Film Freak Central

Eternals (2021)

*/****
starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Chloe Zhao & Patrick Burleigh
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw Chloé Zhao's follow-up to her Oscar-winning Nomadland is one of those movies that is more interesting to talk about than to watch--which, in the final analysis, may be the poet laureate of South Dakota's most distinctive auteur hallmark. Despite that it's the twenty-some-odd instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals is defiantly a Chloé Zhao picture, and the amount of subversion required to make it so highlights both MCU overlord Kevin Feige's desperation to shake the diversity monkey off his back and his fatal lack of understanding of women creators at the most rudimentary level. In theory that doesn't matter much if all these folks are asked to do is direct the parts that aren't generic action scenes, committee-generated in the house style and dropped into the middle of whatever flaccid drama is possible under the narrative conditions like dead paratroopers into a live warzone. What you see in Eternals is a result of what feels less like a partnership with its attendant compromises than like a quiet war waged in the spaces between a boss who thinks he knows what's happening and a hired gun who's pretty clever about having her way no matter the amount of oversight. By the third or fourth laborious exposition dump by the least comfortable, least seasoned and natural actor in the loaded cast (that would be 14-year-old Lia McHugh), it's pretty clear that Zhao's empathy for unaffected performers rambling in lingering magic-hour landscapes has won the day. Good one, Zhao.

Telluride '21: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay by Simon Stephenson & Will Sharpe
directed by Will Sharpe

by Walter Chaw Will Sharpe's The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is not quite the sentimental, broadly-appealing quirk-fest you might be fearing, largely because it has a strong sense of its own absurdity and maybe even a respect for how tired we are of this crap. Though it stars Benedict Cumberbatch, the patron saint of biopics about iconoclasts like Louis Wain, its most valuable player is, as is so often the case with her, Claire Foy. She plays Emily Richardson, nanny for the younger Wain sisters and, after a funny courtship, the happily-ever-after'd Mrs. Wain. This is a bit of a scandal, their nuptials, because Louis is a gentleman and Emily is working-class, but they're happy, and while they remain childless, they do adopt a cat. That's unusual, since housecats weren't really a thing in Victorian England. So infatuated are the Wains with their fur-baby that Louis, an inventor and illustrator and maybe a genius, starts drawing cats doing people things, partly to pay the bills and partly to distract himself from the fact that Emily is dying of breast cancer. Another complication? Louis is so hopeless at managing his affairs that he's neglected to copyright his paintings, and a cottage industry of Wain's cats springs up without benefiting him in the slightest.

Titane (2021)

***/****
starring Vincent Lindon, Agathe Rousselle, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw In Julia Ducournau's first film, Raw, there's a part involving scissors wielded near a vagina that almost made me pass out. A sequence in her second film, Titane, involves another massively inappropriate object wielded near, and inside, a vagina, yet it didn't bother me half as much. This may have something to do with Titane's tone and attitude towards menace: In Raw, there's a tenderness and familiarity to it all that makes the horror invasive, whereas Titane gives off an alien, madcap, Mack Sennett vibe that announces the movie's allegorical intentions as a barker at a carnival sideshow might. What's constant in Ducournau's two films is an admirably reductive drive to boil a woman's body down to its biological functions. As Titane opens, hero Alexia (Agathe Rousselle)--badly scarred from the titanium plate behind her ear, the product of a childhood car accident she caused by wanting very badly to sing along to the car's engine noise--is making her living as a stripper/model at an underground car show. Her body is a fetish object the way a car is to certain men, you see, and I'm thinking immediately not only of how men often assign a feminine pronoun to their cars, but also of e.e. cummings's naughty poem "she being brand." Here it is in full:

The Manor (2021)

*/****
starring Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison, Nicholas Alexander, Jill Larson
written and directed by Axelle Carolyn

by Walter Chaw Edited like a dog would edit something in a room full of tennis ball-throwing squirrels, Axelle Carolyn's The Manor is terrible by almost every standard measure of quality. Carolyn's own script is tediously overwritten, weighed down by goth-with-a-clove-at-the-all-night-coffee-shop-cum-bookstore notes like, "Oh, wormwood!" and, "I don't know plants but I do know absinthe!" and ironic jokes about Elizabeth Bathory. The only thing missing is a dramatic recitation of a line from "Troilus and Cressida," a red rose held in a harlequin's flourish, and an invitation to a game of chess. Yet despite all the smug listing-off of genre bona fides, all the strained lines and lines upon lines, it still leans heavily on a hilarious bit of exposition obviously inserted in post ("It's your fucking hair, Roland!") at the end as if the lead up to this moment weren't already extravagantly, explicitly spelled out, pitched to the most disinterested student in class. At least one of the alleged jump-scares is telegraphed by the reaction shot before the scare, and all that broaching of serious subjects such as elder abuse in nursing homes, dementia, and privatized healthcare for profit is handled without the slightest hint of the emotional intelligence necessary to deal with them in a substantive or respectful way. Honestly, it would be more offensive if it weren't so clearly the product of incompetence. I don't even know why it's called "The Manor."

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

*/****
starring Leslie Odom, Jr., Freida Pinto, Cynthia Erivo, Orlando Bloom
written for the screen by John Ridley, based on the short story by Robert Silverberg
directed by John Ridley

by Walter Chaw A cautionary tale about writing something whilst in a state of forced, artificial love-drunk, John Ridley's Needle in a Timestack is this year's Serenity: a film so intensely invested in its adolescent feelings that it's headed towards a specific state of camp immortality. Nick (Leslie Odom, Jr.)--because "Nick of time," get it?--is married to Janine (Cynthia Erivo), and they're that kind of The Notebook couple who speak to each other as though they were scripted by Nicholas Sparks, who, let's face it, on the Stephanie Meyer scale of cultural whoopsies, can barely string three words together. "Dance like no one's watching," someone moans in a high state of agitation. "Love is a closed circle," someone else declares; between that and "True Detective"'s "time is a flat circle," circles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the realm of purple overwriting. In this future as imagined by a perfume commercial, time travel is a recreational lark indulged in by the hyper-rich, causing occasional "time waves" that wash over the world like the exact same visualization of the exact same concept in A Sound of Thunder, a film so terrible that your body's autonomous defense mechanism has already largely expelled it from your memory. That film, like this one, is based on a classic science-fiction story: Ray Bradbury there, Robert Silverberg here. The concept of "based" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this instance, too.

Bergman Island (2021)

**/****
starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Walter Chaw Eric Rohmer made some snoozers, too. So it is with Mia Hansen-Løve, the inheritor of Rohmer's cinema of intimate behavioural observation and obsession, and her Bergman Island, which lands midway between pointlessly clever and fatally self-obsessed. It follows married filmmakers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) as they retreat to Ingmar Bergman's compound on Fårö Island in the Baltic to finish their respective screenplays. Tony's having a much easier time of it, and it's revealed they've been invited to this unusual writer's retreat at least in part so Tony can screen and conduct a Q&A for one of his films. From what we see of it, it's possibly a horror film; whatever it is, it's clear that Tony's work is very different from Chris's. Bergman shot a few of his film and TV productions on Fårö--in fact, Fårö was for him like Yoknapatawpha County was for Faulkner: an entire world unto itself that functioned as the canvas and backdrop for his working-through of major themes. There's a tour of sites that Tony goes on and Chris does not, since she meets an earnest young graduate student, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), studying Bergman, of course, and decides to spend the day with him instead. You think this will be a source of conflict in Bergman Island, particularly as Chris comments that the couple will be sleeping in the same bedroom where Scenes from a Marriage was shot, but it's not.

Halloween Kills (2021)

**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Scott Teems & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Bill Chambers Depending on your perspective, Halloween Kills, David Gordon Green's follow-up to his 2018 Halloween, is the third Halloween II, or the second Halloween III, or the twelfth entry in a long-running serial with a compulsion to press the reset button. Though other horror franchises have splintered into manifold continuities (you'd need Ancestry.com to sort out the various branches stemming from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Halloween is unique in that it's not (just) a cash cow getting milked to death by new content farmers--no, a fairly consistent chain of ownership has made a habit of calling a mulligan whenever the consensus is that they've strayed too far from the beaten path. After a failed bid to rebrand as an anthology with the John Carpenter-backed Halloween III: Season of the Witch, whose reputation has since been reclaimed, the series resurrected Michael Myers and his Ahab, Dr. Loomis, only to fly too close to the sun with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween H20 followed, and in bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Michael's sister, it wallpapered over the events of Halloweens III through VI. Then Halloween: Resurrection undid all of that movie's goodwill, so Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of the first film. Zombie returned for a sequel that was roundly rejected despite being the ne plus ultra of Halloween movies for the misfit fans like myself, and the unlikely team of Green and Danny McBride took the reins, making the somewhat unconventional decision to do a legacy sequel to Carpenter's 1978 original alone, again with Curtis but without the early retcon that Laurie and Michael are related.

Frank & Zed (2021) + Mad God (2021)

FRANK & ZED
***/****
written and directed by Jesse Blanchard

MAD GOD
****/****
starring Alex Cox
written and directed by Phil Tippett

by Walter Chaw William Blake etched the plates he used to press his poems with acid. His first books were hand-made by him in this way. He called it the "infernal method," and the idea driving it is that every work of art is enlivened by the hand of its creator. Literally. He believed that touching a thing imbued it with animated qualities in the "soul-giving" sense of the word. I think about that whenever I watch any sort of puppetry or, as it relates to film more commonly, stop-motion animation. Maybe I'm imagining it, but I think Blake had a point. I feel like there's a specific quality of life in graven idols that have been directly manipulated by the human hand. Traditional cel animation? The same: the little imperfections, the stutters and hesitations that keep it just the other side of the Uncanny Valley. It's hard to put a finger on what it is, but it's stimulating in the same way a film projected on 35mm is ineffably different from the same film streamed digitally. Shadows on the wall and all that; maybe Plato and John Lennon had something there. William Blake was, of course, a prophet.

TIFF '21: Wrap-up

by Bill Chambers I've been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn't expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I'm fully vaccinated, I wasn't about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

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"Heaven" is for Real: An Interview with Aharon Keshales

I met Aharon Keshales during the junket for Big Bad Wolves and found in him something like a kindred spirit. A former teacher and film critic, he spoke fondly of his love for 1970s cinema and provided cogent defenses of modern blockbusters. Both his co-directing debut, Rabies (the first Israeli horror film), and its follow-up, Big Bad Wolves, demonstrate a strong distaste for hewing to conventional narratives and resolutions. His first American film, South of Heaven, finds Jason Sudeikis at the moment of his superstardom, bolstered by a supporting cast that includes Evangeline Lilly, Mike Colter, Shea Whigham, and Jeremy Bobb, each delivering career-highlight performances in the service of a script that feels personal and, above all, wise. Keshales spent eight years from his last film to get to this point and has some scars as proof of the hazards endured along the way. Like the weather-beaten films that inform his taste, South of Heaven begins as something like a love story and ends, as all great love stories must, in terrible tragedy. (Keshales is absolutely unafraid of the "down" ending.) Its obvious touchstones are Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway and Beat Takeshi's Hana-bi; to say it's exactly my jam is an understatement. I love Aharon as a person, so take this with whatever grain of salt you feel it merits, but South of Heaven is fantastic.