Film Freak Central

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott's second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is... And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics--it's all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of "MST3K"--although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto's turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here's the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino's accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There's a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, "I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you'd-a unnerstan!" while Aldo makes the "c'mon" expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the "you disappointed the hell out of me" kiss of death and, again, it's... Well, it's notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Licorice Pizza (2021) + Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

LICORICE PIZZA
*½/****
starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE
**½/****
starring Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace
written by Gil Kenan & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, John Michael Higgins plays real-life restaurateur Jerry Frick, proprietor of "The Mikado." Frick is married to a severe and disapproving Japanese woman (Yumi Mizui) who apparently doesn't speak any English, although she seems to understand it fluently. She certainly understands her husband, who doesn't speak Japanese but does speak English, when he's speaking it to her, in a cartoonish Asian accent. This is perhaps a commentary on how backwards everyone was in 1973, but Licorice Pizza is not otherwise a satire, so what the fuck is going on here? Is PTA reserving the barbed edge of his keen sociological blade exclusively to excavate anti-Asian depictions in film and nowhere else? Based on Hong Chau's brief but memorable turn in Inherent Vice as a tough hooker (oops) who tries to warn the idiot hero of danger, there's reason to hope. Yet if Frick is meant to be a satire of how white men are racist towards Asians in general and Asian women in particular... How? Just by the fact of him? In his second scene, he shows up with a different wife (Megumi Anjo), explaining how his first wife has left him and this is the new Mrs. Frick. The joke is either that Frick is a fetishist, or that all Asians look alike.

Tick, Tick... Boom! (2021)

tick, tick...Boom!
**/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp, Robin de Jesús, Vanessa Hudgens
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on the musical by Jonathan Larson
directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda

by Walter Chaw Dropping the same weekend as another hagiography for a narcissistic workaholic (King Richard), tick, tick...Boom! at least doesn't include a 70-page manifesto for its subject's unborn children. Also in its favour? It doesn't centre a man in the success story of two women. No, Lin-Manuel Miranda's technically-proficient biopic instead adapts the autobiographical musical of self-pitying tragic figure Jonathan Larson, played in the film by Andrew Garfield. Watching it, I got the feeling the whole exercise was just a way of showcasing songs from Larson's defunct sci-fi magnum opus Superbia, which... Look, there's a Ray Bradbury story called "The October Game" that tells about that nasty kid's game where you turn out the lights and put your hands in a bowl of spaghetti and someone says, "This is the witch's hair," and so on. Except Bradbury suggests that there's been a pretty terrible murder, and this is the murderer's idea of a Greek kind of justice. It ends with one of the most memorable lines in Bradbury's career: "Then ...... some idiot turned on the lights." I think about that line a lot, unbidden at the weirdest times; I thought of it during tick, tick...Boom! because I realized that some idiot will one day resurrect Superbia, a musical based on 1984, and make a billion dollars, thus driving me insane.

No Time to Die (2021)

****/****
starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge
directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Cary Fukunaga's No Time to Die, the twenty-fifth canonical James Bond film, is the best one since Peter Hunt's On Her Majesty's Secret Service and for many of the same reasons. One could hazard that the similarities, a vulnerable Bond chief among them, comprise the guiding principle behind this picture, with its multiple call-outs to Fleming's books--On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in particular, along with its downbeat, mortal sequel You Only Live Twice, the last Bond Fleming completed himself. In the latter, 007's boss, M, uses the same Jack London quote to eulogize the presumed-dead superspy ("The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time") that his screen counterpart (Ralph Fiennes) uses to eulogize Bond in No Time to Die. It ends with Bond, initially dumbstruck by grief over the death of his wife in the previous novel (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), now stricken by amnesia and about to abandon his impregnated wife--the child a development Fleming never got to bring to term, but who finds her fruition in Fukunaga's film. At a late point in No Time to Die, two combatants reaching the end of their struggles agree that the only reason to live is to leave a legacy. I find it touching that this film brings a small and precious note of Fleming's to life, so many years after his death.

SDAFF '21: Introduction + In Front of Your Face

인트로덕션
INTRODUCTION
**/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Park Mi-so, Shin Seok-ho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

당신 얼굴 앞에서
IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE
**½/****
starring Cho Yunhee, Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw Hong Sang-soo's films, more so than most, are only ever about Hong Sang-soo--and in his mind, Hong Sang-soo is Henrik Ibsen: the iconoclast, the great social observer and auto-didact, the artist who, late in his career, shifted his observations from class concerns in general to the insular peculiarities of individuals imprisoned by lifetimes of secrets. Hong is now more playwright and stage director than filmmaker; increasingly, the act of capturing his interpersonal dissections on film has felt like an afterthought unto inconvenience. One gets the sense Hong would rather be left alone with his company of players like the playwright/theatre director hero of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, initiating a lifetime of rehearsals with no opening date in sight. I think, closer to the truth, he can't get out of his head anymore. Maybe it's no surprise, then, that two new Hong films are dropping simultaneously, given that both credit Hong as director/writer/editor (and, one presumes, sound engineer, gaffer, and craft services). In Front of Your Face is the less consumer-grade-home-movie-seeming between it and Introduction, though neither seems like something that took much time to put together, landing the same way as vignettes in a local one-act play festival might. Which is not to say there aren't pleasures to be had, only that these are less full meals than amuse-bouches served at a tastefully-set party to which you weren't necessarily invited.

SDAFF '21: Time

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko's Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin's shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there's pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like "take a hit out on twilight," Ko's flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, '70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief--roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung's the only one of them, really, who isn't all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job--a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He's still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

My Fair Lady (1964) - 4K Ultra HD + Digital (Bryant Frazer's last review)

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc.

This is the final review Bryant Frazer wrote for FILM FREAK CENTRAL before he passed away. It's technically a work-in-progress, but I don't think its publication is anything to be embarrassed about. For what it's worth, Bryant neglected to provide a star rating or grades for the audio, video, and extra features, so I've left them off rather than attempt to second-guess him. As our own Walter Chaw poetically put it to me, "His last act was not an act of judgment."-Ed.

starring Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Theodore Bikel
screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based upon the musical play as produced on the stage by Herman Levin, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, from a play by Bernard Shaw
directed by George Cukor

by Bryant Frazer My Fair Lady opens, provocatively enough, at a performance of Gounod's operatic adaptation of Faust, that ageless drama of unforeseen consequences. As in the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, the role of the Devil is filled by Dr. Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a linguist who loudly (and rudely) laments the Cockney patois spoken by the lower classes. Drawing his attention is a wary flower girl named Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a London-born-and-bred Faust who's intrigued by Higgins's boast that, through speech training alone, he can elevate her from working-poor status into a new position as society maven. The drama pivots around that transformation: Hepburn moves into Higgins's spacious home for the duration of her schooling, with an upcoming embassy ball--where Higgins hopes to debut his newly cultured creation--imposing a deadline on his project. Surrounding them are a variety of colourful characters, such as Higgins's sponsor, Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), Hungarian language scholar Zoltan Karpathy (Theodore Bikel), and Eliza's father, Alfred (Stanley Holloway), whose big pre-wedding number, which includes the immortal turn of phrase "Girls come and kiss me / Show how you'll miss me / But get me to the church on time," is a highlight of the film's otherwise logy second act.

SDAFF '21: Catch the Fair One

***½/****
starring Kali Reis, Tiffany Chu, Michael Drayer, Kevin Dunn
screenplay by Josef Kubota Wladyka
directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Josef Kubota Wladyka follows his Colombian drug-trafficking adventure film Dirty Hands with the concussive, propulsive sex-trafficking thriller Catch the Fair One, announcing himself as an artist with the chops to handle an efficient action vehicle that functions as a vibrant social statement, too. It's a rich, angry work that has not a hint of sentimentality to it nor an ounce of fat on it. The uncharitable would maybe call it too straightforward: a march, brutish and uninterrupted, with a message that's more like a klaxon than a statement--but the picture is admirable for its unwillingness to gild the intensely ugly lily of vanished Native American women and white law enforcement's utter lack of interest in doing anything about this epidemic. Kali Reis collaborated on the story, a personal one for her as one of the most visible spokespeople for the MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) movement--visible because, as a boxer, she's the WBA super lightweight world champion.

SDAFF '21: 7 Days

**½/****
starring Geraldine Viswanathan, Karan Soni, Gita Reddy, Zenobia Shroff
written by Roshan Sethi & Karan Soni
directed by Roshan Sethi

by Walter Chaw Roshan Sethi's 7 Days is a charmer. It opens like When Harry Met Sally... with interviews of real couples at different stages in their relationships talking about how they met and how they're getting along. In this incarnation, the couples all appear to be desi, and the common theme that binds them is their arranged marriages. They set the stage for this story of traditional cultures trying to maintain in the diaspora, of how a young generation of desi struggle with the pull of tradition versus the siren's call of assimilation. I don't use this metaphor loosely: assimilation is a kind of death. If it results in rebirth, so be it, but a thing dies in the process of that renaissance and I'm no longer certain that the transformation is necessary or, if it's necessary, worth it. The rewards fall far short of the price one pays for surrendering something so valuable as a cultural lineage, an identity beyond the one provided by an adopted culture that would prefer you edgeless and easy to compartmentalize.

Finch (2021)

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks
written by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell
directed by Miguel Sapochnik

by Walter Chaw No movie with Tom Hanks can be entirely bad, especially when that movie marries Hanks favourites Apollo 13 and Cast Away--two films in which our Jimmy Stewart is asked to be ingenious when everything goes wrong. In Finch, he is Finch, an engineer in the post-apocalypse after a solar flare has shredded our ozone layer, wreaking havoc on our crops and allowing the sun to fry people instantly. Time has passed since then, it seems, and there are few signs of life left in St. Louis other than Finch and Finch's dog, Goodyear. Like Hanks's volleyball buddy, the dog is named for a product and, because we've all read I Am Legend, we know that Goodyear is vital to Finch as the last link Finch has with not just the former world, but his own humanity as well. Oh, the humanity. Finch really loves the Don McLean song "American Pie" and, testament to Tom Hanks's titanic charisma and reservoir of goodwill, we like him anyway. We forgive him for Chet; we can forgive him for "American Pie." As the film opens, he's singing "American Pie" and scavenging for goods at the local dollar mart, meaning this is a Chloe Zhao movie all of a sudden though thankfully not for long.

SDAFF '21: Drive My Car

ドライブ・マイ・カー
****/****
starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, Tôko Miura
screenplay by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, based on the short story by Haruki Murakami
directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Haruki Murakami's short story "Drive My Car" is a model of the rich economy that typifies his writing. The prose--inasmuch as I can tell from its English translation--is simple and declarative, and the action, such as it is, is mundane. But that simplicity is akin to the "Drink Me/Eat Me" invitations presented to Alice on the outskirts of Wonderland--the Red Pill/Blue Pill keys to entire landscapes littered with signs and referents pointing to the things Murakami was thinking (of) as he was writing, possibly even to what he was reading immediately before setting pen to paper. Midway through the short story, the protagonist, Kafuku (a homonym for Kafka), a small-time stage actor who has had to hire a driver because of a drunk-driving accident, mentions his love of zoning out to Beethoven--or, on occasion, American soft rock--on the way home from the theatre. On the way in? He listens to a cassette of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya", the play in which he's playing the lead role. Some days, he'll close his eyes and try to catch his driver, a young woman called Misaki, shifting gears on his 12-year-old yellow Saab. As Murakami describes it, Misaki is such a good driver that Kafuku can only tell gears are being changed by the engine's sound, which he compares to an insect flying nearer, then away, then back again.

Bryant.

Photo courtesy of Karen Frazer

"At some point during the free-for-all brawl that climaxes The Swinging Cheerleaders, I remember thinking to myself, "This has got to be one of the most American movies ever made." I was reacting in part to the iconography--cheerleaders fighting policeman fighting college footballers, almost in the manner of a silent comedy, as Scott Joplin plays on the soundtrack--but also to the mood of the film, in which converging themes of corruption and cynicism lead to an eruption of chaotic, comic violence, and open-hearted jocks make way for joyous optimism to prevail."
-Bryant Frazer on The Swinging Cheerleaders

FILM FREAK CENTRAL's own Bryant Frazer passed away unexpectedly on October 22, 2021.

SDAFF '21 - Introduction

by Walter Chaw Brian Hu and his ace staff, including programmer Christina Ree, walk the walk. Their work with the Pacific Arts Movement in San Diego is consistently rewarding, revealing the deficiencies in not just the distribution of Asian films in North American theatres but also the paucity of such fare in our mainstream festivals as well. Without the kind of careful curation provided by the San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF), these titles have a tendency to fall through the cracks. What Brian and his team do year upon year is vital for the visibility of Asian film in the United States and, not incidentally, for the cause of Asian-American filmmakers of the diaspora. It's at this festival that Kogonada, then E. Joong-Eun Park, premiered his underseen debut, Late Summer. (He returned five years later with his breakout, Columbus.) It was one of the first fests to feature Better Luck Tomorrow, I Was a Simple Man, and Minari. It engaged in the discourse while I was still avoiding the discourse. Even as I joined the movement late, I was welcomed as if I'd hopped the train at the first station.