Film Freak Central

The Green Knight (2021) + Pig (2021)

THE GREEN KNIGHT
****/****
starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Ralph Nelson
written for the screen and directed by David Lowery

PIG
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
written and directed by Michael Sarnoski

by Walter Chaw A thing has no value if there is no risk of losing it. A treasure is only that if there are hobbits. If you're a parent and you've done everything right, and everything goes exactly as it should, your children will know the exquisite pain of your death. The story for us all ideally has the tang of misadventure to it and a sad ending full of irony. It is a great fable without a moral, wrought with temptations--though hopefully, when the curtain falls, free of too much regret. The key to navigating the labyrinth of the Rose Poet's medieval romance "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is perhaps in its prologue, where it presents the history of the founding of England from the Fall of Troy through to Aeneas's further stories: his conquests and foundings, sure, but also the inevitable decline of his line. A popular version of this history around the time that "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" would have been written holds that Brutus of Troy is the grandson of Aeneas, exiled from Italy because, in fulfillment of a prophecy similar to the one that doomed Oedipus, he accidentally killed his father with an errant arrow. In the course of his wanderings, this Brute, the product of a cursed line beset with hubris and tragic folly, becomes the first king of what would be called England.

Fantasia Fest '21: Prisoners of the Ghostland

*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Tak Sakaguchi
screenplay by Aaron Hendry, Reza Sixo Safai
directed by Sion Sono

by Walter Chaw A theory I've been kicking around about certain pre-made, fast-fashion auteur demimondes like, say, Sion Sono: there are those who are anointed cult filmmakers because they have idiosyncratic tastes; and there are those without any real taste who aspire to be cult filmmakers because they've figured out that idioscyncracy can be marketable and have thus taken it on as an affectation. The former make films the only way they can make them, driven by a purity and persistence of vision; the latter make stuff like Prisoners of the Ghostland, because they've seen films by the former and wonder what could be so hard about that? It's why Sono's work is only spoken of in reference to other films and filmmakers, or even to earlier entries in his own filmography, back when he was doing what he felt was right rather than what he thought he should. Prisoners of the Ghostland is a facile affectation, in other words, a slapdash collection of somebody else's cool without a genuine, native bone in its body. Douglas Adams includes instructions for how to fly in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books: you fall and miss. You can't fly on purpose, you see. You can't make a camp movie on purpose, either. It took me three tries to get through Prisoners of the Ghostland. 102 minutes of someone not meaning it is incredibly boring.

Candyman (2021)

½*/****
starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Colman Domingo
screenplay by Jordan Peele & Win Rosenfeld and Nia DaCosta
directed by Nia DaCosta

by Walter Chaw An old urban legend, it goes like this: an amorous pair of youths spirit themselves away to a remote Lovers Lane when, lo, the girl hears something lurking about. With thoughts of the recently-escaped murderer on her mind, she convinces her boyfriend to leave and, frustrated, he takes her home. Recovering himself on the ride back, he thinks to come around to open the door for his beloved, and there he blanches, for dangling from the door's handle is a razor-sharp hook, the bloodied stump to which it's fused still attached. I have to think Clive Barker had heard some version of this tale before conceiving of his short story "The Forbidden." It's collected in the fifth volume of his "Books of Blood" series--the one that, with Stephen King's shining endorsement ("I have seen the future of horror, and its name is Clive Barker"), propelled Barker into the upper strata of horror authors in the mid-Eighties. When I was 13, I devoured every word of Barker's six-volume anthology with a white, hot fury. Thirty-five years on, I still remember them all vividly.

Demonic (2021)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, Michael J. Rogers, Terry Chen
written and directed by Neill Blomkamp

by Walter Chaw Carly's mom, Angela (Nathalie Boltt), killed a lot of people once and then fell into a coma, not that Carly (Carly Pope) would know, because Carly stopped talking to Angela years ago--long about the time Angela killed a lot of people. I mean, even if she had tried to talk to Angela, she wouldn't have been able to. Because coma. Technically, she could talk to her, I suppose, and the jury's out as to whether Angela could hear her, but being in a coma, Angela wouldn't be able to respond. Comas are a bitch that way. Anyway, a sketchy beard-o in a suit (not Sharlto Copley, which is this film's first and last surprise) from some tech company called Therapole reaches out to Carly and says, "Hey, what if you could talk to your mother?" And Carly says, "I don't want to talk to my mother." And he says, "She's in a coma." And she says, "Why is she in a coma?" Then she goes to the Therapole headquarters (erected on some kind of haunted burial ground, as her friend Martin (Chris William Martin) discovers while Googling stuff for her), since the news that Angela's in a coma has made Carly want to reach out to her. This is what we call in the business "a really good plot" and "solid writing." Seems Dr. Creepy (Michael J. Rogers, playing Sharlto Copley) has invented a virtual-reality technology that allows people to Dreamscape/Brainstorm themselves onto a holodeck of someone's memories using advanced Bakshi-era rotoscoping technology. It bears mentioning that Martin believes Therapole--not to be confused with Theranos--wants to find a demon to exorcise, the drawing of which resembles one of Giger's aliens. That's because the writer and director of this mess, Neill Blomkamp, didn't get to make an Alien movie like he wanted. It's the world's saddest Easter Egg--which says something, given that there's a Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Fantasia '21: Dreams on Fire

***/****
starring Bambi Naka, Akaji Maro, Ikuyo Kuroda, Masahiro Takashima
written and directed by Philippe McKie

by Walter Chaw I don't know if I've ever seen a film quite like Philippe McKie's Dreams on Fire. Not for its story of a young dancer looking for her big break while jumping from humiliating job to humiliating job; Flashdance and Fame are two of the picture's obvious touchpoints, although the Step Up franchise is the obvious headwater. Rather, Dreams on Fire is distinctive because of its focus on how each failure is a gift if you can manage somehow not to quit. The movie opens in a familiar place as young Yume (Bambi Naka) declares her dream of being a dancer to the violent disapproval of her tradition-bound grandfather (Akaji Maro), her mother (Ikuyo Kuroda) hiding to avoid the conversation. I've learned something, hopefully not too late, after thirty-some years in corporate America: that everything my parents taught me was a measure of success was a lie. Education, climbing the ladder, home-ownership, money as the end-all/be-all of happiness--lies, obvious lies. I have achieved everything I was supposed to achieve and it didn't make me happier for even a moment. No one comes to the end of their life wishing they'd worked more. I made the decision to be happy, and my worst days now are better than my best days then.

Fantasia Fest '21: When I Consume You

**½/****
starring MacLeod Andrews, Evan Dumouchel, Libby Ewing
written and directed by Perry Blackshear

by Walter Chaw Living with addiction, Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Wilson (Evan Dumouchel) are siblings on the perpetual edge of destitution. They are each other's only means of emotional and occasionally material support. As writer-director Perry Blackshear's When I Consume You opens, Daphne spits blood and other viscera into a sink and yells through the bathroom door that she just needs a minute. She has a secret to hide, and her brother seems to be having a rough time of it, so maybe that's why she's not telling him whatever it is that's going on with her. A lovely early scene that won me over, as it happens, sees Wilson having a panic attack and Daphne talking him through it. This depiction of the sibling relationship is intimate, empathetic, and authentic-feeling. There've been a few compelling sibling relationships anchoring horror films--I'm thinking of the brothers in The Lost Boys, or the brother/sister in Jeepers Creepers, and how those films similarly use threats to that relationship as empathy engine and maybe even as a metaphor for growing apart. A flashback in When I Consume You to, if not "happier," at least earlier times, shows the pair working on a project together in a tight physical space talking about shared burdens and possible futures that we know are insurmountable on the one hand and doomed on the other. Affecting stuff, and it proves to be the central concern of When I Consume You after all the sound and fury burns off: It's your siblings who know what you've been through; and maybe it's your siblings who, for as much as they're responsible for you holding on to your demons, will help you get past them, too.

Fantasia Fest '21: The Sadness

***/****
starring Regina Lei, Tzu-Chiang Wang, Berant Zhu
written and directed by Rob Jabbaz

by Walter Chaw Canadian expat Rob Jabbaz has had it. His hyphenate debut The Sadness is one of the bleakest, angriest films I've seen in a long time, made rarer still by being carried off with obvious chops. Its focus is to unequivocally cut through the bullshit of this, our shitty timeline. The first real conversation of the film is between our hero, Jun (Berant Zhu), and his neighbour across adjoining balconies, concerning how a virus causing some doctors concern is a hoax perpetrated by big business and the media. A talk-show host in the background speaks over a virologist who warns of the potentially world-ending evil of politicizing a pandemic, and...well, you get the picture. The scariest thing about The Sadness--a very scary picture--is that it's the product of a Canadian filmmaker working in Taiwan, which confirms that Trump is a symptom not the cause of whatever the good fuck is wrong with us. In my darker moments, I like to say that we're just monkeys in clothes, and every minute we're not killing each other over protein and access to women is a miracle. The premise of The Sadness is a thought exercise in ironic magnification, one where you make the point by exaggerating the scenario slightly. The premise of The Sadness is that we're all monkeys in clothes, and imagine if we stopped pretending that we aren't.

Fantasia Fest '21: Don't Say Its Name

***/****
starring Julian Black-Antelope, Samuel Marty, Sera-Lys McArthur, Madison Walsh
written by Rueben Martell & Gerald Wexler
directed by Rueben Martell

by Walter Chaw Colonialism is the monster in Saskatchewan (and Cree) filmmaker Rueben Martell's Don't Say Its Name, the "that which must not be mentioned" in a story set among Indigenous Peoples, battling the loss of its people to an inexorable malignancy. The Great Evil manifests as two things: white energy employee Donny (Tom Carey), representing European skullduggery through the fetishizing of Aboriginal women and the committing of all manner of atrocity upon the land and its people in the name of manifest right; and an invisible golem that announces itself with the cry of a crow and a vile stench before disembowelling the isolated residents of a remote Canadian backwood. The victims both bad guys claim are the people in this place--the one because he's a representative murderous asshole, the other because its sense of outrage over Indigenous Peoples who have if not fully participated in the annexation of their land, are at least sympathetic to a policy of appeasement rather than resistance. Powerful, timely stuff in this age of the Keystone Pipeline and the discovery of scores of dead Indigenous children buried in Catholic schoolyards, made even more powerful by its centring of police officer Betty (Madison Walsh) and her new deputy, a former game warden and army vet named Stacey (Sera-Lys McArthur). Don't Say Its Name isn't fucking around.

Almost Famous (2000) - 4K Ultra HD + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

Almost Famous **½/****
Untitled ***/****
Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Bryant Frazer Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's fondly remembered period piece about a bygone era of rock stars and the various satellites in their orbit, is a bit of a relic these days. Even on its release in 2000, when it was almost 30 years removed from its subject matter, Almost Famous was a notably uncritical celebration of a moment in 20^th-century music history. Another 20 years on, having centred the phallic sexual and creative powers of a white guy with a guitar, Almost Famous is increasingly disconnected from the prevailing pop and hip-hop zeitgeist, and the film feels even more like cultural hagiography. On the other hand, it is a hell of a story. The fundamentals are autobiographical: Cameron Crowe really was a 15-year-old whiz kid who earned early graduation from high school; he really did seek career advice from legendary rock-and-roll critic Lester Bangs; and he really landed a ROLLING STONE assignment to hit the road with a group of next-big-thing cock-rockers. The story, as Crowe retells it here, has intrepid young journo William Miller (a fresh-faced Patrick Fugit) on assignment with the fictional rock group Stillwater--dealing with celebrity egos, yearning for the teenaged groupies who sprinkle their figurative fairy dust around a series of interchangeable ballrooms, basketball arenas, and hotel suites, and checking in with a protective mother (Frances McDormand) who can only peer helplessly into her son's wonderland from her world outside the circus tent. Finally, William meets with his editors back at HQ to bang out a chunk of blistering reportage that will lay bare the raw emotional state of a band on tour and cement his status as a rock journalist. What could go wrong?

Fantasia Fest '21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi's directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn't have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It's so good because it's so...simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that's kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

CODA (2021)

½*/****
starring Emilia Jones, Eugenio Derbez, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin
screenplay by Sian Heder, based on the original motion picture La Famille Belier by Éric Lartigau
directed by Sian Heder

by Walter Chaw It says something, something terrible, that the Deaf community has expressed gratefulness for CODA because it's some kind of representation, while also expressing trepidation because CODA trafficks in harmful stereotypes and centres the hearing perspective. The great Marlee Matlin made news by insisting that deaf actors be cast as the film's deaf family, and that's amazing, huge, a tremendous step in the right direction--and still, the material is so rancid that all of their great work highlights how desperately this community deserves to have material worthy of them. CODA is a grotesque bit of "big performance"/workingman's blues uplift trash in the vein of Mr. Holland's Opus or Dangerous Minds. It has a high-school audition montage, for Christ's sake. (A practicing-for-the-big-recital montage, too.) CODA posits that Deaf people don't like music even though it shows the parents, Jackie (Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), pulling up to a heavy rap beat, suggesting that the film itself doesn't consider rap to be music, just a noise even Deaf people can appreciate.

Fantasia Fest '21: Hotel Poseidon

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director's fever dream, Stef Lernous's Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro's City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we're all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It's not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch's work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious--a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

Beckett (2021) - Netflix

*/****
starring John David Washington, Alicia Vikander, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Filippos Ioannidis
screenplay by Kevin A. Rice
directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's obvious what Ferdinando Cito Filomarino is after with Beckett: a 1970s paranoia thriller in the Three Days of the Condor vein. And it's just as obvious that he misses the mark. Beckett isn't even a prestige knock-off version à la the Peter Hyams remake of Narrow Margin. Lots of reasons for its failure, chief among them that it doesn't have a point of view; landing somewhere in the junction between a "wrong man" thriller and a film about a truth-seeker finding more truth than he bargained for makes it all seem arbitrary. To be clear, not arbitrary in the sense that what's happening to our heroes is meaningless (a capricious universe is the fodder, after all, for great paranoia)--arbitrary in the sense that the film itself has no real reason for being, and that's a hurdle very little art can overcome. It's a hurdle that not even great cinematography (by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) and a Ryuichi Sakamoto score can ameliorate. Instead, they underscore how top-heavy it all is. Great cast, too, scenic locales--everything top of the line. But there's nothing mooring it to relevance, despite all its arched-eyebrow pipe-smoking about the state of Greece and American interventionism.

Fantasia Fest '21: Giving Birth to a Butterfly

*/****
starring Gus Birney, Annie Parisse, Paul Sparks, Judith Roberts
written by Patrick Lawler & Theodore Schaefer
directed by Theodor Schaefer

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Theodore Schaefer's Giving Birth to a Butterfly is in love with doubling and other broad metaphors deployed to speak, Kieslowski-like, to the winsome possibilities of unlived lives. Trapped in a loveless marriage with oaf Daryl (Paul Sparks), Diane (Annie Parisse) is mother to wry Danielle (Rachel Resheff) and a dreamer of a boy (Owen Campbell) who has just brought home a girlfriend, Marlene (Gus Birney), pregnant by another. Marlene needs a place to stay, and against Diane's wishes, everyone's planning to impose Marlene upon Diane's household. It's weird, you know, because Marlene doesn't even seem to want to be there. That's the essential premise of Giving Birth to a Butterfly: that women aren't in charge of their own fate--ever, but particularly when they're in the process of expressing their biology. That is, when they're mothers. The best part of this film is the first part establishing a tense family dynamic, with Diane maybe the only adult in the room. The men and the pre-motherhood teen girl are silly and unmoored to the cold realities of existence.

Fantasia Fest '21: Baby, Don't Cry

*/****
starring Zita Bai, Boni Mata, Vas Provatakis, Helen Sun
written by Zita Bai
directed by Jesse Dvorak

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Zita Bai stars in and scripts Baby, Don't Cry, a film by Jesse Dvorak that follows a rough few weeks in the life of troubled teen Baby (Bai). Unsuccessfully navigating a dysfunctional home and hostile high-school environment, she meets bad boy Fox (Vas Provatakis) and, in the tradition of stuff like Badlands and Gun Crazy, falls in love and engages in some very bad things--not necessarily in that order. The promise of the piece is that Baby initially seems unfamiliar: a heavily-accented Chinese-American who consoles her loneliness with a habit of filming people and things--perhaps to contextualize them, though more likely to hold them in digital amber, thus negating their immediate threat. The problem is that this promise is largely squandered in a series of repetitive conflicts and resolutions punctuated now and again by hints of magic realism (like her mother sprouting pig ears, or a cartoon fox pacing a car) that, again, are suggestive of a deeper exploration of alienation and loss without the muscle to provide an adequate reckoning with them.

Fantasia Fest '21: Agnes

***½/****
starring Chris Browning, Mary Buss, Sean Gunn, Ben Hall
written by Mickey Reece & John Selvidge
directed by Mickey Reece

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Agnes (Hayley McFarland) and Mary (Molly Quinn) are young nuns at the tightly-run convent of Mother Superior (Mary Buss). The two are friends, and they both have terrible stories about their lives before they, separately, sought out this place--less, we think, from a desire to be wed to the Almighty than to find shelter from the sorrows of the big, wide world outside. One night, Agnes calls all of the other sisters "whores" over dinner while the table shakes and a coffee cup hovers around. Of course they strap her to her bed and call Rome, and of course Rome responds by sending an old/young priest pair in Father Donaghue (Ben Hall) and soon-to-be Father Ben (Jake Horowitz). Trouble is, Father Donaghue has been recently accused of being a pederast (a charge he has not denied), while Father Ben has just passed his coordination period as Deacon and is not nearly prepared enough to be in the company of an entire nunnery, much less perform an exorcism. They're being set up for failure. Perhaps Father Donaghue dying during an exorcism will save the Bishop the trouble of transferring him to an unsuspecting diocese.

Fantasia Fest '21: Introduction

by Walter Chaw Fantasia Festival is special. Every time I cover it, I see something I love.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

***½/****
starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Viola Davis
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw James Gunn's The Suicide Squad is weird. It's explosively, hilariously gory, profane, ridiculous, and, best of all, lawless. As much as I love Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the darkness--the grittiness--he brought to the DC Universe has proven difficult to shake due to its commercial success. In contrast, The Suicide Squad looks and acts a lot like the Adam West "Batman" TV series, a piece fully embracing the elasticity of both its mediums and, though it seems silly to say, one bracingly unafraid of literal colour. I also felt this way about Gunn's still-dour-but-colorful-by-MCU-standards Guardians of the Galaxy--but this film feels very much like something, from character and production design down to the choice of members for the titular squad, allowed to be whatever it was going to be, damn the torpedoes. Have I mentioned that it's weird? It's exquisitely strange, and not just because of the obvious ways in which things are strange, but because it says the bad guys are the colonial-/meddling-minded United States, the military-industrial complex is reliant on the enslavement of the carceral state, and the best test of manhood is not facility with firearms and sociopathy. A billion-dollar IP that isn't trying to skate the middle line of absolute, frictionless equivocation? Weird, right?

Howard the Duck (1986) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you'll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12" EP of the movie's title track, performed by Dolby's Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas "She Blinded Me with Science" Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-'n'-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly's mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.