Film Freak Central

Vivarium (2020)

***½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris, Molly McCann
screenplay by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan's Vivarium cues what it's going to be about with a title that could, arguably, also describe movies: artificial, controlled environments constructed for the observation of collected specimens. As the film opens, nature footage of a cuckoo bird pushing baby birds out of their nest to take their place segues into grammar-school teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) leading a classroom of kids acting out a windstorm. In the next scene, Gemma counsels one of her young charges as the child discovers the dead-bird babies on the ground beneath a tree. A cuckoo could be responsible, she says, and it's terrible, of course, but it's nature. If you were to stop watching Vivarium there, about five minutes in, you'd miss some fun stuff, but the whole film has already been summarized. The picture boils every impulse down to biological impetus, you see. But rather than making Vivarium simplistic, this philosophical determinism makes the behaviours of its subjects extraordinarily complex and interesting.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG
***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, June (née June Tripp), Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault
scenario by Eliot Stannard, from the novel by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

DOWNHILL (1927)
When Boys Leave Home
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, Robin Irvine, Isabel Jeans, Ben Webster
scenario by Eliot Stannard, based on the play by Constance Collier & David L'Estrange (née Ivor Novello)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Alfred Hitchcock's fifth time at the plate produced his third completed picture, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (hereafter The Lodger), based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes that was itself based on the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, which still would have been in the immediate cultural memory of 1927. When first screened, distributor C.M. Woolf proclaimed it incomprehensible, jeopardizing its release until London Film Society founding member Ivor Montagu was enlisted to clear up the mess. In truth, Montagu liked what he saw, advised the reshooting of the darkest scenes, and, with Hitchcock's approval and assistance, discarded a good number of title cards to, in effect, leave the storytelling to the visuals. Producer Michael Balcon, already a supporter, called it good, and the picture allowed the British film industry to finally boast a product that could compete with not merely the artistically-dominant European cinema (France, Germany, and Russia), but also the commercially-dominant American dream factory. Just in time, as it happened. The passage of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act stipulated that distributors would guarantee at least 7.5% of their total output be British: a number that would increase in increments until it hit 20% in 1936. The skeletal British industry boasted few stars. On the strength of The Lodger and his earlier The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock was something of a known quantity before much of the British public had even seen any of his films.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane
screenplay by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton
directed by Robert Altman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller is, even more than his Nashville, the quintessential American film. The whole of it is in a constant state of construction and reconstruction, a continuous and ever-doomed battle against entropy and that human desire to matter a little before it's all over too soon. The modern analogue for it is Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, as both films detail the sad lives of entrepreneurs staking a claim for themselves on the frontier at the beginning of America's potential. The only reward for ambition, unfortunately, is death. Death is the only reward for anything. John McCabe (Warren Beatty) is a swaggering loudmouth in a big fur coat who one day struts into the tiny town of Presbyterian Church, pop. 120 (the majority of those prospectors and illiterate scumbags), lays a cloth across a table in the disgusting saloon of Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois), and proceeds to take the rubes for everything they're worth. With that cash, he buys three broken-down whores, then lights out for the edge of town, where he starts a company.

Business is good.

Richard Jewell (2019) - Blu-ray + Digital

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Paul Walter Hauser
written by Billy Ray, based on the article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" by Marie Brenner
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda You'd be hard-pressed to think of a more fateful intersection between director and biographical subject than Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell, which crystallizes the venerable American filmmaker's aesthetic and thematic interests of late. The infamous minimalist and chair-scolder--hyped to godly proportions in some corners of Film Twitter for his cool efficiency, scorned as a conservative propagandist by others--has been charged since the film's AFI Fest debut last month with cranking out ill-timed "Trumpian talking points" about the FBI and smearing a journalist's good name after her death. While some of the callouts are fairer than others, the uproar has distracted from the quiet dignity and formal strangeness of the work, which deepens Eastwood's recent interest in unlikely American newsmakers with asterisks beside their names and their acts of heroism by grounding itself in the awkward humanity of an even less immediately palatable figure than the inarticulate, gelato-eating Euro travellers who saved lives in The 15:17 to Paris.

The Circus (1928) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A
starring Charlie Chaplin, Allan Garvia, Merna Kennedy, Harry Crocker
written and directed by Charlie Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer It started with the tightrope. That was Charlie Chaplin's original idea as he developed his feature-length comedy The Circus--his iconic character, the Tramp, forced into a high-wire act, defying death and injury on a rope stretched taut far above the ground. It was later, shortly before production started, that the monkeys came into the picture. Those mischievous animals, those gremlins, would crawl over his arms and body, wrap themselves around his face, and pull down his pants as the Tramp struggled to maintain his balance on the wire. From what we know of his off-screen life at the time, it's easy to imagine why Chaplin felt bedevilled. His second marriage, to Lita Grey, still a teenager, was fundamentally unhappy. He spent his time away from home with divorce on his mind, and it was around this point he learned that Lita was pregnant with his second child. He also kept an eye out for the detectives he was sure had been hired to investigate his affair with Hearst's wife, Marion Davies.

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)|The Grudge (2020) - Blu-ray + Digital

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft's Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that's particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They're fairy tales, fables. They're warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they're how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species' survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don't come home if they're caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades--each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

Onward (2020)

**/****
screenplay by Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, Keith Bunin
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Walter Chaw Onward is notable not because it features Disney/Pixar's first LGBTQ character (a cop--Jesus, you guys--voiced by Lena Waithe), but because it's the family-friendly studio's first stoner comedy. Dan Scanlon's follow-up to his middling Monsters University is an unholy amalgam of Detroit Rock City and Weekend at Bernie's that finds two elf brothers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), going on a quest to resurrect the top half of their dead dad's body for the one magical day they've conjured for him via an ancient spell and a "phoenix crystal," the double for which serves as the film's exhausted MacGuffin after they squander the first one. The setting is an industrialized world where there was once magic; as technology became easier than memorizing spells and perfecting belief, magic was left to lie fallow, just waiting for a winsome young elf with father and confidence issues to reintroduce it to the world. You can read this a few ways. The way I'm choosing to interpret "magic" is as a metaphor for the American progressive movement, which died at the end of the Sixties with a series of assassinations. If we lay this over Onward, then the film becomes a call to action for progressives in this country to rally after decades of being buried under the inequities of late capitalism.

Run This Town (2020)

½*/****
starring Ben Platt, Mena Massoud, Nina Dobrev, Damian Lewis
written and directed by Ricky Tollman

by Walter Chaw Ricky Tollman's Run This Town is a neo-Sorkin, fast-talking, "ripped from the headlines" potboiler that is really just one of those plucky underdog-makes-good melodramas wherein a cub reporter breaks the Story of the Century™. Said story this time around is that Toronto mayor Rob Ford is a grotesque fucking idiot. (Ford has since had the good fortune to be posthumously outdone and overshadowed in his cheap-mobster, bully-bro incompetence by the worst human being on the planet, Donald "POTUS" Trump.) Playing Ford in this hip little photoplay is the great Damian Lewis; it bears mention that the fat-suit makeup makes him look a lot like David Lynch's Baron Harkonnen (or Mike Myers's Fat Bastard) as he stumbles around calling a staff member "Jew" and sexually harassing his aide, Ashley (Nina Dobrev). The bright-eyed stringer looking to break into the big-time is schlubby Bram (Ben Platt), who, when first pitching the story to his tough editor (Jennifer Ehle), is scolded for not having much of an opinion about anything. Are you rooting for him yet? It's hard not to.

Swallow (2020)

**½/****
starring Haley Bennett, Austin Stowell, Elizabeth Marvel, Denis O'Hare
written and directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis

by Walter Chaw Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller ends with our Mrs. Miller on an opium trip, absorbed in close contemplation of the smooth, alien landscape of a trinket that's caught her eye. We go on that trip with her, zooming in as she zooms out, skating along the polished curve of some uncharted dimension in an undiscovered country. Meanwhile, out in a snowstorm, the idiot who loves her dies alone. In Carlo Mirabella-Davis's debut feature Swallow, lonesome, abused young wife Hunter (Haley Bennett), because she's trapped, isolated, and miserable, swallows a small glass marble that is the colour of Mrs. Miller's bauble and, as it happens, serves a similar function of distraction, providing a similar illusion of control. Hunter has "pica," a medical/psychiatric condition that causes its sufferers to swallow items that are not edible--in many cases, not even biological. I don't know anything about this disorder beyond what the Internet tells me, but how it functions as the outward expression of Hunter's loss of agency is fascinating and on point.

Le Samouraï (1967) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Le samouraï
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Michel Boisrond
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

by Walter Chaw Jef (Alain Delon) is an assassin, and while he's objectively terrible at it, he seems to be sought-after for his services. Maybe there's a shortage of killers; maybe he lives in that bubble where handsome people exist without knowledge of the advantages they're given for the fact of their attractiveness. Hired to assassinate some guy who owns a nightclub in Paris, Jef steals a car by trying out a lot of keys on this giant key ring he has and goes to the club to do just that. Everyone sees him: the guests, the bartender, and most notably the club's unnamed, featured chanteuse (Caty Rosier), who catches him walking out of her boss's office after hearing gunshots. Jef pauses when he sees her, and for a second you wonder if he's going to kill her to eliminate any witnesses. I mean, that's what a hardened criminal would do--but he doesn't. It's not that Jef isn't smart, exactly, it's that Jef is a cipher, and Le samouraï is less noir than it is a commentary on American genre films and, along the way, a satire of them, too. Jef's affect is blank and pretty, perfectly turned-out in his neat suit and overcoat, a fedora perched on his head just so. Melville spends a lot of time watching Jef look at himself in the mirror, fiddling with his collar and smoothing down the crease in his pants. Not unlike a Robert Bresson film, Le samouraï is obsessed with gestures. It's a story told by hands at rest and in motion.