by Walter Chaw
Things to do in Telluride:
by Walter Chaw The road home is always shorter, so I find an excuse to stop on the way.
by Walter Chaw
Dirt */**** (d. Darius Clark Monroe) One of those time-loop conceits that opens with a guy burying a body and ends with...no, not telling. Dirt has an issue with editing and looping, the fallout being that image overlaps noise, confusing function. It's possible to do this meaningfully; it's also possible to junk it up so completely that every transition begins with unnecessary obfuscation. That's what's happened here. Dirt isn't promising, but it is brief.
**½/****
directed by Errol Morris
by Walter Chaw Towards the end of Errol Morris's fitfully-fascinating portrait of legendary large-format Polaroid photographer Elsa Dorfman, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography, Dorfman, looking at one of the dozens of snapshots she's taken of the late Alan Ginsberg, says that maybe the true life of a photo isn't revealed until the subject has died. It's the emotional fulcrum of this brief piece, as the now-79-year-old Dorfman looks back on a lifetime of pictures taken while she went from being a single "New York Jew" without direction to a hob-nobber among the Greenwich Village crowd. Ensconced at Morris's bequest in her studio's backroom, she's dwarfed by a cluttered drafting table on the one side and rows and stacks of archived portraits on the other. As she opens each cabinet, Morris captures the delight and surprise of her rediscovering the "discards" of her customers (they pick one to keep; the other she dubs "the B-side" and ferrets away), reading the detailed captions she's left on them.
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½*/****
starring Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Garner, Jason O'Mara, Beverly D'Angelo
screenplay by Robin Swicord, based on the story by E.L. Doctorow
directed by Robin Swicord
by Walter Chaw Angry businessman Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) tunes in and drops out when, after chasing a raccoon into the unused attic of his garage, he decides to live there for a few months, spying on his wife Diana (Jennifer Garner) and their twin "budding adolescent" girls (as E.L. Doctorow, author of the story upon which this is based, calls them). There's a 1990 Jan Egleson film called A Shock to the System that sees a Howard Wakefield type played by Michael Caine mordantly, hilariously deciding to take control of his life through a series of carefully-planned murders. Robin Swicord's Wakefield aspires to be an updating of this but is hampered by the fact of Robin Swicord. Take the moment where Howard watches his long-suffering spouse dump his dinner on top of a bag of garbage in their driveway. Cut to the next day, with Howard opening the lid and looking down at it. Flashback to Diana dumping the dinner on top of a bag of garbage in their driveway. Yes, Swicord is so literal-minded and inept that she has offered gaffed viewers a flashback to a scene that just happened.
****/****
starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan
by Walter Chaw Kenneth Lonergan is a brilliant writer who specializes in small interpersonal moments. His plays are extraordinary. The two previous films he directed, You Can Count on Me and Margaret, are masterful portraits of human failure and weakness. He is a poet of imperfection and imperfect resolution. Margaret gained attention for the lengths to which Lonergan fought for a cut that exceeded a contracted-upon two-and-a-half-hour running time. Martin Scorsese, with whom Lonergan collaborated on the script for Gangs of New York, helped facilitate a 165-minute cut that to my knowledge has never been screened. When Margaret finally hit home video after a swell of support from online advocates, the long version had inflated to 186 minutes. I've only seen the theatrical and extended cuts of the film. I love them both. I rarely wish movies were longer; Lonergan's are the exception. That has something to do with his writing, of course, and something to do with his casts, who, to a one, have contributed extraordinary work--perhaps the best work of their careers. Crucially, Lonergan trusts them to deliver his words. He doesn't garnish them with gaudy camera angles, or underscore them with expository soundtrack cues. Mark Ruffalo once said of Lonergan, affectionately, that the playwright was only playing at being humble. For me, however Lonergan is with other people, his humility comes through in the extent to which he allows his actors to do their job.
**/****
directed by Werner Herzog
by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes of Werner Herzog's 104-minute Into the Inferno is recycled footage from his own Encounters at the End of the World. Another 20 is a strange diversion into the discovery of a hominid skeleton in Africa featuring a particularly excitable paleoanthropologist. This leaves roughly an hour for the cultural/anthropological examination of cults sprung up around active volcanoes the movie promises, and at least a portion of that is devoted to the amazing footage captured by the late Katia and Maurice Krafft, who, like Kilgore on the beach, never thought they could be killed by the fire. They were. It's the kind of gallows revelation that is the purview of Herzog's mordant documentaries. He is at least as good at this as he is at his more traditional fictions. But Into the Inferno seems tossed-off and unfocused, and not even a partnership with affable British vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer can help Herzog ground this material. A previous incarnation of the filmmaker would find him stealthily building a profile of a man who spends his life staring into magma pools, perched at the edge of pyroclasmic calamity. This Herzog interviews a few chiefs of island cultures, the most fascinating of whom has decided that an American airman lives in the lava and will one day emerge to shower the villagers with a bounty of consumer goods.
**/****
starring Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed, Tara Fitzgerald
screenplay by David Harrower, based on his play "Blackbird"
directed by Benedict Andrews
by Walter Chaw Theatre director Benedict Andrews makes his feature-film debut with the best Patrick Marber stage adaptation that isn't from a Patrick Marber play, Una. (The play is actually David Harrower's "Blackbird", adapted for the screen by Harrower.) It's kind of a low bar, let's be honest. Una is about Una, who, as a 13-year-old child, is raped by Ray. But young Una (Ruby Stokes) thinks that she loves Ray (Ben Mendelsohn), and Ray, a sick fuck, is sure that he loves Una. This is Lolita told from the point-of-view of Controversial Playwright: Harrower stirs the shit and Andrews does his best to expand what's probably a one-room drama into a warren of warehouse offices, an apartment, a dinner party, and lots of flashbacks. The strategy appears to be a lot of walking around and then stopping to exchange twenty pages of gravid dialogue. The best things about Una (and they're fantastic) are Rooney Mara, who plays the title character as an adult, and Mendelsohn. Mara is growing on me, and if Mendelsohn has ever given a bad performance, I can't remember it. These two have a genuine fission in their interplay that makes it all feel dangerous. When Ray turns tender at the end, smoothing 28-year-old Una's hair and telling her she was the only 13-year-old he's ever been attracted to, there's a beat--maybe two--before you hear what he's saying.
****/****
starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang
directed by Denis Villeneuve
by Walter Chaw Based on a humdinger of a Ted Chiang short story called "Story of Your Life," Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, while changing a detail here and there, distils the emotionality of the story, honours the science of it, and goes places the premise naturally indicates that it might. It clarifies without simplifying. It posits as its hero Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams, who has never been better), a brilliant linguistics professor enlisted by the military to try to communicate with the things in the giant spacecraft that have appeared in twelve different locations around the planet. Not all of them, mind--just the ones in Montana. The others are their problem. Arrival suggests that the first complication of this story of our lives is that there are pronouns other than "us" in matters of international import. It reminds of The Abyss in its tale of an alien arrival that requires human cooperation, but whose purpose doesn't appear to be to coerce a response through a show of force. They just hang there, waiting for us to learn their language. That's an important point. It's something to think about.
*/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Finn Wittrock, J.K. Simmons
written and directed by Damien Chazelle
by Walter Chaw Damien Chazelle's La La Land is sort of like Down with Love and also sort of like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, derivative in the way that things are derivative when they have no real knowledge of or even maybe affection for the things from which they ostensibly derive. At the least, the picture demonstrates no real knowledge of the Hollywood musical. It's homage in the same way that "Stranger Things" is homage. It's beard oil, suspenders, and craft beer: The Movie. It's homage the way that putting a tutu on a dog pays homage to ballet. When something is this familiar, its set-pieces need to be extraordinary. Howard Hawks understood this. Vincente Minnelli, of course. Stanley Donen? Stop yourself. Yes. When Chazelle does the two or three blow-out sequences meant to dazzle, all they do is seem psychotic. The best thing about his Whiplash is arguably its editing. (It won the Oscar.) Now imagine Brigadoon cut like that. Consider the scene in La La Land that ends in a swimming pool, camera spinning deliriously around in a circle like something drowning or getting death-rolled by an alligator. It's intended to be ebullient; it feels panicky and hallucinogenic. It feels like that scene in Seconds where Rock Hudson joins a bacchanal in a grape-stomping vat. Seconds wasn't a good musical, either.
***/****
starring Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Mahershala Ali
screenplay by Barry Jenkins
directed by Barry Jenkins
by Walter Chaw Barry Jenkins's sophomore feature is lovely. It deals with ideas of masculinity and black culture with sensitivity and a dedicated Romanticism. It's buoyed by a trio of remarkable performers--all playing the same character, Chiron, at three different stages of his life: troubled child, troubled teen, and troubled adult. They share mannerisms. They have the same vulnerable quiver to their lip. I don't know how Jenkins and his team put that together, but there it is and it's among the most affecting things I've seen in a film. It's overwhelming. Visually, Moonlight reminds me a lot of David Gordon Green's similarly lyrical George Washington. It captures a certain reflective poetry in the poverty and privation it depicts. There's a moment in the second section, "ii. Chiron," that finds the teen incarnation (Ashton Sanders), all elbows and gawkiness, alone on a beach with his only friend, Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), looking up at the stars and discovering for a second who it is that he really is. Jenkins demonstrates patience with medium shots. He frames the boys against the water before them and the city behind them like Eliot's hero, in liminal spaces, experiencing catastrophic change.
by Walter Chaw Telluride rests in a valley on the Western side of Colorado. It sits at 8,750 feet. You have to cross Monarch Pass (elevation approximately 12,000 feet) to get there from where I live, a six-and-a-half hour drive away. If you're doing it right, you walk everywhere in Telluride, taking the free gondola service over the longer stretches up and down the mountain, and feeling the sharp constriction in your chest when your body, even one acclimated to a mile above sea level, discovers there's noticeably less oxygen to breathe at such great heights. I wonder if mild hypoxia has something to do with my euphoria while I'm here. I am the best version of myself at the Telluride Film Festival, even as the festival itself continues to subtly decline by inevitably becoming more beholden to middlebrow interests and tastes at the same pace it now sells out the highest level of ticket package they make available. Not the ones you can buy off the website, the ones you secure through $100,000 donations.
by Walter Chaw On my way back down on US 50 to 285 to C470 and I70 and home, I pulled off at someplace carved into the side of a mountain, a lagoon fortified all around with rock and shattered wood and sand. I let out a breath and wondered how long I'd held it. I listened to the lap of water and the air and the spaces inside my head. I took my shoes off. I waded a little way in and schools of fry shoaled away from my feet in black clouds. The water? Frigid. Snow run-off. I could see the white of it, dotting the peaks around me, even now in early September where, still five hours away, it was over 90° in the shade--the last gasps of Colorado's brutal Indian summer.
Hrútar
***½/****
starring Sigurður Sigurjónsson, Theodór Júlíusson, Charlotte Bøving, Gunnar Jónsson
written and directed by Grímur Hákonarson
by Walter Chaw There's a little of Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjuat in Grimur Hákonarson's Rams. Something of the formal beauty of La cinquième saison and the deadpan absurdity of Aki Kaurismaki's films as well. It is a story of brothers in conflict. More-functional recluse Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and less-functional recluse Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) are both hidden away in remote cabins in Iceland, tending to herds of sheep bred from a legendary stag whose lovingly-taxidermied head decorates Gummi's hovel's entryway. The picture opens in tension at a sheepherder's competition, where the prize stock is prodded and judged. And it ends in tension, as the two brothers, who haven't spoken in 40 years, must deal with the loss of everything while, just outside, an allegorical--but literal--storm obliterates the petty concerns of mortal men.
**½/****
starring Idris Elba, Richard Pepple, Ama Abebrese, Abraham Attah
screenplay by Cary Fukunaga, based on the novel by Uzodinma Iweala
directed by Cary Fukunaga
by Walter Chaw A couple of days removed and I'm still not able to shake the scene where child soldier Agu (the amazing Abraham Attah) thinks he's been reunited with his mother, finds out he's mistaken, and metes out mercy/justice/betrayal in a sequence of events that ends with him standing on a box to peer out a window. He's a child. One of many in a roving platoon of fighters led by red-eyed Commandant (Idris Elba) through a nameless African country, wreaking havoc in a nameless conflict. Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of Nigerian-born Uzondinma Iweala's debut novel is less politics than survey history of the transcendental war film. It's more wise about how something like this should look, in other words, than how it should feel, and the epiphany one has while watching it isn't that this kind of thing happens in the world all the time, across centuries and continents, but that Beasts of No Nation looks a lot like Come and See before it looks a lot like The Thin Red Line before, finally, it looks a lot like Apocalypse Now. Since we're comparing things, Kim Nguyen's War Witch (Rebelle) is the more powerful child-soldier film--mainly because it's about something other than the abomination of using children in war. Children in war as an abomination isn't a controversial stand. If that's all you have to say, well, it's not like I'm not listening, but I'm not impressed.
****/****
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Duke Johnson & Charlie Kaufman
by Walter Chaw Writing about a Charlie Kaufman film, if you do it honestly, is writing about yourself. I've said before and it helps me to repeat it that I don't really understand Kaufman's films but that they do understand me. Kaufman is the most important, innovative voice in American cinema since Orson Welles, and though he has enjoyed more autonomy in expressing that voice than Welles, I would argue that the seven years separating his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, and this follow-up, a stop-motion collaboration with Duke Johnson called Anomalisa, suggest that it's not as easy as it should be. Certainly the journey that Anomalisa has taken is far from conventional, from Kaufman play written under the pseudonym "Francis Fregosi," through a Kickstarter campaign, through the general challenge of making an adult-themed animation in a country that sees animation as a genre not a medium, to now this tour of festivals, looking for distribution. The play was introduced as part of a Carter Burwell project titled "Theater of the New Ear". It was a late replacement on a Kaufman/Coen Bros. double-bill when the Coens "dropped out" at the eleventh hour, and this unknown Fregosi's piece took its place.
***/****
starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy
directed by Tom McCarthy
by Walter Chaw Michael Keaton's a handsome guy. Not movie-star handsome in the traditional sense but, you know, not a dog. Everyday-guy handsome. Like Gene Hackman or Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. I think fans responded the way they did when Keaton was cast in Tim Burton's Batman (i.e., violently) because Keaton doesn't look like a superhero. He has an attractively average physique. His chin is soft and that's the bit you see under the mask. But then he puts on the suit and plays the role and you understand that Keaton is who he is for the chaos of his energy. Burton used him as muse before turning to Johnny Depp, I think, because of the mania of his persona. There is no other actor the equal of Beetlejuice. He replaced Pee-Wee Herman in Burton's progression through men-children. He's doomed to eternally be smarter than the characters he plays, and more interesting. He's the boy version of Illeana Douglas. Keaton in motion is a thing of wonder and danger. He's a perfect Batman because Batman's story arc inevitably leads to the place where he's seen as the Superego to Joker's Id--as the opposite side of the same Arkham coin. Keaton is Grant Morrison's Batman. He is the average-looking Warren Beatty. If he were making movies in the '70s, he would be Robert De Niro. There aren't a lot of movie stars I like better than Michael Keaton. He is the embodiment of aspiration and stick-to-it-iveness.
*/****
starring Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy
screenplay by Emma Donoghue, based on her novel
directed by Lenny Abrahamson
by Walter Chaw If you've read the book, you'll probably like the movie. If you haven't, like me, you'll have some questions. Lenny Abrahamson's Room is about how a child's "plasticity" allows him to better recover from extreme psychological trauma. It's about how the adults in said child's life can aid in the process of recovery by hiding things from him and also letting him know that the reason the adults are better is because the child is a hero, and strong, and an appropriate catalyst for healing. That the adults' mental health is, in fact, the child's responsibility. I'm told the book is not exactly about those things, but then again, it's not exactly not about those things. Many watching the film find in it a redemptive story about a mother's relationship with her child. I find in it a seriously deranged, idealized fantasy in which an adorable little kid is given the weight of the world to carry and does so with no real ramifications for himself. I'd like to see a sequel to this film in which the little kid, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), reveals that he's been keeping roadkill in jars in the storm shelter he's moved into as a surrogate for his lost "room." I think that's the honest version of Room. You can leave comments at the bottom of this review that I will not read.
**½/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler
screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
directed by Todd Haynes
by Walter Chaw Todd Haynes movies tend to grow on me. I expect that Carol, his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, will do the same. First pass, though, finds me considering a film adapted by a filmmaker I like from an author I adore as fully twenty minutes too long with enough fake-out climaxes and epilogues that you can almost see the air hissing out of it. Maybe it has something to do with the relative straight-forwardness of Haynes's approach here. Gone are the Sirk shrines that indicate his best work as a modern evocation of the great German expat's lush Technicolor tragedies; Carol doesn't pack the same kind of punch, because it doesn't allow us to access it as allegory. A couple of longing, lingering moments shot through snow-wet car windows and in Edward Hopper-framed hotel rooms (it's Haynes's most Wenders work), as well as a final shot that is the picture at its most evocative and unapologetically Romantic, point to the film that might have been. It could have been a more hypnotic exercise. It could have found a certain lulling rhythm in its longueurs. In Carol, the high stylization of Haynes is evoked mainly in the carefully-affected stiffness of the performances. Highsmith's prose is a delight but, freed of the awful gestalt of its pulsing drive, it proves a tall order for the cast asked to speak it.
*½/****
starring Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth
directed by Scott Cooper
by Walter Chaw I liked Scott Cooper's Out of the Furnace well enough. It's miserabilist poverty porn, but it features an impressive cast doing ugly work, and I was fine with its stock pleasures as a deep genre exercise in the Next of Kin/hillbillysploitation mold. I like Black Mass considerably less. It's a cartoon with a cartoon performance by Joel Edgerton, cartoon makeup for Johnny Depp, and cartoon accents from everyone else, including a miscast Benedict Cumberbatch, tasked with sounding South Boston rather than South London c. 1882. There's a scene early on when the respectable senator played by Cumberbatch, Billy, is at home for the holidays with older brother and star of this show, Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger (Depp), that plays exactly like an outtake from Johnny Dangerously--card-cheatin', tough-talkin' Irish ma and all. It's funny. Unintentionally so, I'd wager, but in any case funny in a cruel way. Edgerton's big, showy, Townie turn as former boy from the old neighbourhood (I should say "NAY -buh--hud") turned FBI agent Johnny is also funny--for the wig, yes, but for the outrageous overacting, too. It's the first time since maybe What's Eating Gilbert Grape? that Johnny Depp has been out-hammed by someone, so at least there's that.
½*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Abi Morgan
directed by Sarah Gavron
by Walter Chaw Focus on two scenes. The first, the pivotal moment where evil police inspector Steed (Brendon Gleeson) begs his superintendent for mercy for the brave ladies arrested while violently protesting their lack of the vote. The second, a reflective moment in which audience surrogate Maud (Carrie Mulligan), a fictionalized composite character like Charlie Sheen's in Platoon, reads a poignant book by poignant candlelight. (Seriously, she looks like a Hallmark commercial--it's really awesome.) Steed delivers his spittle-flecked, earnest-member-of-the-ruling-majority-finding-humanity-in-the-struggle-of-the-martyred-heroes speech, whereupon director Sarah Gavron, following up Brick Lane and Village at the End of the World with another IMPORTANT film, shoots a standard long shot down the middle of a stairwell. It doesn't aid the scene. It doesn't even make much sense in the context of the scene. There's no reason to establish their place in that space; there's nothing to be said about the symbolism, as both inspector and superintendent appear to be on a middle-floor level. In fact you can barely see them. It's just a pretty shot. A pretty standard shot. It shows up in a lot of student films and student-photographer portfolios. And when Maud reads a book given her by one of the real leaders of England's suffrage movement by flickering flame in an abandoned church? It's pretty thick, isn't it? Here's the clincher: the way she's sitting and holding the book, the candle is casting no illumination on the pages--but lights her up just perfectly, like a little golden angel. This is exploitation, isn't it?
***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Tom Courtenay
written and directed by Andrew Haigh
by Walter Chaw Andrew Haigh's 45 Years turns on a fifty-year-old mystery that resurfaces in the week before the 45th wedding anniversary of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), causing the couple to reassess what they know of each other and their place in their relationship. It's a slow unravelling, and Haigh trusts his cast to a laudable extent. In the film's best, most visually interesting moment, he has Kate look at slides projected against a sheet in the extreme foreground. Kate herself, visible to the left of the sheet, is crammed into the eave beneath a slanted attic ceiling. Her interpretation of what she's seeing dawns on her face--creeps across it like shadows pulling back across the course of a day. It's an extraordinary moment in a film full of them. Look, too, to the scene immediately following when Kate picks Geoff up from some afternoon event, and how she holds the steering wheel while he rails on about exactly everything that isn't important. The very definition of an actor's workshop and a character drama, 45 Years attacks the idea that things get easier as you get older. Geoff's toast at their anniversary party speaks to how when one gets older life provides fewer big decisions, so all one's left with is regret at the big decisions already made. In many ways, the film is about that sort of nostalgia. In many others, it's as bitter as Make Way for Tomorrow. Imagine that film, or Tokyo Story, without children.
***/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels
screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by Walter Isaacson
directed by Danny Boyle
by Walter Chaw With Aaron Sorkin dialled to "11" on the Sorkin meter and Danny Boyle doing his best impersonation of Oliver Stone circa 1994, hotly-anticipated Steve Jobs biopic Steve Jobs features an Oscar-winning (in a year without a slavery or Holocaust picture, just mail it to him) performance by Michael Fassbender in the title role of a dysfunctional Sorkin genius figure, surrounded by the Sorkin retinue of brilliant but subordinated women and various omega males. The dialogue is alive, of course, that much to be expected, but in an attempt to capture Jobs's fragmented, hyperkinetic, probably-somewhere-on-the-autism-scale psyche, neither Boyle nor Sorkin demonstrate much in the way of restraint nor, really, much idea of what story it is that they want to tell. Some would push this scattered approach as a virtue. I see it as a good try at winnowing down a massive amount of source material into a broadly-entertaining, brisk awards-season biopic.
by Walter Chaw About three hours into the six-hour drive to Telluride, I feel something unknot. It's somewhere between my shoulder blades. My head clears. I find myself stopping more this year than I have in years past. I pull off onto more scenic overlooks. I push my teeth into the journey.
****/****
starring Jack O'Connell, Paul Anderson, Richard Dormer, Sean Harris
screenplay by Gregory Burke
directed by Yann Demange
by Walter Chaw I'm old and stupid enough to have contextualized the "Troubles," the armed conflict in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants, the IRA and the Brits, into a few U2 songs and that Paul Greengrass movie named after the same incident as...um, that one U2 song. I believed it was a tense period marked by a few unpleasant incidents. Yann Demange's debut feature '71 has shown me exactly how ignorant I've been of recent history, with a film he himself describes as an excoriation of our propensity, across nations and time, for sending our young men off to fight "dirty" wars. It's absolutely harrowing, and it provides no respite to its tension. The best type of history, it's alive and vital, thought-provoking and utterly, dispiritingly familiar. It reminded me a lot of Gallipoli; and as with Gallipoli, I feel like '71 will be the moment a young actor (Jack O'Connell this time) becomes a star. It's brilliantly shot, smart, and brutal. I went in it not knowing a thing about the film or what it portrayed and left a true believer.
Toutes des connes **/**** (France, 6 mins., d. François Jaros) Recently redubbed Life's a Bitch, Toutes des connes is a fitfully-engaging relationship dramedy composed of a few dozen ultra-shorts featuring a guy (scriptor Guillaume Lambert) who breaks up with his girlfriend, goes through stages of grief and acceptance, then gets back together with the girl. It's well-done for what it is but feels like it needed half the time to be what it is. Toutes des connes doesn't do anything surprising or innovative, announcing itself conspicuously as a calling-card film for director Jaros. Yes, I see that you can shoot and edit, though the grieving dude with the shaving-creamed face staring at the mirror thing was funnier in Raising Arizona.
*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Haluk Bilginer, Shoreh Aghdashloo
screenplay by Jon Stewart, based on the book Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari
directed by Jon Stewart
by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart's hyphenate debut Rosewater, based on briefly-imprisoned Iranian-born Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari's memoir Then They Came For Me, is painfully earnest, suffering from the first-timer disease of being both unimaginatively-shot and laboriously About Something. It's a message movie, and there's no crime in that, but it's laid out so carefully that any sense of tension--or drama, really--is sapped out of it, simplifying its message to the point of inconsequence and, eventually, making the picture vulnerable to mockery. Rosewater is one of those movies that makes you cringe because although you believe in its politics, it isn't helping the cause. Consider the moment where one of Bahari's jailers cracks wise about Abu Ghraib because America, see, is just as bad as Iran, maybe in many ways: I was distracted by the moist sound of 1,200 eyes rolling at the same time. It also doesn't help that this issue film casts Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as Iranian-Canadian Bahari. This "best actor for the role" nonsense has to have a limit, lest Daniel Day-Lewis one day play Martin Luther King; this Christmas, Leonardo DiCaprio is Buddha. Chill out, we're post-racial, brah! Rosewater is the kind of shit that gives liberals a bad name, and for as much as I like and often admire "The Daily Show", it's very much the movie the host of "The Daily Show" would make.
Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one-thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she's too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It's Petula Clark's French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon's "Needles and Pins," "La Nuit N'en Finit Plus." Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she's so natural in this moment--in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It's stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable--a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter ("Thank you, goodbye") is identical each time. It's through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there's ever been.
***½/****
starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
directed by Bennett Miller
by Walter Chaw Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher is timely because of its excoriation of the 1%--and timeless because of the care with which it handles relationships between men, and between men and their mothers. It has faith in its audience in a way that's rare and always has been, leaving wide swaths of exposition buried in glances and gestures, making itself into something that's very much like the amateur wrestling it ably recreates in the film. It's a big movie composed of subtle movements; it's reticent. It's also grounded by unbelievable performances from Mark Ruffalo, an actor I really like who's never been better; and Channing Tatum, who reduces himself to a pure distillation of his masculinity and will probably be underestimated as a result. An early moment with Ruffalo and Tatum--playing Olympic champion wrestlers and brothers Dave and Mark Schultz, respectively--as they train in a dingy little college gym, is grim and wordless, bloody and violent, and capped by Dave cuffing his little brother and asking for a hug as he drops him off. It's brotherhood in its intimate complexity in just a few gestures.
**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear
screenplay by Graham Moore
directed by Morten Tyldum
by Walter Chaw Benedict Cumberbatch is amazing, truly, in Morten Tyldum's better version of A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game. Based on the life of logician and mathematician Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park genius who broke the Enigma code but was later pilloried for his homosexuality, the film is conventional in every way save Cumberbatch, who, frankly, had never particularly appealed to me before now. His Turing is clearly (to a guy in the middle of all this sudden awareness of Autism) somewhere on the Autism spectrum, incapable of building relationships and understanding metaphors, making him the perfect person, in his (mis)understanding of the world, to break codes. All language and every subtlety of human interaction is a puzzle for him, you see; breaking the unbreakable German Enigma cipher is simply another of the same variety. The Imitation Game, however, is crystal clear, lockstep in narrative and exposition and careful to leave no child behind as it explains how Turing and his team of irregulars managed to build the first computer and defeat the Nazi war machine by intercepting its communications. At the end, its message is the same as The Incredibles', though housed in a far more conventional motor: different is good, and you shouldn't criminalize homosexuality, because what if a gay guy is the saviour of the free world and you just chemically-castrated him and caused him to kill himself? As messages go, that's not a tough one to get behind.
**/****
starring Reese Witherspoon, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Laura Dern
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel by Cheryl Strayed
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
by Walter Chaw Wild is exactly what you think it will be and is that for what feels like forever. It's the inspirational true story of smack-addicted party girl Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), who, after reading a lot of well-known volumes of collected verse, cleans out an REI store and sets out to walk the PCT up the Western coast. And she likes Snapple. Yeah, it's a commercial about regaining white privilege after trying to give it away, complete with more rapey moments than expected. That's not fair: Cheryl doesn't so much give her privilege away as indulge in the perks of it to the point where a trio of hale, happy-go-lucky trail-bums dub her the "Queen of the PCT" for all the favours and special treatment she receives along the way. It also takes time for Cheryl to thank REI for being her most favouritist corporation ever for replacing her faulty boots, so that happened.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
*/****
starring Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
by Walter Chaw A benighted, gangly thing midway between a mid-life crisis Black Swan and the Noises Off version of Brazil, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is the lonesome yawp of a limited, one-trick-pony given now to defensiveness and self-consciousness. Assailing the tale of a washed-up former mega-star of superhero blockbusters, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton, check), who's trying to gain a measure of self-respect on Broadway in a Raymond Carver adaptation he wrote, directed, and is starring in, the picture doesn't do anything it doesn't warn us about first and then apologize for after. It covers the three preview performances leading to opening night in one, digitally-unbroken take, making room along the way for Method asshole Michael Shiner (Method asshole Edward Norton)--who steals both the play Birdman is about and the play-within-a-play conceit of the movie by stealing the movie--and tons of narrative melodramatics, including a neurotic leading lady (Naomi Watts), Riggan's burnout daughter (Emma Stone), and his stressed-out lawyer/manager (Zach Galifianakis). The whole story roils with desperation and disappointment, and the film-as-object does the same--the transparency between those two things (cine-reality and sad-truth-of-it reality) cited repeatedly in the screenplay-by-committee in exhausting, self-abnegating fashion. Birdman is an incredible bore. The closest analogue in feel is Todd Solondz's unfortunate riposte to his detractors, Storytelling, but at least that one wasn't all tarted up in attention-grabbing technical pandering. Birdman is about as clever as that Blues Traveler song: the tedious offense of idiots calling you an idiot.
by Walter Chaw You get into trouble when you expect the things you love the most in your life to be the salvation for bad choices. I was in a job last year that I hated. It paid well, and I took the money without thinking over-much that it was money for lying to people who trusted and respected me so they would continue to be productive for an organization that didn't care about them. I was good at this. To quiet the little voices that began to fray around the edges of "everything I'm supposed to do," I taught, and I wrote, and I identified myself as a writer and a critic and a teacher whenever someone asked me what I did. I came to Telluride last year at the invitation of a friend at a point where I thought of suicide a lot and couldn't figure out why exactly that was. I didn't review much anymore. I didn't want to watch movies. I didn't know what made me happy--I didn't understand why nothing made me happy. Then there was the attendant self-loathing where you realize you have it made and shouldn't you just stop complaining?
Continue reading "Telluride '14: Second Variety or: An Introduction" »
by Walter Chaw The drive home always feels faster. I didn't think it would this time, but it did.
On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride's free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola's gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that--she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I'd last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can't imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.
Continue reading "Telluride '13: FFC Interviews "Under the Skin" Director Jonathan Glazer" »
"On Death Row" Conversation with James Barnes
***/****
directed by Werner Herzog
"On Death Row" Portrait of Robert Fratta
**/****
directed by Werner Herzog
by Walter Chaw Two shot-for-television documentaries, running about 50 minutes apiece, serve as Werner Herzog's epilogue to 2011's Into the Abyss, each profiling a single inmate in the inimitable Herzog style that has evolved over the years into something that doesn't punish its subjects (as it once did) so much as it punishes the audience. Looking back to the way he shot coroner Franc G. Fallico in Grizzly Man, allowing him to twist a few beats too long, reveals that Fallico was perhaps a little too eager for the camera. That strategy--delightful then--is a bludgeon now, as the extra beats have become interminable and, I'm afraid, useless. Of the two docs screened at this year's Telluride Film Festival, the first, "Conversation with James Barnes", is the better, as Herzog gives time to one of Barnes's cousins, who declares The Exorcist to be a documentary because, among other things, anyone who twisted her head around like Linda Blair does in that movie would have died. No, it's true, the logic doesn't work. It's less Herzog finding the equivalent of his bingo-playing chicken in these inbred huckleberries than it is Herzog getting the money shot by telling the poor, dumb thing that no, he's never seen The Exorcist. It's brilliant. And it's cruel. "Portrait of Robert Fratta", on the other hand, profiles narcissistic Death Row pretty boy Fratta in a way that reveals almost nothing except what it looks like when Herzog riffs too long on the same theme. In the post-film Q&A, moderated by an obsequious Ken Burns, Herzog promised that he's done now with these Death Row interviews--it's almost like he understands that he might have picked at this one 'til it bled, and his consistent disclaimer that he wants to humanize these interview subjects because, as a German, he's seen the evil of capital punishment carried out by a monolithic State, has become brittle and, fatally, ironic.
***/****
directed by Ralph Fiennes
by Walter Chaw It opens with an almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), it has about it a delicious gravity, a weight of inevitability driven by long shots of Nelly pounding across a beach as waves crash behind, the crunch of her footfalls foretelling a coming storm. With his second feature, Fiennes establishes himself as midway between the traditionalism of Merchant/Ivory and the carnality of Kenneth Branagh--the marriage of the two styles in bright relief during a climactic train-crash sequence that, initially muted, pulls out into something wilder. Though it arguably breaks no new ground save successfully portraying Dickens as the asshat he was, credit is due for a very fine, studiously-detailed performance from Jones that allows Nelly to avoid the clichés attendant to the young mistress role. Hers is a completely rounded, imminently human journey through childhood to self-actualization, joining the growing list of strong roles for women this year despite the film seeming doomed to be shunted to the side. It deserves more than that. If short of great, The Invisible Woman is strong enough (note all the rumblings on the soundtrack, the lines warning of storms rhyming with minor apocalypses in the picture proper) to establish Fiennes as perhaps the same kind of director as he is an actor: alive somewhere between the meat and the mind.
****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer
by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer's astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber's strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it's the best film I've seen this year and among the best films I've ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it's a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour's gone by that I haven't thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.
***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne
by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It's easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.
**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón
by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón's eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity--a title that doesn't reference the Ray Bradbury story "Kaleidoscope," to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name "Stone"), or any real meat at the heart of the story. It's not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt, after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men, to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific Rim--if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with the best sound. It's possibly the first film since Avatar that actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It's an effect that no doubt had everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company running around before the show, tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice the "acceptable" volume.
**½/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano
screenplay by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northrup
directed by Steve McQueen
by Walter Chaw With performances this good, with a director this astonishing, the only thing that could make it less than transcendent, I'm afraid, is source material so well-respected, so revered truth be known, that it limits the places the cast and director might otherwise go. What I'm saying is that the prospect of Steve McQueen making a slave narrative is one to savour, celebrate, induce chills in the hearts of every serious scholar of cinema as experiential philosophy--and the prospect of Steve McQueen adapting Solomon Northrup's (as related to white lawyer David Wilson) 12 Years a Slave is one to inspire some level of inevitable disappointment. What I expected was to be blown away by Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor's performances--and I was. What I didn't expect was to be disturbed by a few instances of manipulation of the document that seem driven by something other than good faith. Why, for instance, would one portray the death of a black conspirator on a slaver ship bound for Louisiana at the hand of a white crewman about to rape a sympathetic figure, when the document reveals this conspirator was taken by smallpox? For the sake of drama? Were the roles reversed, this kind of narrative manipulation would take on a decidedly different hue.
**½/****
directed by Teller
by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his little gizmo-whatsit, then sits down, the consummate non-painter, to produce a Xerox-accurate replica of Vermeer's masterpiece. Various talking heads weigh in, day titles depict the passage of time, and by the end it's clear that the topic isn't so much technology's role in art (there's a proximate reality problem presented by the film that pushes it near to a place of science-fiction) as it is Jenison's apparent illness, his meticulousness becoming obsessive and even, at times, frightening, possibly to the point of self-destruction. For the experiment to work, see, Jenison must be unschooled in every required discipline of his project: architecture, costume design, construction, and finally painting. It makes the definitive last image suddenly ambiguous: how do we measure success, and what price is too steep?
****/****
directed by Errol Morris
by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations. When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening--an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has made, all the more timely now that the United States--under new leadership, elected on a platform of hope and change--is on the eve of another act of war.
*/****
directed by John Curran
by Walter Chaw Kind of like a dustier Eight Below, in which Mia Wasikowska walks four camels and a dog across the Australian Outback in a whimsical death march that I find, at my age (40), amazingly selfish and borderline sociopathic. Tracks is based on the true story of "camel lady" Robyn Davidson, who, in 1977, walked across a huge stretch of Australia because she really hated being around other people. Davidson says, by way of charming voiceover narration, that she didn't want to be a whiny bitch like the rest of her generation, but she replaces that option with becoming an ungrateful, surly, mortally-broken (by her mother's suicide--fair enough) girl-woman intent on taking camels with her on a trek across some of the most unforgiving terrain on the planet. Just because it's there, try to pay attention. So it's like Into the Wild, but terrible, scored as a child or James Horner would score it and directed like a not-on-purpose horror film in the way that people who've never seen any horror films...or other films...shoot in locations like these. It's also a crowd-pleaser that will attract everyone who doesn't want to be challenged by a movie--think Rabbit-Proof Fence, without the corollary benefit of making the middlebrow believe they're not racist.
by Walter Chaw It's a six-and-a-half hour drive from my home in Arvada, CO to Telluride on the Western Slope, and there are two ways to get there. One way is all highway; the other way is all beauty. I took the second route, and it made all the difference. I've been in a dark, difficult place for a long time now, or, at least, long enough in the parlance of near-crippling depression. I was caught in eddies; I had become inert. I had almost completely stopped writing. Not just essays like this one, but reviews, too, which I used to be able to pump out with I think alarming speed and ease. Early on, someone asked my editor how I did it; at times over the last couple months, I wondered if I'd ever write like that again. Things are hard when you're dark. Getting out of bed was a negotiation--getting out to a screening was a near act of God. The thought of accidentally eavesdropping other people's thoughts was agony. The times I did, of course, were good, because the guilt I would have felt had I gone and not written on the privilege would have been untenable. Would that the guilt of not writing on home-video releases have the same lubricative effect.
Continue reading "Telluride '13: An Introduction or, The Stand" »
