Film Freak Central

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision - Books

Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision
FFC rating: 7/10
by Charles Elton

by Bill Chambers Six years after his death, Michael Cimino remains an enigma, shrouded by a swirling mass of rumours and contradictions. A biographer has their work cut out for them. Before reading Charles Elton's Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven's Gate, and the Price of a Vision, I took stock of everything I knew about the mercurial filmmaker: that he helmed seven movies during a span of 22 years, the second of which he was fêted for (The Deer Hunter), the third of which he went to director jail for (Heaven's Gate); and that he gradually began to look different in ways for which time alone cannot account. I also had some preconceived notions about Cimino--that he was vain, an egotist, one who burned a lot of bridges--that are more or less borne out by Elton's overview, but it's important to note that Cimino was not around to defend himself when the author went rummaging through his past. (I feel fairly confident in saying, again from the picture Elton paints, that he probably would've spent more energy trying to halt the book's publication altogether.) Though Cimino is not one of the great posthumous bios on the order of David Weddle's If They Move...Kill 'Em! or Lee Server's Baby, I Don't Care, it does have unique virtues (which I'll get to) and is reasonably good at preserving Cimino's dignity while countering or outright demolishing his own unreliable narrative.

All at Once: An Interview with the Makers of "Everything Everywhere All at Once"

Walter Chaw interviews "The Daniels," Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writer-directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once

The function--the true function--of art at any time, but particularly in dark times collective and personal, is, I think, to provide evidence of grace. However low, however diminished, however stricken we may find ourselves, here are these artifacts of others who went before us into the breach to retrieve...I don't know: signposts? Breadcrumbs in the wild, overgrown wood; strings in the labyrinth; a way out or a way in. I don't know. Everything Everywhere All At Once returned fragments of myself to me that I had not been aware were missing. It is one of the most meaningful films of my life, appearing at a stage of my experience and movie-obsessed existence where I thought it was no longer possible to feel that way about a movie again. It reminded me of why I, more than love, why I need art to fill the spaces in me.

The Northman (2022)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers's latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There's even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film's settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare's Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers's previous film, The Lighthouse, and it's the first of his movies that doesn't require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.

All the Old Knives (2022)

*/****
starring Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Olen Steinhauer
directed by Janus Metz

by Walter Chaw Fred Schepisi's The Russia House is a dignified, austere, mature adaptation of John le Carré that feels like a Graham Greene in its colonial exhaustion and resignation. Sean Connery plays "Barley" Scott-Blair, a publisher pulled into a game of international intrigue as the CIA and MI6, from opposite sides of the pond, seek to make him and a young Russian, Katya (Michelle Pfeiffer), into pawns in a game of Cold War chess. Barley falls in love with Katya, of course; who wouldn't fall in love with Michelle Pfeiffer? And he plays both sides--well, all three sides--against the middle in order to secure a romantic future for himself and his lady fair. It's the best film Schepisi's made outside his native Australia, with a Jerry Goldsmith score (featuring Branford Marsalis on the soprano sax) that treats it as a bit of a chamber piece, like a story told to grandchildren when the danger has faded but the love's continued to bloom. They've heard it a million times, but let the old guy tell it: he seems so happy when he does. I've loved The Russia House ever since seeing it on Christmas in 1990. It's one of my comfort movies, twisty enough to engage with performances that feel lived-in like an old and beloved sweater.

The Contractor (2022)

***/****
starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland
written by J.P. Davis
directed by Tarik Saleh

by Walter Chaw Tarik Saleh's The Contractor reminds me a lot of Michael B. Jordan's recent attempt at a franchise-starter Without Remorse in that both are the sort of workmanlike action pictures that once kept multiplexes afloat but now occupy a mid-budget niche relegated to streaming services. Its closest analogue might be Amazon's "Reacher" series in terms of its clean action, straight-line plotting, and lantern-jawed "all-American" hero trained to kill and prone to angst over his lethal ways. The Contractor adds some wrinkles in using the plight of veterans returning from service with neither financial nor emotional support while also reserving some criticism for the private, for-profit contractors who send mercenaries into conflict zones for the purposes of ratfucking and wetworks. Mostly, though, it's an able showcase for Chris Pine as a sturdy action hero who is also a non-threatening avatar for the Average Joe demographic: handsome but cool, clever not brainy, self-sufficient but loyal to an old buddy, a good dad and good Christian good at tamping down "girl" emotions and, moreover, good at boom-boom stab-stab.