Film Freak Central

Supernova (2021)

****/****
starring Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci
written and directed by Harry Macqueen

by Walter Chaw Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is an author of some minor renown who has a way with a toast and a loving, if sometimes crabby, relationship with his husband, Sam (Colin Firth). Sam is a concert pianist of even more minor renown whom Tusker teases at a diner along the route of a holiday they're taking in the English countryside by telling a waitress that Sam will be glad to sign an autograph for her if she likes. It's clear the poor woman doesn't have the first idea who Sam is, but she's very polite about it. Sam asks why Tusker does things like this when Tusker admits that half the time he doesn't get any joy out of it. Tusker says, "For the other half of the time." In his film Supernova, writer-director Harry Macqueen's script is consistently like this: understated, beautifully observed, intensely human. It's a two-hander with two of the absolute best actors on the planet, so how much script and direction do they need? However much it is, Macqueen gives them just enough. I love the way Sam says "Tusker" like "Tosca," the Puccini opera, but I love it because that's the way, accent or no, your name will evolve with your partner over a life together. It's not a nickname, it's a secret language. After 24 years, no one says "Walter" like my wife says it. It's subtle, but I hear it. I know the contours of it in her voice like I know the curve of her hip when I sleep next to her. The film opens with Sam and Tusker bickering, first about a map, then about what station they're listening to. When Donovan's "Catch the Wind" comes on the radio and Tusker, to cool the tension a bit, cajoles Sam into singing along, well, I fell in love with them. Tusker and Sam are real people.

Shadow in the Cloud (2021)

***/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Beulah Koae, Taylor John Smith, Nick Robinson
written by Max Landis and Roseanne Liang
directed by Roseanne Liang

by Walter Chaw Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud opens with a vintage training cartoon for WWII flyboys about the dangers of gremlins clogging their bombers' works, indicating that whatever this film seems like it's going to be about, it's going to have a monster in it. And it's inevitable, once you know that, for you to think about how one of the episodes recreated for Twilight Zone: The Movie was "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which a gremlin on the wing of a plane terrorizes a nervous flier. And then how John Landis co-directed that film (though not that segment) and, through unimaginable carelessness compounded by his unfettered ego and well-documented lack of a moral compass, instructed a helicopter pilot to fly too low over illegal pyrotechnics, resulting in the chopper's crash and the brutal death of leading man Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen. Child actors who shouldn't have been working at that time of night due to labour laws, as it happens, but, shhh!: an artiste is at work. It's all on video (Zapruder-esque footage of the crash aired multiple times on the 6 o'clock news), there was a trial with damning testimony, the film's producers--including Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy--fled the country and refused to testify (because, in Spielberg's case, he was "too important" to do so (the judge agreed)), and then, the world the way that it is, Landis got off. He even went to Morrow's funeral uninvited to spew some blubbery words, and now, in the late-Leni Reifenstahl phase of his career, he's treated like an elder statesman allowed to reframe his legacy. Let me help you with that. His legacy is three things, each of them true: he is the director of An American Werewolf in London and a couple of obnoxious comedies people like for some reason; he is a murderer; and he is the father of one of the all-too-predictably worst people on the planet.

Palmer (2021) + Music (2021)

PALMER
*/****
starring Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Alisha Wainwright, June Squibb
written by Cheryl Guerrero
directed by Fisher Stevens

MUSIC
ZERO STARS/****
starring Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr., Maddie Ziegler, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by Sia & Dallas Clayton
directed by Sia

by Walter Chaw I feel like I've seen Fisher Stevens's well-intentioned Palmer dozens of times in the last three months alone. This version takes a few half-hearted stabs at social relevance with a heartfully-plucked acoustic guitar on the soundtrack but is finally nothing more than Justin Timberlake's latest shot at movie stardom. He's going deep as Palmer, fresh out of prison with a gruff attitude and a neckbeard denoting his impoverished status, reminding largely that his best role isn't the one where he plays a guy married to Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis, but the one where he lip-syncs The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" in Southland Tales. The familiar movements: Palmer has to get laid, get a job, and become the guardian to a moppet, who saves him. He's got a hard shell, that Palmer, though the hint of a grin halfway through as he's driving his catalyst-towards-redemption to school hints that underneath his hard shell, there's a big ol' softy. The twist is that the moppet is non-gender-conforming Sam (Ryder Allen), who likes to wear pink, put barrettes in his hair, and have tea parties with the girls in his class. He also hates football but lives in the south, and Palmer used to be a bigshot high-school football player. Man, what a conundrum in which Palmer's found himself. A dadgum conundrum's what it is.

Willy's Wonderland (2021) - VOD

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Emily Tosta, Ric Reitz, Beth Grant
written by G.O. Parsons
directed by Kevin Lewis

by Walter Chaw Kevin Lewis's high-concept Nicolas Cage-vs.-Chuck E. Cheese thriller Willy's Wonderland misses because it believes it can't miss. Star Cage has built a career for himself as that weirdo who will do stupid movies, and here he is playing The Janitor, a man of no words who cleans things up. A real contempt for the audience roils off this garbage, the belief that there need be no real effort expended in the creation of this product as long as there's enough Nic Cage doing dumb shit as bizarrely as possible. It's lazy. There's one long exposition dump towards the beginning of it, delivered by a somehow and sorely overmatched Emily Tosta, about Satanic rituals and stuff at the local theme restaurant, and honestly, it was all done better in that video game "Five Nights at Freddy's", where the reason for the robot characters springing to homicidal life isn't really addressed at all. It's painfully bad, Willy's Wonderland, in exactly the way things are bad when a bunch of bros get together to capitalize on a phenomenon they can't begin to understand and couldn't be bothered to interrogate. Cage + animatronic monsters? As William Hurt once asked, "How do you fuck that up?"

Sundance '21: We're All Going to the World's Fair

***/****
starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Walter Chaw We spend our teen years--and, if we're not careful, our entire lives--imagining ourselves a player in a grand, romantic storyline where everything that happens has meaning, every misdeed receives justice, and every moment of grace is returned in kind. We need to feel like there's more to this than just chaos and meaningless suffering. Most of all, we need to believe that we have some control over how things turn out on both a personal level and a cosmic one, too. The alternative, after all, tends to be despair. I suspect the reason Boomers are the majority demographic in the Q-nonsense is their fear of a world in which they suddenly understand nothing requires some sort of recourse, no matter how tortured.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

**½/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King

by Walter Chaw Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma's moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, '80s emblem of white, "compassionate" conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King's film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma's indisputably powerful piece, King's film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever's embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton's cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.

Sundance '21: Strawberry Mansion

****/****
starring Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney
written and directed by Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley

by Walter Chaw Strawberry Mansion is very much like a live-action "Adventure Time", perhaps doomed, like Pendleton Ward's existentialist/surrealist masterpiece, to a long road to appreciation as something emotionally incisive rather than something especially but merely unconventional. Of all the antecedents it boasts (add eXistenZ, Alphaville, Tom Schiller's Nothing Lasts Forever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Douglas Adams's work, and, um, Laura to the mix), however, Strawberry Mansion finally reminds me most of the Oliver Stone-produced miniseries "Wild Palms" in both its literal execution and the low thrum of underlying paranoia about the commodification of dream sleep. The danger is great that a stew as heady as this will be ponderous at best, indecipherable at worst, but it's delivered with a confident, even light touch by co-writers/co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. As odd as it seems on the surface, the picture, again like "Adventure Time", has easy-to-argue themes and is guided by what feels like real, cathartic pathos. Strawberry Mansion's aggressive artifice actually enhances its emotional authenticity. I love this film.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020); Freaky (2020) [Killer Switch Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw "You've gone strange on me," Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that's impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn't himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he's surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he's vulnerable to the mistakes he's made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning "parts" or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven't been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don't think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow's nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

Sundance '21: Violation

****/****
starring Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse LaVercombe, Obi Abili
written and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli

by Walter Chaw Just the image of a man, naked, fighting for his life against a clothed assailant after a sexually-compromised engagement feels by itself something like rebellion. Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer's Violation isn't the first in the struggle, but it's a powerful addition to a fulsome rape-revenge subgenre that, with classics like Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45, Lars Von Trier's Dogville, and Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave leading a to-this-point male-dominated field, has always had something on its mind about the way women are brutalized in a society that sees them mainly as appendages for male desire. What I like best about Violation, though, isn't its similarities to modern examples, but rather its relationship (not unlike Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring) to ancient examples such as Medea and Atreus. Indeed, the film lands somewhere between the two: the House of Atreus cursed because of a rape and playing out through the rendering and surreptitious cannibalism that Violation makes distaff through Medea's vengeful filicide (at least in the Euripedes telling). Violation is ancient Greek, too, in the pulling of atrocity into the immediate comparison to not the indifference of the natural world, but the transformative viciousness that animates it. Things are always in a state of violent flux; it's nature's lone promise. And this cosmological tendency towards equilibrium is only achieved through the passing through of distant polarities. The road to "fine" leads through bliss and blood.

Malcolm & Marie (2021) - Netflix

ZERO STARS/****
starring Zendaya, John David Washington
written and directed by Barry Levinson's son

by Walter Chaw An eight-minute diatribe is the noxious centre of Sam Levinson's intolerable ego trip Malcolm & Marie, distinct neither for the obnoxious volume at which it's delivered nor for the hollowness of its content, but because it manages to stand out at all, coming as it does in the middle of the other shouted invectives that form the rest of it. In this diatribe, flavour-of-the-moment, hotshot movie director Malcolm (John David Washington), on the night of the premiere of his well-received debut, reads a glowing early review by "that white lady at the L.A. Times" and rails on about "woke" culture and how he, as a Black director, is only compared to other Black directors as opposed to people like William Wyler and Billy Wilder? Does he mean real directors, or does he mean white directors? Does he mean that he doesn't like to be compared to John Singleton and Spike Lee because they are not good, or because they are Black and what he does, what Malcolm does, is entirely independent of his identity as a Black man? Is he suggesting that he has no identity as a Black artist? And if he's not suggesting that, is Levinson, the unimaginably-privileged white son of Hollywood royalty (Oscar-winning Barry is his dad)? Why is either Levinson or Malcolm complaining about this straw lady also talking about how Malcolm's film addresses trauma, recovery, and violence towards women? Is this not the one area in which she should be "allowed" to opine?

The Reckoning (2021)

½*/****
starring Charlotte Kirk, Joe Anderson, Steven Waddington, Sean Pertwee
written by Neil Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, Edward Evers-Swindell
directed by Neil Marshall

by Walter Chaw The first film of British director Neil Marshall's I haven't liked, The Reckoning is his contribution to the niche but endlessly rich Witchfinder General horror subgenre. What I've liked about Marshall to this point--from the Hawksian platoon-meets-soccer hooligan bonhomie of his werewolf debut Dog Soldiers through to his reboot of the Hellboy franchise (a widely-derided piece that I found delightfully perverse, gory, and hewing closer to the Mignola source, for better or worse)--is the efficiency and lack of sentimentality driving his narratives. His best-known picture, The Descent, is a triphammer thing, not an ounce of fat anywhere on its body--an instant classic about interpersonal tensions and resentments expressed through collapsing, wet, vaginal tunnels and the monsters that live there. It's a product of a distinct directorial voice that I could trace through all of his pictures. In contrast, The Reckoning could have been directed by anyone and, more to the point, feels a lot like it was directed by its star, Charlotte Kirk, who had a hand in its production and writing. It's a romantic hagiography of Kirk, establishing her as a romance-novel heroine in various carefully-arrayed, soft-focus, medieval tableaux. The Reckoning is not simply bad, it's uncharacteristically bloated and flaccid. Embarrassing, too.

Sundance '21: Cryptozoo

*/****
written and directed by Dash Shaw

by Walter Chaw I rail a lot about how animation is a genre in the United States instead of a medium, how the Japanese have it all figured out and we Americans are at least a generation behind. Now here's graphic novelist turned animator Dash Shaw, following up his better--or at least more focused--My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea with the oddly blissed-out eco-adventure flick Cryptozoo. What's clear is that this, more than his previous stuff, is an attempt to ape Japanese director Ujicha's hand-drawn nightmare/cutout style from stuff like the indelible The Burning Buddha Man and Violence Voyager. What Shaw hasn't successfully ported over is Ujicha's kineticism--that sense of propulsive, compulsive, nightmarish energy that confers upon his films a weird, repulsive energy. Watching Ujicha's films is like accidentally touching a sea cucumber. I reached into an opaque bag of Wonder Bread that I found in a cabin once and drew back, in revulsion, a hand covered in bright green slime. That's Ujicha. Cryptozoo is a movie that feels like it was based on one of the breathless stories Juliet and Pauline would have made up over a lazy summer's day in Heavenly Creatures. Just a long string of terribly important things tied together by "and then and then and this and also this" narrative exposition.

Sundance '21: Knocking

Knackningar
**½/****
starring Cecilia Milocco, Krister Kern, Albin Grenholm, Ville Virtanen
written by Emma Broström
directed by Frida Kempff

by Walter Chaw Frida Kempff's Knocking reminds me a great deal of Matthew Chapman's underseen Heart of Midnight, in that both are about troubled young women recovering from some recent trauma, given autonomy over themselves and their environment and then mistrusted when things, perhaps insidiously, start to go pear-shaped. Where they diverge, however, is that Chapman's film is deliciously sleazy--the peril therein largely housed in the tension between sexual repression and expression and the lengths to which a male-dominated society is interested in manipulating women. It's no accident an inciting moment in Heart of Midnight involves an apple dropped from a peephole bored through the heroine's ceiling. In Knocking, the tension is whether Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is hearing ghostly knocking coming from her ceiling--maybe in Morse code, maybe not--or imagining it. That's it. Unless the knocking is attached to some tangible anchor, it can exist only as a metaphor for Molly's flashed-back-to but oblique trauma, for her sexual identity as gay (though no one seems interested in her one way or another), or for a more general sense of societal systems designed around not believing women. All are important in a social sense and tedious in a metaphorical sense. If the message is women get shafted, well, this is true and terrible. But if that's all you have to say about it, there's nothing left to consider in the subtext.

Sundance '21: The Pink Cloud

A Nuvem Rosa
***½/****
starring Renata de Lélis, Eduardo Mendonça, Helena Becker, Girley Paes
written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

by Walter Chaw Iuli Gerbase's stunning feature debut The Pink Cloud owes a great deal to the insular psychodramas of J.G. Ballard, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a more specific High Rise in which the fall of society is focused through the decay of a relationship forged in quarantine. It works best as allegory, allying itself with something like Lorcan Finnegan's recent and similarly-pre-pandemic Vivarium, using science-fiction as a launch point to test the tensile strength of the tenterhooks tethering us to one another. The details of the corruption matter less than how we change when our environment changes--or, more specifically, how we fail to.

Sundance '21 - An Introduction

by Walter Chaw I think there are so many film festivals now that it's never not festival season. As a consequence, no one festival is more important than any other festival. They're each a different tentacle of the distribution/exhibition octopus, an appendage of chthonic horror. If any distributor happens to show some apparent innovation, call it a novel mutation: temporary and vestigial on the body impolitic. Celebrate A24 and NEON, in other words--but I have an idea that everyone is connected to the same profit motive. Meanwhile, the festival clockwork churns on unimpeded.