Film Freak Central

Telluride '22: Tár

****/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong
written and directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a monster. She's also a genius of surpassing brilliance, which begs the question--as it so often does, although the artist is usually male--of what the connection might be between genius and monstrosity. Artists and athletes get a certain pass for their behaviour. The myth of the difficult genius is a popular one fostered, I suspect, by the "geniuses" themselves to excuse their neurodivergence...or the unchecked privilege and sense of entitlement their preternatural abilities have won them. When Todd Field, who has not made a bad film, though this is only his third in 21 years, makes the genius in question a woman, there is now the possibility the monster is a victim as well. A victim of systemic misogyny who has internalized that misogyny; a victim of a patriarchal collection of values and standards for success that diminish women, one who has figured out how to manipulate and exploit those values for her own advancement. I mean, what choice does she really have? The pathway to fame and success in this culture entails climbing a ladder constructed from the bodies of those who didn't survive the journey. It's dog-eat-dog out there, people tell you--but no one tells you this cannibalism metaphor is more a literal warning than an artful turn of phrase.

Elvis (2022)

***½/****
starring Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Luke Bracey, Olivia DeJonge
screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromwell and Baz Luhrmann & Craig Pearce
directed by Baz Luhrmann

by Walter Chaw Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is part Perfume, part Immortal Beloved--which is to say, it's horny as fuck and formulates music as mass delusion and mind control. Safe to say, the sordid story of the King of Rock-and-Roll is the perfect match for a maximalist director I have found to be excessive to the point of obnoxious, even on those rare occasions where I've liked the movie anyway (see: Moulin Rouge!). Before Elvis, there wasn't an establishing shot Baz didn't torpedo with gratuitous angles and "whooshing" sound effects; before Elvis, his films were not just childish but relentlessly, punishingly childish. The first half of Elvis is more frenetic than the last, though neither sports any affectations that don't augment the story in positive ways. Dissolves, triple-split screens, restless camera movements--they all underscore the breathless headlong rush of Elvis's rise from broke Tupelo hillbilly living in the "Black" part of town to the biggest-selling solo recording artist in history. When it comes time for his inevitable fall, Luhrmann places it in a sociopolitical context, toning down his trademark freneticism in favour of a, most shockingly of all perhaps, thoughtful analysis of several factors that may have played into Elvis's decline into paranoia, drug abuse, isolation, and despair. A story this familiar in a genre as permanently scuttled by Walk Hard requires a certain wisdom to know what to recap versus what to excavate. Elvis walks that line more than it doesn't.

I'll Find You (2022)

*/****
starring Adelaide Clemens, Leo Suter, Ursula Parker, Stellan Skarsgård
screenplay by David S. Ward and Bozenna Intrator
directed by Martha Coolidge

by Walter Chaw Martha Coolidge's I'll Find You, in distribution limbo since 2019, is a lushly-filmed but dramatically inert WWII period romance about a trio of starcrossed lovers and musicians, separated by war and reunited by amour. Coolidge does her best with the material, but movies that employ flashbacks to when the characters are children exchanging doe-eyed stares are a little doomed from the start, even when they're not also saddled with having to somehow use the Holocaust as a plot device that inconveniences our lovers for a while like a pesky ex-boyfriend or a dream job that requires a move across the country. Alain Resnais pulled it off ("it" being love in a time of war) in Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Philip Kaufman similarly succeeded with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but this is deep and shark-infested water, the moral and practical perils of which I'll Find You never fully reckons. Take the scene where hero tenor Robert (Leo Suter) searches for lost love Rachel (Adelaide Clemens) at recently-liberated Bergen-Belsen, where Robert shuffles disconsolately past a "Warning: Typhus" sign that serves as a jolting reminder of the housing of human beings like cattle in what feels essentially like a zombified but expensive Jane Austen adaptation. I'll Find You sands all the edges off, which is fine some of the time but never okay when it comes to genocide. Coolidge is a spirited director, the driving force behind all-time classics like the thornier-than-you-remember Valley Girl and the deceptively jagged Rambling Rose, contorted here to helm what is essentially a Rob Reiner vehicle.

TIFF '21: Wrap-up

by Bill Chambers I've been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn't expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I'm fully vaccinated, I wasn't about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Almost Famous (2000) - 4K Ultra HD + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

Almost Famous **½/****
Untitled ***/****
Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Bryant Frazer Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe's fondly remembered period piece about a bygone era of rock stars and the various satellites in their orbit, is a bit of a relic these days. Even on its release in 2000, when it was almost 30 years removed from its subject matter, Almost Famous was a notably uncritical celebration of a moment in 20^th-century music history. Another 20 years on, having centred the phallic sexual and creative powers of a white guy with a guitar, Almost Famous is increasingly disconnected from the prevailing pop and hip-hop zeitgeist, and the film feels even more like cultural hagiography. On the other hand, it is a hell of a story. The fundamentals are autobiographical: Cameron Crowe really was a 15-year-old whiz kid who earned early graduation from high school; he really did seek career advice from legendary rock-and-roll critic Lester Bangs; and he really landed a ROLLING STONE assignment to hit the road with a group of next-big-thing cock-rockers. The story, as Crowe retells it here, has intrepid young journo William Miller (a fresh-faced Patrick Fugit) on assignment with the fictional rock group Stillwater--dealing with celebrity egos, yearning for the teenaged groupies who sprinkle their figurative fairy dust around a series of interchangeable ballrooms, basketball arenas, and hotel suites, and checking in with a protective mother (Frances McDormand) who can only peer helplessly into her son's wonderland from her world outside the circus tent. Finally, William meets with his editors back at HQ to bang out a chunk of blistering reportage that will lay bare the raw emotional state of a band on tour and cement his status as a rock journalist. What could go wrong?

CODA (2021)

½*/****
starring Emilia Jones, Eugenio Derbez, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin
screenplay by Sian Heder, based on the original motion picture La Famille Belier by Éric Lartigau
directed by Sian Heder

by Walter Chaw It says something, something terrible, that the Deaf community has expressed gratefulness for CODA because it's some kind of representation, while also expressing trepidation because CODA trafficks in harmful stereotypes and centres the hearing perspective. The great Marlee Matlin made news by insisting that deaf actors be cast as the film's deaf family, and that's amazing, huge, a tremendous step in the right direction--and still, the material is so rancid that all of their great work highlights how desperately this community deserves to have material worthy of them. CODA is a grotesque bit of "big performance"/workingman's blues uplift trash in the vein of Mr. Holland's Opus or Dangerous Minds. It has a high-school audition montage, for Christ's sake. (A practicing-for-the-big-recital montage, too.) CODA posits that Deaf people don't like music even though it shows the parents, Jackie (Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), pulling up to a heavy rap beat, suggesting that the film itself doesn't consider rap to be music, just a noise even Deaf people can appreciate.

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 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.

A Star is Born (1976) - Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

***/**** Image A+ Sound B Extras B
starring Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark
screenplay by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion and Frank Pierson
directed by Frank Pierson

by Sydney Wegner Two-and-a-half hours ago, I didn't care one bit for Barbra Streisand. As a mega Kris Kristofferson fangirl, I was grudgingly willing to endure her performance alongside him in A Star is Born. I grew up with people who wouldn't be caught dead listening to her music; I'd never seen any of her movies. All I knew of her besides the larger-than-life fame and cloned dogs was her legendary ego. Diva, control freak, crazy, stuck-up--many of these distasteful adjectives stemming from the troubled production of A Star is Born. Despite its awards and box-office success (it was the third highest-grossing film of 1976), the years have not necessarily been kind, and almost every recent review has mentioned her presence as overwhelming the movie. That is, the lack of chemistry between the leads, the way the movie skips over chunks of badly-needed character development to make room for her songs, and the fashion disasters are frequent complaints with one common target: Babs.

TIFF '18: Teen Spirit

**/****
written and directed by Max Minghella

by Bill Chambers Pity about Teen Spirit, since it opens so well. Elle Fanning scrolls through her MP3 player to find the perfect song to start things off. A beat drops, and then we get the usual assortment of corporate logos. There's another great moment early on, where Fanning, having turned down a ride home from a slurring stranger who comes on like a dirty old man, is waiting at a bus stop late at night when she spies a group of young hooligans heading in her direction. The camera swipes across Fanning from one potential threat to the other: a clever visual that shows she's between a rock and a hard place. She chooses the dirty old man, Vlad (Zlatko Buric). He's a bear, but at least she wouldn't be outnumbered. Director Max Minghella clearly inherited some filmmaking chops from his old man, the late Anthony Minghella, though he asserts his individuality by shooting in anamorphic widescreen (something Anthony eschewed despite specializing in epics), and his overall style is relatively spastic; I waited in vain for Minghella to resist a gratuitous edit or camera movement. Fanning, by the way, plays a teenage chanteuse named Violet, forced to hide her passion from her mother (Agnieszka Grochowska), a proud, stern Polish immigrant who just wants her daughter to wait tables with her and stop these pop-star pipe dreams. It's a cold, cruel world out there where men abandon their families, after all, so you need a job you can depend on.

TIFF '18: Cold War

**/****
written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Pawel Pawlikowski follows up on the airless perfection of Ida with the ostensibly warmer but equally over-manicured and emotionally distant Cold War, a more historically trenchant La La Land for postwar Poland. Leave it to Pawlikowski, who never met a compelling, age-lined face he didn't want to frame in an artfully-arranged tableau, to mute even the potentially energizing opening montage of folk performers doing their bits before his ethnographic camera and its onscreen extension, the extended mic of pianist and recruiter Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, whose passing resemblance to Will Forte makes one yearn for the free comic pleasures of MacGruber). Wiktor's been tasked with putting together a nationalist throwback performance that as another, more committed officer of the state puts it, a bit ironically, should tap into the music of these rural folks' grandparents--that is to say, a culture "of pain and humiliation." It's in that process of, as MacGruber might say, putting together a team, that Wiktor meets his soon-to-be-star-crossed lover Zula (Joanna Kulig), a live-wire who auditions not with a humble song from the fields but a boisterous one from the movies. Zula's energy, alas, doesn't do much to raise the film's own temperature. To be sure, Wiktor and Zula's sad, state-crossing, decades-spanning affair, modelled after Pawlikowski's own parents' romantic history against the backdrop of the iron curtain, is intermittently moving. There is some allure in Cold War's elliptical, set-piece-based structure, which leaves its characters in, say, East Berlin only to pick them up in Paris or Yugoslavia years later, either refining their Communist anthems (now for Stalin!), performing in a jazz bar, or composing music for films. And, as expected, the deep black-and-white photography is never less than fetching--the cramped 4:3 frame an ideal if at this point too familiar canvas for a filmmaker who seems to love nothing more than to gently nudge his characters into off-kilter compositions that speak to the way they either come together or fall apart. But as in Ida, for all the effort on display, it's hard to shake the feeling that this isn't a little too easy for Pawlikowski, who, despite his personal connection to this material, ultimately delivers a desaturated version of The English Patient's more hard-won story of the violence wrought by the arbitrariness of state lines, populated by ciphers named after Mom and Dad. Programme: Special Presentations

TIFF '17: Brad's Status

**½/****
starring Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fischer, Michael Sheen
written and directed by Mike White

by Angelo Muredda Nobody captures the insidiousness and pervasiveness of depressive thinking quite like Mike White, who returns to the middle-aged professional anxiety and panic-inducing Impostor Syndrome of "Enlightened" with Brad's Status, a quiet, obstinately minor film that largely unfolds through the emotionally-stunted protagonist's daydreaming voiceover critiques of his own minimal actions onscreen. Brad's Status positions itself as a lower-middle-class American B-side to Éric Rohmer in its focus on one man's interrogation of his own moral failings, a modest goal it mostly pulls off.

TIFF '17: Suburbicon + Bodied

SUBURBICON
*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

BODIED
*½/****
starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen
directed by Joseph Kahn

by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens' and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov's. Trouble is, the best parts aren't that great and the worst parts...yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn't just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie's pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-bound wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them's blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin' Cousins.) One night, while Jupe's Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge's system can't handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can't figure out why his father won't positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers' casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they're always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.

Baby Driver (2017)

**½/****
starring Ansel Engort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jamie Foxx
written and directed by Edgar Wright

by Walter Chaw Edgar Wright is a good filmmaker and a better fan. The things he likes, he likes better than other people. It makes him the perfect choice for a zombie movie, a buddy movie, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type alien-invasion movie, even a videogame movie. What Edgar Wright doesn't appear to be is the type of Sidney Lumet/Walter Hill, gritty 1970s action-film auteur he'd probably like to be. With his new film, he's going for Report to the Commissioner but coming up with The Super Cops--and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, except that straining for one impacts the effortlessness and unfiltered joy of the other. Baby Driver lands somewhere in the area of Peckinpah's The Getaway with its nasty rogue's gallery and Hill's The Driver with its enigmatic hero and his way with cars before sliding off the rails at the end, which feels like, of all things, the climax of Christine. Yet for a few effortless minutes at the beginning, it's something all its own, and it's delirious. It's the feeling you get when you first see Shaun of the Dead: like watching a favourite film for the first time again. I like that Wright loves all of these guys and their movies, but I wish he'd pick a lane. I admire his ambition and taste a great deal. But his far-ranging interests have made a disjointed mix-tape of this picture. It's the kind you make to impress instead of from the heart. For what it's worth, and it's not worth a lot, I just selfishly sort of wish he'd do more Cornetto films. How many flavours are there, anyway? At least seven, right? Let's get on that.

Vinyl: The Complete First Season (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

Image A- Sound A Extras B-
"Pilot," "Yesterday Once More," "Whispered Secrets," "The Racket," "He in Racist Fire," "Cyclone," "The King and I," "E.A.B.," "Rock and Roll Queen," "Alibi"

by Bill Chambers A feeling of déjà vu pervades HBO's "Vinyl", and not just because it's so prototypical of the network's taste in weekly dramas. The first--and simultaneously last--ten episodes are a somewhat hellish loop of stylistic motifs, crutches, and tics. Refrains are a musical conceit, and this is a show about the record industry, so maybe there's a thematic defense for the repetition. But with all the imbibing that goes on on screen, "Vinyl"'s periodicities (running out of synonyms!) begin to make most sense as cues to take a shot. This review should provide all the drinking prompts you need while also serving as a post-mortem for the series, which got cancelled just as I sat down to write about it.¹ At the risk of beating a dead horse, here's what went wrong--and, occasionally, right--with "Vinyl".

Green Room (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw I wonder if Jeremy Saulnier has ever made something that wasn't, in its dark heart of hearts, a comedy. I hadn't considered this before a dear friend suggested it after a screening of Green Room, and it caused me to reassess Saulnier's previous films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin. The labels "hardcore" and "brutal" don't feel exactly right, though his work is certainly both at times. There's a Mel Brooks quote I like that defines tragedy as you getting a paper-cut--it hurts, it's awful, it's terrible--and comedy as somebody else falling into a sewer and dying. Saulnier's films are litanies of horrible, unimaginable calamities befalling generally well-meaning schlubs who are altogether unequipped to deal with them. Murder Party, his feature debut, set the template. Its protagonist is a lonely guy who answers a general invitation to attend a Halloween "Murder Party," where he discovers that he's the only guest and that all of the hosts have decided to murder him. It's the most obviously comic of his pictures, and it ends with a moment of crystal-blue melancholy as it becomes clear that the audience has sutured not just to this guy's guilelessness, but to the loneliness driving him as well. Blue Ruin is a masterpiece of the same sort of mechanics. It's delightful: delightfully funny, delightfully smart, delightfully brutal. The hero of that piece, played by Macon Blair (who has a key role in Green Room), is another nebbish pulled from obscurity to be, briefly, the hero of his own life.

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

***/****
starring O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw Exhilarating until it turns into a "Behind the Music" special, F. Gary Gray's N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton (hereafter Compton) is most affecting for just how timely are its self-aggrandizing tales of police brutality and racial profiling. Amid a sequence that reprises the Rodney King tape, it occurred to me that we're talking about something that happened almost 25 years ago; all we've done in the time intervening is lengthen the list of martyrs and sites of atrocity. Progress that a movie that deals as directly as Compton does with race and the police exists in any form, I guess, but it's cold comfort in the face of what feels like a treadmill built on a Moebius strip. Call it a national farce and a tragedy that what is obviously an auto-mythology plays so much like objective, sober documentary and evening newscast. God bless America.

Limelight (1952) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Charles Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce
written and directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer The opening titles of Limelight describe the film modestly but self-consciously as "the story of a ballerina and a clown." The clown, of course, is Chaplin himself, playing a faded superstar of the stage named Calvero. The ballerina is Chaplin's own discovery, Claire Bloom, playing a beautiful and earnest young dancer. The story is about their relationship--how a washed-up old comedian takes a despairing young performer under his wing and gives her the confidence to become a great artist, even as his own career fades into irrelevance. The main dilemmas facing Calvero--his steadily advancing age and the fickleness of his public--were the same ones that bedevilled Chaplin at the time.

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (2014)

**½/****
directed by Florian Habicht

by Bill Chambers There's an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" where tragic sidekick Hank Kingsley asks producer Artie what he thinks of him opening his solo act with Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel." "It's a showstopper, Hank," Artie says, briefly raising Hank's hopes before delivering the kicker: "Never open with a showstopper." I was reminded of this at the outset of Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets, which opens with the title band giving a rousing performance of their "Common People" that is, for those of us watching after the fact, vicariously thrilling. "[1996] won't produce a more indispensable song," wrote rock authority Robert Christgau, and indeed, "Common People" went on to crystallize the Britpop movement and be covered by the disparate likes of Tori Amos and William Shatner. If you're a dilettante like myself, you go into this first sanctioned documentary about Pulp (lead singer Jarvis Cocker receives a "concept" credit alongside director Florian Habicht) wishing to hear "Common People," and what follows pales for the instant gratification--at least until it becomes clear that "Common People" had to be up front: for purposes of this film, it's nothing less than the national anthem.

TIFF '14: Seymour: An Introduction; Love & Mercy; Whiplash

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
***½/****
directed by Ethan Hawke

LOVE & MERCY
**½/****
directed by Bill Pohlad

WHIPLASH
**/****
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Bill Chambers Ethan Hawke's first documentary isn't the affected thing its Googler-confusing, appropriated-from-Salinger title would suggest. (And perhaps we should be grateful he didn't go with Suddenly Seymour, Seymour Butts, or I Know What You Did Last Seymour.) Intimate but not prying, Seymour: An Introduction profiles the homuncular Seymour Bernstein, a former pianist of some renown who withdrew from the concert circuit in his prime to focus on teaching piano, hoping to stave off the neuroses of fame. Hawke decided to make the film after receiving some life-altering advice from Bernstein at a gathering, as if compelled to share his good fortune with the world, and that generosity of spirit courses through a piece that looks for wisdom, not pathology, in its subject's hermetic existence (57 years alone in the same New York apartment) and monk-like devotion to music. A forgotten genius, Bernstein also proves an unsung raconteur in enthralling stories that place him at the centre of a real-life Sunset Boulevard or on the front lines of Korea; he commands the screen in lingering close-ups and holds court with equally-captive audiences of confrères and disciples, despite his professed stage fright. The picture builds to Bernstein's first live performance in decades, a recital Hawke has arranged in a gesture that seems like a betrayal yet has the not-undesirable effect of making Bernstein look oddly heroic. If possible, he's an even more expressive individual when filtered through the keys of a Steinway.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw I love the Coen Brothers, despite my suspicion that most of their movies don't think much of me at all. What's often read as disdain for their characters I've read mainly as antipathy for their audience: I believe they like their characters just fine, it's just that they could give a shit about your opinion of what happens to them. I love the Coens for their literary acumen, for their fine ability to understand not simply the form of genre--and, in their adaptations, of authors--but the entire function as well. They don't just adapt Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis novels, they adapt those writers' entire bodies of work. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a remarkable retelling of The Odyssey, for instance, because in addition to following the outlines of the poem, it adapts its themes and storytelling strategies; it's a dissection and a representation and glorious, of course. They return now to The Odyssey--or, at least, to the character of Odysseus--in Inside Llewyn Davis, a picture set in 1961, among the bohos and coffee shops of a Greenwich Village on the verge of Bob Dylan and the counterculture, and it's populated with lost souls in overlapping underworlds. Transpose that passage from Homer where Odysseus fills troughs with sheeps' blood to draw the undead (and finds his poor deceased mother there at her drink) to scenes in Pappi's (Max Casella) infernal nightclub as proto-hipsters and neo-beatniks assemble blandly on the edge of a trembling something while performers bleed out before them. In rituals for new gods, after all, there must be lambs to slaughter.

SDFF '13: I Used to Be Darker

***/****
directed by Matthew Porterfield

by Walter Chaw Matthew Porterfield's quiet and humane I Used to Be Darker provides an interesting contrast to Richard Linklater's talkier improvisations while covering the same interpersonal landscapes of how people speak to one another, react to one another, and interact physically within a space. One of the first images is of a little Irish girl, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), taking a knife to a couple of paintings. It's a rejection of many things, as well as a declaration. I Used to Be Darker will privilege the cinematic (i.e., showcase the complexity and eloquence of communication through moving pictures), and Porterfield's DP on this production, Jeremy Saulnier, who's pulled off something like a masterpiece with his own Blue Ruin, is just the man to do it. Taryn, run away from the UK all the way to the U.S. to stay with her aunt and uncle, discovers that she's gone from perceived familial strife to tangible familial strife, as the pair is in the process of separating--leaving Taryn's cousin Abby (Hannah Gross) embittered and caught in the middle. More clues to Porterfield's intent come in the casting of musicians Ned Oldham and Kim Taylor as the aunt and uncle: non-actors (as is Porterfield's practice through three films), both, they inhabit their roles with the winsomeness, and indistinctness, of dedicated artists. It's not a far reach for them to access the despair that's essential, I think, to a certain kind of creation, and Porterfield allows them each a moment to express themselves in song: one in a basement before Oldham destroys his instrument, the other on stage and then over the closing-credits, with the coda being a sigh from Taylor and a little shake of her head. I Used to Be Darker isn't about anything more complicated than observing unhappiness and conflict; take it as the counterpoint to Felix Van Groeningen's Broken Circle Breakdown: the quiet between notes, a celebration if you can call something this downbeat celebratory, of what film should act like and look like when you leave it alone.

SDFF '13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it's exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents--how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film's central event, then, isn't the child's fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise's (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier's band's songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once--even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.

Starz Denver Film Festival '13: All Together Now

**½/****
screenplay by Ryan Kasmiskie & Alexander Mirecki
directing Alexander Mirecki

by Walter Chaw Two scenes: one featuring a bonfire-illuminated kiss against a forest backdrop, the other a man standing on a platform in a clearing as a crowd fills in around him. Both are captured in glorious 16mm, shot through with grain and lit by natural light; both are suffused with a magical, twilit glow that only really happens in exactly this way when you use old, some would say obsolete, technology. These moments almost, by themselves, justify the existence Alexander Mirecki's All Together Now. At the least, there's nothing about the substance of the film that detracts from the beauty of Zoran Popovic's cinematography. Plotless, listless maybe, wobbling slightly from portentous to unassuming and slight, the picture is a half-fictionalized document of an all-night music festival that, in the tradition of Richard Linklater's earliest forays into proto-mumblecore (Harmony Korine's, too), doesn't have much on its mind and would even, given its lo-fi visual beauty, be better served as a silent. Still, it demonstrates just enough in terms of instinct to suggest that Mirecki has a future. Lou Taylor Pucci presents an affable semi-centre for the piece as the organizer of the concert and recipient of the aforementioned kiss, while bands like Manicorn, Pedestrian Deposit, Nice Face, and Night Control provide the right CBGB authenticity when we pull away from the overly-scripted (overly-slotted, truth be told) interactions of the audience. 

MHHFF '13: Shorts Program #4

Next Exit **/**** (UK, 14 mins., d. Benjamin Goodger) A light bit of nothing, Next Exit is a little Ludditism along the lines of that one episode of the American "The Office" where Michael Scott follows the bad instructions of his GPS directly into a lake. The performances are good, the direction is fairly pedestrian, and the story, about a girl who accepts a ride home from a pub one night, has a couple of decent twists but is ultimately more mildly clever than disturbing or compelling. In its short time, it does manage to cover the bases in terms of going out of cell-phone range and the suggestion of a cyclical ending, but it fails mostly in terms of generating much in the way of horror or comedy. Mostly, I had trouble with the idea that anyone would think a hotel--or a hospital, or anything--is located in the middle of the woods.

Muscle Shoals (2013)

**/****
directed by Greg 'Freddy' Camalier

by Walter Chaw And so I find myself again reviewing a documentary that's terribly informative but not terribly artistic, Greg Camalier's Muscle Shoals, which does a very fine job of cataloguing all the great musicians who discovered their "sound," their "funk," their swamp, if you will, along the banks of the Tennessee River in a little Alabama town called "Muscle Shoals." Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon, Jimmy Cliff, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Traffic--and, oh, there's Bono, talking about the struggle of black people, why not. Camalier throws a lot of stuff out there but can't quite find the balance between artsy pretension and straight reportage. Every time he mentions someone calling someone else, in other words, he's somehow dug up a different portrait of someone on a telephone--let it marinate enough, repeat it enough, and suddenly it's unintentionally hilarious. Bono could be connected to the film because either U2 was greatly influenced by the Shoals variety of R&B or because Bono is an expert talking-head or because Bono is an insufferable boor who likes to be on camera. Whatever the case, archival footage--always fun, if not that much funner than a night spent chain-surfing YouTube--splits time with new interviews with dudes like Keith Richards who wax rhapsodic about the magic of the place. It doesn't go pear-shaped, though, until Native Americans are invoked, revealing that the original name of the Tennessee River had something to do with singing.

Autumn Sonata (1978) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

Höstsonaten
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar Björk
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Bryant Frazer By 1978, Ingmar Bergman was in trouble. The director had fled his native Sweden two years earlier after an arrest on charges of tax evasion. (He would be completely exonerated in 1979, but his mood was no doubt grim until then.) He visited Paris and Los Angeles, then settled in Munich, where he would shoot his first English-language film, the 1920s Berlin-set The Serpent's Egg, a Dino de Laurentiis co-production co-starring David Carradine and Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann. The Serpent's Egg was a box-office flop in Sweden, a critical and commercial failure internationally, and most of all a big artistic disappointment for Bergman himself--a decided stumble for a director riding high on the success of 1970s titles like the harrowing Cries and Whispers, which enjoyed huge success in the U.S. in the unlikely care of Roger Corman's New World Pictures, and the audience-friendly The Magic Flute. At the same time, Bergman was embarking on what would prove to be an unhappy tenure at Munich's Residenztheater, where he managed to mount eleven productions before being fired in 1981. In this turbulent context, the very Bergmanesque Autumn Sonata can be seen as a kind of comfort film--a deliberate return to roots. Someone once described it as "Bergman does Bergman," and the gag stuck. Bergman himself eventually quoted the remark, calling it "witty but unfortunate. For me, that is."

The Producers (1968) [Deluxe Edition] - DVD|[Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray and DVD Combo Pack

Mel Brooks' The Producers
*½/****
DVD - Image A- Sound B- Extras B+
BD - Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars
written and directed by Mel Brooks

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw A seminal year for film, 1968: Once Upon a Time in the West, Rosemary's Baby, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barbarella, If..., Targets, Faces, Danger: Diabolik...and, some would say, Mel Brooks's The Producers, a film back in the limelight thanks to the record-breaking, award-winning Broadway play on which it's based now coming out as an extraordinarily ill-advised feature film of its own. Unlike Brooks's other classics (Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, even High Anxiety), The Producers has aged pretty poorly. It's played broad, which is to say that everyone acts like they're being defibrillated every five minutes, leading to a lot of high-decibel screeching and running around in circles. And I don't really understand what the film is about: Is it an attack on the theatre, or is it an attack on Nazis? If it's neither, if it's instead some kind of vaudevillian farce about the last days of Jewish entertainment hegemony, then perhaps that's as good an explanation as any for why its prehistoric rimshots, timing, and attitudes strike me as puzzling. Maybe it's a satire of being a Jewish comic.

Not Fade Away (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring John Magaro, Jack Huston, Bella Heathcote, James Gandolfini
written and directed by David Chase

click any image to enlarge

by Bryant Frazer Not Fade Away doesn't have an opening scene--it has an overture. You could almost call it a mash-up. After a brief snippet of TV footage showing New Jersey boys Joey Dee and the Starliters performing their 1962 hit "Peppermint Twist," the image is replaced by an old RCA "Indian Head" test pattern superimposed with the words "Please Stand By" as a voice announces a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. After the familiar emergency-alert tone starts buzzing away for a couple of bars, it's co-opted as part of  the beat behind the guitar riff that opens "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." The sense of time and place thus conjured is strong: it's 1965, and America is on the verge of a rock-and-roll emergency.

Cabaret (1972) - Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey
screenplay Jay Allen, based on the play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
directed by Bob Fosse

by Walter Chaw Bob Fosse's Cabaret is an astonishment. It's a milestone for musical adaptations, a scabrous mission statement early on for the best period in American film (in film anywhere, really), and, taken with her turn in The Sterile Cuckoo (and arguably as Lucille 2 on "Arrested Development"), everything you need to know about Liza Minnelli as a very down, very particular American icon. Daughter of one Judy Garland, whose 1969 death from an abuse of drugs and alcohol was no longer considered spectacular in the shadow of poor, martyred Marilyn Monroe, she represents the broken legacy of Old Hollywood. Ray Bolger said at Garland's funeral that she had just worn out. Poignant. Poignant especially because it happens the same year her daughter has a breakdown from a broken heart in The Sterile Cuckoo, and just three years before Minnelli's Sally Bowles composes herself a split second before the curtains part and she, snap, justlikethat, puts on a happy face for a Weimar audience fiddling as the Republic burns. As endings go, it's as horrifying as the editing error at the close of John Frankenheimer's 1966 Seconds--the film that, for my money, is the real beginning of the New American Cinema, appearing less than a year before the "official" starting gun of Bonnie & Clyde. Cabaret is a quintessential '70s picture, a devastating experience and an exhilarating one, too.

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) [15th Anniversary Edition] + High Fidelity (2000) - Blu-ray Discs

GROSSE POINTE BLANK
***½/**** Image C+ Sound B+ Extras D
starring John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd
screenplay by Tom Jankiewicz and D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack
directed by George Armitage

HIGH FIDELITY
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C
starring John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Joelle Carter
screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink & John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg, based on the novel by Nick Hornby
directed by Stephen Frears

click any image to enlarge

by Jefferson Robbins John Cusack spent much of the 1990s stubbornly trying to dodge his high-school reunion. Barely present in Sixteen Candles, he nevertheless may have suffered a bit of the curse that pursued John Hughes's other players: We wouldn't let them grow up for quite a while, and careers were hampered. Cusack navigated this impasse better than most, netting late-'80s leads both romantic (Say Anything…) and dramatic (The Grifters) that unpack and showcase his mature dimensions. Cusack has, if it's not too oxymoronic, a vulnerable edge--his characters are deeply attuned to others, but only out of self-defense. Lloyd Dobler, Roy Dillon, and, in the two films under discussion, Martin Blank and Rob Gordon constantly assess input to learn how the prevailing emotional currents of a scene affect them, not others. "You think I'm a dick," Lloyd determines when Diane (Ione Skye) gives him a Pen of Friendship as a parting gift. His feelings, dependent on hers, are paramount. Cusack's heroes are sensitive but far from selfless, yet the actor somehow convinces us otherwise.

To Rome with Love (2012)

**/****
starring Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There's an odd moment early in To Rome with Love that makes you sit up and wonder if Woody Allen has made good on the promise shown by his surprisingly warm Midnight in Paris. Stumbling out of a movie theatre with his wife and another couple, regular schmo Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) mounts a rousing defense of Saverio Costanzo's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, offering that its openness to human mystery makes it far superior to The King's Speech. I can't say I agree with him, but how nice to see such an idiosyncratic opinion voiced in earnest. That's a good sign, coming from a director whose characters often sound like variations on one another in his lesser works--but it's also a false one, when much of what follows plays out like a flat homage to omnibus city movies.

Hot Docs 2012: Shut Up and Play the Hits (ds. Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern)

by Angelo Muredda “It’s like a sad hipster DJ Revolutionary Road.” That’s recently-retired LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy on first single “Losing My Edge” in Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s by turns ebullient and funereal Shut Up and Play the Hits. “Losing My Edge” is one of the dance-rock act’s infamous “position songs.” You could think of it as a hunted gazelle’s lament before the wolves swoop in, masquerading as a thirtysomething’s off-the-cuff recitation of his musical knowledge before a pack of preternaturally all-knowing twentysomethings who are “actually really, really nice.” It’s probably the best example of Murphy’s uncanny ability to position himself at the edge of things – in this case between the accumulated experience of old-school music appreciation (it’s not for nothing that the last LCD album was called This Is Happening) and new digital ways of knowing by downloading in massive quantities. Credit Lovelace and Southern, then, for positioning their film at the same edge, and delivering a concert film of LCD’s last show at Madison Square Garden that’s a self-consciously dead record of a living wake, announcing itself as a funeral even before the credits.

The Bodyguard (1992) - Special Edition DVD + Blu-ray Disc

**/****
DVD - Image B Sound A Extras C
BLU-RAY - Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston, Gary Kemp, Bill Cobbs
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Mick Jackson

by Walter Chaw Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston have a conversation about Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (whose title means "The Bodyguard") in the middle of Mick Jackson's hilarious camp artifact The Bodyguard, the one where Costner plays a barely-vocal lunk and Houston plays a singer-turned-actress with severe personality flaws. And that little chat, occupying a minute-and-a-half or so of screentime, encapsulates everything that's priceless about this flick: It's stupid, embarrassing, and watered-down, but it's also surreal, queer, and hermetically sealed in a rhinestone-studded mason jar. Have no fear, though, as that revelatory discussion of one of the great films in world cinema segues in record time into a heartfelt rumination on the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song, and then into a courtship ritual involving a big samurai sword and a piece of silk. Is Kevin going to sheathe his blue steel in Whitney's purple scarf? Ah, the decadent ribaldry! What could it all mean?

O Lucky Man! (1973) [Two-Disc Special Edition] + Never Apologize: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson (2008) - DVDs

O LUCKY MAN!
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Rachel Roberts, Arthur Lowe
screenplay by David Sherwin
directed by Lindsay Anderson

NEVER APOLOGIZE: A PERSONAL VISIT WITH LINDSAY ANDERSON
**½/**** Image C Sound B-
directed by Mike Kaplan

by Jefferson Robbins As magnetic an actor as he is, Malcolm McDowell is often the acted-upon. Alex DeLarge of A Clockwork Orange seeks to master his chosen domains by force, but once he finds himself in the larger circuitry of the world, he's really just an implement of others' power. Is Caligula the prime mover of his vulgar Roman Empire, or merely its best expression? And so on. It was only in his later career that lazy filmmakers and casting agents made McDowell a shorthand for sinister worldliness; today, he arrives onscreen and you know who he is. Time was, he was a squirrelly, intense audience surrogate, Everymannish but beautiful in a way that was at once fragile and sharp. Asked to identify McDowell's essential quality as an actor, director Lindsay Anderson told him, "You're rather dangerous." For good or ill, the movie industry has looked no farther than that in the way it's handled McDowell for the last thirty years.

Paul Williams: Still Alive (d. Stephen Kessler)

Stephen Kessler's fun, funny Paul Williams: Still Alive proves that you can revere and challenge a documentary subject at the same time, and in that sense, the film was a tonic after watching two-plus hours of Pearl Jam blow their loads into Cameron Crowe's waiting mouth. Paul Williams is of course the diminutive singer-songwriter who was a veritable Zelig in the '70s, his facile wit making him a favourite guest of Johnny Carson, his unique look making him a viable character actor, his whorish need for attention making him powerless to turn down any offer to appear on television. (The day after he won an Oscar for the Barbra Streisand song "Evergreen," he agreed to do "Circus of the Stars".) Williams didn't adapt well to '80s pop culture, in part because he could no longer juggle his career with drugs and alcohol, in part because, I would argue, movies, TV, and music all started becoming so image-conscious as to marginalize guys like Williams, nobody's definition of a pretty boy. According to his self-deprecating narration, Kessler, an Oscar-nominee himself (for the short film Birch Street Gym), idolized Williams in his youth for precisely that reason. I know that girls feel the phantom pressure of the media but believe me--boys do, too; Williams was a homuncular beacon among the studly John Travoltas and Burt Reynoldses, and though many of his career choices look tacky in retrospect, most misfits only saw that he was everywhere and felt validated, nay, vindicated, by his mainstream ubiquity. Ironically, the trouble with Paul Williams: Still Alive is that it's image-obsessed in a different way. Kessler catches up with the decades-sober Williams, whom he thought dead (hence the title) and who now enjoys a quiet life of performing on the casino circuit. He grills Williams about the crap larding his resume and Williams is philosophical about it all (at one point, he muses that Simon & Garfunkel probably wish they'd done more "Hollywood Squares"), bristling only when Kessler starts speaking to him from an ivory tower. In a phenomenally squirm-inducing sequence late in the picture, Kessler subjects Williams to an episode of "Merv" the latter guest-hosted with coke-fuelled hubris. (Remember that episode of 'The Larry Sanders Show" where the chance to guest-host went to Hank's head? Multiply the painfulness of that by a thousand.) The star's reaction, as the film portrays it, is to unload a storage unit filled with archival footage of himself. Williams's arc--rags to riches to rehab--is a familiar one but that's not the problem: the problem is that although Kessler periodically reminds us that there's more to Williams than kitsch (the melancholy strains of "The Rainbow Connection," for instance), no one needs reminding more than Kessler. **½/****

PROGRAMME: Real to Reel

Pearl Jam Twenty (d. Cameron Crowe) + Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (ds. Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill)

When Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty was over, I lined up to use the bathroom between two other people, a woman and a man, who were at the same screening. The woman, who looked perhaps like she might've been in kindergarten when Pearl Jam's "Ten" came out, asked me, "That Chris Connell [sic], the guy with the--" she crooked her finger over her lip to indicate a pencil moustache, "--was he in the band?" "No," I said, "he's the lead singer of Soundgarden." "Oh," she replied, and I could tell this answer didn't satisfy her in the least, but the bathroom became vacant and she excused herself. Then the man behind me, who was closer to my age (36) and patchouli-scented, wanted to know what I thought of the film. I told him that as someone who lost track of the band--lost interest in it is the truth, but something told me not to say that, for he'd take it personally--after "Ten," I had trouble keeping up with it. He nodded sagely and said, "The thing about the drummers?"

Sundance '11: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

****/****
directed by Göran Hugo Olsson

by Alex Jackson Goran Hugo Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 begins with a disclaimer explaining that this film is not intended to categorically define the Black Power movement, but merely to represent a few Swedish filmmakers' impressions of it. This seemingly innocuous statement raises more questions than it answers. Why would Swedes want to tell this story in the first place? Do they have the right to tell this story? And what's the point of looking at the Black Power movement of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies in 2011? It seems the moment you make a film about the Black Power movement, it becomes a commodity to be consumed, at least in part, by a white audience. I believe that whites are attracted to stories of the black experience and to the icon of the black militant for a number of reasons, perhaps least among them liberal guilt. On an individual level, the white may feel disenfranchised and see the black militant as a kind of romantic ideal. Or maybe he believes himself to be relatively lacking in cultural identity and looks upon the strongly defined culture and identity of African-Americans to satisfy this need. The Black Power Mixtape is a compilation of direct documentary footage shot by Swedish journalists in the United States from 1967 to 1975. Olsson has mildly contextualized what we're seeing via several contemporary audio interviews with major figures like Angela Davis and Melvin Van Peebles, and he scores it to songs by The Jackson Five and The Roots; the film is a coherent and edifying history of the Black Power movement tightly wound into an efficient 96 minutes. But in unabashedly indulging our taste for nostalgia, and in preying on the fundamental emptiness of the "white experience," it's also a rollicking entertainment. (The spell is broken, briefly but provocatively, by a lingering shot of a heroin-addicted infant.) By consciously underlining the fact that he and his fellow countrymen are essentially outsiders interpreting this material, Olsson introduces a tension between the revolution-as-revolution and the revolution-as-pop. The film exists as one, the other, and everything in-between.

I'm Still Here (2010)

****/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Antony Langdon, Casey Affleck, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs
screenplay by Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix
directed by Casey Affleck 

by Ian Pugh It's far too easy to believe that Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here hinges on whether or not its subject has perpetrated a hoax. Joaquin Phoenix grows a lunatic's beard, declares he's quitting acting, and starts planning a hip-hop career? Surely, he can't be serious. But here's how it ends, kids: yes, I guess you could call it a "put-on" in the strictest sense of the word--yet at the same time, he is deadly serious. What needs to be understood about Phoenix, and this film, is that there was a kernel of truth to everything the man mumbled through that maniacal persona. I do believe that Phoenix is tired of acting (or, at least, tired of stardom), and, for his farewell performance, he's blurred the line between actor and role so completely as to obliterate all our preconceived notions of who he is and what he is supposed to represent. The false Phoenix--the bedraggled, abusive prophet spouting non sequiturs--is, for all intents and purposes, the "real" Phoenix, the iconic artist who pulls a disappearing act by forcing the art and the iconography to consume his entire being. You can't call I'm Still Here a mockumentary, exactly, because, inside and outside of the "act," that is precisely what happened. And what came out of it is a harrowing thought exercise about artistic failure and the baggage of celebrity.

TIFF 2010 Day 1: Stone; I'm Still Here

originally published September 9, 2010
I started the morning off on a bum note by boarding the wrong subway train (which caused me to miss The Town), but other than that, the day went off without a hitch. I found the new homebase of the Festival okay, spotted Karina Longworth (who like most critics of note looks part cartoon character), got mistaken for a stand-up comic (am I the only one who feels bizarrely contrite when this happens?), and managed to park my ass in a cinema just as Stone was beginning to unspool. As an aside, I now see a real upside to holding the press screenings at the Scotiabank instead of the Varsity, as the larger auditoriums are cutting down on the last-minute scrambles to find a seat; at both of my movies today, the first few neck-straining rows were almost entirely empty. It's a throwback, really, to the good old days of the Uptown.

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.

Fame (1980) - Blu-ray Disc + Fame (2009) [Extended Dance Edition] - DVD

FAME (1980)
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Irene Cara, Lee Curreri, Laura Dean, Antonia Franceschi
screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Alan Parker

FAME (2009)
*/**** Image N/A Sound C Extras D
starring Debbie Allen, Charles S. Dutton, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Mullaly
screenplay by Allison Burnett, based on the screenplay by Christopher Gore
directed by Kevin Tancharoen

by Walter Chaw Alan Parker seems to fancy himself a bit of a sociologist--a chronicler of Truth surveying man's inhumanity to man and the injustices perpetrated especially in the United States, offering up pictures that seek to expose just exactly what's wrong with his non-native land. When he makes a good movie, like Angel Heart, it's good because he's not proselytizing about corruption so much as he's indulging in his suspicions about the Home of the Brave. (Filthy with evil, right?) The matinee of appreciation for Parker is not surprisingly around fifteen, when stuff like Mississippi Burning and Midnight Express has the weight of sagacity rather than the reek of puerile outrage and unbecoming grandstanding. He's Stanley Kramer with a drug and counterculture fixation that marks him as a product less of Mod than of Free Love. Fame is the perfect Parker vehicle because it's an anthology of Parker's perception of inner-city woes, and as it appears at the end of the Seventies, the decade that was America's crucible of self-reflection, the sort of prison-wallet Passion Play of which Parker's most fond finds a more tolerable climate. It's perfect, too, because Parker's background in commercials often leads him to make films that are told in images impossible to misconstrue with concepts that aren't necessarily substantial enough for a feature. (See: his big-screen adaptations of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and Webber's awful Evita.) Fame's structure is a sequence of vignettes and its characters a collection of types, so that the demand to sustain itself over the course of two hours is ameliorated by the fact that it's basically an anthology piece.

It Might Get Loud (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
directed by Davis Guggenheim

by Bryant Frazer In the U2 concert film Rattle and Hum, Bono finishes speechifying about Apartheid in the middle of the song "Silver and Gold" by growling an acid faux-apology: "Am I buggin' ya? Don't mean to bug ya." Then he says, "OK, Edge--play the blues," and The Edge holds up his guitar and goes WEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE-DEEDLE! Watching the movie with friends in college, I always savoured the absurdity of that moment. We imagined Bono scrunching up his face in a grimace and scolding The Edge for reverting to his ordinary clamour. "Aw, Edge," he might say, "that ain't the blues. That's the same shit you always play." And I'd collapse in helpless laughter.

This Is It (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
directed by Kenny Ortega

by Ian Pugh Cobbled together from the rehearsals for Michael Jackson's planned fifty-show tour, the almost-concert film This Is It is intended to provide a simulacrum of the man's "vision" before his untimely death. However, its primary attraction may very well be the rumble you feel from the unforgettable basslines of "Smooth Criminal" and "Beat It" when played in a movie theatre. It proves an experience unto itself, as does watching Jackson perform his greatest hits with impossible elegance--but the picture stumbles whenever it slows things down to hold a love-in for Jacko, which is pretty often. This Is It gets itself into trouble off the bat, with the unending praise from the singer's tearfully grateful dancers (pre-audition/pre-mortem) giving way to a screen bathed in white light and a choir of angels; the whole affair is so beatific that it crosses the line from loving eulogy to revival tent. It's a feeling the film never quite shakes.

Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Miley Cyrus, Emily Osment, Jason Earles, Billy Ray Cyrus
screenplay by Dan Berendsen
directed by Peter Chelsom

by Bill Chambers Peter Chelsom may have sold his soul when he joined the ranks of Lasse Hallstrom and John Madden to become a house director for Miramax, but going to work at Disney--on a feature-film vehicle for one of the company's biggest brands, no less--is a mercenary move, pure and simple. So it's surprising, considering he probably could've treated the job as a paid vacation without incurring the wrath of "Hannah Montana" fans (who've been weaned on a particularly low-rent sitcom), to say nothing of the suits in charge (Disney favours foremen to filmmakers, after all), that Chelsom seems legitimately inspired by the material more often than not. The 'Hannah Montana' concept itself needs only gentle pushes to yield something resembling a story, but Chelsom doesn't exactly coast on it; anyone who's involuntarily endured the collected works of Kenny Ortega or Andy Fickman will notice a more idiosyncratic hand at the helm almost immediately. While I can't say I've ever thought much of Chelsom's films (they're a bit twinkly for my tastes), he appears to have found his niche. As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it's certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.

Stop Making Sense (1984) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A-
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bryant Frazer Stop Making Sense opens sparely, with a close-up of a man striding onto an empty stage. By "empty stage," I don't mean a bare stage, exactly. I mean a big empty theatre space--it's basically a rectangular room behind a proscenium, illuminated by bare light bulbs dangling overhead--with furniture, ladders, scaffolding, and the like cluttered near the walls. It feels less like a performance is about to begin than like a rehearsal or, and maybe more to the point, an audition. And by "close-up," I don't mean a tight shot on the man's face. Rather, we are looking at his lower extremities--white shoes, white pants--in a SteadiCam shot that follows him to a waiting microphone stand. He plops a boombox down beside him and announces, in a faux-naïf voice, "I have a tape I want to play." If you know the Talking Heads, you'll recognize this immediately as David Byrne's shtick. But if this film is your introduction to the band--as it was for teenaged me--there may be something off-putting about the whole precious set-up. "What's up with this fucking twerp," I remember thinking, "and his art-damaged affectations?" I quickly learned the joke was on me.