Film Freak Central

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron's pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill--a personal Chekhov's Gun, if you will. It'll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley's Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly's Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne'er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend's sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

Telluride '15: Rams

Hrútar
***½/****
starring Sigurður Sigurjónsson, Theodór Júlíusson, Charlotte Bøving, Gunnar Jónsson
written and directed by Grímur Hákonarson

by Walter Chaw There's a little of Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat in Grimur Hákonarson's Rams. Something of the formal beauty of La cinquième saison and the deadpan absurdity of Aki Kaurismaki's films as well. It is a story of brothers in conflict. More-functional recluse Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and less-functional recluse Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) are both hidden away in remote cabins in Iceland, tending to herds of sheep bred from a legendary stag whose lovingly-taxidermied head decorates Gummi's hovel's entryway. The picture opens in tension at a sheepherder's competition, where the prize stock is prodded and judged. And it ends in tension, as the two brothers, who haven't spoken in 40 years, must deal with the loss of everything while, just outside, an allegorical--but literal--storm obliterates the petty concerns of mortal men.

Philadelphia Film Festival '07: The Boss of It All

Direktøren for det hele
***/****
starring Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Iben Hjejle, Fridrik Thor Fridrikson
written and directed by Lars von Trier

by Ian Pugh Presenting himself to us as an image reflected in a window, Lars von Trier literally begins The Boss of It All with an assurance that the following hundred minutes will be nothing more than a light comedy not worth "a moment's reflection." He then introduces us to pretentious, untalented actor Kristoffer (Jens Albinus), who has been hired by office worker Ravn (Peter Gantzler) to pose as the company's absentee president in delicate negotiations to merge with an Icelandic company. Kristoffer soon learns that there is no president beyond a fictional, faraway entity created by Ravn, the real company head, but once the employees catch wind of the "president"'s sudden appearance, he's forced to continue the illusion. The plot outline just screams "light comedy" (with "comic misunderstanding" being the name of this occasionally funny game), and while von Trier's opening remarks are obviously a transparent challenge, he also questions why we would take him up on it, why we would try to find deeper meaning in something intended to be taken at face value. Emphasizing the arbitrariness of it all, he leaves the cinematography to "Automavision," a computerized shot randomizer that crafts bizarre framing compositions, which in turn lead to off-putting jump cuts. (Meanwhile, Kristoffer is so obsessed with his favourite absurdist playwright that the attempts at homage distract from a convincing performance.) The Boss of It All differs from the why-bother hatred of The Ten, though, because the allegories put the pressure on us to determine a "right" way to look at a film: look too deeply, and you risk missing the point (or giving the filmmaker too much credit). But the obviousness of von Trier's parallel to his dissatisfaction with mediocrity and anti-intellectualism also adds the counterpoint: refuse to look into it at all and you're just wilfully blind. If the only thing it ultimately proves is that von Trier is still a cantankerous, contradictory bastard, then at least The Boss of It All gets us thinking about our expectations as filmgoers--and the responsibility for the quality of art that passes through our eyes.

TIFF '06: The Last Winter

***/****
starring Ron Perlman, James Le Gros, Connie Britton, Zachary Gilford
screenplay by Larry Fessenden & Robert Leaver
directed by Larry Fessenden

by Bill Chambers Larry Fessenden has always been an artist and a consummate professional, but there's a newfound commercial glaze to The Last Winter--however ironic its use of widescreen--that makes one feel somehow less inclined to coddle it. An ambiguous statement, I know; I guess what I'm saying is that if I have any reservations about the piece (and I had fewer about Wendigo and Habit), I don't really fear seeming anti-intellectual in voicing them. Fessenden's own private The Thing, The Last Winter unfurls at an Alaskan outpost, where the blustery Pollack (Ron Perlman, delivering another perfectly-metered performance) has docked hoping to kick-start stalled plans to drill for oil. He's pitted against environmental scientist Hoffman (James Le Gros), with whom his former girlfriend, Abby (the lovely Connie Britton), has fallen into bed, giving Fessenden ample opportunity to exploit the alpha-male subtext of many a red state/blue state conflict. In fact, the Bush/Gore allegory is so compelling in and of itself that, while I wouldn't begrudge the picture its horror elements (Fessenden is the genre fan's salvation, after all), with supernatural as opposed to psychological forces taking out the team, The Last Winter builds to an apocalypse whose nihilism suggests equivocation. Too, the picture is kind of perched, teeter-totter-like, on a shocking Blair Witch set-piece, never to reach its lofty heights again. Still and all, an elegiac piece of filmmaking that transcends cheap thrills in each of its onscreen casualties; I'd love to see Fessenden try his hand at a war movie. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

DIFF '03: Noi the Albino

Nói albinói
****/****
written and directed by Dagur Kári

by Walter Chaw Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino (Nói Albinói) is a film about emptiness, really--a terrific picture crouched in the centre of a blasted Icelandic winter, with its titular hero, Nói (Tómas Lemarquis), too smart for the isolation. When the beautiful Iris (Elin Hansdóttir, wow) comes to work in the town-of-maybe-100-people's convenience store, Nói finds himself for perhaps the first time motivated for long enough to aspire to something larger. A Steve Earle song directed by Jim Jarmusch, the picture is deadpan hilarious and haunted by the oppressive power of dark and chill, which presses down on the characters with a smothering insistence. Kári's direction is understated and the performances he elicits from his cast of newcomers are the perfect pitch for the low timbre of the film. A look at adolescence as yearning and blue as The Ice Storm, Nói Albinói is tragedy punctuated by repeated glances into a ViewMaster: a vehicle for escape like the picture on Barton Fink's wall, with the box Nói's underground bunker, Zippo-lit protection from natural disaster and the life of the mind. Originally published: October 9, 2003.

The Sea (2002)

Hafið
*/****
starring Gunnar Eyjólfsson, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Hélène de Fougerolles, Kristbjörg Kjeld
screenplay by Baltasar Kormákur, based on the play by Olafur Haukur Símonarson
directed by Baltasar Kormákur

by Walter Chaw A family melodrama that's a little like Chekhov but a lot more like Telemundo, Baltasar Kormákur's The Sea (Hafið) takes the bare bones of "King Lear" and fashions from them the sort of bleeding hair-render that runs roughshod through the Altman/Bergman canon without the benefit of genius. Its use of foreground, of mannered close-ups and overlapping dialogue, of old men journaling their lives at the end of their lives, all feel at odds with the film's weightless, familiar tale of an old man shackled to the ideal of a better era in opposition with subsequent generations of useless, snivelling bastard children trying to feed off the corpse of said better era, the irony of that Icelandic tradition including a sort of culturally institutionalized rape (the contention of which I find to be not merely shockingly reductive, but deeply suspect besides) mentioned but left unexamined for the most part. The problems of The Sea aren't restricted to this reliance on reckless ascriptions of cultural archetype for irony or poignancy (an Ayn Rand-ian predilection for staging hypothetical, unwinnable arguments in their extreme), extending to issues as problematic as a script (adapted from a Olafur Haukur Símonarson play by Kormákur, a sometime-actor who appeared as the mad scientist in Hal Hartley's No Such Thing) that is as repetitive in regards to dialogue as to scenario.