, known, inspired. The best art does that: locates that juncture between expression and activism. I felt it during Get Out as I began to recognize the parties where I'd been the only minority guest and somehow also the guest of honor; I hope to feel it one day while watching something about the Asian-American experience. I'd always wondered about the black community coalescing around bootlegs of Seventies kung fu movies, but now I understand it as I find myself vibing to Janelle Monae's and Childish Gambino's energetic, pithy counterculture activism. Sorry to Bother You belongs to this moment of crisis. It's a withering indictment of capitalism and the white ruling class in the United States as it's metastasized into a machine that's only ever interested in consuming its weakest, most underrepresented members. The running joke involves prison/work programs dressed up as a way for entire subsistence, formerly middle-class families to sell their lives to the proverbial "company store." "WorryFree" promises freedom in endless toil. The sign over the entrance to Auschwitz and on the gate at Dachau promised something similar with "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Sets You Free"). In this way, the for-profit prison system in the land of the free is presented for mockery and shame. The idea that the corporate structure in the United States is akin to a prison is raised, too. If films are an empathy machine, this one is the "uncomfortable recognition generator" piece of it. These past eighteen months have been sobering for a lot of my white friends. Sorry to Bother You is a summary of what, until Trump, was easy to sweep under the carpet.