Film Freak Central

The Fabelmans (2022)

*½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle
written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) loves making movies. He loves it so much there's a chance he'll destroy his family because of it--showing things that aren't for public consumption, mishandling the power of the medium, underestimating the magnitude of his gift. We know this because there's a scene where Sammy, while editing raw 8mm footage of a family camping trip, notices his mom, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), getting a little too friendly with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). He cuts all the incriminating clips together into a mini-reel he projects for Mitzi against the wall of his closet as explanation of sorts for why he's sullen lately, and maybe as punishment for Mitzi, who has just struck him out of frustration. We know this, too, because his obviously insane grand-uncle, ex-lion tamer Boris (Judd Hirsch), has warned him, in a movie-stealing bit of scenery-chewing, that the tension between art and family always ends in tragedy. We know this, too...uh, too, because it's ventriloquized through the mouths of more than one character, including Sammy's bully, Chad (Sam Rechner). Word for tortured word. There are more monologues in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans than there are dialogues--more peaks than mountains, as it were. More waves than ocean. I don't know why everyone in this movie talks like either a greeting card or a diagnosis, though I think it probably has to do with Spielberg wanting to excavate his past and, in the exhumation, to find easy and uplifting bows in which to tie his various strings. We all want that. I feel for him.

To Speak!: FFC Interviews Luca Guadagnino

Walter Chaw interviews Luca Guadagnino, director of
BONES AND ALL

Sicilian-born Luca Guadagnino is a chronicler of the sensual, of the sublime and occasionally ridiculous. He's a sensationalist in the best sense of the term, a cartographer of the more embarrassing, least examined borders of human experience. His closest analogue, to my mind, is Nagisa Ōshima, another artist unafraid of digging into our most intimate, most carnal aspects and somehow mining high-minded art from all that primate muck. At his best, I would slot Guadagnino's pictures in with the likes of Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes or Derek Jarman's The Last of England: erotic rather than titillating; taboo rather than polite. His movies are about the freedom of becoming lost.

The Thinker: FFC Interviews Rian Johnson

AI-generated likeness

Walter Chaw interviews Rian Johnson, writer-director of
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

I met Rian Johnson when his directorial debut, Brick, was making the festival rounds. In the middle of interviewing him, I received a panicked call from my wife that my infant daughter was sick and had been vomiting. Rian overheard some of it, saw my reaction to the rest of it, and, as I hung up, handed me a piece of paper with his cell phone and email on it and told me we could continue talking if I wanted after I was sure my kid was okay. We've been friends ever since. I can confidently say that through the rollercoaster of a Hollywood career, he's remained the same person: kind, funny, available for a chat, able to navigate the absolute highs and troll-infested lows of fandom with equanimity and a notable lack of ego. Speak to his collaborators and you'll hear the same stories about what seems like a unicorn in show business--but I'd add the caveat that Rian, in addition to being a truly nice guy, is also razor sharp. He's the kind of person who likes to play board games and will beat you at them; who will make a bet about his beloved Dodgers with some idiot who has to root for, say, the Rockies, and never let you forget it. His unique genius is on display in films as varied as Knives Out, a morality play about righting a complex social injustice as much as it as a whodunit, and The Brothers Bloom, a puzzle-box all of sleights-of-hand and the love of the grift. Wanting to talk with Rian about the sublimated outrage, the righteousness, of his new film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I began by asking him to identify the pleasure that films like Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun held for him as a kid:

The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ruairi O'Connor, Sarah Catherine Hook
screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick
directed by Michael Chaves

by Walter Chaw I like the Conjuring movies--or, rather, I've come to appreciate them independent of their actual quality. I like them not because of their supernatural stuff or sometimes-expert jump scares, but because they're a popular mainstream film series--one that has suspiciously little to do with any conjuring--about a corny, middle-aged, 1960s married couple who are hot for each other. They own a small business together and respect the unique skill sets the other one brings to the table. Their marriage is as solid as American steel. Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) thinks Ed (Patrick Wilson) is the manliest man that ever manned; Ed thinks Lorraine is the most spiritual spiritualist to ever spiritual. In each other's eyes, they are the utmost. I bet the sex is incredible. Ed and Lorraine are based on real-life couple the Warrens, who earned a living as the kind of sideshow hucksters James Randi made it his holy mission to expose. Yet as immortalized in this flourishing billion-dollar franchise, they are golden and perfect. They are Ozzie & Harriet: Demonologist Exorcists, and these movies are vehicles for their vintage, good ol' middle-American can-do spirit. They're what Republicans used to be before devolving into domestic terrorists and Christo-fascist cultists, and so they carry with them a trace of nostalgia for a time before this country seemed irrevocably divided. In this cinematic universe, the threat isn't only from within.

SDAFF '22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let's say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan's House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun--whose name means "Mr. Fish," leading me to suspect it's maybe not his real name--is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan's peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he's well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF '22: No Bears

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi's No Bears is about imprisonment--a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker's heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran's fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course--good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He's directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza's earbuds. "It's not the same without you," Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can't pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn't one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they've said. I've seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too--letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?

SDAFF '22: Millie Lies Low

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill's hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet's Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It's an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She's Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane's on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can't get back on without a new ticket she can't afford. Unable to accept that she's made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she's made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she's left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral--all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

SDAFF '22: Riceboy Sleeps

**/****
starring Choi Seung-yoon, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang
written and directed by Anthony Shim

by Walter Chaw Anthony Shim's emotionally lacerating memoir-cum-melodrama is an intimately observed cultural piece molded around a Mildred Pierce framework. There's nothing it doesn't do reasonably well, even switching aspect ratios to reflect expanding consciousness and experience in a way that's useful rather than simply distracting, yet there's a certain tidiness to it all that makes it feel calculated. I think it ultimately fails to do what it most wants to do, that is, express the fullness of the immigrant experience as one based as much on hopeful aspiration as on struggle and generational trauma. I got the sad part to the extent the film is willing to go there in an honest way. The other part? Not so much. Maybe moments of connection and love would clash with the typical blue stateliness that defines the Canadian film industry: self-seriousness undermined by the picture's slavishness to prestige formula. One part defiant individualism, one part obvious insecurity. Or maybe there isn't a non-traumatic aspect to immigration and the challenges of assimilation, and Riceboy Sleeps is acknowledgment that life for perpetual aliens is just unrelieved--indeed, unrelievable--pain. I think, really, the problem with Riceboy Sleeps is that it arrives after watermarks like Minari, Columbus, Spa Night, Driveways, The Farewell, and Everything Everywhere All at Once--films that provide a fuller portrait of the Asian-American experience while also covering the key trigger points this one covers. If it were the first rather than the latest, it would be closer to revelation than to parody.

Nocebo (2022)

**½/****
starring Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon
written by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan's Nocebo would fill an interesting double-bill with Jaume Collet-Serra's Black Adam, both violently rejecting the interventionist and exploitative tenets of colonialism (traditional and neo-). The reasons these films at opposite ends of the production spectrum might manifest within days of each other in 2022 are cynically self-evident, perhaps, but it doesn't lessen the fascination of their parallel genesis. The world is being destroyed by unfettered, voracious capitalism in ways so obvious that even widgets extruded from the intellectual-property mill are compelled now to occupy the same sociopolitical spaces as an independent film. I don't know that it's possible to qualify this development in that while it seems like progress, history has a way of reducing revolutions almost instantly to T-shirts and freshman dorm-room poster-ganda. Capitalism is undefeated. I loved Vivarium, Finnegan's previous film, a great deal, mainly because it played out manifold variations on its philosophical theme: to what extent does biology determine behaviour? Nocebo is similar in that it, too, asks a question about guilt and vengeance, then works over through multiple approaches to the answer before landing on the same conclusion that notions of good and evil are arbitrary distinctions imposed on innate compulsions. A mother will be compelled to avenge her child because a creature is obliged to reproduce itself. Anything else is merely obfuscating chantilly on an intrinsic cake.

Armageddon Time (2022)

***/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, Anthony Hopkins
written and directed by James Gray

by Angelo Muredda "All the great artists sign their work," Anthony Hopkins's benevolent grandfather Aaron tells his aimless but creatively-inclined grandson Paul (Banks Repeta) early in Armageddon Time, James Gray's autobiographical profile of growing up in Flushing, Queens as part of a tight-knit Russian-Jewish family. That advice seems to weigh heavily on Gray, who places it at the top of a ladder above less helpful artistic feedback like one teacher's admonition not to copy when Paul reproduces a Kandinsky he saw at the Guggenheim from memory, and another's gentler but no less prescriptive prompt, after Paul's creative work doesn't follow the brief, that he do the assignment. Signing the work for Gray, who has long been fascinated by the tension between the weight of Old World family ties and the seductive levity of contemporary life, means carefully tracking his fictional surrogate family's cross-generational assimilation into Ronald Reagan's America, which he proposes happened not just in the shadow of ghouls like Fred and Maryanne Trump (played here by Jessica Chastain)--donors at Gray's and Paul's private school--but, more insidiously, through American Jews' growing proximity to whiteness. Suffused with Gray's typical tragic grandeur and rich thematic preoccupation with the uniquely American compulsion to recreate oneself as a blank slate despite one's inescapable background, that signature is nevertheless a bit fainter than usual here, owing to the off-the-rack genre elements of the artist's coming-of-age narrative and a still-developing protagonist who, by film's end, remains too opaque to leave his mark as either an artist or an authorial surrogate.

Nope (2022) [Collector's Edition] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don't think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn't stop wondering why. Just because it's more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There's a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don't know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I've never seen them do that, in any case. If there's a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn't, why did he? I understand there's a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn't care about the people who work in it--especially minorities and child actors--once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There's a reveal that's less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There's a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it's explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both--but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn't the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it's ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?