Film Freak Central

Universal Soldier (1992) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Ally Walker, Jerry Orbach
screenplay by Richard Rothstein & Christopher Leitch and Dean Devlin
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bryant Frazer You might expect an early-1990s T2 knock-off starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren to be a bit of a romp, but Universal Soldier is pretty dark from the get-go. It opens with a cut-rate Vietnam War-movie pastiche that has Sergeant Andrew Scott (Lundgren) going on a My Lai-style rampage, stitching human ears into a necklace, executing innocent civilians, and decrying the horrified American soldiers around him as traitors before shooting them, too. Private Luc Devreux (Van Damme) manages to jam his bayonet into Scott's gut, ending his murderous spree but earning a lethal volley of return fire in the bargain. Both men end up bleeding out in the mud before the U.S. military spirits their bodies away and declares them AWOL. Fast-forward 20 years or so, and the government has figured out a way to revive and power up dead soldiers and repurpose them as an unbeatable tactical force. We see these so-called "universal soldiers," including Scott and Deveraux, working as a unit to take out a group of terrorists in an action set-piece that was, impressively, shot at the Hoover Dam. All goes well for a while, until both Scott and Deveraux start recalling their former lives--and remembering they don't like each other very much.

Strangers in Strange Lands: FFC Interviews Andrew Ahn

One goal for minority filmmakers is to no longer be considered minority filmmakers. Failing that, it would be keen to be asked about craft rather than minority identity. As an Asian-American born in the United States of immigrant parents, I'm still trying to sort all that out for myself. There's an Ani DiFranco lyric that's stuck with me from those halcyon grad-school days where she was a constant point of reference for me (and now you know just enough about me). It goes, "Every time I move, I make a woman's movement." Yeah, preach it. Who the fuck knows what we represent to the ruling culture? I'm just over here making shit.

SDAFF '19: To the Ends of the Earth

***½/****
starring Atsuko Maeda, Ryo Kase, Shota Sometani, Adiz Radjabov
written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw Kiyoshi Kurosawa's still best known to Western audiences, if he's known at all, as one of the progenitors of the Japanese J-Horror movement, which gained traction in the United States in the years immediately following 9/11. Once the U.S. joined Japan as an industrialized nation experiencing the detonation of a large-scale weapon of mass destruction over a populated area, I think it also took on Japan's cinematic mechanisms for coping: nihilistic horror films where evil comes with neither warning nor explanation--and city-levelling kaiju eiga in the form of a nearly-uninterrupted glut of superhero movies. Kurosawa's twin masterpieces, Cure and Pulse, deal in issues of technophobia and isolation with a painterly eye and a poet's patience. They are among the most frightening films of the last quarter-century, proving perpetually current as our world, and our reality with it, continues to fray. His movies used to feel like cautionary tales; now they feel like prophecy. Pulse, especially, with its tale of ghosts in the machine and airplanes falling from the sky, throbs with an insistent, hopeless melancholy that speaks to the essential loneliness of existence. It's as important a work in its way as anything by Camus or Sartre.

SDAFF '19: Stray Dolls

***/****
starring Geetanjali Thapa, Olivia DeJonge, Robert Aramayo, Cynthia Nixon
written by Charlotte Rabate & Sonejuhi Sinha
directed by Sonejuhi Sinha

by Walter Chaw Its title calling back to both Akira Kurosawa's seminal noir Stray Dog and Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang's miserablist masterpiece Stray Dogs, Sonejuhi Sinha's Stray Dolls would fit most comfortably on a double-bill with Sean Baker's The Florida Project. Like it, Stray Dolls is set almost entirely in the impoverished world of permanent-residence motels, where the desperate do their best to grab their slice of the pie. Unlike Baker's film, Sinha's is essentially a crime movie centred on two room-cleaners: rough-and-tumble Dallas (Olivia DeJonge) and her roomie, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant Riz (Geetanjali Thapa), from whom Dallas immediately steals her belongings and holds them as ransom. The price? Riz must steal something from a guest's room that Dallas can turn over for a quick buck. The stakes are high for Riz, who, as we see in the first of the film's cynical turns, has her passport confiscated by her employer, Una (Cynthia Nixon), who immediately, surreptitiously shreds it. Riz is well and truly on her own, more than she knows, even: marooned in a strange land without allies or papers.

SDAFF '19: Lucky Grandma

**/****
starring Tsai Chin, Corey Ha, Michael Tow, Woody Fu
written by Angela Cheng & Sasie Sealy
directed by Sasie Sealy

by Walter Chaw There's no arguing with the craft of Sasie Sealey's Lucky Grandma, nor are there any aspersions to cast on the diversity of its crew and the inspiration of its funding as the million-dollar winner of an AT&T- and Tribeca-sponsored screenplay contest. But its backstory is ultimately more interesting than the film itself.  In the end, it feels like a support system for the star-making performance of its octogenarian lead, Tsai Chin (The Joy Luck Club); it's not serious enough to make much of an emotional impact, was never meant to be an action film, and is just amusing enough to force comparisons with Stephen Chow's depictions of bad-ass grandmothers. In other words, Lucky Grandma sort of trundles along for a while and then stops. Along the way, however, there's that central performance, married to a few fine supporting turns (especially ex-basketballer Corey Ha as a gentle-souled bodyguard) and an end product that looks like it had a budget many times its actual budget. There's promise here as a feature debut.

SDAFF '19: Driveways

***½/****
starring Hong Chau, Lucas Jaye, Christine Ebersole, Brian Dennehy
written by Hannah Bos & Paul Thureen
directed by Andrew Ahn

by Walter Chaw A sentimental film neither cheap nor schmaltzy, Andrew Ahn's sophomore feature Driveways is a rare beast in more ways than that. It's a measured character piece featuring standout performances from Hong Chau, Brian Dennehy, and a kid, Lucas Jaye, who, in his unaffectedness and ease, is one to watch. Along the way, the picture is also a calm conversation about racial tension, economic privation, and mental illness in these United States, following a woman, Kathy (Chau), who's investigating a house left to her by a sister recently passed. It's tempting to dismiss anything that wears its heart so prominently on its sleeve (and so uncomfortable to look at directly sometimes for all the guilelessness), but you come to find that it's maybe the kind of palliative cure for the collective melancholy ailing us right now. Driveways doesn't condescend or try to teach something, it simply exists alongside its characters and gives us, and them, the space to recognize each other. In that, in this day of big entertainments and embittered satires, it's something like a unicorn.

SDAFF '19: Just 6.5

Metri Shesh Va Nim
****/****
starring Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Parinaz Izadyar, Hooman Kiaee
written and directed by Saeed Roustayi

by Walter Chaw With only ten minutes left in its running time, Saeed Roustayi's Just 6.5 introduces a brief musical sting in a film that, up to that moment, had relied entirely on diegetic audio and long, rapid-fire monologues delivered at high volume and intensity for its soundtrack. Said cue highlights erstwhile villain Nasser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) drawing a line in the sand in a matter concerning the dispensation of a house he's bought for his parents. It's the fulcrum on which the entire film rests: not whether or not the Iranian state will confiscate a home, but the level of desperation that drives the lower classes into crime--and then the addictive nature of wealth that makes it impossible to retire from crime. As Nasser confesses when asked why he didn't quit while he was ahead, "My eyes were still hungry." The whole film is about the question of class and the possibility of ever climbing from one to the next. Everything in Just 6.5 is a barter at the world's late-capitalism bazaar. For instance, the crazed narco cop on Nasser's tail, Samad (Payman Maadi of A Separation), is dangled a bribe by drug lord Nasser that would essentially vault him into a different circle. It's a boost he needs, we gather from a few tossed-off comments about his kid and a phone call he gets at the worst time that he has to take while the whole world is crowding in around him. He doesn't take it because of "his honour," but he might as well have. It makes no difference.

SDAFF '19: Straight Up

**½/****
starring Katie Findlay, James Sweeney, Randall Park, Betsy Brandt
written and directed by James Sweeney

by Walter Chaw James Sweeney's hyphenate debut Straight Up is a dense, screwball, and occasionally irritating though ultimately rewarding wall of words swirling around and between erstwhile lovers Rory (Katie Findlay) and Todd (Sweeney, a triple-threat here) as they negotiate standard relationship stuff like dating and cohabitation--and not-so-standard romcom fare like Todd's apparent asexuality (which is possibly homosexuality). In its antic vibe and its characters' strategy of obscuring their feelings behind shoals of patter, Straight Up most reminds of Hal Hartley's work. Todd has a thing about fluids, considers sex embarrassing and/or disgusting, and has interests obscure enough--and opinions abrasive enough--that he's having trouble finding someone who will tolerate him, let alone like him. Enter Rory, who, while enjoying sex fine, thank you, talks the same way, thinks the same way, and finds most of Todd's peccadillos to be charming.

SDAFF '19: A French Woman

*/****
written and directed by Kim Hee-jung

by Walter Chaw Kim Hee-jung's A French Woman seems curiously of a piece with other recent films about dislocation and loss, such as Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night for one, Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In for another--works at times suffocatingly pretentious but each possessed of pockets of real beauty and the occasional insight. Denis's film works the best of these, largely for the invisibility of its direction. Calling attention to oneself as a director is a high concept that can work sometimes; more often, it's a tactic that neuters emotional involvement, turning the film into an intellectual exercise and a trainspotting diversion. A French Woman follows Mira (Kim Hojung) on the worst night of her life, as she learns in the middle of a crowded Parisian restaurant that her husband's been unfaithful. She leaves to compose herself and suddenly finds herself transported back to a day some twenty years in the past when she first left Korea to pursue life and love in Paris.

SDAFF '19: An Introduction

by Walter Chaw I'm statistically past the midway point, alive for more years than I will be alive for again, and I've spent most of my time denying, being embarrassed by, often hating, who I am. I was born in Colorado in 1973, raised in downtown Golden in a Norman Rockwell postcard of an existence. I walked to school, walked to the little silversmith store my dad owned when it was over, earned pennies at the barbershop on the corner where the mayor, Frank, operated the first chair. I got my money shining shoes and catching flies in the little plastic bags my dad used to put little gems in for his customers.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

***/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it's based, Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It's not unlike Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn't just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it's impossible to read Lee's sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it's impossible to read Stephen King's Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick's The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film's Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny's mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he's played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who's held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you're pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

Red Heat (1988) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O'Ross
screenplay by Harry Kleiner & Walter Hill and Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Walter Hill

by Bryant Frazer The first, pre-credits scene of Red Heat takes place in a Russian banya, a steam bath where hulking, Vulcanian workers in grimy T-shirts labour to shovel wood and coal into massive stoves that keep the water hot and the room steamy. The camera follows a blue-eyed man as he steps into the room, assuming his POV as he surveys the tableau. A whole section of the space is dedicated to barely-clad muscled men pumping iron, and the camera lingers on them. It pans slowly across the room before finding a group of nymphs bathing au naturel, zooming in and reframing, finally deciding it's not interested in them. The blue-eyed man turns his head, catching sight of a figure across the room. It's Schwarzenegger, about one square foot of fabric shy of nudity, striding confidently past the bathing beauties before stepping up into a side chamber and disappearing again into the haze. The next shot catches Arnold in medium close-up, tilting lazily from his calves all the way up his chiselled torso, until it frames him in flattering low-angle portraiture. He is squinting, and he is scowling, and he has an Ivan Drago flat-top. This is peak Arnold. The reverse shot lands, almost hilariously, on a group of a half-dozen nude and nearly-nude bathers, all pink and vulnerable in their skin, gazing back at him, excited or terrified or maybe both. It's as if a god stands before them.

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)

**½/****
directed by Midge Costin

by Alice Stoehr "Sound is half of the experience," says George Lucas over a muted excerpt from Star Wars' opening shot. The din of laser artillery and John Williams's score have fallen away, so the director's voice accompanies two vessels drifting in the silence of space. This sequence caps an introductory montage darting from Jurassic Park to The Elephant Man to Lawrence of Arabia in order to sensitize viewers (and listeners) to the intricacies of film audio. Midge Costin leans a lot on such montage in her documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. They're groupings of iconography à la Chuck Workman, part of her bid to demystify the craft. She structures two-thirds of the film as a rough history via sound-design heavyweights while leaving the rest for anecdotes from other luminaries in the field. Oscilloscopic sound waves are her primary graphic motif. It's instantly accessible, very Film 101. Costin, like the film's writer, Bobette Buster, is a professor at USC. (Lucas and Steven Spielberg endowed her position.) Their work together has all the clarity of a syllabus. The 1992 doc Visions of Light went deep into the art of cinematography; this, decades later, is its ear-oriented counterpart.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

***/****
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate--the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity--where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she's gone. It's a small moment, and one that works to move the film's exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. "He's not here for you, he's here for your womb," says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)--but "he," a killer robot from the future called a "Rev-9" (Gabriel Luna), isn't. He's there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah's videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon--a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man's attire even though a woman's is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.