#walter chaw

[steveyockey]

The funniest thing about the film is none of them will be remembered. Everyone will be forgotten. There is no point to any of the things that are supposed to matter, and too little attention paid to the... Look, Wordsworth said it best in my favourite poem, "Tintern Abbey." He writes, "The best portions of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love." And so you carry on with hard choices pushed against your breast. Not whether you'll be left by people you love, that's out of your hands, but as to what your response will be to having your worldview first set, then confirmed, over and over and over again, by these sad people in whom you've planted what you've lost, only to see it disappear once more. "I'm a fool," you could say, and you could live in the salt of it, barren and afraid to trust again. Or you could say, "They're a fool," and nurse what's left of you in a warmth you reserve for the people you've taken for granted--who've kept the fire going while you were out there looking for life in the chests of people afraid of dying.

Walter Chaw, “The Banshees of Inisherin (2022),” December 3, 2022.

[luntfontanne]

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

****/**** starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert by Wal

https://twitter.com/dunkwun/status/1509934008699809797

[davidhudson]

Happy 83rd, Walter Hill.

[thecommoncurator]

WW84 was baaaaaad y’all.

[steveyockey]

There will be a time when I can no longer recall that which means the most to me. Seventeen years after my father's death, I no longer remember the sound of his laughter. If my sister doesn't, and if my mother dies of the cancer that is devouring her, who will be left who does? Is my memory of the things I treasure the aspect of myself by which I define myself? It's not just the memory, right, but the sensation that comes with the experience of it, too. I made my dad laugh so hard one Christmas that my in-laws commented on it when he died, how nice it was that we had that moment before he was gone. But said moment has faded, and my in-laws are gone now, too. Another five, ten, twenty, certainly not more than thirty years on and all of it will be gone and I will be someone completely different for its loss. Is memory the anchor that keeps me tethered to an identity bobbing there on the surface of an ocean of time?

Walter Chaw, “Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020),” Film Freak Central, November 13, 2020.

[vivian-bell]

James Wong Howe’s Way with Light

Throughout his prolific career, the Oscar-winning cinematographer mixed technical ingenuity with the vulnerability and longing of an outside

Wong Howe traveled a circuitous route to his vocation. After the death of his father in 1914, he fled his abusive stepmother and the bigoted community in Pasco to seek his fortunes in Oregon, settling for a time in Portland, where he found minor fame as a local prizefighter. Then he moved to California with dreams of becoming an aviator, only to discover that the Chinese people there were limited to working in menial jobs as restaurant workers, launderers, and delivery boys. It was during a stint at a photography studio that Wong Howe taught himself the basics of the camera and various film stocks. This expertise came in handy when he happened upon a shoot for a Mack Sennett movie in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. One of Sennett’s crew members—a man Wong Howe had once boxed with—advised him to seek out Alvin Wyckoff, who had served as the cinematographer on dozens of Cecil B. DeMille’s pictures and was the head of the camera department at Lasky Studios. Wong Howe arrived at Lasky hoping to land a gig, and when he was denied entry by a puzzled guard, he scaled a fence and talked himself into a job carrying camera equipment. From this humble beginning in 1917, he went on to become one of the most celebrated and best-paid cinematographers in Hollywood.

[theputterer]

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

****/**** starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert by Wal

fantastic (spoiler-y!) review of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

[cristalfele-blog]

Telluride '16: La La Land

*/**** starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Finn Wittrock, J.K. Simmons written and directed by Damien Chazelle by Walter Chaw Damien Chazelle's La La Land is sort of like Down With Love and also sort of like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, derivative in the way that things are derivative when they have no real knowledge of or even maybe affection for the things from which they ostensibly derive. At the least, the picture demonstrates no real knowledge of the Hollywood musical. It's homage in the same way that "Stranger Things" is homage. It's beard oil, suspenders, and craft beer: The Movie. It's homage the way that putting a tutu on a dog pays homage to ballet. When something is this familiar, its set-pieces need to be extraordinary. Howard Hawks understood this. Vincente Minnelli, of course. Stanley Donen? Stop yourself. Yes. When Chazelle does the two or three blow-out sequences meant to dazzle, all they do is seem psychotic. The best thing about his Whiplash is arguably its editing. (It won the Oscar.) Now imagine Brigadoon cut like that. Consider the scene in La La Land that ends in a swimming pool, camera spinning deliriously around in a circle like something drowning...

Ça m’a fait un bien fou de relire hier soir cette critique aussi drôle que méchante de La La Land, par Walter Chaw, pour me sentir moins seul. J’ai quand même aimé le film plus que lui, mais je suis tout à fait d’accord avec ce passage, l’ouverture de son texte:

“Damien Chazelle's La La Land is sort of like Down With Love and also sort of like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, derivative in the way that things are derivative when they have no real knowledge of or even maybe affection for the things from which they ostensibly derive. At the least, the picture demonstrates no real knowledge of the Hollywood musical. It's homage in the same way that "Stranger Things" is homage. It's beard oil, suspenders, and craft beer: The Movie. It's homage the way that putting a tutu on a dog pays homage to ballet.”

Et ça:

“They base their relationship on Rebel Without a Cause, by the way, which is only stupid for anyone who's seen Rebel Without a Cause. I do like this plot point because it suggests the filmmakers understood that Gosling has some of the same qualities as James Dean and went ahead and made him the lead in a musical anyway. “