Film Freak Central

TIFF '18: Fahrenheit 11/9

**/****
directed by Michael Moore

by Walter Chaw Michael Moore is an often-terrible filmmaker and a repugnant human being. His films are scattershot and on the whole unhelpful. In a few meandering minutes of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, he notes that members of Trump's inner circle have invested in his films and that when given the opportunity to hold Trump's feet to the fire in a public forum, he played the Jimmy Fallon. He appears to be owning that he's part of this disaster, but it's not clear, ultimately, what the fuck he's on about. Moore also spends time with the teen survivors of the Parkland, FL shooting, in what seems like an attempt to borrow the glow of their youthful activism; with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for probably the same purpose; and then he spends some time doing his stunt bullshit by spraying a tanker full of Flint water onto the governor of Flint's lawn. What works in the film is his focus in on how the DNC actively betrayed the will of the people by overriding primary results in states like West Virginia, Michigan, and Montana in throwing the presidential nomination to the legendarily unpopular Hillary Clinton. He reminds that during the heat of the Flint crisis, President Obama flew in, performed the stunt of drinking Flint water (he didn't), then told a folksy story of how he probably ate some lead when he was a little kid and, shucks, he turned out fine. These moments are vital because they show why thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of devoted Democrat voters decided their votes didn't matter and, indeed, that Democrats cared about the poor exactly as much as Republicans do. The problem isn't that Trump is who he has always obviously been, right there out in the open (and proud of his vulgarity and ugliness); the problem is that the entrenched political establishment on every side had fallen into complacency and lost interest in any class other than their own. Outside of that thread, the rest of it, including an extended comparison of Trump to Hitler, is just Moore being the Left's Rush Limbaugh. When preaching to the choir, best to turn the camera on the choir: Fahrenheit 11/9 is gold when it's shaming the Left. I wish he'd spent more time doing that. Programme: TIFF Docs

Telluride '18: The Front Runner

ZERO STARS/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga, J.K. Simmons, Alfred Molina
written by Matt Bai & Jay Carson & Jason Reitman
directed by Jason Reitman

by Walter Chaw In 1988, Gary Hart, the democratic former senator from my home state of Colorado, was the front runner for the Presidency of the United States. About a week before the primary, which would have cemented his ascendancy to a post seemingly all but preordained, this guy--classically handsome, tall, masculine, progressive--did what powerful men in privileged positions sometimes do: he slept with a young woman who wanted a job with his campaign. That's a problem, but the problem is he dared the WASHINGTON POST to follow him; he touted his ethics and morals as a foundational plank to his platform, and when the MIAMI HERALD took him up on his dare, they discovered that he was maybe a serial philanderer who in those last halcyon days before the Internet, hadn't learned the voracious appetite the public has for a good, sleazy story concerning the tragic fall of kings. It's hardly ever the crime--it's almost always the cover-up. And in 1988, Jason Reitman's The Front Runner says, politicians weren't very good at the cover-up. Largely because the press was complicit in helping politicians, athletes, and other powerful men in powerful spheres keep sexual dalliances and abuses quiet. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, after all.

Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism [Limited Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

EROS + MASSACRE (1969)
****/****
Director's Cut: Image B+ Sound B Extras B-
Theatrical Version: Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Mariko Okada, Toshiyuji Hosokawa, Yûko Kusunoki, Etsushi Takahashi
written by Masahiro Yamada & Yoshishige Yoshida
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

HEROIC PURGATORY (1970)
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Mariko Okada, Kaizo Kamoda, Naho Kimura, Yoshiaki Makita
written by Masahiro Yamada
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

COUP D'ETAT (1973)
***½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring Rentarô Mikuni, Yasuo Miyake, Akiko Kurano, Tadahiko Sugano
written by Minoru Betsuyaku
directed by Yoshishige Yoshida

by Bryant Frazer In director Yoshishige Yoshida's restlessly erotic trio of films dealing with Japanese radicalism (aptly dubbed "Love + Anarchism" by Arrow Films), past and present merge as easily and ineluctably as the personal and the political. Released between 1969 and 1973, they were made at a politically turbulent time in Japan, when the New Left movement gained social currency and student anarchists, the Zengakuren, challenged the status quo by occupying buildings at universities and high schools around the country. In that conflict between anarchy and order, Yoshida saw reflections of Japan's past--earlier generations of radicals who challenged societal structures in the same way that new activists were pushing back against contemporary norms. Yoshida was not inspired to make anything as simple as a series of biopics or historical dramas; instead, he embarked on a series of formally elaborate films that evaluated the struggles of radicals and would-be revolutionaries from decades past in light of the then-current political moment.

John Adams (2008) + Jimmy Carter Man from Plains (2007) - DVDs

JOHN ADAMS
Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
"Join or Die," "Independence," "Don't Tread on Me," "Reunion," "Unite or Die," "Unnecessary War," "Peacefield"

JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS
***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Ian Pugh It's hardly anything new to explore the professional brilliance and personal failings of those upon whom history has bestowed the title of Greatness, but Tom Hooper's epic miniseries John Adams bucks genre expectations by refusing to keep us at arm's length with a standardized character archetypally flawed, deigning to present us instead with an actual human being. Certainly it forges an entry point in dismissing the sense of harmonious unity we usually attribute to those early American leaders: marvel as the opinion Adams (Paul Giamatti, a delightfully bitter pill) holds of stoic, wooden George Washington (David Morse) sours from respect to resentment; smirk as he barely hides his contempt for the hedonistic Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) and his platitudinous adages; shock as he is too late in realizing the treachery orchestrated by that prick Alexander Hamilton (Rufus Sewell). But it's not enough to tear down romantic icons by having General Washington--who looks as if he's leapt out of a Stuart painting--crack one of his false teeth at breakfast. "Bed, both'a ya!" Adams shouts at his children shortly after witnessing the bloody aftermath of the Boston Massacre, and suddenly the shroud of tall tales collapses in a single powerful blast from a man who may represent the antithesis of any preconceived notions we have about the era of powdered wigs and stockings.

Head of State (2003)

½*/****
starring Chris Rock, Bernie Mac, Tamala Jones, Lynn Whitfield
screenplay by Chris Rock & Ali LeRoi
directed by Chris Rock

by Walter Chaw Chris Rock's directorial debut Head of State is a little like Weird Al Yankovic's UHF or Dana Carvey's Opportunity Knocks: a vehicle meant to showcase a sketch comedian's strengths but functioning more as an exposé on said comedian's weaknesses. It vacillates between a potentially interesting central plot and a couple of misogynistic and boring subplots, managing by the end to come off as shrill, cynical, and disjointed as well as overly cutesy and infatuated with its own cult of bling. Its one saving grace is that it seems to occasionally know what a satire is, conceiving of a "white folks can't dance" sequence that actually scores a couple of points in letting the poor Man dance well instead of mockingly (see Bringing Down the House), and in the identification of "God Bless America" as the hypocritical exclusionary bullshit that it is.

Mays Gilliam (Rock) is an alderman picked to run for president when the frontrunners in his party (we presume Democrat, we can't be sure) are killed in a plane crash. The right candidate at the right time (he can't win, he looks good for the party in trying), Gilliam bucks his spin doctors to be true to his own self and, in the process, wins the adoration of both sides of the aisle. Like another excrescent Carvey vehicle, Master of Disguise, Gilliam's running mate and big brother Mitch (Bernie Mac) ends most of his scenes by slapping someone in the face. As comic devices go, it falls somewhere between old white people speaking ghetto jargon and Robin Givens as a psychopathic ex-girlfriend who's constantly being tackled by security or running into parked cars.

Despite the whiff of entitlement inherent in any premise wherein outrage is the equal to competency (the old guard white media is made sport of for caring whether the vice presidential candidate knows anything about NATO), Head of State is less racist than puerile, repetitive, and tiresome. It falls in line with Rock's penchant for Prince and Pauper stories rewritten along race and class distinctions (Down to Earth, Bad Company)--urban fairy tales that aren't satirical jabs at white culture so much as slapstick fantasies with racial elements. Rock the director tends toward a sort of irreverent jumble that demonstrates too much faith in Rock the actor's ability to carry romantic scenes (the token love interest played by Tamala Jones) and too little faith in Rock the writer's gift for social commentary.

In toning it down for a PG-13 rating, Head of State attacks politicians, whites, and the media, leaving only lawyers off the list of easy targets that are beneath gifted comedians. Like Richard Pryor before him, Rock has proven himself a smart social observer as a stand-up comedian and, also like Pryor, Rock has demonstrated absolutely no potential for translating that acerbic genius for film. Blunted and neutered, Rock in Head of State is the very definition of nondescript: uncertain about what this film is about and unclear as to how to get to wherever it's going. It's not sure how to walk the line between insulting and moronic and settles for being a little of both--the big presidential debate (scored, like the rest of the film, in a schizophrenic slurry of hip-hop and Monday Night Football) highlights the confusion with its dense visual jokiness and rabble-rousing broadsides.

Urging parents to "knock your children out, it's good for them" is something that was funny when Pryor was saying it in the Seventies, less so when Murphy was repeating it in the Eighties, and less so again when Sinbad dredged it up in the Nineties. Head of State is at least the fourth generation of the same old shtick--its alleged shock has worn off with its relevancy (and why a bit about child-rearing in a political satire?). Rather than raising eyebrows, Head of State is just a sickly version of Bulworth (another film written/directed/produced by/and starring its lead), a movie that wasn't much in the final analysis but at least had the anger and edge to draw a little blood. Originally published: March 28, 2003.

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Focus (2015)

Lions for Lambs (2007)

½*/****
starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Derek Luke
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan
directed by Robert Redford

by Walter Chaw Stilted, awkward, an Ayn Rand screed complete with straw men and pontiffs poised to burn them down, Robert Redford's smug, self-satisfied liberal weltschmerz anthem Lions for Lambs is tailor-made for festival-season standing ovations. It's the prime example of why a lot of Republicans get away with calling Hollywood--the single highest concentration of Big Business and corporate interest outside the Beltway--a lefty hotbed of pinko nonsense carried on a cloud of flatulent hot air. It's a prime example, too, of why it's so hard to vote for Democrats even when the alternative is the GOP. Put this one on the shelf between Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe and this year's deplorable Rendition--movies so earnest in their chest-pounding pontification that it's impossible to imagine on the one hand who could be converted by them and on the other who could resist changing their party affiliation out of sheer embarrassment. In this one, the call is for activism in whatever form said activism might take just for the sake of doing something, damnit. To quote a guy writing in the 1920s, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Fair Game (2010) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound C Commentary C
starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, David Andrews, Sam Shepard
screenplay by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth, based on the books The Politics of Truth by Joe Wilson and Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson
directed by Doug Liman

by Walter Chaw I remember distinctly somewhere in year two of W.'s administration the feeling of extreme "outrage fatigue"--that burnout that occurs when you've spent so much time incredulous that you realize you're the idiot for expecting something different. Subsequently, I recall being the only one in my circle of friends to predict W.'s re-election, as well as the only one not surprised when we didn't find any WMDs. It's not that I'm particularly smart, it's that I'm dick enough to be right half the time. Why fight it? Bad movies tend to win the weekly box office, bad music dominates the charts, bad TV gets renewed; rather than declare it a new phenomenon, take cold comfort in knowing that it was always this way and it's not necessarily worse now. Sophocles wasn't selling out the Coliseum, after all. So if Fair Game, Doug Liman's adaptation of Valerie Plame's memoir of her betrayal by the Bush Administration for the sins of her big-mouthed, self-righteous husband Joe Wilson, doesn't have shock and outrage going for it, it at least has the smarts to portray Joe as a deeply ambiguous figure. He's a jackass, but he's right, and Sean Penn's portrayal of him is uncompromised, unflattering, and completely in keeping with stuff like his Into the Wild and The Assassination of Richard Nixon: liberal shots that don't offend the conversation.

Invictus (2009) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Tony Kgoroge, Patrick Mofokeng
screenplay by Anthony Peckham, based on the book Playing the Enemy by John Carlin
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw During an awards season seemingly devoted to surveying the racial divide, Clint Eastwood's Invictus lands a glancing blow as a Reconciliation sports melodrama that avoids the hysterical outburst even as it fails to hit one out of the park. Of the two, I think I'd rather the former. Expecting a (more) self-important Hoosiers, I was pleasantly surprised by Eastwood's leisurely, cocksure, tempered-by-age stroll through the first days post-Apartheid as Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, finally playing Abraham Lincoln) is tasked with the near-impossible job of suturing a nation coming out from under a long Plantation nightmare without his administration becoming exactly what the minority Afrikaner fears. It locates sports as one quick avenue to the heart of the lowest common denominator (just as the existence of Invictus locates film as another), and it fires dual salvos at its audience by first being a sports underdog uplift flick without much sports or uplift, then in not deigning to explain the fundamentals of rugby to its American audience, instead launching a quick jab at America's reluctance to engage the worlds' pastimes (rugby and soccer, notably). What it really does for the race conversation is allow Eastwood the opportunity to at last feature Freeman in a movie designed around him as opposed to having him--as he did in Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven--function as a comparative component against which the white protagonist is memorialized and measured. Better late than never.

The Rambo DVD Trilogy [Special Edition] - DVD

FIRST BLOOD (1981)
**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill McKinney
screenplay by Michael Kozoll & William Sackheim and Sylvester Stallone, based on the novel by David Morrell
directed by Ted Kotcheff

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985)
*½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Charles Napier, Steven Berkoff
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
directed by George P. Cosmatos

RAMBO III (1988)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Marc de Jonge, Kurtwood Smith
screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Sheldon Lettich
directed by Peter MacDonald

by Bill Chambers Ted Kotcheff's melancholy First Blood opens with Vietnam vet John Rambo looking up a fellow soldier and discovering that the man has died. Sullen, he hits the road, only to be harassed by the town sheriff (Brian Dennehy), who sees long-haired drifters wearing surplus jackets and thinks: Troublemaker. Possessed of a disposition similar to that of Bill Bixby's David Banner, Rambo 'Hulks out' after being stripped of his dignity in the bowels of the police station, escaping his jailers' clutches and squealing off into a mountainous region of the Pacific Northwest on a stolen motorcycle. His mission is one of self-preservation; Rambo doesn't start committing premeditated murder until the sequel. (Unlike in the David Morrell source novel, where Rambo is a veritable serial killer, however justified his rage.)

Hot Docs '13: Fuck for Forest

***½/****
directed by Michael Marczak

by Angelo Muredda "Don't you think we're already fucked anyway?" a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest, Michael Marczak's gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn collective-cum-NGO. It's a decent question, but you don't get the sense that the sweet young Berliners to whom it's directed have much of a clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide for the group's journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals who want to preserve the Amazon.

Hot Docs '13: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer

**½/****
directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin

by Angelo Muredda Civil disobedience is about as uncinematic as political protests get, so credit Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin for making Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer a more or less compelling paean to the troupe's fortitude against Russian orthodoxy. The film chronicles the ongoing legal battle that ensued from the feminist collective's 15-second guerrilla performance of a song called "God Shit" at the altar of St. Christ Church in Moscow. The impromptu number, captured in fuzzy cellphone video that's the most stirring footage in the movie by a mile, got masked performers Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Mariya Alyokhina a 3-year sentence at a penal colony for simultaneously dumping on the Orthodox Church and Putin. That such a minor demonstration could inspire such a heavy-handed state response is just one of the hooks the filmmakers exploit to strong effect in their look at how deeply religious values are embedded in Putin's Russia, which turns relatively minor acts of punk rebellion into the most vital expressions of political dissent.

State of Play (2009)

*½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray, based on the BBC television series created by Paul Abbott
directed by Kevin Macdonald

by Ian Pugh If it were smart, Kevin Macdonald's State of Play would stick to lamenting the ignominious death of newsprint at the hands of Internet sensationalism and all that that implies. As a veteran reporter and a U.S. Congressman--college roommates once known as rabblerousing muckrakers in their respective fields--turn to each other when their worlds collapse, you'd think that maybe the film had in mind a meditation on the dissolution of the Old Boys' clubs. Done in by our demystifying familiarity with the subjects under scrutiny (cops and politicians) and an unwillingness to inject new blood into their veins, right? Hell, even Watergate is brought up as an incidental location, as Macdonald sends a sweeping camera across the notorious hotel. You can't tell me there isn't something to be said here about how a reliance on outmoded tactics and an obsession with decades-old victories has only sped up their obsolescence.

"Zero Dark Thirty": The Ashes Of American Flags

by Jefferson Robbins Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is politically abhorrent, an ideologue's digest of how torture "works" on behalf of democratic governments seeking to defend from or avenge themselves upon terrorism. There's no debate: by means of torture, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) digs her way from Osama bin Laden's outer network to his inner circle, one, two, three. As journalist Malcolm Harris put it, "That Kathryn Bigelow used to be involved in left aesthetics should make us shiver in fear about who we may yet become." But subtly, in the way Bigelow presents her lead character's view of the battlefield and the flag under which she strives, Zero Dark Thirty betrays mixed feelings about its own ramifications.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C
starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Ehle, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Mark Boal
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

click any image to enlarge

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who tweeted that critics lauding the film "need to admit that they're admiring a morally indefensible movie." With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film writers who've taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's treatment of the CIA's decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis's tasteless tweets about Bigelow's appearance a few weeks back make his word suspect, it's harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty's representation of torture from the likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for himself and insisted that the viewing only confirmed his initial impressions: "[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing of bin Laden is - by definition - to glorify X," he observed, where X meant torture; woe to the "huge numbers of American viewers" about to be "led" down the filmmakers' dim alleyways.

No Man's Land (2001)

**½/****
starring Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Filip Sovagovic, Georges Siatidis
written and directed by Danis Tanovic

by Walter Chaw Chiki (Branko Djuric) is one of two surviving members of a front-line relief party that was decimated after their guide got them lost in a fog. (From the first, the visual metaphors fly as thick as pea soup.) His companion Cera (Filip Sovagovic), thought dead by the enemy, has been placed on a pressure-sensitive mine; his antagonist, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), has been disarmed and wounded. The three of them (four if you consider the mine a character) decry their causes while overlooking their similarities. No Man's Land is at its best when it tantalizes with the possibility for resolution--and at its worst when it explodes the claustrophobia of its first hour to include the UN, the press, and a newsreel montage lending background to a conflict the movie's only ostensibly about in the first place.