Film Freak Central

Honey Boy (2019) + The Lighthouse (2019)

HONEY BOY
***½/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs
written by Shia LaBeouf
directed by Alma Har'el

THE LIGHTHOUSE
***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw There is a suggestion in Alma Har'el's haunted, raw Honey Boy that the only knowledge forbidden in the United States is that of the self. The picture aligns in that way with Robert Eggers's similarly haunted The Lighthouse; both films deal in a sense with the sins of the fathers becoming the secret trauma of the sons. They diverge, though, not in the process of peeling away layers and layers of sedimentary fragments the everymen of these dramas have shored against their ruins, but in what they discover at the end of their excavations. To my depressed hope, the final image of The Lighthouse, which promises this cycle of suffering is evergreen, ever-returning, and inevitable, sounds something like the truth. At the other pole is Honey Boy, which, in the course of one of its fantasy sequences, offers, of all things, reconciliation. It says that there's hope at the end of all the suffering, that the map actually leads to buried treasure and not just the skeletons of the things left to guard it (their ranks are full but they're always recruiting). I'm not sure I'm compelled by the case it's trying to make, particularly as this story has more to tell, but there's a power to its piquant grace and love and acceptance.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

***/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it's based, Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It's not unlike Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn't just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it's impossible to read Lee's sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it's impossible to read Stephen King's Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick's The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film's Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny's mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he's played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who's held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you're pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)

**½/****
directed by Midge Costin

by Alice Stoehr "Sound is half of the experience," says George Lucas over a muted excerpt from Star Wars' opening shot. The din of laser artillery and John Williams's score have fallen away, so the director's voice accompanies two vessels drifting in the silence of space. This sequence caps an introductory montage darting from Jurassic Park to The Elephant Man to Lawrence of Arabia in order to sensitize viewers (and listeners) to the intricacies of film audio. Midge Costin leans a lot on such montage in her documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. They're groupings of iconography à la Chuck Workman, part of her bid to demystify the craft. She structures two-thirds of the film as a rough history via sound-design heavyweights while leaving the rest for anecdotes from other luminaries in the field. Oscilloscopic sound waves are her primary graphic motif. It's instantly accessible, very Film 101. Costin, like the film's writer, Bobette Buster, is a professor at USC. (Lucas and Steven Spielberg endowed her position.) Their work together has all the clarity of a syllabus. The 1992 doc Visions of Light went deep into the art of cinematography; this, decades later, is its ear-oriented counterpart.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

***/****
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate--the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity--where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she's gone. It's a small moment, and one that works to move the film's exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. "He's not here for you, he's here for your womb," says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)--but "he," a killer robot from the future called a "Rev-9" (Gabriel Luna), isn't. He's there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah's videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon--a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man's attire even though a woman's is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.

Gemini Man (2019)

**/****
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we're attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film's prologue, it's stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee's Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It's kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories--like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It's considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that's stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it's poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the "you just need an egg!" explanation. Better if said explanation were that they'd figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

In the Cut (2003) + Sylvia (2003)

IN THE CUT
****/****
starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Damici
screenplay by Jane Campion & Susanna Moore, based on the novel by Moore
directed by Jane Campion

SYLVIA
*½/****
starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner
screenplay by John Brownlow
directed by Christine Jeffs

"Come at last to this point
I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark"
-Yosana Akiko

by Walter Chaw Frances Avery (Meg Ryan) is in love with words. She moves through life obscuring herself in a nimbus of them, passing through the world with poetry as her guiding principle. Director Jane Campion is no stranger to a life lived in thrall to poesy--her films An Angel at My Table and The Piano detailed the life of poet Janet Frame and the life of the mind, respectively, and In the Cut finds its meaning and rhythm in the words that Frannie collects, fragments of poems cut from books and collected from subway walls. The New York through which Frannie walks is festooned with ghosts of American flags, tattered and blown after two years of constant display, losing their meaning along with their colours fading up to the sky. Likewise, Frannie sees herself a phantom of unmentioned tragedies, haunting her own life, retreating to the comfort of words when a half-sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), pillories her chaste existence, or when Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) interrogates her about a string of serial murders he's investigating. A scholar of words, Frannie is involved as the film opens in a project analyzing inner-city slang: language as organic and in transition.

The Others (2001)

***½/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Elaine Cassidy, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan
written and directed by Alejandro Amenábar

by Walter Chaw The Others is an intricate character drama that takes turns shifting its suspicions on any number of scenarios and suspects. It subtly considers each of its small troupe of players as alternately worthy of mistrust, and its fantastic cast is more than equal to director Alejandro Amenábar's quiet attributions of innocence and diabolical attributions of wickedness. Throughout, Amenábar maintains the unnerving possibility that, despite the spectre of a hoax or a plot ever-looming in the sometimes-inexplicable actions of one or more of its characters, something paranormal might, in fact, be at work.

3 from Hell (2019)

***/****
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley, Richard Brake, Sid Haig
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw 3 From Hell's twin fathers are Sam Peckinpah and Jim Thompson; when Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) screams "Kill em, kill em all!" in obvious emulation of that iconic early moment in The Wild Bunch, she announces that the picture's setting in a disgusting Mexican villa is not just purposeful, but meaningful and pointed. In scope, the film is better framed as Rob Zombie's The Getaway, which, as may be expected, keeps the surreal, cannibalistic ending from the novel, unlike either of its proper adaptations. Indeed, 3 From Hell is as sordid, violent, base as anything from Peckinpah or Thompson; and an observant a satire of how the world runs on the threat of violence and the promise of sex. Likewise, it's steeped in self-loathing, that sense that everything is in an active state of putrefaction. If The Getaway can be read with profit as a film about the transactional nature of human relationships, Zombie's films are also best considered as detailed, acutely sensitive explorations of human, especially familial, relationships. 3 From Hell is his most pointed statement about the nigh insurmountable cost of existence. The marriage makes sense, as life is never cheap in Zombie's films. In fact, life and the living of it, is really fucking expensive, and no one gets out alive.

Ad Astra (2019)

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones
written by James Gray & Ethan Gross
directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw James Gray's Ad Astra is the sort of movie people who don't like Terrence Malick think Terrence Malick movies are like. It's overwritten to the point of self-parody in some places (consider a scene aboard a Mars-bound shuttle where our hero's patrilineage is mentioned, reacted to, discussed at length, and then brought up again), with a voiceover that doesn't invite introspection so much as comparisons to Harrison Ford's reluctant Blade Runner exposition. Imagine the version of this film with about a quarter of the lengthy chit-chat--or even one that doesn't mistrust its lead's performance so much that a scene where he's acting out his betrayal isn't underscored with narration: "Goddamnit, they're using me!" It's such a handsome film, with cinematography by Interstellar's Hoyte van Hoytema, that one is inclined to forgive this second consecutive attempt by Gray to make Apocalypse Now, except that it plays unforgivably like a "For Dummies" version of an ecstatic picture. Imagine the Carlos Reygadas version, or the Peter Strickland one (Ad Astra most resembles a super-chatty Berberian Sound Studio). Or just watch the Claire Denis version, High Life, which asks many of the same big questions as Ad Astra without asking them explicitly. Nor trying to answer them.

It: Chapter Two (2019)

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Gary Dauberman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Calling the monster "It" suggests some BigBad that should not be named in polite company--molestation, suicide and depression, abandonment, abuse (domestic or otherwise)--and Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter Two (hereafter It 2) covers each of those bases, literally, along the way of what turns out to be a painfully sensitive metaphor for how the things that happen to us in childhood dig their talons into how we function as adults. Not unlike the pointedly named It Follows, It 2 is a horror film about our personal and collective loss of innocence and the many ways we unsuccessfully suppress our trauma: "It" always escapes the containers we put it into--an idea illustrated explicitly at one point in the film as a thing too big for the rituals we use to tame it magnifies in the Jungian sense and explodes in the Freudian, laying waste to our carefully-cultivated gardens. It's possible to outgrow a fear of clowns--a lot less likely that we'll ever outgrow the litany of disasters that fed the fear of clowns in the first place. My mom is dying. Dealing with it has unearthed all of these memories I'd hidden away, of our relationship and of my childhood. I'm not armed. Neither are the "losers" of It 2.

Gwen (2019)

***/****
starring Maxine Peake, Eleanor Worthington-Cox
written and directed by William McGregor

by Alice Stoehr The place is Wales. The time is the past. The subject is a penniless family of three. Mancunian actress Maxine Peake plays the sallow, unsmiling mother of two girls: little Mari (Jodie Innes) and teenage Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox). They live in a ramshackle farmhouse amid mossy boulders and fields of emerald grass. The sky tends to be thickly overcast; particles of soot get everywhere. Wind rasps the valley and pervades the sound design by Anna Bertmark, whose credits include You Were Never Really Here. The soundscape is much like that of Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, another film about rural privation on an uncaring earth. Snow falls, thunder cracks, and the family's meagre assets dwindle. This is the starting point for Gwen, William McGregor's flinty debut feature. McGregor started in British television, with shows like "Misfits" and the period drama "Poldark", on both of which he collaborated with Gwen's cinematographer Adam Etherington. The two of them put tremendous discipline into the film's style, shooting across the Welsh countryside in early winter. They apply a rich visual lexicon to this desolate space: focus pulls, slow pans and zooms, reflections in sullied glass. Due to the era's lack of electricity, they favour backlighting, with pale sun penetrating the house's gloom. Night scenes rely on the unsteady and audible flames of candles or torches. It's a world of fog and fire and dirt.

Adam (2019)

**½/****
starring Nicholas Alexander, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Leo Sheng, Margaret Qualley
screenplay by Ariel Schrag, based on her novel
directed by Rhys Ernst

by Alice Stoehr The first five minutes of Adam offer a concise sketch of its title character. He's an unsuave 17-year-old from a Bay Area suburb; his parents fret over his social life; and he's spending summer 2006 in a closet at his lesbian sister's Bushwick apartment. Screenwriter Ariel Schrag condenses the first 40 pages of her 2014 novel into this prologue, after which the credits accompany Adam's first cab ride through Brooklyn. A montage of murals and graffiti flashes past. Nicholas Alexander plays Adam, his hair floppy, his expression glazed, as a vessel ready to be kiln-fired and filled. (He looks a little like Ice Storm-era Tobey Maguire.) He's the star of this bildungsroman about a young man's initiation into the LGBT community and the glaring fact of his own cisness.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

***½/****
starring Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Dean Norris
screenplay by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman, based on the series by Alvin Schwartz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw André Øvredal's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (hereafter Scary Stories) is a dulcet, autumnal picture balanced right there between the endless summers of dandelion wine and the interminable and harsh winters of brutality that lie ahead. A project based on a beloved series of children's books by Alvin Schwartz, it transcends its source by understanding the true function of little nightmares: the stories we tell our kids to begin to toughen them up for lives spent in this hell. Scary Stories unfolds, essentially, in the days between Halloween, 1968 and Election Night (November 5th) of that same year, when Richard Nixon won the Presidency on a date that disrupted 36 years of New Deal expansion. Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic nominee, but only after Bobby was shot (just a short while after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot); the beheading of the Democratic party's progressive soul was now complete. George Wallace, a piece of shit still somehow not as repugnant as Donald Trump, carried five states that night by promising racial segregation. Old footage of Walter Kronkite delivering the results of the election provides the background for a young woman, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), trying in vain to convince the adults that things are not going to be okay before calling her recently-widowed dad to tell him that all the disappointments of the world are not his alone to carry. It would be instructive to watch Scary Stories as the warm-up feature for Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. Both occupy the same dream-space, the same halcyon "the past" where everything is possible until it isn't anymore. The surprise is that of the two films, it's Scary Stories that is the less hopeful.

The Nightingale (2019)

***/****
starring Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman
written and directed by Jennifer Kent

by Walter Chaw Philomela was the daughter of King Pandion I of Athens, sister to Procne, who was married to King Tereus of Thrace. After five years apart, Procne asked her husband to fetch Philomela for a visit. During the trip back, he raped her, and when Philomela wouldn't promise to keep quiet about it, Tereus cut out her tongue and left her for dead. She wove the story of the crime into a tapestry, however, and the two sisters, once reunited, boiled Procne and Tereus's son and fed him to Tereus. Upon discovering this, Tereus flew into a rage and the gods changed them each into birds: Procne into a swallow, Tereus into a hoopoe (the king with his crown of feathers), and Philomela into a nightingale, renowned for its song. In literature, the nightingale is associated with truth. John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is one of his poems of "negative capacity." The traditional interpretation of it finds the poet falling into a state of death without death, exploring an idea that everything is transient and tends towards decay. It opens like this:

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019)

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw It was a late summer night, humid and low, in the "hill" area of downtown Seattle, outside a coffee shop called "Coffee Messiah" festooned wall-to-wall with tacky tchotchkes featuring our Lord and saviour. I spent a couple of college summers there and in the San Juans with my friend, Keith. I'd met him at a Primus concert where an entire gymnasium had been converted into a mosh pit. We locked onto each other and agreed that if one of us went down, the other would pick him up. We've been friends now for almost thirty years. So we were standing outside Coffee Jesus sometime in the early Nineties with two other friends I'd made through Keith: Sam and Dan. Dan, tall, white, and awkward, was playing around with being a DJ; Sam was a squat Jewish kid with a chip on his shoulder and a lot of hours spent in a gym. A guy walked up to us swinging nunchucks, shirtless and raving. Sam smiled, put his hand out and talked to him until he put his sticks away. The guy clapped us on the shoulder as though we were old chums he'd run into on the street, and left. Sam was our peacemaker and our enforcer. I noticed after it all went down that we'd automatically moved a step behind Sam when trouble came. Sam would go on to law enforcement and a sad, sickening stint as a 9-1-1 operator that haunted him for years after. A groomsman at my wedding and one of the best friends I'll ever have in this life, Sam killed himself last week, and I'll never be alright again. I'll never feel as safe. Not in the same way.