Film Freak Central

Black Widow (2021)

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz
screenplay by Eric Pearson
directed by Cate Shortland

by Walter Chaw You know it's gritty because of the gritty cover song interrupting the bucolic prologue--Think Up Anger ft. Malia J's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" this time instead of Rose Betts's "Song to the Siren." Too on the nose, perhaps, although they're both pretty on the nose, let's be honest. Another clue is a montage under the opening credits that shows rows of little girls abducted not for sex trafficking (because Marvel is more comfortable suggesting sex trafficking than, you know, consensual adult eroticism), but for the purpose of creating a Whedon-fantasy team of Dollhouse assassins. I spent most of my childhood reading comics and have watched and reviewed almost all of the MCU films to this point. I've seen none of the TV/streaming shows and don't intend to remedy that because life is incredibly short and also full to bursting with things I desperately want to see that I still won't be able to, no matter how smart I am at managing whatever time I have left. I have no idea what's going on in Black Widow, and I think that once you get bucked off this horse, there's no getting back on. So here's Cate Shortland's Black Widow, the 24th MCU flick, if only the second centred around a female protagonist--one we know has sacrificed herself for the sake of the least interesting/worthy of her male counterparts, meaning this one takes place in either the past or an alternate timeline or something. It doesn't matter. In the comic-book world, there are new #1s every few cycles that are reboots or speculative storylines or something. It's how they get you to keep buying them. What matters is, the more you humanize this character you've already made abundantly clear you don't really care about, the worse her already-loathsome sacrifice feels.

My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (2021)

****/****
starring Patrick Fugit, Ingrid Sophie Schram, Owen Campbell
written and directed by Jonathan Cuartas

by Walter Chaw The reason Dwight (Patrick Fugit) goes to diners is to eat a little toast, drink some coffee, and listen to other people go about their lives. His sister, Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), waits tables at one where she suffers the indignities of the service industry with pallid, resigned despair. Between them, the extent to which they can empathize with people beyond their bubble will drive their existence to a crisis. Cut from the same cloth as Jim Mickle's exceptional We Are What We Are and destined to be compared to Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In, My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To (hereafter My Heart), the hyphenate debut of Jonathan Cuartas, finds its closest analogue in Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, which is similarly about the brutal banality and biological horror of caring for a terminally-ill loved one. Dwight and Jessie look after their brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell--so good in Super Dark Times), who needs to drink blood to survive. Sunlight burns him badly and instantly. Well into puberty, he still acts like a child--not for any sort of mental disability, but rather, we surmise, because of a lifetime spent in a handful of the same rooms, his brother and sister as his sole companions.

Lisa (1990) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Cheryl Ladd, D.W. Moffet, Staci Keanan, Tanya Fenmore
written by Gary Sherman & Karen Clark
directed by Gary Sherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's cheesy, right? He stakes out beautiful women, breaks into their apartment while they're out, and decorates their place with enough candles for a Meat Loaf video. When they return home and check their messages, they hear one from him: "Hi, this is Richard. I'm in your apartment. I'm going to kill you." Then he pounces, doing exactly what he promised to do. I went to see Gary Sherman's Lisa with a friend on opening weekend in May of 1990; we had planned on going to Ernest Goes to Jail but were late for the matinee. We were late for everything, in fact, except Lisa, and the only competition for a seat was the tumbleweeds--a reflection of the skeletal marketing budget and maybe Siskel & Ebert's downcast thumbs. Anyway, my buddy and me, both 15 at the time, were snorting derisively at Richard's M.O.--the media has christened him, ooh, the Candlelight Killer--as Lisa got underway, mainly because it involved the type of aesthetic jive we put up with for a flash of nipple on late-night cable. (Did I mention the saxophone music?) Then came the introduction of the title character, a 14-year-old girl who lives with her florist mother Katherine in a cozy little womb of a loft, and any residual laughter took on a nervous edge. Safe to say that Scooby-Doo-ish frisson of siccing a sociopath on the territory of Apple Paperbacks worked like a charm: We were on tenterhooks for the next 90 minutes or so, like air-traffic controllers monitoring the progress of Lisa and Richard's inevitable, inexorable collision.

Luca (2021)

**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews, Mike Jones
directed by Enrico Casarosa

by Walter Chaw Enrico Casarosa's Luca is a gentle love letter to the Miyazaki-verse set in a small, coastal Italian town called "Porto Rosso" in an obvious nod to Porco Rosso. The body of it, meanwhile, is parts of Ponyo, parts of Kiki's Delivery Service, bits and pieces of shots and sequences from Spirited Away, and even the scavenging scenes from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Luca's message of acceptance is general and loose enough to allow for a couple of innocuous interpretations, the obvious one being the Depeche Mode-ism of how people are people and shouldn't, therefore, get along so awfully, the more potentially impactful one a coming-out tale in which the residents of a cloistered community realize their friends and neighbours harbour secrets about their identities that they're afraid to reveal, lest they be ostracized, even murdered. It's tempting to go here, not just because the central drama revolves around the friendship between little Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) and his buddy Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but also because of the late-film reveal that a pair of elderly spinsters in town are identically coupled. There are also moments where it's clear that Alberto, without being interested in her, is jealous of the relationship blooming between Luca and Giulia (Emma Berman), the little girl who takes them in when they find themselves needing a place to stay. It's there if you want it.

Spiral (2021)

Spiral: From the Book of Saw
½*/****
starring Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols, Samuel L. Jackson
written by Josh Stolberg & Peter Goldfinger
directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

by Walter Chaw It's so familiar it's fatiguing, another one of these projects that begins with passion and the best of intentions and ends up chewed to paste and regurgitated as this thin, masticated gruel. Is Darren Lynn Bousman's Spiral (a.k.a. Spiral: From the Book of Saw) the product of too many notes from too many people, or simply the wrong people? Or maybe there weren't enough voices in the room to challenge accepted wisdom, which tends to be unreliable more often than not. Spiral occupies a weird space where it's both desperate and cocksure. In moments of duress, one tends to revert to the familiar and the comfortable, so when things are obviously going south for Chris Rock, still-aspiring movie star, Chris Rock, legendary stand-up comic, tries to assert himself. The script is a mess, and the grafts meant to save the patient have been rejected. Spiral probably should've been killed at inception.

Infinite (2021)

*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sophie Cookson, Toby Jones
screenplay by Ian Shorr, based on the book The Reincarnationist Papers by D. Eric Maikranz
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw At the root of it all is the Cloud Atlas suggestion that any number of spiritual roads end in a white-saviour persona. Which is offensive, of course, a non-starter in the modern parlance, one would hope (if one were an optimist not paying attention), made that much more offensive for said white person being convicted felon Mark Wahlberg. It was a long time ago; he served 45 days of a 3-month sentence, he was amped-up on PCP and racism, and, hey, the only people he wronged were Black children and an Asian man he beat blind with a stick. Wahlberg made a nice career for himself as an ass model despite this and got popular enough to become the butt of one of the most exquisite pop-cultural takedowns in recent memory as Andy Samberg formulated Wahlberg's entire persona into a single sketch. Wahlberg, of course, doesn't owe me anything, but when you reach a certain level of success, it's not enough to make apologies--it's time to make amends. He did try to get the felony assault wiped from his record in the hopes that he could secure a liquor license for his hamburger restaurant, though, so there's that. The American Dream.

Cruella (2021)

***/****
starring Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Mark Strong
screenplay by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw It's better to think of Craig Gillespie's Cruella as a riff than as a prequel--a variation on a theme rather than the puzzle-box predecessor to a beloved intellectual property. In fact, one's ability to do so informs the extent to which this film is not merely enjoyable but indeed good. Cruella is a mindfuck of a construct, a postmodern exercise in which nothing of it could cohere without knowledge of, and experience with, other cultural artifacts--but even there, it occupies two spaces simultaneously: the Disney side, where the references are all to 101 Dalmatians, against the Gillespie side, where the references are to pop-cultural movements in music, fashion, even literature. Early on, a young Cruella (Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), born "Estella," is urged by her saintly mother Catherine (Emily Beecham) to contain Estella's exuberant, sometimes-violent and "evil" side by dubbing her "Cruella" and, in so naming it, caging it. The suggestion, then, is that "Estella" is the polite-if-constricting requirement that Cruella be a prequel to a Disney "vault" classic, while "Cruella" is the Something Wild barely contained that, like Michelle Pfeiffer's resurrected Catwoman in Batman Returns, is a creature born of violence returned as the avatar for perversity and chaos. Imagine how great this good film would have been were it just the one with none of the other.