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TIFF â21: You Are Not My Mother
**/****
starring Hazel Doupe, Paul Reid, Carolyn Bracken, Ingrid Craigie
written and directed by Kate Dolan
by Bill Chambers Although I called last yearâs iteration of the Festival âthe COVID-19 TIFF,â itâs really the 2021 crop of films that have been shaped by the pandemic, formally and, perhaps as a result, conceptually, the way Jørgen Leth wound up with five dissimilar incarnations of his experimental short The Perfect Human when Lars von Trier tasked him with remaking it under different sets of âobstructions.â In a charming pre-taped intro that saw her receiving trick-or-treaters (points for creativity), writer-director Kate Dolan talked about how difficult it was shooting You Are Not My Mother during the second lockdown in Ireland, but thereâs a low-key expressionism to the film that might be a happy accident, a bonus stemming from compromise. Our young heroine navigates a near-apocalyptically empty suburbia, which feels not necessarily true, but right, externalizing her feelings of isolation along with her vulnerability. The movie isnât pushing any envelopes, however, and is, to some extent, modest to a fault.
TIFF â21: Mothering Sunday
**/****
starring Odessa Young, Josh OâConnor, Sope Dirisu, Olivia Colman
screenplay by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift
directed by Eva Husson
by Bill Chambers An orphan groomed for servitude, young Jane (Odessa Young) is a maid in the employ of aristocratic couple the Nivens in post-WWI England. Jane is quiet, dutiful, mindful of the cloud of sorrow hanging over her employers, who lost a child to the war. (We infer that itâs left Mrs. Niven (Olivia Colman) catatonic and Mr. Niven (a grizzled Colin Firth) a babbling mess as he tries to fill the silences.) Jane is also, we glean from inserts of word prompts from her notebooks, a listener, hoarding material for some writing project we see her working on years later, boyfriend Donald (Sope Dirisu) close by to serve as a sounding board. Mothering Sunday, the UK version of Motherâs Day, arrives and the Nivens give motherless Jane the day off, which she spends in bed with the neighboursâ son, Paul (Josh OâConnor), who appears to have counted his blessings upon returning from the battlefield and refuses to risk disappointing his parents by breaking off his engagement to a woman of means for a maid, despite his obvious affection for Jane. Eventually, Paul takes off to go meet his fiancee, leaving Jane to explore the big empty house alone. Jane, au naturel, ventures downstairs and becomes particularly taken with the vast library, her lack of clothing critical to breaking down the hermetic seal of the rich and making all this profoundly hers. This show of somewhat transgressive behaviour feels transgressive in itself, partly because the movies have gotten so chaste lately and partly because, through a COVID lens, nudity is an especial act of hubris. Itâs mesmerizing, these few minutes of Mothering Sunday.
TIFF â21: The Good House
*/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney
screenplay by Thomas Bezucha and Maya Forbes & Wally Wolodarsky, based on the novel by Ann Leary
directed by Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky
by Bill Chambers Earlier this year, I revisited 1995's Copycat, in which Sigourney Weaver plays an agoraphobic criminologist assisting the police in their hunt for a serial killer who arranges tableaux in tribute to famous murderers of the past. It's the sort of B-movie in A dress they don't make anymore, an exuberantly tasteless piece of crackerjack filmmaking that made me wistful for medium-budget, middle-class movie-movies that exist for their own sake. But, perhaps because her most iconic roles are so heroic (this is a woman neither gorillas, nor xenomorphs, nor Bill Murray himself could cow), Weaver's brand doesn't bend towards powerlessness without showing the strain. I thought then and still think that Weaver was miscast as a woman who hyperventilates into paper bags in Copycat. Similarly, her character's reluctance to admit she has a problem with alcohol in The Good House seems as much informed by pride and social stigmas as it does by certain firewalls in Weaver's persona. Hildy Good (Weaver) is a real-estate agent in Wendover, Massachusetts (actually Nova Scotia). It's a small coastal town and she worries what her neighbours think of her, especially considering word-of-mouth affects her livelihood. Maybe that's why she's had her struggles with booze, because of the pressure of maintaining a reputation. Booze, of course, never helped anybody's reputation.
TIFF â21: The Humans + Lakewood
THE HUMANS
**½/****
starring Richard Jenkins, Beanie Feldstein, Steven Yeun, Amy Schumer
screenplay by Stephen Karam, based on his play
directed by Stephen Karam
LAKEWOOD
*/****
starring Naomi Watts, Colton Gobbo, Sierra Maltby
written by Chris Sparling
directed by Phillip Noyce
by Bill Chambers Richard Jenkins leads an all-star cast as the nightmare-plagued patriarch of the Blake family, who have gathered for Thanksgiving at the new home of daughter Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and her boyfriend Richard (Steven Yeun): a duplex in the middle of Chinatown thatâs falling apart, Polanski-style, in symbiotic echo with the dysfunctional Blakes. Erik (Jenkins) and his wife Deirdre (Jayne Houdyshell) have been keeping something from their children thatâs bound to sting, while their other daughter, Aimee (a dynamite Amy Schumer, which is the filmâs biggest surprise), is intent on protecting the dinner table from the life-altering medical prognosis sheâs received. Then thereâs Erikâs mother, Momo (June Squibb), who sits in a wheelchair muttering in a secret language between brief periods of lucidity. Itâs a long dayâs journey into night in which truths are laid bare but none of the characters experience catharsis, since all this TMI does is create space between themâand more room for their personal demons. The Humans is pretty on-brand for distributor A24 in that it dabbles in the syntax of genre, but how scary you find it will probably depend on how much you relate to Erik, a dinosaur who can see the asteroid coming for him now that nobody really depends on him anymore.
TIFF â21: Dash Cam
Dashcam
*½/****
starring Annie Hardy, Amar Chadha-Patel, Angela Enahoro
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage
by Bill Chambers Rob Savage's Host dared to suggest our new digital fortresses were inadequate shield against the old insecurities and became a cultural phenomenon as a result. There had been movies like it (Unfriended and its sequel, for instance), but the pandemic subtext gave its core premiseâa haunted Zoom callâmass appeal, and having the actors play "themselves" Ă la Blair Witch added a veneer of documentary credibility. With Dash Cam, his much-anticipated follow-up (and his first film for horror factory Blumhouse), Savage again sets things against the backdrop of COVID and continues the neo-realist conceit of giving the lead the name of the actress playing her, but he's in murkier conceptual territory here, tipped off by the early and frequent abandonment of the titular gimmick. Real-life musician Annie Hardy, from the band Giant Drag, stars as a version of herself, seemingly the worst version of herself (though I gather her online persona is somewhat controversial), an MC who hosts BandCar, "the Internet's #1 Live Improvised Music Show Broadcast from a Moving Vehicle." At the beginning of the film, Annie abandons her L.A. apartment and feline roommate for an extended stay in England with former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). Boarding the plane, she turns out to be the type to let their mask droop below their nose. It's the first real hint of an impulse to troll that is reflexive bordering on pathological and seems to particularly flare up around the socially conscious or anyone who tells her "no." In the case of Stretch, these are one and the same, and after she manages to alienate him completely, she steals his car and looks for trouble in London (which is really as simple as not wearing a mask), broadcasting it all for the amusement of her followers and sometimes their tips.
TIFF â21: Violet
**/****
starring Olivia Munn, Luke Bracey, Erica Ash, Dennis Boutsikaris
written and directed by Justine Bateman
by Bill Chambers In her taped introduction to Violet, actress-turned-filmmaker Justine Bateman describes it as an immersive experience, tantamount to putting on a coat. I would say itâs slightly more akin to having a pillow on your face. Though not explicitly autobiographical, the picture indeed betrays an insiderâs grasp of Hollywood politics in its portrait of a production executive plagued by self-doubt and industry sexism, including, fairly, the internalized misogyny of a female underling. Violet (Olivia Munn) has reached a ceiling in her current job that probably canât be broken. Her passion project is in limbo, the perfect man (Luke Bracey) is Just a Friend, and sheâs still shook from a relationship that ended badly when she accidentally burned down their apartment. A scene where her boss (the great Dennis Boutsikaris) gets her pumped up about the book of poetry she dreams of turning into a film only so he can sucker punch her in a meeting with talent, Scorpion-and-the-Frog-style, captures something essential of toxic power dynamics in the entertainment industry that a more straightforward lampoon of a Rudin/Weinstein type probably would not. Another truthful moment, opposite in effect, finds Violet making a move on Braceyâs Red that surprises even her. Itâs genuinely swoony. Then she spends the drive back to his place worrying sheâll be judged for dating beneath her station. (Redâs a screenwriter.) The irony of Violet being an eminently relatable mess of insecurities in an Olivia Munn-shaped package fades over the course of the film, perhaps in a way it wouldnât have before âthe great equalizerâ of our current pandemic.
Super 8 (2011) â Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy|Super 8 â 4K Ultra HD + Digital
***/****
BD â Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A-
4K UHD â Image B Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, Joel Courtney, Gabriel Basso
written and directed by J.J. Abrams
by Walter Chaw J.J. Abramsâs Spielberg shrine Super 8 mines the birth-of-the-blockbuster nostalgia vein so doggedly that you actually wish it was better than it is. Still, what works about it works really well, the best result of it being that it offers a vehicle for young Elle Fanning that should catapult her to the real superstardom Somewhere would have had anyone seen it. Sheâs stunning; every second sheâs on screen, no matter whether sheâs sharing the frame with a two-storey monster, itâs impossible to look away from her. Sheâs the natural lens-flare Abrams offsets with his trademark visual tick. Fanningâs Alice, the daughter of town drunk Louis (Ron Eldard), is enlisted by a pack of Goonies-stratified youngsters to be the female lead in their kitchen-sink zombie flick. The erstwhile director is the Stand By Me chubby one Charles (Riley Griffiths), and along for the ride are the one who pukes (Gabriel Basso) and the one who likes to blow shit up (Ryan Lee). And, yes, thereâs that scene where the kids throw their stuff over a fence, gather up their bikes, and recreate an entire sequence from the Amblin Entertainment logo that opens the picture.
Howard the Duck (1986) â 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck
by Bill Chambers If youâll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12âł EP of the movieâs title track, performed by Dolbyâs Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas âShe Blinded Me with Scienceâ Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-ânâ-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFlyâs mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.
Siberia (2020) â Blu-ray + Digital
****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Christina Chiriac
screenplay by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois
directed by Abel Ferrara
by Walter Chaw I had a dream when I was very young. A fever dream, while tangled in my parentsâ bed sheets, delirious and afraid, soaked and burning. I bore horrified witness to a line of bald monks stretching into an impossible black, all awaiting their execution by beheading and various other cranial offenses. I couldnât make out the executioner. I wondered why my parents couldnât see what I was seeing, and in my confusion, I didnât know if they were angry with me or lying to me. Abel Ferraraâs Siberia has somehow manifested this fever dream of mine in a sequence where its ex-pat protagonist, the Jack London-ian Clint (Willem Dafoe), rides a dog team through the arctic on his way to a cave carved into the side of a jagged rockface. He passes a village in the midst of some sort of violent cleansing where gunmen force a group of men, naked and bald, into the cold to be executed, one after the other. When I had my hallucination as a child, I couldnât have been more than five or six. I had never, at that point in my life, actually seen a monk. When I finally did, some years later, I felt as though Iâd already borne witness to their martyrdom. When you first read Carl Jungâs Memories, Dreams, Reflections, youâre confronted with two beginningsâtwo approaches to what is one of the most profound works of self-examination in the history of Western thought. The first is in the prologue, the next in the first chapter (called âFirst Yearsâ). In the prologue, Jung writes:
Lisa (1990) â Blu-ray Disc
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Cheryl Ladd, D.W. Moffet, Staci Keanan, Tanya Fenmore
written by Gary Sherman & Karen Clark
directed by Gary Sherman
by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Itâs cheesy, right? He stakes out beautiful women, breaks into their apartment while theyâre out, and decorates their place with enough candles for a Meat Loaf video. When they return home and check their messages, they hear one from him: âHi, this is Richard. Iâm in your apartment. Iâm going to kill you.â Then he pounces, doing exactly what he promised to do. I went to see Gary Shermanâs Lisa with a friend on opening weekend in May of 1990; we had planned on going to Ernest Goes to Jail but were late for the matinee. We were late for everything, in fact, except Lisa, and the only competition for a seat was the tumbleweedsâa reflection of the skeletal marketing budget and maybe Siskel & Ebertâs downcast thumbs. Anyway, my buddy and me, both 15 at the time, were snorting derisively at Richardâs M.O.âthe media has christened him, ooh, the Candlelight Killerâas Lisa got underway, mainly because it involved the type of aesthetic jive we put up with for a flash of nipple on late-night cable. (Did I mention the saxophone music?) Then came the introduction of the title character, a 14-year-old girl who lives with her florist mother Katherine in a cozy little womb of a loft, and any residual laughter took on a nervous edge. Safe to say that Scooby-Doo-ish frisson of siccing a sociopath on the territory of Apple Paperbacks worked like a charm: We were on tenterhooks for the next 90 minutes or so, like air-traffic controllers monitoring the progress of Lisa and Richardâs inevitable, inexorable collision.
A Website Turns 24âŚ
FILM FREAK CENTRAL turns 24 this month and I became curious what our 24 most-read reviews might be. Unfortunately, we didnât sign up for Analytics until 2014, and any record of our traffic before then has evaporated from the Internet. So, uh, hereâs a countdown of our 24 most-read reviews since, um, 2014. Few surprises on here (longtime visitors to the site can probably guess what took the #1 spot, with 147,457 reads), but definitely a head-scratcher (#6) or two (#20). Perhaps the biggest takeaway? No Marvel. DC is another matter entirely, though. Thanks again for reading and supporting us!-Ed.
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) â Blu-ray + Digital Code
**½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King
by Walter Chaw Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma's moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, '80s emblem of white, "compassionate" conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King's film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma's indisputably powerful piece, King's film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever's embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton's cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.
The Ten Commandments (1956) â 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Anne Baxter, Edward G Robinson
screenplay by Ăneas MacKenzie, Jesse L. Lasky, Jr., Jack Gariss, Fredric M. Frank, in accordance with the ancient texts of Philo, Josephus, Eusebius, the Midrash, and the Holy Scriptures
directed by Cecil B. De Mille
by Bill Chambers A harbinger of the pageantry to come, Cecil B. De Mille's 1956 The Ten Commandments begins with a pair of ornate drapes. De Mille himself emerges from behind them and steps up to a microphone. Back then, this would've had an uncanny effect on filmgoers, who were used to seeing curtains shield the silver screen from view until the lights went down. (To my recollection, curtains went the way of the dodo in the late-'80s, when they were deemed impractical by the new cookie-cutter multiplexes that would drive the traditional movie palace to extinction.) De Mille, then a name synonymous with "director" to the American public, proceeds to all but invent William Castle as he introduces The Gimmick: What you are about to see will fill in all the gaps in the biblical account of Moses, thanks to an investigative technique seldom used in Hollywood known as research. Well, not all of the gaps: kid Moses and teen Moses, who was surely elected Prom King in De Mille's imagination, still get the short-shrift.
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] â Blu-ray Disc
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Eric Stoltz, Mary Stuart Masterson, Craig Sheffer, Lea Thompson
written by John Hughes
directed by Howard Deutch
by Bill Chambers âCinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie.â John Hughes may have had this famous Jean-Luc Godard quote in mind when he embarked on the screenplay for Some Kind of Wonderful, a gender-swapped version of his heavily-compromised Pretty in Pink that came out less than a year later. But Some Kind of Wonderful did not start out like it ended up: The script that director Howard Deutch originally signed on to direct was about a citywide first date between a social pariah and the prettiest girl in school that notoriously called for the Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron to put on a private show for the couple. A broad comedy, it opened with its hero masturbating into a pillow. If youâve seen Some Kind of Wonderful, this will all sound pretty incongruous.
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) â 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins
by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say itâs not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isnât the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the worldâwhoâs playing an immortal superheroâtearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What Iâm saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.
Sheâs Having a Baby (1988) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] â Blu-ray Disc
*½/**** Image C Sound A Extras B-
starring Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth McGovern, Alec Baldwin, James Ray
written and directed by John Hughes
by Bill Chambers I rented Sheâs Having a Baby the moment it hit video out of brand loyalty to John Hughes, whose teen movies had had an epic and indoctrinating influence on my peers and me. And I was largely indifferent to it up until the closing-credits montage of celebrities tossing out names for the titular baby, at which point my lack of enthusiasm gave way to dismay.* At the time, I assumed the filmâs subject matter was too adult for 13-year-old me (and it was), but 18 years later I didnât like it any better, and after revisiting it with another 15 yearsâ distanceâwhich brings us to 2021âIâve decided that when it comes to Sheâs Having a Baby, âitâs not me, itâs youâ suffices. Even though the travails of one Jefferson âJakeâ Briggs remain as hypothetical to me as they were when I was a kid, movies, as Roger Ebert was fond of saying, are empathy machines; the cinema would never have flourished if films demanded a 1:1 relationship with the viewerâs experiences. (Granted, this is also how theyâve gotten away with being so lily-white for so long.) Definitive proof of Sheâs Having a Babyâs mediocrity came for me when I saw Tamara Jenkinsâs Private Life, in which a cultured New York couple struggles with infertility as their biological clocks wind down. It was, next to First Reformed, my favourite film of 2018. Iâve never been on that side of the family equation and Iâm not a churchgoer, either.
Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020); Freaky (2020) [Killer Switch Edition] â Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code
Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg
FREAKY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon
by Walter Chaw âYouâve gone strange on me,â Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression thatâs impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isnât himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though heâs surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, heâs vulnerable to the mistakes heâs made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning âpartsâ or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenbergâs Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I havenât been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I donât think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufmanâs Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelowâs nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.
The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (1990/2020) â Blu-ray Disc
Mario Puzoâs The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia
written by Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola
directed by Francis Ford Coppola
by Bill Chambers I wasnât a fan of 2019âs Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, but Iâm OK with it existing because Apocalypse Now is Francis Ford Coppolaâs Great American Novel, and I donât think heâll ever truly finish writing it. I donât care that he recut The Cotton Club, either, especially since his intentions with that one were to give the movie back to its Black performers, who got marginalized in the theatrical version of a film designed to celebrate the Roaring Twenties from inside the Harlem jazz scene. And I enjoyed the bloat of The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, though Iâm bummed it knocked the original cut out of circulationâthe real scourge of these variant editions. Alas, The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (hereafter Coda), Coppolaâs shortened remix of the famously flawed conclusion to the Godfather trilogy, finally tested my patience for his compulsive tinkering. The Godfather Part IIIâs problems were always foundational, the result of a studioâs impatience and parsimony and a filmmakerâs baffling interpolation of his own dynasty into the fictional one he helped create, and these are bells that canât be un-rung. To believe that a new edit was the magic bullet is to blame the heroic Walter Murchâwho discovered the movie hiding in The Conversationâs hot mess of footage back in the dayâfor the pictureâs shortcomings. (Patently absurd, in other words.) Itâs interesting to me that in 1991, The Godfather Part III was upgraded to a so-called âFinal Directorâs Cutâ in which Coppola and Murch tried to solve the issue of too much Sofia Coppola by adding more of her, reinstating most notably a rooftop heart-to-heart between Michael (Al Pacino) and Mary Corleone (Sofia) that resurfaces in an abridged form in Coda. (Sadly, the 170-minute Final Directorâs Cut permanently resigned the 162-minute theatrical cut to the dustbin of history.) Sans Murch, Coppola sentimentally snips a few of Sofiaâs more girlish line readings, as if itâs not too late to spare her from ridiculeâas if those werenât the endearing parts of her uncomfortable performance.
Tenet (2020) â 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B
starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh
written and directed by Christopher Nolan
by Walter Chaw The misbegotten love child of Christopher Nolanâs own Memento and Michael Lehmannâs Hudson Hawk, Nolanâs Tenet is chonky Looper, a bloated, high-concept actioner that, alas, lacks Rian Johnsonâs light touch and deftness with moments of genuine wonder and delight. Itâs not the Titanic, itâs the iceberg; not a towering example of manâs hubris, but the ironic, frozen engine of its spectacular undoing. Freud liked to talk about how the unconscious was like an iceberg: only the very tip is visible, while the bulk of its mass is subsumed beneath. Freed from metaphor and employed instead as a simile, the hidden depths of an iceberg are more ice, just wetter. Tenet is like the first two Back to the Future movies but longer, not as good, and, uh, wetter.
Coming to America (1988) â 4K Ultra HD + Digital
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, James Earl Jones, John Amos
screenplay by David Sheffield & Barry W. Blaustein
directed by John Landis
by Bill Chambers When I interviewed the great documentarian Steve James of Hoop Dreams fame, he asked me if Iâd ever seen Coming to America, and I didnât know quite how to answer him. There was a time, during my adolescence in the mid-to-late â80s, when not seeing the latest Eddie Murphy movie wouldâve put a serious crimp in my social lifeâwhen the extremely homophobic routines of Eddie Murphy âDeliriousâ (a.k.a. Eddie Murphy: Comedian, which my friend Joel gave to me on vinyl for my 12th birthday) constituted the lingua franca of my peers, for worse or for worse. This was also the age of PayTV and home video, when it was not uncommon to watch a film you liked over and over again until you practically fused with it; I liked Coming to America. I liked it, and lots of kids my age liked it, I suspect, because it made us feel like adults with its titties and swears but basically coddled us with a plot out of Disney and a laid-back vibe to match. Iâd soured on it in the years since, partly out of fear it was a low-key minstrel show. Iâm still not sure that it isnât, but anyway, in answer to Jamesâs question, I said âyep.â
The Goonies (1985) + Beetlejuice (1988) â 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital
THE GOONIES
*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green
screenplay by Chris Columbus
directed by Richard Donner
Beetle Juice
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A-
starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren
directed by Tim Burton
by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw and Alex Jackson already covered The Goonies and Beetlejuice (hereafter Beetle Juice), respectively, for our humble little website, I feel obliged to say something about these films before moving on to the technical portion of this review. Firstly, I donât think Iâd seen The Goonies from beginning to end since the â80s, and it took me a week to get through it this time. I summed up the experience on Letterboxd as âlike being buried alive in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese,â which was equally true no matter where I started from; The Goonies is just so screamy. To a certain extent, thatâs verisimilitudeâthis is, after all, a movie about a gaggle of teens and preteens on a treasure hunt, hopped up on sugar, hormones, and the fantasy of instant wealth. But it isnât merely that theyâre rambunctiousâtheyâre also mean.
Stephen King: 5-Movie Collection â Blu-ray Disc
THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
****/**** Image C Sound A
starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by David Cronenberg
by Walter Chaw Michael Kamenâs score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shoreâs work that if I didnât know better⌠Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. Whatâs sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how like opera they areâso like opera, in fact, that The Fly was eventually turned into one. Each is in some way about the loss of the self to love and all those elevated metaphors for love like body transformation, breakdown, decay, death. He is a poet of liebestraum. His films are suffused with it, as well asâhereâs another German term for youâoverwhelming waves of Weltschmerz. The Dead Zone was the first Cronenberg feature since 1979âs Fast Company not scored by Shore; the two would never be separated again. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE article published at the time of The Dead Zoneâs release (1983), Cronenberg tells of producer Dino De Laurentiis desiring a ânameâ composer and discarding Shore before landing on Kamen, then fresh off Alan Parkerâs Pink Floyd: The Wall. I donât think Cronenberg gave up that kind of control again. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller and home to one of only a handful of lead roles for Christopher Walken, whoâs idol-handsome but, you know, off-tempo. A curious affliction for a trained, gifted hoofer, youâll agree. I used to refer to Cronenberg as an insect anthropologist, an alien observer, and thatâs true, I think. But as I grow older and, minute-by-minute, devastation-upon-devastation, immensely, geometrically wearier, Iâm seeing Cronenberg as afflicted by a certain Proustian lost time. The more I know of grief, the more I hear that edge in Cronenbergâs voice echoed in my own.
TIFF â20 âQuibiâ: Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom
by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some âquick bitesâ in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe itâs true that thereâs no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterbergâs Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis thatâs jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleaguesâTommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)âwhile out celebrating Nikolajâs 40th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn SkĂĽrderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommyâs soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means âbinge-drinkingâ) is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowersâbut, yâknow, itâs booze, and the four men eventually canât resist drinking past the point of âignition,â leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoonâs credo from James L. Brooksâs How Do You Know: âDonât drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better.â Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role thatâs 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.
TIFF â20: I Am Greta
***½/****
directed by Nathan Grossman
by Bill Chambers A deceptively stock rise-to-influence documentary, I Am Greta has haunted me like nothing that begins with âHulu Presentsâ reasonably should. The film is, of course, about teen activist Greta Thunberg, who went on a school strike in her native Stockholm to bring awareness to climate change and became a global phenomenon. It begins at the beginning, in 2018, as Thunberg takes a seat outside the Swedish parliament building with a simple sign that reads âSkolstrejk fĂśr klimatet.â One older woman stops to scold her, more or less, for risking her future by skipping school. Thunberg counters that at the rate weâre destroying the planet, she has no future to risk. The woman walks away in a huff: kids, right? This fearless interaction not only establishes a key theme of I Am GretaâThunbergâs ability to make Boomer heads explode, Scanners-styleâbut is also something of a miracle, given that Thunberg, who has Aspergerâs, once went three years without speaking to another living soul except her parents. What triggered this mutism was her horrified reaction to an educational video about the impact of climate change on polar bears; what snapped her out of it was her realization that she could change her ways (going vegetarian, unplugging power cords, etc.)âand potentially those of others, by drawing as much attention to our environmental crisis, the looming Sixth Extinction, as possible.