Film Freak Central

The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, Kyle MacLachlan
screenplay by Eric Kripke, based on the novel by John Bellairs
directed by Eli Roth

by Bryant Frazer What happens when Hollywood's foremost torture-porn impresario channels his inner child and goes into business with Amblin Entertainment as a director-for-hire on a kid-friendly adaptation of a young-adult thriller from the early-1970s? Well, you get something like Eli Roth's The House with a Clock in Its Walls--nobody's idea of an innovative masterpiece, but at least an unpretentious, lavishly-designed, and mischievously-executed spookshow. Adapted by "Supernatural" creator Eric Kripke from a novel written by John Bellairs and illustrated by none other than Edward Gorey, The House with a Clock in Its Walls is one of those sad-orphan-is-sent-away-to-live-with-a-distant-relative yarns that begins with a young boy's arrival in an unfamiliar city. Naturally, he becomes privy to magical goings-on that open a window on the wider, more dangerous world before him.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic "The Ghost in the Shell" by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii's seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won't have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country's post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it's basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It's puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn't know what to do with the images it's appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there's something worth excavating here.

Hot Docs '17: Ask the Sexpert

***/****
directed by Vaishali Sinha

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers This is a breezy, lighthearted documentary that nevertheless had me on pins and needles from the moment it introduced an antagonist. Former gynaecologist Dr. Mahinder Watsa, the eponymous "sexpert," is India's answer to Dr. Ruth. At 91, he writes a popular advice column for the MUMBAI MIRROR and continues to see patients as a sex therapist, sometimes off the street without an appointment--to the consternation of his children, who worry their widower father's fame, age, and gregariousness could attract ne'er-do-wells. Watsa's a hip dude unfazed by the most cartoonishly filthy questions, the only guy who laughed during a medical conference when a gay doctor facetiously proposed a drug that turns heterosexuals into homosexuals. The kids love him (though some who've never put a face to the name would be stunned to learn how old he is) and Penguin's publishing a book of his material, but he has a particularly vocal detractor in political science professor Dr. Pratiba Naitthani, who says by way of introduction, "I always used to be the monitor of the class. The best person is always the monitor." (Thank you, Judy Hensler.) She's filed an obscenity claim against Watsa's column on the grounds that it's smut in a publication that isn't designated smut, out of sight from minors--and if you think that's reasonable, know that she also objects to diagrams of the human anatomy appearing in classrooms. She's maddeningly obtuse; she asks rhetorically why after thousands of years the civilized world suddenly needs to know about birth control while living in the second-most overpopulated country on Earth. Though Naitthani imposes a lot of dread on the film as both she and Watsa keep checking up on her case, her dissenting voice underscores the value and urgency of Watsa's work. Abstinence-only education of the kind Naitthani endorses doesn't stop teenagers from having sex, it just makes them practise it in ignorance, putting their health and safety at risk. One young man admits that prior to discovering Watsa he didn't even know whether sex is something that's given or taken by force. Yeesh. Naitthani has a humanizing scene where she volunteers that although it looks to us and her mother like she lives alone, her busyness is a constant bedfellow. "I really don't know what's wrong with me," she blurts out with an incredulous laugh. Perhaps she should ask the sexpert.

The River (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Suprova Mukerjee
screenplay by Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir, based on the book by Godden
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw There's something ineffable about Jean Renoir's same-named adaptation of Rumer Godden's The River. It has to do with how the light is different in our memories of childhood, the good days and especially the bad, captured here in three-strip Technicolor that understands at last Impressionism as a birthright of film. It's more real than real ever was, the "real" of nostalgia and melancholy and Romanticism. It's not possible to see in any other visual medium, though I confess I've seen it in certain poetry by certain poets. But there are moments--like in the films of Powell & Pressburger, who did their own Rumer Godden adaptation, the socio-sexual horror flick Black Narcissus--where you can definitely see it in cinema. The past, I mean. Not as it was, but as you remember it. The River captures the fear and longing of lazy summers on the cusp, of passing from innocence over to experience, of remembering things you never experienced so that you know you're connected to the entire stream of lives you've lived and lives you haven't, or haven't yet. I don't know how The River does it, but it does.

Midnight's Children (2012)

**/****
starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary
screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel
directed by Deepa Mehta

by Angelo Muredda It's a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta's adaptation of Midnight's Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis' and Tom Tykwer's ill-fated stab at Cloud Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman Rushdie's magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering five hours--indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they're proof that in the absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.

TIFF '12: Ship of Theseus

***/****
written and directed by Anand Gandhi

by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical origins up front. Gandhi's film begins with a philosophical conceit from Plutarch--the question of whether a ship that's been repaired using parts from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all--and workshops it through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied with the biological analogy of Theseus's broken-down ship, a leaky body that needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance between humanism and intellectual rigor.

Real Steel (2011)

½*/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie
screenplay by John Gatins
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw There's really no excuse for Real Steel, a Frankenstein contraption made up of spare parts from middle-American fairytales like Field of Dreams and underdog sports intrigues starting with Rocky, I guess, and building all the way through to junk like The Rookie and any number of films just like it that appear with what seems like annual reliability. Set a few years from now, in a world where for some reason people have decided they love to watch giant robots fight each other in place of good ol' primate bloodsport, it has going for it the most bucolic vision of the future since "The Jetsons". Indeed, there are so many gorgeous shots of waving wheat and bilious white clouds that it's fair to wonder if Ridley Scott directed it. Alas, Shawn Levy, the genius behind Night at the Museum, The Pink Panther, and Cheaper by the Dozen directed this cynical piece of bathetic crap and his sticky, syrup-coated paws are all over it, from the movie's flat, unimaginative staging to its absolute inability to be non-didactic in its presentation. (The biggest surprise? That there isn't a flatulent dog around for cheap reaction shots.) Already legendary for how quickly its trailers revealed it to be possibly the worst idea since Buck Henry pitched "The Graduate, Part 2" at the beginning of The Player, Real Steel--the condescension starts with the quasi-inspirational dual-meaning of its title--swiftly becomes legendary in its own right for somehow being exactly as bad as you thought it was going to be.

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

*/****
starring Jason Momoa, Stephen Lang, Rachel Nichols, Ron Perlman
screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer and Sean Hood
directed by Marcus Nispel

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to hate on Marcus Nispel's unwell Conan the Barbarian too much, mainly because its failings are more a matter of incompetence than of real malice. There are few pleasures as gratifying as Robert E. Howard's testosterone-rich raving, and for a while there, the movie looks to have found the mad amplification that typified the Texan author's best work. But when the wheels come off--and they come off right around the time that Conan's dad, played by Ron Perlman (naturally), checks out--the whole mess goes careening off the proverbial cliff. If only the rest of the film were as mad as its opening, with a young Conan (Leo Howard) demonstrating his innate birthright to slay every single thing within arm's reach by presenting two handfuls of severed-head to his thunderstruck village after a brutal scuffle in the forest. The level of lawlessness in its first half-hour is as legendary as the brilliant prologue to John Milius's original, from Conan's birth-by-unplanned-Caesarean on a raging battlefield to the presence of none other than Morgan Freeman, lured into a payday to provide solemn narration.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

½*/****
starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Let's be clear: if there were a Hippocratic oath for movies, and there should be, it would be "first, do not suck." It's not about any desire for depth in something called Cowboys & Aliens, but rather the hope that the movie achieves some kind of baseline competence without, along the way, tripping off issues it doesn't have the muscle to address and therefore shouldn't also try to ride to an illusion of depth. It's the difference between Brett Ratner using the Holocaust as a plot point in X-Men: The Last Stand and Matthew Vaughn doing the same in X-Men: First Class; I mean, talk about it or not, but if you bring it up, have something to say. So when Cowboys & Aliens director Jon Favreau casts Adam Beach as the adopted--and hated--black-headed stepchild of racist cattle baron Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford, gruffing it up in a role named after the serial killer in Red Dragon), he needs to do better than offer up a noble Redskin who, with his last martyred breath, all but invites his would-be dad to go be white with his real boy, Dolarhyde's psychotic son Percy (Paul Dano). It's the message of the film, sort of, where no message was necessary or even welcome--this transformation of Dolarhyde from a rawhide-chewing bastard into a dewy-eyed, dyed-in-the-wool liberal who lowers himself to rescue the chief savage (Raoul Trujillo) after taking a second to complain about the disconnectedness of Yankee leadership in the Union army. It's enough to root for the South to rise again.

The Fall (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Lee Pace, Justine Waddell, Catinca Untaru
screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis & Tarsem
directed by Tarsem

by Walter Chaw Beware the film that positions itself as being told from the perspective of a child, because unless you're a child or that specific child's parent, you're eventually going to wish that someone would slap the kid in question. Tarsem's labour of love The Fall, his unlikely follow-up to his serial killer movie as shot by Salvador Dali-cum-Caspar David Friedrich The Cell, is such a film, told from a child's perspective--and rather than as an artistic decision, it plays as a plea for leniency. It's a fairytale about a little girl's emergence into maturity... No, it's a fairytale about the delicacy of life... No, it's not anything much of anything. By touching on a suicidal movie star's convalescence after an impressively-shot accident on a film set (involving a horse, Tarsem scholars take note), the picture seems to want to access some discussion concerning artificiality and its intrusion into reality--something that would make sense if The Fall positioned itself as a dyad with The Cell (which was, after all, only about film as a dream medium that acts as the brain does), but it doesn't really do that, either. All it does, in fact, is provide Tarsem an excuse to indulge his prurience and affection for elaborate set-pieces awash in saturated colours and tableaux that often border on the grotesque. Freed of the necessity to be coherent, freed of much understanding of Bruno Bettelheim or Jung or Freud, it's a fairytale without purpose and pretentious to boot, reminding more than a little of the also-pretty, also-empty Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean collaboration Mirrormask. It's too bad, really, as there are images in here genuinely affecting for their visual splendour. I wonder if it's unforgivable heresy to say The Cell is badly underestimated and due for revisionism while The Fall, despite its relative obscurity (no J-Lo anywhere in sight), is badly overestimated.

The Happening (2008)

**/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw The number one, indisputable, biggest surprise of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is that it doesn't entirely suck--followed fast by the stunner that the director-writer-producer-demiurge doesn't appear anywhere in the film as Christ on a chariot. After his self-aggrandizing cameos in Signs (as catalyst to the story's existence and outcome), The Village (as star of the "twist" in the film's most complicated lighting/camera set-up), and Lady in the Water (as author of the Bible), it seemed that was the next logical step. Instead, The Happening is a Larry Cohen-esque thriller along the lines of God Told Me To, delivered with a heavy hand, to be sure, but full of some of the most delicious misanthropy to hit screens since Julia Roberts was making romantic comedies. Shyamalan, if we follow the auteur theory as closely as he claims to, hates his fellow man enough so that a coda revealing a blessed pregnancy is framed in such a way as to suggest that mankind is spelling its own doom with this urge to procreate. By extension, it's tempting to see it as a criticism of pictures that end in Spielberg town, with marriages and babies and a cabin in the woods for the precogs. If Shyamalan is to the point where he's actively flipping the bird to audiences and expectations, eschewing his life-support systems for twists and protracted takes in favour of ugly, flat, uninspired action sequences and blighted implications, then I might actually at this point be looking forward to his next one. Meaning, at the end of the day, that's the biggest surprise of The Happening.

Pather Panchali (1955) + The World of Apu (1959) - DVDs

PATHER PANCHALI
***½/**** Image C+ Sound C+
starring Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Subir Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta
screenplay by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay & Satyajit Ray, based on Bandyopadhyay's novel
directed by Satyajit Ray

Apur Sansar
***/**** Image B- Sound B
starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee
screenplay by Satyajit Ray, based on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
directed by Satyajit Ray

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Through some strange executive decision, FFC was given the option of reviewing only two-thirds of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy. Note that the word "trilogy" generally indicates three parts; note also that the omitted film, Aparajito, constitutes the middle of this particular trilogy, making the experience of watching movies one (Panther Panchali) and three (The World of Apu) in conjunction seem weirdly disconnected. No matter: Complete or not, revisiting even just the pair helped me to better appreciate the achievement of two of the most hallowed films ever made, each of which I had underrated when I saw them initially on VHS some years ago. And while The World of Apu seems to me to be the weakest of the lot, Pather Panchali more than justifies its position as a precious jewel in the world-cinema crown.

Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)

***/****
starring Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne
screenplay by Kumar Dave, Sanjay Dayma, Ashutosh Gowariker
directed by Ashutosh Gowariker

by Walter Chaw With the subtitle "Once Upon a Time in India," Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan holds a kinship to Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China in more than just appellation and an abiding dislike of the Colonial British. Other than substituting elaborate musical numbers--as is Bollywood's wont--for Hong Kong's martial arts features, Lagaan is in fact as interested in the sociology of enslavement before the rush of technology (embodied in cameras and firearms) as its farther-Eastern brethren. The rather serious-minded attack of India's own caste system and the ineffectualness of its Raj ruling structure lends additional layers to the picture's surprising depths, yet all the politicized subtext in the world does little to suppress the essential exuberance of the gaudy visceral Bollywood experience.

The Mystic Masseur (2002)

**/****
starring Om Puri, James Fox, Aasif Mandvi, Sanjeev Bhaskar
screenplay by Caryl Phillips, based on the novel by V.S. Naipaul
directed by Ismail Merchant

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover While I haven't read The Mystic Masseur, the V.S. Naipaul novel on which Ismail Merchant's latest directorial effort is based, I think I'm fairly safe in assuming that the movie does little to exalt the oeuvre of its Nobel prize-winning author. Aggressive only in its mediocrity, humorous only in its technical clumsiness, the film manages to belittle the very people it intends to uplift with the patronizing head-patting of country-folk it finds adorable but inconsequential. At times, The Mystic Masseur is like an Ealing comedy stood on its head: instead of showing the resilience of the British through their dogged pursuit of absurdity, it undercuts Trinidadian Indians on much the same grounds--so that when Merchant finally tries to make a post-colonial statement, it cuts across the grain of the rest of his adaptation. In the end, he lavishes far less care on his narrative than Merchant's business partner James Ivory does in his own films, resulting in a tepid soup lacking in flavour and presentation.

Maya (2001)

***/****
starring Anant Nag, Mita Vasisht, Nitya Shetty, Nikhil Yadav
screenplay by Emmanuel Pappas and Digvijay Singh
directed by Digvijay Singh

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Maya is a surprisingly natural movie that could have easily degenerated into histrionics. Despite dealing with an outlawed but still-active Indian ceremony in which newly-pubescent girls are raped, it never resorts to sensationalistic horror. Instead, it sketches a portrait of a girl, her cousin, and a family that show both the person about to be crushed and the mentality that allows it to happen. While it occasionally descends into obviousness and smoothes out some hard edges, it distinguishes itself from hand-wringing problem pictures by sketching the violation of a person instead of just a body.

Monsoon Wedding (2001)

**½/****
starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz
screenplay by Sabrina Dhawan
directed by Mira Nair

by Walter Chaw Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding plays like an unedited wedding video, capturing peccadillo along with celebration and ugliness along with beauty. Slyly, a little in the manner of an Ousmane Sembene film, it weaves the troubling elements of its culture into the rituals of joy. (In the case of Monsoon Wedding, Nair explores India's caste system, American cultural diffusion, the question of expatriated sons, and the inevitable death of tradition.) Yet Monsoon Wedding is also an exuberant Bollywood-lite soap opera with flat characterizations and badly-telegraphed plot points punctuated periodically by bombastic sitar sing-alongs. What most separates Nair's piece from Sembene's masterpieces, however, is that ineffable sense of naturalism which better defines a culture than an abuse of its mad cinema's mad archetypes.

The Trumpet of the Swan (2001) - DVD

½*/**** Image C Sound C Extras C
starring Jason Alexander, Mary Steenburgen, Reese Witherspoon, Seth Green
screenplay by Judy Rothman Rofe, based on the book by E.B. White
directed by Richard Rich, Terry L. Noss

by Walter Chaw Gracelessly-animated, unevenly voice-acted, and so carelessly told that it's often unintentionally disturbing (our human hero fries eggs for breakfast when he meets our swan hero), Rich-Crest Animation's The Trumpet of the Swan is an embarrassing cut-rate cartoon based on E.B. White's melancholy 1970 novel. It strips White's wonderful prose to its base essentials, inserts vulgar slapstick involving a skunk, a jive-turkey squirrel, and an aborted Graduate intrigue, and opens with an off-putting and borderline tasteless Lamaze egg-birthing prologue. Its catalogue of atrocity is so variegated and pungent that to list them all would be more effort than has in fact gone into the film's production. Absolutely the only saving grace for this slack entertainment is its modest length--which, at a brisk 75 minutes, still plays like a film twice as long.