Film Freak Central

Toy Story 4 (2019)

***/****
screenplay by Stephany Folsom and Andrew Stanton
directed by Josh Cooley

by Walter Chaw Much like AI, Steven Spielberg's similarly fascinating, similarly imperfect spiritual collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, Josh Cooley's Toy Story 4 asks questions about creation and the responsibility of the creator to the created. Toy Story 4 is itself the product of a chimeric parentage, this being the third sequel to a franchise that is to Pixar what Mickey Mouse is, or once was, to Pixar's parent company, Disney. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is a modern archetype of the sort described by Barthes: an image, a sign, encompassing an entire history of meaning for members of a sympathetic culture. It means one thing by connoting a multitude of things. The Toy Story films rely on the shared human experience of creating totems in the endless fort/da exercises we engage in as children. Inanimate objects are imbued in that way with our expectations of our parents and our disappointments with them, too, as we re-enact events real and play out dramas imagined. They are practice and we invest them with the payload of our souls; the root of the term "animation," after all, is that literal investment of a soul, and so many of our creation mythologies--Prometheus, Eve, the Golem--consider the lives of the lifeless. The Toy Story films are disturbing because they occasionally cause us to question our moral responsibility to things we gift with life only to abandon emotionally, if not always physically. (A quick scan around my office finds it to be a plastic chapel of toys I couldn't buy as a child.) They are disturbing because they speak to ideas of free will vs. predestination that apply to us--created beings, perhaps, programmed along certain paths and predilections certainly. Toy Story is epistemological theology.

Men in Black: International (2019)

½*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson
written by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw Banking on the idea that no one has seen Tomorrowland, F. Gary Gray's atrocious Men in Black: International (hereafter MiB4) begins three years in the past on a steampunked-out Eiffel Tower, where our titular alien hunters, Agents T (Liam Neeson) and H (Chris Hemsworth), battle an alien threat to the world called "The Hive." Flashback twenty more years to when young Molly (Mandeiya Flory as a kid, Tessa Thompson as an adult) saves a little CGI alien, inaugurating a lifelong fascination with the Men in Black, then flash-forward twenty...three (?) years to Molly applying for the FBI and CIA before she somehow finagles her way into MiB headquarters and wrangles an internship with Agent O (Emma Thompson). Said internship involves going to London and partnering with the philandering, James Bond-ish Agent H, who gets out of a sticky situation by fucking an alien squid thing. (We're a long way from the will-they/won't-they? flirtation of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Dorothy.) The idea of modelling this movie on the James Bond conventions is fine in a we're-out-of-ideas sort of way, I suppose, but then MiB4 becomes the very worst Hope/Crosby "Road" movie ever made, which is an extremely low bar because those movies were terrible.

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

½*/****
starring Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Near the end of Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die, Centerville police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray)--probably named after legendary everyman actor Cliff Robertson just because--intones to his deputy Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver)--probably named after legendary Formula 1 driver Ronnie Peterson just because--that Jim Jarmusch is a dick. He's responding to Ronnie's revelation that Jim has let him read the entire script while only letting Cliff read certain scenes. Luigi Pirandello did shit like this in his exhausting, wall-breaking, self-referential stuff. He believed the actor would inevitably break with the text and so, in his most famous play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author", he has them reject their script and question their existence. A forerunner to the Theatre of the Absurd, Pirandello was held in some esteem (and met with an equal amount of suspicion) by Mussolini--you can read into the rebellion of his fictional characters from their fictional circumstances a hint of his true allegiances. It's timely, given our current fascist circumstances, for Jarmusch to evoke Pirandello, I guess, and other modern examples like Daffy Duck's "Duck Amuck" short and Grant Morrison's "Coyote Gospel" one-shot in the late-'90s Vertigo run of "Animal Man" support the playwright's case for immortality. But it's hard to get too excited when the execution is this pleased with itself. The conceit (much like when Moriarty became sentient on the Holodeck in that one episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation") is ever in danger of pomposity and self-parody. Jarmusch, who already mucks around in narrative grey areas--such as conceiving of a poet/bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, NJ and reveres a book of poetry by William Carlos Williams called, that's right, Paterson--doesn't need to get so granular about it. The Dead Don't Die plays an awful lot like Jarmusch explaining Jarmusch to a slow child.

Dark Phoenix (2019)

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain
written and directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw So downbeat it plays like a dirge, or a riff on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" (which Dylan described as ten pages of self-loathing prose "vomit" that needed to be set to music), Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix ain't got nothing and so's got nothing left to lose. Subject to numerous delays and a now-notorious reshoot in response to Captain Marvel beating them to the proverbial punch with a space-set finale, it is, against all odds, a tidy, thematically-succinct capper to Fox's X-Men saga--which, at its best, was always explicit about how these films were metaphors for not fitting in, not being accepted for what you were born as, and the importance of building families when your biological ones turn out to be frightened and faithless. Bryan Singer handled the first two instalments before leaving to do Superman Returns. Those three films--X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and Superman Returns--comprise a trilogy of mythologies for disaffected loners, brutalized by disappointment and betrayal, looking within themselves for value in a universe that sets them eternally, pointedly apart. There's an interesting paper to be written on why the radioactive Singer was so good at telling these kinds of stories. Or maybe not so interesting. After Brett Ratner's pitiful conclusion to the original trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand, the series began to play with its timelines in exactly the same way reboots of the comics do--jumping ahead decades, sending series favourite Wolverine back in time to stop a mutant genocide--and consequently delivered a few gems along the way in X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, and Logan. In the battle between continuity and quality, I guess I don't care if these characters never seem to age.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

*/****
starring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ziyi Zhang
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw Everyone is really stressed out in Michael Dougherty's dreadful Godzilla: King of the Monsters (hereafter Godzilla 2), the crass follow-up to 2014's Godzilla, Gareth Edwards's lovely, Spielbergian reboot of the storied Toho franchise for the American market. Everyone here starts at about a 9, temple-veins popping and spittle flying--the undercard attraction to the titanic title bouts between immense CG phantoms. For his part, everyman wolf biologist Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) starts at "Nicholson in The Shining" and ramps up to "Pacino in Heat" before settling down somewhere near status quo William Petersen for the remainder. That little muscle in Chandler's jaw gets a good, clenched workout. Mark is called onto the scene because his ex, batshit Dr. Emma (Vera Farmiga), has spirited away their high-strung daughter, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who's designed an electronic doohickey called "Orca," the better to talk to all the giant monsters people have discovered across the globe. Operation of said doohickey appears to involve standard smartphone skills, so the necessity of pulling Mark out of the wilderness to help track down Emma is suspect. He's certainly scream-y and agitated about the whole thing.

Aladdin (2019)

*/****
starring Will Smith, Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari
screenplay by John August and Guy Ritchie
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw The elephant in the room vis-à-vis Guy Ritchie's new, live-ish action Aladdin is the recasting of the all-powerful Genie with Will Smith after the untimely death of role-originator Robin Williams. Whatever their relative comedic talents, the figure of the Genie is one of essential servility: an almighty being nonetheless bound to the whims of whoever possesses his lamp. Street urchin Aladdin (Mena Massoud) acquires said magical lamp and promises the Genie he'll use one of his three wishes to set the genie free from eternal servitude--a promise Aladdin almost reneges on once he spends some time enjoying the pleasures of omnipotence and the attentions of comely Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott). The elephant in the room is that Will Smith is black--and casting a black man as a slave, in a Disney movie, no less, is fraught, almost impossibly so. I mean, The Toy-fraught. The tangle of implications this casting raises drowns out nearly every other consideration. Lest there be any nuance to the situation, in their very first interaction Genie tells Aladdin that Aladdin is his "master." The rest of the film is essentially Genie helping Aladdin, Hitch-style, woo a pretty girl while hoping that once that's over and done with, the Genie himself will be enslaved no more. When Genie's eventually freed, his shackles fall off his arms, he shrinks, he loses his blue pigment in favour of Smith's natural complexion, and he puts the moves on handmaiden Dalia (Nasim Pedrad), who's been wanting to bang Genie for the entirety of her existence in the movie. It has an unbelievable amount of emotional weight--more than anything the film itself has earned through its narrative.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane
screenplay by Derek Kolstad and Shay Hatten and Chris Collins & Marc Abrams
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw As the novelty wanes and the universe expands, the John Wick franchise becomes less fleet, though its pleasures, when they arrive, have lost little of their joy. I think of these films, three of them now, as describing the arc of the great Hollywood Musical actors, the Fred Astaires and Gene Kellys, the Liza Minellis and Ginger Rogers and Judy Garlands, who would enliven whatever inanimate book in which they were mired with their irrepressible stagecraft and charisma whenever the spotlight caught them. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (hereafter John Wick 3), in other words, is a slog of mythology linking galvanizing action sequences that are meticulously choreographed, unapologetically brutal, and graceful in every way the picture's story and dialogue are not. They're so good, really, that it hardly matters what the movie's about--so good that it's fair to wonder why they're working so hard at trying to pull coherence out of this premise instead of just offering vague excuses to arm the graceful, lanky, morose hero and drop him in the middle of bad situations. I mean, do they know it's not necessary? Is the world-building mumbo-jumbo a meta-joke on a media landscape now dominated by three or four dynastic storylines?

Long Shot (2019)

½*/****
starring Seth Rogen, Charlize Theron, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Alexander Skarsgård
screenplay by Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Walter Chaw Long Shot sort of wants to be There's Something About Mary and sort of wants to be Broadcast News but mostly it's a Legal Eagles/Switching Channels '80s adult programmer that is deeply embarrassing and often difficult to watch. The fact that we don't make a lot of movies like this anymore, if indeed we ever did, should be indication enough that it's harder than it looks. Long Shot is "Veep" without edge, intelligence, relevance. It takes aim at Fox News and manages to nail the misogyny in a broad, improv-troupe way while failing to capture what it is about the network that has led us to the precipice of the end of the Republic. Yes, no kidding. Long Shot doesn't have anything to say about politics beyond the polite broadsides you hear at middle-school debate tournaments, and though it introduces a vile Rupert Murdoch-inspired media mogul intent on disrupting the American election process, it misses every opportunity to land a blow against him. It's like taking a swing at the ocean as you're falling out of a boat--and missing. The film is a disaster in regards to race relationships and representation, so much so that it's a marvel of lack of introspection that this liliest-white of lily-white movies even attempts to address it. Long Shot is the thing that thinks it's helping but isn't helping at all. It is, in other words, the frontrunner for next year's Best Picture Oscar. You heard it here first.

He's Just Not That Into You (2009)

*/****
starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly
screenplay by Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein, based on the book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
directed by Ken Kwapis

by Ian Pugh It starts off as a puerile game of "Six Degrees of Separation" and just goes downhill from there: Janine (Jennifer Connelly) is married to Ben (Bradley Cooper), who's attracted to Anna (Scarlett Johansson), who has an awkward relationship with Conor (Kevin Connolly), who went on a date with Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), who gets dating advice from Alex (Justin Long), who killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. There are about five more movie stars inhabiting He's Just Not That Into You, but one would be hard-pressed to recall their characters' names without consulting the IMDb, and that's pretty much all there is to them. (The combined talents of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston result in a force so monumentally bland that it's either not surprising or very surprising that no casting director ever thought of it before.) My colleague Walter Chaw once wrote that you'll never refer to the characters in Crash by anything other than their broadest generalities, which is exactly how this movie would have it, since it makes it that much easier to project yourself onto these pale stereotypes and reduce the gender divide to a showdown between insensitive assholes and hypersensitive maniacs. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and it's a small world after all. Too easy--too tempting--to call He's Just Not That Into You the romcom equivalent of Paul Haggis's Oscar-winning disaster, but it doesn't give you a reason to think otherwise.

Land of the Lost (2009) + The Hangover (2009)

LAND OF THE LOST
½*/****
starring Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, Danny McBride, Jorma Taccone
screenplay by Chris Henchy & Dennis McNicholas, based on the television series by Sid & Marty Krofft
directed by Brad Silberling

THE HANGOVER
**/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Jeffrey Tambor
screenplay by Jon Lucas & Scott Moore
directed by Todd Phillips

by Ian Pugh I'd estimate there are around a hundred reasons why Brad Silberling's big-screen adaptation of Sid & Marty Krofft's "Land of the Lost" is awful, but none of them are more infuriating than the fact that it panders to its core hipster audience by being a great big nostalgic turd with an ironic bow on top. Have you watched the series recently and cracked self-satisfied jokes about how drugs were its primary influence? If so, then this film is for you. Do you like movies that try as hard as possible to resemble shitty episodic television from yesteryear? Then you've probably seen Land of the Lost twice already and rationalized it as something that won't win awards but at least manages to pass the time. That's certainly the mentality driving this unfortunate theme-park ride: the film would prefer that you look to the old series' theme song to fill in the necessary plot details, jamming the lyrics of same into its dialogue with a heavy-handed wink. Rick (Will Ferrell), Will (Danny McBride), and Holly (Anna Friel) are on "a routine expedition," and despite much ensuing sound and fury, that's all you need to know. But hey, dude, do you remember the Sleestaks? 'Cause this film totally remembers them, too--and while they've been injected with some CGI gloss, the costumes are just crappy enough to keep your childhood memories intact! It's worth noting that this is the second film in as many weeks to use an old-school Universal logo in its opening credits--but unlike Drag Me to Hell, Land of the Lost has nothing to distinguish it from what came before, no special insight into why the TV show that inspired it is a cultural touchstone. Frankly, it's impossible to see how any of it could be considered an improvement on renting the original series and jerking off.

Her Smell (2019)

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

by Walter Chaw

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

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

ICYMI (4/19/19)

Just in time for the first photographic evidence of a black hole, Claire Denis's High Life opens in Canada this week alongside Max Minghella's directorial debut, Teen Spirit. We--that is, Angelo Muredda and yours truly, respectively--covered them at last year's TIFF. Also hitting an unspecified number of screens this weekend in advance of its VOD debut is David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake, which made Walter Chaw's Top 50 of 2018 back when we thought a leaked rip was as official a release as we were going to get.

Lots more to come post-Easter.-Ed.

The Public (2019)

**/****
starring Alec Baldwin, Emilio Estevez, Jena Malone, Taylor Schilling
written and directed by Emilio Estevez

by Alice Stoehr "They're on the wrong side of the law for all the right reasons," runs the tagline for Wisdom (1986), Emilio Estevez's directorial debut. The star of Repo Man and The Breakfast Club was in his mid-twenties when he cast himself opposite then-fiancée Demi Moore, the two of them playing Robin Hood figures on a crime spree. In the decades since, he's had a patchy career as a filmmaker, garnering few awards and little acclaim for one passion project after another. Reviewing the period drama Bobby in 2006, critic A.O. Scott wrote that Estevez "sets himself a large and honorable task. It is important to appreciate this in spite of his movie's evident shortcomings." The same applies to The Public, in which Estevez stars as Stuart Goodson, a Cincinnati librarian fretting over the ethics of his job. One winter night, his branch's homeless clientele stages a sit-in over the city's lack of shelters, and as the police and press get involved, the library becomes a political battleground. Estevez's ambitions are transparent: This is a Capraesque fable for our troubled times, with Stuart as its Mr. Smith or Longfellow Deeds. Most of the film takes place over a matter of hours in a single location, and each figure in the stand-off symbolizes a different ideological perspective. Some sample dialogue: "The public library is the last bastion of true democracy that we have in this country." Lest the viewer get confused.

Pet Sematary (2019)

*½/****
starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence, John Lithgow
screenplay by Jeff Buhler, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The best adaptations understand the totality of an author's work, while the worst try to drag something kicking and screaming from one medium into another, largely incompatible, medium. The famous Frank Zappa quote--writing about music is like dancing about architecture--applies, except that it is possible to dance about architecture if you're a brilliant dancer and understand the essence of the architecture you're taking as inspiration. I think Zappa knew that, being Zappa. I like to believe he actually meant that it's possible, but hard. Stephen King's Pet Sematary is exceptional. I reread it for the first time in thirty-three years before watching the new adaptation from co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. I remember, as a child of thirteen, the visceral fear of those last twenty pages or so (and the hot sex scene); now I'll remember it for the extraordinarily observant and sensitive portrayal of grief and loneliness in the novel's first couple-hundred pages. Indeed, the first sentence, talking about how men sometimes meet the man who should have been their father in the middle of their lives, immediately reduced me to tears. Both the Lambert and the Kölsch/Widmyer adaptations focus on the twenty-page payoff, not the two-hundred pages of poetry.

Shazam! (2019)

***/****
starring Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by Henry Gayden
directed by David F. Sandberg

by Walter Chaw The thing David F. Sandberg's Shazam!, the Captain Marvel I actually like, has going for it is that, like the recent Aquaman (which it takes a jab at during a mid-closing-credits sequence), it doesn't take itself too seriously. Not to say that it doesn't tackle some heavy topics--foster children, domestic abuse, sexuality, race, disability--but that it does so with a kind of good-natured bonhomie that finds one of its kid characters (the Asian one) calling a couple of bullies "assfags." In that sense, Shazam! plays a lot like Michael Ritchie's The Golden Child: another fantasy film with a charismatic lead pitched at children but packed with stuff just over the line of appropriate. There are a couple of nasty murders in this cheerfully self-aware send-up of Big (note a memorable scene set in a toy store), and there's a perfectly-landed recurring joke about a strip club--neither of which, let's face it, as inappropriate as the pedophilia that serves as the emotional centre of Big. Shazam! is, in other words, a shaggy-dog superhero flick that happily checks several boxes while unapologetically indulging in its chaotic silliness. Funnier would have been if schlumpy Seth Rogen had played the adult Shazam rather than hunky Zachary Levi, but there's intellectual property to respect and all. A shame The Rock already did a version of this role in the Jumanji sequel. At least he's rumoured to be cast as Captain Marvel's arch-enemy Black Adam in some film down the line.