Film Freak Central

Soul (2020)

***/****
story and screenplay by Pete Docter, Mike Jones, Kemp Powers
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) teaches middle-school band to a group of largely-disinterested kids and dreams of becoming a big-time jazz pianist like the one he saw in some smoky bar his dad dragged him to one time when he was a kid. His dad was a musician, see, and made a little name for himself. Joe's mom, Libba (Phylicia Rashaad), is a seamstress who owns her own business. She funded Joe's dad's "career" because the world is hard on small things. (Artists and their dreams, too.) Joe is offered a full-time teaching position on the same day he scores a gig with the great saxophonist/vocalist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett)--the same day, as it happens, he gets into a terrible accident that will result in his death unless he can convince the superintendents of an A Matter of Life and Death-esque afterlife to give him a second chance. That second chance comes in the form of 22 (Tina Fey), an "unsparked" soul needing to find that certain je ne sais quoi in order to be "born" in, I presume, a human host body on Earth. The rules are diaphanous, with no great expectation to ever cohere. It doesn't matter. Pete Docter's Soul isn't that kind of fantasy. It isn't about the metaphysical, after all; it's really only about something as simple yet as difficult as the importance of living in the moment. Gathering ye rosebuds whilst one might, if you will. It's not deep. I guess it doesn't have to be.

TIFF '00: Low Self Esteem Girl

Low Self-Esteem Girl
***/****
starring Corrina Hammond, Ted Dave, James Dawes, Rob McBeth
written and directed by Blaine Thurier

Guys want her body.
Zealots want her soul.
-Low Self Esteem Girl's honest tagline

by Bill Chambers A few minutes into Low Self Esteem Girl, I got the distinct feeling I was watching an episode of "Candid Camera" in which the recording device itself, and not the camera's subjects, was the one being had. First-time director Blaine Thurier, a former cartoonist for Vancouver's TERMINAL CITY, zigzags his digital video camera about the house of Lois (Corrina Hammond) like a spy who has unwittingly stumbled upon a stage exercise: Lois and Gregg (Ted Dave), her one-night stand, conduct a pillow-fight with overtones of rape, and then she offers him a beer--at which point I half-expected a drama teacher to call time-out, step into the frame, and critique their performances.

Little Secrets (2002)

*/****
starring Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Angarano, David Gallagher, Vivica A. Fox
screenplay by Jessica Barondes
directed by Blair Treu

by Walter Chaw I fear that Blair Treu's Little Secrets is the latest picture to fall victim to my predisposition against insipid and trite films. The problem with my bias in this instance is that there is a considerable segment of the middle-class population at large that seems particularly enamoured with such fare, particularly as it manifests under the aegis of "family entertainment" or Meg Ryan movies. It's only a problem, I hasten to add, because I hate arguing with the upper-reaching bourgeoisie--there is no good way, after all, to explain to the fuzzily intractable why a self-pitying adopted girl who makes money like Lucy from the "Peanuts" strip while staying home to practice violin in anticipation of an orchestra tryout is more suited for the dinosaur prose of big-print Beverly Clearys than for the voluntary consumption of any self-respecting human being.

Leatherheads (2008)

*½/****
starring George Clooney, Renée Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce
screenplay by Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw George Clooney's Leatherheads is a lifeless, desperate-feeling vacuum that arrives without much reason for being other than to underscore that the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty was pretty underestimated as an attempt to revive the screwball farce. It's deeply flawed as a comedy, given that the only real laugh has to do with someone being set on fire. And while the instinct is to give it a pass because it's innocuous and slickly done, the other side of that is this giant diagram of a slippery slope. The film's first mistake is casting the flat, increasingly insipid Renée Zellweger as a Rosalind Russell/Kate Hepburn type; the second is its expectation that a screenplay by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED scribes Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly could have the same kind of oomph as a Charles Lederer or Brackett/Wilder piece; and the third and last is a slowing down of the patter from 45 to 33 to accommodate modern actors' relative inability to do rapid-fire delivery, thus highlighting the first and second mistakes anew. Zellweger further perfects her walking-on-a-rail-whilst-sucking-on-a-lemon shtick (she moves and acts like a puckering hat rack), leaving Clooney--a gifted physical comedian, as his work with the Coens would attest--to carry the load. No help that the Ralph Bellamy in the standard triangle is the American "The Office"'s Jon Krasinski, who'd better get Lloyd's of London on the horn about that fourth-wall smirk. Without it, he's wallpaper.

The Kid (2000)

Disney's The Kid
**/****
starring Bruce Willis, Spencer Breslin, Emily Mortimer, Lily Tomlin
screenplay by Audrey Wells
directed by Jon Turteltaub

by Bill Chambers Hurling overwrought insults at just about everyone he meets, Russell Duritz (a dour Bruce Willis) is an image consultant with G-rated impatience for the world at large. Enter Russell, age eight (Spencer Breslin, only slightly less annoying than I had braced for)--Duritz's chubby younger self has somehow materialized to teach him a few Valuable Life Lessons. The trouble with a hyped-to-the-gills high-concept movie is, of course, that by the time we're lining up to see it, we've digested and come to terms with the central conceit--the fantasy premise is why we're there. Thus, the wait for a protagonist to accept what we already have can be excruciating, as it is here. The rest of Disney's The Kid's (so you don't mistake it for Chaplin's, I guess) concerns the two Russells trying to determine the cosmic moral behind their unlikely meeting, with both of them equally appalled by how the other lives his life. (This being Disney, the film only agrees with the younger, workaholic one.)

On the Rocks (2020)

****/****
starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Of all the people making them, Sofia Coppola makes Sofia Coppola movies better than anyone else. Her body of work is remarkable for its consistency--such as that of a Japanese master like Ozu or Mizoguchi, frankly. So the chief complaint of nepotism levied against her strikes me as something of a mixed blessing. I don't know that many creators have ever had the cachet to make exactly the films they want to make. Every single time. And the ones I can think of for which this is also true, it either wasn't always true, hasn't resulted in the level of visibility that Coppola's films earn, or tend to be the province of men exclusively. I wonder about the resentment of some critics towards Coppola for somehow not being representative enough, as though any one artist can or should be expected to check every box. Best, often, not to try. I think of another woman and filmmaker with a similar amount of creative single-mindedness, Claire Denis, scoffing in an interview with Jonathan Romney of THE GUARDIAN when asked about the Hollywood #MeToo movement: "That's a discussion that's only being had in rich countries. The world is not just the United States and Europe. It's a debate of spoiled children. I couldn't care less about the Weinstein affair." Where Denis is indicated mostly by how little she cares what you think, Coppola is branded as a figure mortally wounded by her time in the public view. That vulnerability, real or only perceived, inextricably infuses every frame of her movies with just a little extra trembling pathos.

I Spy (2002)

*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Owen Wilson, Famke Janssen, Malcolm McDowell
screenplay by Marianne Sellek Wibberley & Cormac Wibberley and David Ronn & Jay Scherick
directed by Betty Thomas

by Walter Chaw The best bit of dialogue in Betty Thomas's abysmal I Spy, a film saddled with a hack director and a too-many-cooks scenario that translates adroitly into the screenwriting process (the script is credited to Marianne Wibberley, Cormac Wibberley, Jay Scherick, and David Ronn), is a bit where Eddie Murphy "Cyranos" Owen Wilson to the tune of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing." That out of a mercifully-brief 90-minute film the best moment comes courtesy a cheap gag involving an R&B classic and a flash of panty is, really, statement enough about the wisdom and ingenuity of the entire enterprise. Proof positive, if more proof is needed of the fecklessness of this shipwreck, is the fact that Wilson, easily the most gifted screenwriter on set, was not among the many asked to put pen to paper for I Spy.

Hollywood Homicide (2003)

**/****
starring Harrison Ford, Josh Hartnett, Keith David, Lena Olin
screenplay by Robert Souza & Ron Shelton
directed by Ron Shelton

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie where a cop who calls himself "Smokey" is referring to Smokey Robinson (more to the point, the kind of movie where Smokey Robinson makes a cameo), Ron Shelton's Hollywood Homicide is a diary of decline made by aging filmmakers and aimed at an aging audience. Shelton returns to the old guy/young guy/slut dynamic of Bull Durham while Harrison Ford turns in what is possibly the first "old guy" performance of his career--one that pings poignantly off his patented "weary bemusement" shtick before a finale (a comedy of humiliation) that functions as the only part of the film that really works. Sandwiched between the standard buddy/too-convenient-crime caper formula set-up and that deliriously good conclusion is a laboured exercise in forced bonhomie and a mysterious existential melancholy that feels a great deal like a tired exhalation. Hollywood Homicide is an extraordinarily average film that has something of a distinct, dark intimation nudging at its corners. A shame the Ron Shelton of today is not the Ron Shelton of Cobb.

Head in the Clouds (2004); Bright Young Things (2003); Vera Drake (2004)

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, Stuart Townsend, Thomas Kretschmann
written and directed by John Duigan

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
**½/****
starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Stephen Fry, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
directed by Stephen Fry

VERA DRAKE
***½/****
starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney
written and directed by Mike Leigh

by Walter Chaw There's a certain fascination embedded in our images of wartime England. When a film comes birthing across the pond this time of year, dripping with prestige and a whiff of stuffiness, what can it be but awards fodder laden with lovely sets, sepia-stained cinematography, handsome wool and silk costumes, and largely European casts that remind of how venal American mainstream casts tend to be by comparison? Something about the Blitz still intoxicates--perhaps England's steadfast refusal to surrender their island sanctuary to the barbarians at the gate tickles at our national self-delusion, trading on the belief, once ironclad, that our borders were as sacrosanct, or that our intentions in establishing a New World Order were ever that noble. Now, without the comfort of our own inviolate island sanctuary (what was Manhattan pre-9/11 than that--and what was it after but the biggest metaphor for the irony of capitalist arrogance since The Titanic?), there's just that much more reason for moth-balled middlebrow arthouse audiences to snuffle up great pinches of mid-twentieth century British pluck and remember from the cloistered perspective of a cloth chair a when that never existed--at least never for them.

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)

½*/****
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Rob Corddry, Neil Patrick Harris
written & directed by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg

by Walter Chaw The first film was a pleasant surprise for its light-hearted puerility and surprising smarts, and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (hereafter Harold & Kumar 2) misunderstands this to the extent that all that's left are the shit and dick jokes and the dispiriting carrying of the new torch that male full-frontal nudity is the ne plus ultra of comedy. When it works, credit John Cho and Kal Penn (and Neil Patrick Harris, reprising his role as the filthiest Neil Patrick Harris on the face of the planet) for their comfort in their roles--and when it doesn't (which is most of the time), blame a lacklustre screenplay that strives for edgy but, like the Judd Apatow school of moral/filth passion plays, is exceptionally conservative, even timid, in its message. All that stuff about smoking pot and saying "vagina" is a smokescreen for monogamous relationships, upholding traditional family values, and a studious avoidance of offending anyone politically in a movie that revolves around an Asian and an Indian getting sent to Guantanamo Bay because the one is mistaken for an Arab terrorist. The contortions the picture goes through to remain innocuous are so awkward (take, for example, the attempts to humanize W. and Muslims) that, in just a few short months, it could become this archaic artifact of the political correctness that's killed the current era in scatology. The flick's only sure target is homosexuality--because, let's face it, the only thing safe to talk about in this context is how much we hate fags. Am I right?

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004)

***/****
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Neil Patrick Harris, Anthony Anderson
screenplay by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
directed by Danny Leiner

by Walter Chaw Danny Leiner's Dude, Where's My Car isn't as bad as you'd think and his Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is probably a good deal better than you have any right to expect. It begins as any number of gross-out frat-boy comedies do, with a white guy picking on a quiet Asian dude--and then it makes the interesting decision to stay with the quiet Asian dude (Korean actor John Cho (Harold)) and his roommate, East Indian Kumar (Kal Penn), as they embark on a quest to kill marijuana munchies at the revered White Castle hamburger chain. It's about, as Harold says at one point, the feeling of a man getting what he really wants. A simple enough statement (certainly a simple enough basis for a picture--some would say too simple), but it speaks volumes of our culture that it's so unusual that Harold and Kumar are not only not merely racial shorthand caricatures, but also just young men.

Happy Accidents (2001)

**/****
starring Marisa Tomei, Vincent D'Onofrio, Nadia Dajani, Holland Taylor
written and directed by Brad Anderson

by Walter Chaw Too long by at least the length of an unwelcome framing device and an expert but superfluous performance by Holland Taylor as a therapist, Brad Anderson's Happy Accidents is invested in the 16^th-century ideal that Love is the abeyance of Entropy, in the idea that true romantic bliss is the key to staving off chaos in a world eternally falling into it. The phenomena of time flying when one's having fun is spoken of early in the film as a scientific verity rather than as a cozy homily, and Happy Accidents is likewise best defined as a familiar love story stretched to justify old Heinlein and Wells pulp. A series of still photograph interludes recalling Chris Marker's La Jetée are handled with skill and a surprising poignancy but give too much away as to the ultimate resolution of the film to those familiar with the experimental French short.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don't be a dick.

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Emerald Fennell's feature debut Promising Young Woman trails the same kind of buzz that accompanied David Slade's Hard Candy 15 years ago. Here, that buzz says, is a film that will turn the tables on predators in a meaningful way; it purports to put the bad guys on notice that things are about to change for them: the hunters will now enjoy a bitter draught of their own medicine. Delicious! Unfortunately, like Hard Candy, Promising Young Woman is a sheep in wolf's clothing, a mousetrap made out of wax, good intentions, and the right politics that pulls its punches in absurd, and absurdly consistent, ways. It doesn't help. It doesn't discover a new way to have an old conversation. And at the end of it all, it manufactures an ending in which the authorities it's spent its entire thesis crucifying as ineffectual are relied upon to be the cavalry coming to save the day. Promising Young Woman is the punk that wants very much to be acceptable to the system against which it's rebelling. At least it has some effective performances.

Coming to America (1988) - 4K Ultra HD + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones, John Amos
screenplay by David Sheffield & Barry W. Blaustein
directed by John Landis

by Bill Chambers When I interviewed the great documentarian Steve James of Hoop Dreams fame, he asked me if I'd ever seen Coming to America, and I didn't know quite how to answer him. There was a time, during my adolescence in the mid-to-late '80s, when not seeing the latest Eddie Murphy movie would've put a serious crimp in my social life--when the extremely homophobic routines of Eddie Murphy "Delirious" (a.k.a. Eddie Murphy: Comedian, which my friend Joel gave to me on vinyl for my 12^th birthday) constituted the lingua franca of my peers, for worse or for worse. This was also the age of PayTV and home video, when it was not uncommon to watch a film you liked over and over again until you practically fused with it; I liked Coming to America. I liked it, and lots of kids my age liked it, I suspect, because it made us feel like adults with its titties and swears but basically coddled us with a plot out of Disney and a laid-back vibe to match. I'd soured on it in the years since, partly out of fear it was a low-key minstrel show. I'm still not sure that it isn't, but anyway, in answer to James's question, I said "yep."

Love and Monsters (2020) - VOD

***/****
starring Dylan O'Brien, Jessica Henwick, Dan Ewing, Michael Rooker
screenplay by Brian Duffield & Matthew Robinson
directed by Michael Matthews

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie someone like Joe Dante might have made for Roger Corman once upon a time, Love and Monsters, Michael Matthews's follow-up to his Five Fingers for Marseilles, is a joyfully, unashamedly silly American kaiju modest in its ambitions and occasionally poignant for that modesty. In Love and Monsters, a broad (very broad) updating of L Q. Jones's deep-cut cult movie of Harlan's Ellison "A Boy and His Dog," a lovable schlub named Joel (Dylan O'Brien) is ensconced in a bunker with a handful of other survivors thanks to a plague of monsters that has obliterated 95% of the human population. It's possible to go deep on how these monsters are the result of "chemicals" raining down on the planet because emergency rockets were fired into a looming asteroid, and how if this is a quarantine allegory, its ultimate message that you should leave quarantine is unfortunately-timed, but the picture is too good-natured to deserve much opprobrium for misreading the room.