Film Freak Central

DIFF '03: A Slipping-Down Life

**½/****
screenplay by Toni Kalem, based on the novel by Anne Tyler
directed by Toni Kalem

by Walter Chaw With an excellent first hour and a less impressive, almost sprawling second, Toni Kalem's hyphenate debut A Slipping-Down Life finds an excellent cast in the employ of a Southern Gothic about a young woman "awakened" by the "shout outs" of a small-time backwater singer/songwriter. With tunes by Peter Himmelman and nice performances from Guy Pearce and Lili Taylor (too pretty to play the overweight teen protagonist of the Anne Tyler novel on which the film is based), what starts out as unusual and compelling loses its way at some point to become a more conventional comedy of manners, Grant Wood-style. Though it reminds of May in a way for Taylor's self-mutilation and studied romantic intensity, Kalem strives more for the grimly uplifting than the grimly ironic. Still, there's something smart going on in the picture's visual design and return to doubling motifs, in its portrayal of the difficulties of communication, and Taylor's trademark obsession with young women on journeys of discovery and love. Add a genuinely affecting moment between Taylor and veteran Tom Bower, not to mention a few pointed unicorn images given poignancy when Taylor's character carves a name on her forehead, and A Slipping-Down Life finds itself, if not entirely successful, at least ambitious and, for a long while, even brave. Originally published: October 15, 2003.

Adam & Steve (2006)

*/****
starring Craig Chester, Malcolm Gets, Parker Posey, Chris Kattan
written and directed by Craig Chester

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover This site's editor Bill and I were on the phone one night, and we came up with a pleasant dream: What if a movie's stereotypical gay character--the one who gets all the bitchy repartee--actually wasn't funny? Be careful what you wish for: Adam & Steve is all stereotypes, all the time, and none of them are remotely funny. Only not by design, like in our fantasy--it's meant to be hilarious, meaning that you die of embarrassment on behalf of everyone involved. Although the film is supposed to be about a gay romance, its real theme is failure, and it's so terrified to seem like anything less than an outrageous good time that it tries too hard. (That the film's lone comedienne generally performs to crickets pretty much sums up the self-flagellant tone of the whole enterprise.) Hostile, ugly, and generally unpleasant to endure, it engenders fear intense enough to snuff out whatever lightness it might have had.

Music of the Heart (1999)

**/****
starring Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett, Aidan Quinn, Jane Leeves
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Wes Craven

by Bill Chambers I should start this review by telling you how much I hate the generic title Music of the Heart. Wes Craven's bid for prestige was more evocatively (and appropriately) called 50 Violins in development, and the switch only proves how far distributor Miramax has strayed from its edgier roots. Almost as infuriating is the positioning of an 'N Sync/Gloria Estafan duet as Music of the Heart's theme song: a nigh unlistenable ballad opens and closes a film about music appreciation.

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.

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.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio's Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the twenty-four hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It's therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day--on the hour, almost--that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana's eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

24 Hour Party People (2002)

***½/****
starring Steve Coogan, Keith Allen, Rob Brydon, Enzo Cilenti
screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Walter Chaw Inviting direct comparisons to Todd Haynes's ebullient Velvet Goldmine with a flying saucer, Michael Winterbottom's brilliant 24 Hour Party People apes, too, a great deal of the style and tone from that film: insouciant, arch, and invested in giving over the stage to the zeitgeist of an era through its youth culture and its music. 24 Hour Party People distinguishes itself, however, with a flip, post-modern absurdism that includes asides to the camera ("I'm being post-modern before it became popular") and a certain self-awareness that somehow encapsulates the discursive, free-associative madness of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan). Beginning with The Sex Pistols' first performance in 1976 before a rapt crowd of 42 people, the picture takes on a dizzying kind of animal logic, stalking the fortunes of the "New Wave" Manchester ethos of Joy Division (into the band they became, New Order), Happy Mondays, the Hacienda dance club, and, most importantly, Wilson himself--part huckster, part savant. All along, Wilson cues us that the world is about to change and that this band of brothers, this group of bouncing, sullen, devotees to a new punk energy, are the men who will change it.

Soul Power (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
directed by Jeffrey Levy-Hinte

by Jefferson Robbins There's a double filter of nostalgia on Soul Power, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's assemblage of decades-old footage from the Zaire '74 music festival. The Kinshasa-based event opened the fabled Muhammad Ali-George Foreman bout "The Rumble in the Jungle," where Ali reclaimed the world heavyweight championship--back when the thought that music and sport could change the world seemed less far-fetched. But while the concert showcase captures stirring performances from some of soul music's greatest figures, it still winds up being only half a documentary. The miles of film accumulated in Kinshasa--shot by Albert Maysles, among other notables--sat in storage until it got aired out for Leon Gast's rousing sports doc When We Were Kings in 1996. That piece is a valuable curation, recording exactly how Ali-Foreman (mostly Ali, by seizing the narrative early) energized a nation oppressed first by Belgian colonialism, then by Mobutu Sese Seko's dictatorship. That's not to mention how the fight (again, via Ali) reasserted ties between African-Americans and their ancestral continent, and was billed (by Don King) as a triumph for American black pride.

Ray (2004)

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell
screenplay by James L. White
directed by Taylor Hackford

by Walter Chaw Jamie Foxx is so mesmerizing as Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford's biopic of the legendary performer, that the typical Hackford-isms threatening to weigh down the piece don't seem as heavy as they usually do. At its heart, the film is really just another faux epic from Hackford: another glimpse at the rise and fall (and rise) of a uniquely American persona (Everybody's All-American, An Officer and a Gentleman), another recent-historical essay, and another picture that begins to feel a little repetitive in the hermetic rises and falls in action that comprise such things. But then there's Foxx. He's the real deal, I think, and between this and Michael Mann's Collateral, 2004 is the year that Foxx becomes a top of the line, bona fide superstar. He's going to win the Oscar in a couple of months--and as the third African-American to claim the Best Actor prize, he's going to deserve it more than Denzel Washington did for Training Day.

TIFF '06: The Page Turner

La Tourneuse de pages
***/****
starring Catherine Frot, Déborah François, Pascal Greggory, Julie Richalet
screenplay by Denis Dercourt, Jacques Sotty
directed by Denis Dercourt

by Bill Chambers I question whether Denis Dercourt's Chabrolian The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages)--which more than earns its presumptuous double entendre of a title--actually has anything of consequence to say, but I sure got a charge out of it. Mélanie, a butcher's daughter, blows her shot at getting into a music conservatory by becoming flustered when one of the entrance exam's administrators, famed concert pianist Mme. Fouchécourt (Catherine Frot), interrupts her audition to sign an autograph. Some years later, the grown-up Mélanie (L'Enfant's Déborah François, who cleans up good) worms her way into Fouchécourt's life and proceeds to demonstrate that Hell indeed hath no fury. What's refreshing about The Page Turner is that Mélanie's revenge scheme, such as it is, is predicated on serendipity: Although the picture sets itself up as a shell game, Mélanie isn't a sooper-genius out to prove the screenwriter's flair for reversals of expectation; she just repeatedly dangles herself on a hook and hopes for a bite. (Given that François looks like the love child of Anna Paquin and Julie Delpy, it's never a long wait.) Cold-blooded in that delectable way we associate with Patricia Highsmith, the film plays a little like a Sapphic Leave Her to Heaven (in particular with regards to Mélanie's sadistic treatment of the Fouchécourts' young son, Tristan (Antoine Martynciow)) while simultaneously harking back to All About Eve, though it blessedly lacks the latter's attendant piousness. Fans of Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle may find Pascal Greggory's final scene as M. Fouchécourt especially witty. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

TIFF 2019: Sound of Metal

***/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Raci
written by Abraham Marder & Darius Marder
directed by Darius Marder

by Angelo Muredda It comes as a pleasant jolt that there's a lot to say about Sound of Metal, The Place Beyond the Pines' co-screenwriter Darius Marder's feature debut. On paper, the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a noise-metal drummer and recovering addict who suddenly loses his hearing in the middle of a tour with his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), seems like the stuff of a run-of-the-mill disability melodrama about learning to appreciate life's little pleasures in silence. And though it veers close to something like that message in its final moments, which threaten to put a bow on a rather messy human drama, the film is surprisingly complicated about the new worlds, sensory experiences, and cultures in which Ruben is being initiated.

Telluride '19: Judy

*½/****
starring Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Finn Wittrock, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Tom Edge, based on the stageplay "End of the Rainbow" by Peter Quilter
directed by Rupert Goold

by Walter Chaw One problem with hagiographies is that when bad things happen to the sainted subject, it comes off as maudlin and self-pitying. Another problem with hagiographies is that they're boring, since they're largely impenetrable to anyone not already in the choir. Take Rupert Goold's Judy, for instance, a hagiography of one of the two or three most biographied figures from Hollywood's golden age, Judy Garland: Mickey Rooney's erstwhile song and dance partner, Dorothy Gale, gay icon, mom to Liza (and Lorna and Joey), and deeply troubled trainwreck who died of a barbiturate overdose at the tender age of 47. She's played by Renée Zellweger in the film with an eye towards puckish grit and mawkish imitation, imagining a character instead of a person in a movie designed to do exactly the same thing. What's assumed, though, is that people will know going into the film why Judy was essentially homeless as Judy opens; how she thought a run at the Hippodrome (then the "Talk of the Town" nightclub) in the City of Westminster, London might rescue her financial calamities; and what it was exactly that made her so appealing to so many for so long. That's a lot of assumptions and, you know, fair enough, because I can't think of anyone else who'd possibly be interested in Judy, anyway.

The Doors (1991) [The Final Cut] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kevin Dillon, Kathleen Quinlan
written by J. Randal Johnson and Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

by Bryant Frazer Oliver Stone's lofty take on California psychedelic rock band The Doors begins near the end, with a thickly bearded Jim Morrison--Val Kilmer, delivering a well-practiced but largely soulless imitation of the '60s cultural icon--slouched in a dark Los Angeles studio recording lines of spoken-word poetry. "Did you have a good world when you died?" he demands. "Enough to base a movie on?" The setting is December, 1970, a few months before Morrison voluntarily exiled himself in France--perhaps to dodge a potential prison sentence after his arrest for lewdness on stage--and a little more than six months before his death in Paris. Stone fills all of that in later, but he starts here, not just because the poem Morrison is reading, "The Movie," is too apropos for a filmmaker as literal-minded as Stone to resist, but also because Morrison's demonstrated preoccupation with death and storytelling dovetails so nicely with the film's manifestation of same. Stone includes a formative event from Morrison's early life: His family is driving through the desert when they pass the aftermath of a car accident where an elderly Navajo man is bleeding to death at the side of the road. Young Jim, rubbernecking, locks eyes for an instant with the Native American and, just like that, picks up a fellow traveller. Stone digs the idea. Throughout the film, he has Morrison seeing Native spirits at key moments, dancing at Doors performances, or lurking in the corners of parties. He also gives Morrison a stalker: a mysterious man (an uncredited Richard Rutowski, who later collaborated on the screenplay for Stone's Natural Born Killers), well-built and sometimes nude, who represents death and occasionally materializes at the periphery of the action, not unlike the reaper from Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

Her Smell (2019)

****/****
starring Elisabeth Moss, Cara Delevingne, Dan Stevens, Amber Heard
written and directed by Alex Ross Perry

by Walter Chaw

"When I needed it, no one ever put a hand on my back and told me it was gonna be alright."

This is Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) on stage at a performance by her band, Something She, and she's two hours late, as it happens--as is her habit and her custom. All she does is inflict pain, her mother (Virginia Madsen) tells her; Becky, a black vortex of drama, tells her mom to lay off the drama. It's a practice of narcissists to project their toxic behaviour on the people around them, but Becky, who acts very badly indeed, isn't the only bad actor. Her mom has a manila envelope full of something Becky's long-absent father wants Becky to see and the mother bringing it to her daughter at this moment, knowing her daughter is explosively unstable, is a form of narcissism, too. It's the person in your life who wants you to process your experience in the same way they process theirs--emotional bullies engaged in the tyranny of the weak. Becky's bandmates are at once enablers of her behaviour and disdainful of it. Her ex, former DJ and now long-suffering single-dad Danny (Dan Stevens), brings his and Becky's toddler around for a visit with his new young girlfriend (Hannah Gross) in tow, because that's just a selfish, terrible idea, too. The first third of Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell is a collision of flawed people self-medicating, self-deluding, doing their best on the fly in the middle of a hurricane of fame and other people's expectations and making the worst possible decisions. It's claustrophobic to the point of panic attack, and Perry, with DP Sean Price Williams, composer Keegan DeWitt, and editor Robert Greene, beautifully orchestrates the walls crashing in. It's relentless and suffocating. And if you're wired a particular way, it's also uncomfortably familiar.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

*/****
starring Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Mike Myers
screenplay by Anthony McCarten
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There's a real tragedy behind Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer's formula biopic of Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) and Queen, and it's not Mercury's rise and fall and rise and fall and posthumous rise. No, it's that a life lived as rebuke to boxed-in functionality is now boxed into a functional, easy-to-parse package. Not the first person to say it but the only good version of this movie is Walk Hard, and there's never been a bad version of this movie, not really. It's oatmeal. It's always okay. I genuinely love Singer's X-Men films. Superman Returns is a masterpiece. There was a time when the idea of Singer doing this would've promised a keen, incisive coming-out melodrama, but even that's been neutered by Singer's defensive posturing against real-life, possibly criminal ugliness and its looming threat of legal repercussions. His well-publicized dismissal from the project in its eleventh hour is the most Mercury moment of the whole thing and it happened behind the scenes. When the most interesting scene in Bohemian Rhapsody is a contentious press conference where Mercury's sexuality is attacked as the movie warps and stutters around him, you get the sense of the On The Waterfront apologia that almost was rather than the sop to popular taste this is.