Film Freak Central

Shotgun Wedding (2023) + You People (2023)

SHOTGUN WEDDING
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Lenny Kravitz
written by Mark Hammer
directed by Jason Moore

YOU PEOPLE
***/****
starring Jonah Hill, Lauren London, David Duchovny, Eddie Murphy
written by Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris
directed by Kenya Barris

by Walter Chaw Jennifer Coolidge, 61, plays the mother of 50-year-old Josh Duhamel in Jason "Pitch Perfect" Moore's abominable-in-pretty-much-every-conceivable-way Shotgun Wedding, and her being 11 when she had him isn't even the worst of it. Honestly, this is the kind of movie where it would've been funny if they'd made a joke out of that somehow (like maybe how Steve Coulter, who plays his dad, would've been 12), and Coolidge has exactly the befuddled, oversexed MILF persona to pull it off. I don't know, I didn't write this shit. Coolidge is Carol and Coulter is Larry. Their son Tom is a total loser recently released from a minor-league baseball team, which only makes sense because he's on the AARP mailing list. Has he been trying to make it to "the show" for 30 years? One of these Crash Davis things, I guess. Just kidding: Crash was 33; can Tom even tie his own shoes anymore without getting winded? Because I'm turning 50 this year, and let me tell you, I cannot. Tom is marrying Darcy (Jennifer Lopez), who spends every other sentence mobbing Tom for each of his groomzilla decisions--decisions he has to make, because Darcy is disengaged from the entire process and resents having to have a wedding at all, since one of the first things she said to him when they started dating was that she didn't want a fancy wedding. Tom will eventually apologize for not listening to her, but if the intent is to make this about Tom learning to be a better partner, I must confess I would stop listening to someone as passive-aggressive and monstrously belittling as Darcy. Maybe Tom has a humiliation kink. That would explain why he played minor-league baseball for 30 years and probably votes Republican. It's not my place to judge that, I'm just observing it.

Infinity Pool (2023)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda Brandon Cronenberg delivers his own visceral riff on the resort satire trend with Infinity Pool, a high-concept thriller that shares obvious genetic material with its precursor, Possessor (2021), but feels more like the runty kid brother in terms of its ideas. With his third feature, Cronenberg hones his skillsets in grounded sci-fi storytelling and kaleidoscopic montage while continuing to make a meal of the charge that he's merely following in his father's footsteps as a new purveyor of brainy body horror, boldly playing once more with the motifs of inheritance and imitation where less confident nepotism babies might dodge the comparison outright. Yet in the absence of stronger material, these predilections don't ripen into rich artistic fruits so much as they rot, leaving Infinity Pool's success riding largely on the back of its occasionally startling images and self-effacing cast, who, like Cronenberg, are riffing on the roles we expect from them.

Blood (2023)

***/****
starring Michelle Monaghan, Skeet Ulrich, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Skylar Morgan Jones
written by Will Honley
directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Of the films Brad Anderson's made over the course of a long and varied career, the ones I remember best are his slow-burn haunted-asylum movie Session 9 and his portrait of progressive madness, The Machinist. Both are focused on how a person can get fixated on obsessive thoughts, and how elastic reality might become to conform itself around those fixations. He's the perfect chronicler of this fraught moment where belief has come to be as valued as fact--and more powerful, too, in the defense and inspiration of division and atrocity. His Blood is a queasy folk horror, its title referring to the thickness of it in relation to water as well as the only sustenance, the human variety, a little boy named Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) can tolerate after encountering something that lives in the hole of the dead tree in the woods behind his house. The two, family and its enervating qualities, are inextricable. In one way, Blood is about the evolutionarily proscribed madness of becoming a parent to a parasitic lifeform you love, whether or not it loves you back--that it would devastate you to lose, even as it's born with no ability to survive on its own.

There's Something Wrong with the Children (2023) - VOD

*/****
starring Alisha Wainwright, Zach Gilford, Amanda Crew, Carlo Santos
written by T.J. Cimfel & Dave White
directed by Roxanne Benjamin

by Walter Chaw Roxanne Benjamin's There's Something Wrong with the Children is a tired retread in the folk-horror category of evil children that doesn't break any new ground and certainly doesn't tread any old ground with anything resembling energy or invention. It's just lugubriously competent, cozy in the way of a broken-in boot or a well-loved terrycloth robe--an "I'll be right back, you don't need to pause it" movie. Indeed, one doesn't need to pause it. For what it's worth, the best evil-kid movie is probably Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child?, although my favourite is the repugnant, deeply wrong 1981 Lew Lehman freakout The Pit. In that one, unhinged 10-year-old creeper Jamie (Sammy Snyders) discovers a pit in the middle of the forest behind his house that's swarming with carnivorous troglodytes he thinks are communicating with him through his teddy bear. Between feeding bullies and football players to the pit, Jamie spends his time making passes at his teen cheesecake babysitter and peeping on her while she's in the shower. Yes, that movie has it all. Alas, There's Something Wrong with the Children is aggressively forgettable, even freed of comparisons to films it's so obviously aping: a pair of evil kids, check; a pit in the forest full of evil? Check. Parents too wrapped up in their bougie bullshit to notice their offspring are breaking supernatural bad? Check. You've seen it. We've all seen it. Better versions.

Alice, Darling (2022)

***/****
starring Anna Kendrick, Kaniehtiio Horn, Charlie Carrick, Wunmi Mosaku
written by Alanna Francis
directed by Mary Nighy

by Walter Chaw Not quite the sequel to Alice, Sweet Alice I was hoping for, Mary Nighy's Alice, Darling is actually a principled character piece about a woman named Alice (Anna Kendrick) stuck in an emotionally controlling--indeed, abusive--relationship with manipulative artist Simon (Charlie Carrick). Simon's determined, as these pricks tend to be, to isolate Alice into a codependent situation in which she rejects her best friends, Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn), in favour of a singular fixation on his wants and desires. Ripped, according to Kendrick, from personal experience, Alice, Darling feels, for lack of a better word, real. Real enough that I recognized a few terrible tendencies from the villain in my own dating history as a much younger man--people I've hurt in my past because I was too insecure to be alone, too selfish to be a partner, too stupid to know how to be better. I needed the help of a brilliant and fierce partner to set me straight. It is the work of my life to unlearn the things that were taught to me, and to feel whole enough not to require someone else to complete me. I don't hope to get there; I do hope to get close. No one deserves to be the final piece in an incomplete person's puzzle. It's an uncomfortable thing to see everything you've despised about yourself reflected in a movie character, but there you have it. Simon is a bad guy who doesn't kill people (this isn't a Sleeping with the Enemy thriller), though he's a destructive child who abuses a woman psychologically until she relies on his approval. Alice is through the looking glass, and she knows it.

Now in Paperback! "A Walter Hill Film"

A Walter Hill Film, Walter Chaw's critical biography of filmmaker Walter Hill (The Warriors, 48Hrs., Streets of Fire), is now available in paperback from MZS Press. Featuring photos from Hill's personal archives, introductions by James Ellroy and Larry Gross, an afterword by Edgar Wright, and cover art from the acclaimed Ganzeer, it's A Walter Hill Film: Tragedy and Masculinity in the films of Walter Hill. Get your copy here.

Till (2022)

*/****
starring Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Frankie Faison, Whoopi Goldberg
written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu
directed by Chinonye Chukwu

by Walter Chaw At once a muddle and overly simplistic, Chinonye Chukwu's Till is told in a broad visual style that signals "prestige picture," replete with slow and stately circular pans and, in one appalling instance, the dolly zoom Hitchcock made famous in Vertigo to dramatize a mother's pain upon confirmation of her son's death. It's handsomely decorated, and its costumes went on a national tour with the film's rolling release, which feels as oblivious as a tie-in fashion show for Schindler's List would have. That the screenplay, by a trio of authors including alleged Till scholar Keith Beauchamp (whose contentions a grand jury partially refuted in 2007), trafficks in debunked accounts of the inciting event in the film is one thing, but Till plays loose in favour of testimonies that eyewitnesses have since recanted, thus leaning towards Carolyn Bryant's account--Bryant being the white store clerk who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) of making verbal and physical passes at her in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Her accusations led to Till's kidnapping, torture, and murder, his body left for boys fishing in the river to discover. Till's mother, Mamie, insisted he be returned home to Chicago, and though the corpse was bloated by its time in the river and mutilated by the attentions of the backwoods crackers who killed him, she held an open-casket funeral that earned national attention.

A Man Called Otto (2022)

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mariana Treviño, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Mike Birbiglia
screenplay by David Magee, based on the novel A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and the film A Man Called Ove written by Hannes Holm
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw "Get out of here while you can," the old man snarls to the stray cat. "I'm not your friend." But of course he will befriend the kitty, because you don't introduce a stray cat at the beginning of a manipulative piece of happy-go-fuckery like A Man Called Otto without it becoming one catalyst of many for the objectionable curmudgeon's development of a renewed reason for living. You could say that every character in A Man Called Otto is similarly a collection of adorable quirks and bottomless patience designed exclusively for the redemptive salvation of our man Otto. Otto, who is Tom Hanks's second shot at playing someone on the neurodivergent spectrum, this time landing somewhere just south of the elder Paul Newman, in the neighbourhood of Walter Matthau (at the corner of Richard Russo and Garrison Keillor). On his first date with his dead wife (Rachel Keller), a scene played in flashback by Hanks's other other son, Truman (who is less like a cross between Hanks and Rita Wilson than between Colin and Chet), Otto's asked what he's passionate about and says he's interested in machines and how things work. Forced into early retirement as the picture opens, he's a dedicated engineer obsessed with details--yet he doesn't understand that if he wants to hang himself from a rope looped through a ring hook in his living room, he needs to use a support beam in the ceiling or else what you know is going to happen will happen. Then he blames the hook. I know it's a Better Off Dead gag, but it's also inconsistent writing meant to extort a response like Thomas Newman's emotive/emetic tongue bath of a score. If you turned the concept of "insincere pathos" into a music box, this is the noise it would make. It conjures the images of teddy bears finding a baby next to a river. Look, if Thomas Kinkade paintings came with soundtracks...

M3GAN (2023)

***/****
starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by Gerard Johnstone

by Walter Chaw That the Internet works the way it does and evolved as quickly as it did likely had everything to do with it being the finest distributor of pornography the world had ever seen. If a band of apes created something like the Internet, for instance, they would use it primarily to inflict violent dominance over others--and for sex, if possible. No "ifs" about it: we are, and we did. When an artificial intelligence was tasked with machine learning via the Internet, it became a misanthropic, misogynistic racist almost instantly. The Internet is also the single greatest anthropological bellwether ever created, diagnosing who we are when we're not obsessively adjusting our mask of civility; 100% pure id. I love Alex Garland's Ex Machina because it understands that if a robot that looked like Alicia Vikander were invented, men would try to fuck it, and no expense would be too great in that pursuit. It doesn't even have to resemble Alicia Vikander--it can just be a flashlight with a rubber hole in it. Which brings us to the question M3GAN refuses to confront. If you make a little blonde doll that looks like a 12-year-old Fiona Gubelmann, you're opening an entire hornet's nest of uncomfortable issues that would be fascinating to address. What happens when unfettered tech capitalism collides with pedophilia? I mean, the Replicants in Blade Runner are soldiers, teachers...and prostitutes. Even Spielberg's A.I. recognizes that great leaps in technology are historically tied to warfare and rutting.

"The 50 Best Films of 2022" by Walter Chaw

My mom died this year, but I lost her decades ago. Our relationship was radioactive, and I had neither the courage nor the resolve to even begin to repair it--or to investigate whether there was anything left to repair. I lost a mentor this year, too, because I wasn't interesting enough to maintain as an apprentice. I turn 50 in 2023. It's an age that seemed absurd to me as recently as a few years ago. If I live to 54, I'll be how old my dad was when he died. My mom's death brings an end to this season of death for us, my wife and me. We're both orphans now, because everything worked out the way it was supposed to. It's how parents hope it works out. I guess we're lucky that way. Maybe it's just me, yet it felt like there were many films in 2022 dealing with childhood and lost parents, biological or otherwise. Lots of films about ghosts.