Film Freak Central

The Night Clerk (2020)

½*/****
starring Tye Sheridan, Ana De Armas, John Leguizamo, Helen Hunt
written and directed by Michael Cristofer

by Walter Chaw Asking the never-asked question of whether Rain Man would fly in 2020, Michael Cristofer's excrescent The Night Clerk answers with a fairly-resounding, "It would not." The Night Clerk also asks if a "Rain Man + Sliver" mash-up is a good idea (it isn't) and if it's time, finally, for a redux of Mercury Rising (no again). Still, it does provide Helen Hunt her best role in ages despite seeming to confirm that a great cast giving it their all can't salvage a high-concept this retrograde and gleefully offensive. Tye Sheridan plays superhero-named Bart Bromley, the night clerk at a two-star hotel who, he tells anyone who will listen, has Asperger's Syndrome--which in this iteration means he's a collection of twitches and vocal affectations. Pair Bart with Edward Norton's Tourette's-afflicted hero from Motherless Brooklyn for an almost-deadly megadose of ACTING. To get better at mimicking "normal" human interaction, Bart has placed various spy cameras in a guest's room. It's not a sex crime; it's a kid with some social issues addressing his disadvantage. Really, it's inspirational if you think about it.

The Call of the Wild (2020)

*½/****
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Gillan, Cara Gee, Dan Stevens
screenplay by Michael Green, based on the book by Jack London
directed by Chris Sanders

by Walter Chaw Chris Sanders's The Call of the Wild shares a few character names and a setting with the Jack London novella upon which it's ostensibly based but exists in a perverse fantasia of its own that has more in common with Lars Von Trier's surreal Zentropa (or Tom Schiller's Nothing Lasts Forever, to which Zentropa owes more than a little) than it does with London's critique of capitalism. Scenes of the Alaskan Gold Rush herein have about them the crazed Uncanny Valley effect of The Polar Express, which is only slightly less distracting than The Call of the Wild's imagining of an egalitarian utopia free of racism, sexism, even classism. The final triumph of dog-kind in the film recalls, of all things, Matt Reeves's superlative Planet of the Apes trilogy, postulating a future in which hyper-intelligent, non-human mammals inherit the earth. Spearheading this new species of hyper-intelligent freak dog is Buck (shades of Corey Haim's experimental super-dog in Watchers), who in classic Red Scare-agitprop fashion embodies all the best traits of the Old Hollywood Man of Action archetype: being kind to his fellow sled dogs like some canine Babe handing out jellybeans before saving human maidens from drowning.

Seberg (2019)

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Jack O'Connell, Margaret Qualley, Anthony Mackie
written by Joe Shrapnel & Anna Waterhouse
directed by Benedict Andrews

by Walter Chaw Benedict Andrews aspires to Alan J. Pakula with his paranoid biopic of martyred Nouvelle Vague sensation Jean Seberg but approaches it like Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can instead. His Seberg is a handsome, even slick production with a great cast and a bright period production design where something rougher-hewn, something grainier and consistently darker, might have given it a more appropriately claustrophobic feel. Shot as a prestige movie trying very hard to be About Something, Seberg has the effect of making Iowa-born Jean Seberg (Kristen Stewart) seem shallow and silly, every bit the accidental activist and media-diagnosed hysteric she was portrayed as during her lifetime. Andrews often obscures her with foreground objects to suggest a voyeuristic perspective, allows a lot of repetitive dialogue from Jean about how she knows she's being bugged, and goes so far as to invent a sympathetic FBI agent named Jack Solomon (Jack O'Connell) to confess to his wife (Margaret Qualley) that his agency is engaged in ratfucking Seberg for her support of the Black Panthers. But when your film looks this clean and expensive, the feeling is one of a privileged perspective acting like a tourist for some borrowed righteousness.

Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)

*/****
starring James Marsden, Ben Schwartz, Tika Sumpter, Jim Carrey
written by Pat Casey & Josh Miller
directed by Jeff Fowler

by Walter Chaw At some point, Jeff Fowler's Sonic the Hedgehog, based on the tentpole for the Sega Genesis video-game system, achieves a certain queasy, weightless critical mass of pomo fascination. The story elements, the graphics-I-mean-art-direction, the affable James Marsden boyfriend archetype and manic Jim Carrey capering--all of these elements are so familiar they're almost subliminal, mashed together in epileptic flashes to tell an also intrinsically familiar story about a journey across the country with an alien buddy. Starman, Paul, E.T.--just the first references to register (and as soon as they register, make way for the next set). Sonic the Hedgehog is very much like encountering a Frankenstein's monster constructed out of The Beatles. Oh god, oh Christ, I recognize this, I know from whence this abomination sprang. It is the well of our culture gone rank. The picture's closest analogue isn't other video-game movies, it's Spielberg's knowingly self-loathing Ready Player One, which doesn't get the credit it should for being ashamed of itself. You might feel like Sonic the Hedgehog is "good," but that's you mistaking "good" for "Oh, I know all the words to this song at karaoke, it's good!" Not necessarily.

Birds of Prey (2020)

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey
**/****
starring Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Ewan McGregor
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Cathy Yan

by Walter Chaw When I used to teach Hitchcock, I'd ask students what the term "bird" refers to in British colloquial slang. "Women," yes? So, immediately, Cathy Yan's Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (hereafter Birds of Prey) carries with it an obvious secondary, didactic meaning, announcing itself as a piece about women who are predatory at most, not to be fucked with at least. I'm all-in. What kind of idiot wouldn't be? The time is right for a film about women assuming agency, flipping the script on predatory men, and making a DC comic-book property into something very much like an extended rape-revenge horror movie. I love rape-revenge horror movies. Ms. 45 is seminal. Ditto the original I Spit On Your Grave. I even love Neil Jordan's widely-derided The Brave One, which hung issues of assault and miscegenation on the framework of what is essentially a superhero origin story, years before it was stylish to do so. The time is right, too, for more female-led action films--what better than one starring a popular actress playing a popular antihero? Pity, then, that Birds of Prey is more Captain Marvel than Wonder Woman.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)

***/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Vanessa Hudgens, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Chris Bremner and Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

by Walter Chaw Rumors of Will Smith's death were greatly exaggerated as, in reprising one of his most vile characters, he finds in this third Bad Boys flick the pathos-leavened vitality that had been missing since his last third instalment, 2012's Men In Black 3. Between: a string of bathetic misfires of varying levels of foul, wherein the once and future superstar struggled to regain his stride. Truly, only a Will Smith could survive a concentrated period such as his last eight years of genuine calamities like Winter's Tale, Suicide Squad, Collateral Beauty, and Max Landis. Here, again, the irrepressible charisma that made him a bona fide A-list action hero long about Independence Day (if not the first Bad Boys the year before) busts off the screen like a physical thing. It's a ballsy choice, then, that the directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Black) choose to sideline him for a while immediately after a bombastic opening car-chase sequence. Even that's a fake-out, as our rogue cops Marcus (Martin Lawrence) and Mike (Smith) are just rushing to Marcus's daughter's side as she gives birth to Marcus's grandson. Everyone's growing older. Bad Boys for Life gets that.

Dolittle (2020)

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it's worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, "it" being a scene from Dan Simmons's Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing "pieces" summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan's Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It's played for laughs, but I wasn't laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy's accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who's been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn't for you, it's for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.

Underwater (2020)

**½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwyck, T.J. Miller
screenplay by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad
directed by William Eubank

by Walter Chaw Wasting absolutely no time and not interested in talking to you about it, William Eubank's Underwater is both a model of efficiency and a prototypical post-modernist piece wholly reliant on your familiarity with this genre for its depth and backstory. A seasoned viewer knows that this film is going to be about a small group of survivors picked off one-by-one; that the real bad guy will be corporate greed (or Russian greed, depending); and that if you're African-American or, God forbid, Asian, you'll very likely be the first to go. Curiously, it's in these aquatic thrillers that key exceptions to that rule--Ice Cube in Anaconda, for instance, or LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea--seem to make their appearance. Maybe the trick to surviving the monster is being a late-'80s rapper. Alas, Mamoudou Athie is not a late-'80s rapper. He plays Rodrigo, friend of plucky engineer Norah (Kristen Stewart), and it's at his urging that Norah saves their deep-sea drilling platform to initially survive a mysterious event--and then through his noble sacrifice that Norah gets to continue to be heroic. It's worth dwelling on this conceit, but there's no time: once the dust settles on the disaster that opens the film, several other disasters follow in rapid succession.

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft's Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that's particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They're fairy tales, fables. They're warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they're how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species' survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don't come home if they're caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades--each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

1917 (2019)

*/****
starring Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Daniel Mays, Colin Firth
screenplay by Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw Paul Fussell wrote what is for me the definitive book about WWI. It's not an exhaustive history à la Martin Gilbert's authoritative volume (or the countless other masterpieces and approaches the conflict has spawned from authors such as Robert Graves, Barbara Tuchman, and Erich Maria Remarque, not to mention the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen), but Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was my gateway to understanding how war has influenced our outlook on the world and our interpretation of it. From the start, Fussell goes deep on the notion of war as "ironic action," giving a close reading of a passage from Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, in which a young lance-corporal cheerfully fixes tea in a shelter as the author walks by. A shell drops, the author breathes a sigh of relief at the near miss, but a cry calls him back to a scene of carnage as the lance-corporal has been reduced to "gobbets of blackening flesh." Just at that moment, "the lance-corporal's brother came round the traverse." He offers further examples, for instance the mother driven to madness by two of her three sons being killed in a doomed push and then, once the third has been targeted for salvation by his commanders, news that a shell has detonated, leaving only one man dead (guess who) and all of his compatriots unscathed. Irony, Fussell argues, was the only way, post-Battle of the Somme, for shell-shocked survivors to impart the screaming, existential absurdity of freshly-mechanized war's indescribable atrocity. WWI defeated the peculiar innocence evinced by the prophylaxis of language immediately prior to its screaming nihilism. Reality had shifted for us in a season of impersonal death--our language and means of expressing the same with it.

Wimbledon (2004)

*½/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Paul Bettany, Kyle Hyde, Robert Lindsay
screenplay by Adam Brooks and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin
directed by Richard Loncraine

by Walter Chaw If you go see Wimbledon, the umpteenth edition of Tired Romantic Comedy Theater, it's only because you have a checklist in your head and aren't content with a film that doesn't satisfy every contrivance. There's the meet-cute, the unlikely match, the handsome rival, the gay best friend, the falling-in-love montage, the plot conflict (spouse, parents), the break-up montage, the public apology, the triumphant reunion. Director Richard Loncraine's tepid foray into Richard Curtis territory is rife with the kind of familiar hallmarks that lull throngs of lonesome Mia Farrows to the warm embrace of The Purple Rose of Cairo--a brief respite from the used paperback bookstores that rely on a steady trade of romance novels the way that independent movie stores rely on porn. In fact, there's not that much of a difference between Wimbledon and porn: plot is predictable and secondary to the performers, who provide whatever interest there might be in the enterprise. Everything else is plug and play, so to speak.

What Planet Are You From? (2000)

**½/****
starring Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, John Goodman, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Garry Shandling & Michael Leeson and Ed Solomon and Peter Tolan
directed by Mike Nichols

by Bill Chambers To paint a picture of how juvenile Mike Nichols's What Planet Are You From? can get, its running gag is a humming penis. The film stoops, often, to a level of humour rarely found outside the schoolyard--or an episode of "Married With Children". Yet there's infectious sunshine in Garry Shandling's first big-screen starring vehicle that makes it difficult to begrudge its bad taste. Whatever issues I may take with What Planet Are You From? certainly have nothing to do with being offended by it.

W. (2008) + Trouble the Water (2008)

W.
**½/****
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn
screenplay by Stanley Weiser
directed by Oliver Stone

TROUBLE THE WATER
**½/****
directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin

by Walter Chaw John Powers once called Nixon-era Oliver Stone our most Nixonian director: smart, driven, divisive, unlikeable. So the neatest trick of Stone's latest biopic, W., is to make George W. Bush--arguably the most reviled, detached, ideologically arrogant president since James Buchanan--a figure of genuine pathos. Never mind that this incurious, adolescent, fundamentalist fanatic is our proverbial Nero, fiddling while every foundational tenet of Lincoln's party is fed to anti-intellectualism and evangelical Christianity. George Orwell said something once about how the end of democracy is heralded by millionaires leading dishwashers; what's unexpected for me is the extent to which the Republican party in the new millennium has not only convinced the blue-collar to vote against its own self-interests by waging class warfare against liberals, but also begun to turn against the intellectuals in its own party. "Georgetown cocktail party" conservatives are now painted with the same broad brushstroke as "Latte-sipping" lefties--and this idea of abandoning the middle class takes on the onus of not just money and privilege, but education and eloquence as well. The logical end-point of wanting a President as ill-read, venal, and feckless as your alcoholic born-again Uncle Festus is a figure like Governor Sarah Palin, whose chief qualification appears to be her ability to blend into your local chapter of Oprah's Fan Club without a ripple. Hate, division, ugly innuendo, and racism: sowing fear and reaping the political benefits until the house falls down.

Little Women (2019)

**/****
starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Greta Gerwig, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott
directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Halfway through Greta Gerwig's rejiggering of Louisa May Alcott's beloved and stultifying classic of marrying well, the four March women gather in their attic to play dress-up in a homegrown drama club. Their purpose that day is to inaugurate honorary March sister Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) into their ranks, and the energetic, excited babble of children playing at theatre and democracy rises to the rafters as a joyful noise. The appeal of this Little Women, I think, is that it tries very hard to maintain this level of energy throughout; and the ultimate failure of this Little Women is that its reasons for doing so are inspired less by genuine exuberance than by calculated, maybe even arch, affectation. This little play-within-a-play is like Hamlet's play-within-a-play: it's the key. Gerwig's adaptation is careful in constructing an image of itself of progressiveness and metatext without risking enough to actually be critical of its text and, by extension, itself. It has its cake and eats it, too, because they deserve cake, goddamnit, and who are you to tell them they shouldn't have any? I mean, honestly.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Star Wars: Episode IX -The Rise of Skywalker
*/****
starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Billy Dee Williams
written by J.J. Abrams & Chris Terrio
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw J.J. Abrams's Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker (hereafter The Rise of Skywalker) is a breakneck, National Treasure-style quest flick so intent on the prize that it takes its eyes off the goal. It's slick and frictionless, offering nothing to hold on to and holding on to nothing in return. In it, our heroes rattle off facile one-liners and play around with childish surface emotions as though they were experiencing them for the first time. There aren't any stakes, and because of that most of the dialogue centres around how everything is very desperate and the Last Time and run! hurry! don't look back!, but looking back is really all it does. By turns dishonourable and irritating, it plays on fond nostalgia with invasive, clumsy fingers, undoing the considerable goodwill engendered by a trilogy series that began with the same director, hitting the right notes to resurrect the franchise in The Force Awakens--and continued with a genuine auteur piece in Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi that seems a unicorn in an increasingly fearful marketplace. Those films, whatever their flaws, were for fans that had grown up in the last forty-two years: the one for their remembered joys, the other for their grieved losses. This one's for an algorithm.