Very Frank Pictures (the blog)

TIFF 2010 reviews: Red Nights

2010-09-20T14:50:00.001-04:00

Sigh...last one of the year. Another TIFF come and gone, closing it out this overcast Sunday with one last Midnight Madness escapade, the French/Cantonese Les Nuits Rouges du Bourreau de Jade (Red Nights). I suppose I could lay a lot of the same criticism at the feet of this flick that I did with The Butcher yadda yadda, as it does veer dangerously close to disorganized mashup territory, but Red Nights carries it off much better; you never feel as if the directors aren’t actually steering the ship. It’s a French film, really, it just happens to be set in Hong Kong, and stars Carrie Ng, who I somewhat remember from my years as a HK film fanatic, though she was a second-tier star whose work I didn’t pay as much attention to as I did, say, Maggie Cheung, and who did way too many sleazy Wong Jing comedies for my liking. Still, she does have an impressive screen presence here, as a femme fatale whose viciousness would put Bridget Gregory to shame.

The plot is ostensibly a thriller, a noirish tale of antique smuggling and competing mob bosses, but layered onto the action is a bizarre tale of a perverse sexual underground, with Ng as a black widow type who straddles the line between fetishistic kink games and the kind of bloody sadism that made me nearly throw up at Martyrs two years ago (what is it with French directors and their desire to see women skinned alive, anyway?). The scene in which she demonstrates the effectiveness of a paralyzing agent on a hapless underling by flaying her alive with a set of three inch jade fingernails is one for the MM record books, and did provoke more than a few walkouts. While I can’t quite recommend the film—its jumble is a little too unhinged for my liking—I will concede that it does deliver all it promises, which is the hallmark of a successful Midnight Madness festival pick. So I didn’t end the festival with a bang...it’s been a few years since my final film sent me out onto the autumn streets of Toronto with a film-lovin’ spring in my step, but overall this year is on an upward swing from 2009. Only fifty or so weeks to go until the fun starts again...(**1/2)

TIFF 2010 reviews: The Trip

2010-09-20T14:27:00.002-04:00

As I’ve mentioned before, The Trip was the one big “I can’t miss this one” of the festival for which I came up short in the ticket draw. Michael Winterbottom is the kind of filmmaker that never makes the same movie twice, which can be a plus or a minus when it comes to being an audience member, but Winterbottom has followed his muse to quite a few very cool places of late. Plus, how could I resist the premise? Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drive around the English countryside eating elaborate meals and bickering. For a fan of a certain kind of British comedy, this was the golden ticket. Alas, my order form was in the 35th bin processed and I didn’t get to go to the premiere. A spare ticket did turn up for the final day of the festival though, and though I had little hope of any of the principals still being in town (not a given: in 2007, Son of Rambow was the last screening I saw on the final Saturday, and Garth Jennings was still enjoying Toronto) I snapped it up.

So glad that I did. The Trip was just, to fall back on a hoary old cliché, a crowd-pleaser of the first order. It’s basically an hour and a half of two brilliant comedians playing vaguely fictionalized versions of themselves, driving each other up the walls, doing endless impressions, working out comedy bits, doing that British thing where they insult the other person but couch it in a way that it’s not meant to be an insult but the target really knows it is but neither will admit it and engaging in bizarre and ultimately (in the case of Coogan) heartbreaking introspection. I don’t think I’ve laughed as long or as hard in ages, and neither had the rest of the packed Ryerson auditorium, from the sounds of things.

Thing is, I don’t know if there’s more out there to enjoy. I looked The Trip up on imdb.com, and it’s listed as a six-episode TV show. So possibly what I saw was an edited-down version of all the episodes stitched together (Millennium trilogy style), and maybe a full-length version is coming out on BBC DVD. Or maybe each episode was only twenty minutes long and used as filler for those oddly-timed British TV shows to keep the schedule vaguely hourly. At any rate, pity I didn’t get to witness what was no doubt one hell of a Q&A on the 11th, but I’m still glad I got to see the film. (****)

TIFF 2010 reviews: The Butcher, the Chef and the Swordsman

2010-09-20T14:03:00.002-04:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about cinematic excess lately and how it’s almost become a thematically-varied genre unto itself, and specifically how that pertains to the Midnight Madness program. I suppose it’s one of the big draws for that section of the festival, the chance to watch something onscreen go Over The Top with an audience primed to totally lose their shit at the very prospect. There are degrees of course. On one level, you have the films that achieve their craziness (subjectively speaking) honestly. Think Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, or John Woo’s 1986-1991 output.. Jackson especially seems to revel in tossing viscera at the screen for no higher-minded reason that a desire to please both himself and a certain sympathetic type of audience member bound to scream in joy at the sensation. On a second level, you have the kind of excess that exists only for its own justification; a self-conscious craziness that exists because it’s expected, or because the writer and/or director have a desire for the sensation without earning the right to it with the surrounding story. This one’s often given away in the screenplay, with plenty of caps and exclamation points in the action descriptions.

And recently there’s emerged this bizarre third level, a cousin once removed that seems to actually be about the process of creating excess. Exhibit A is Robert Rodriguez, who teetered back and forth across the line between 2 and 3 with Rose McGowan’s machine gun leg in Planet Terror and then firmly planted his flag with Machete, something which barely qualifies as a movie but is rather a collection of “bet you can’t top this” moments in a simulacrum of a genre that, strictly speaking, has never existed in the form that Rodriguez thinks it did.

Anyway, all this comes up now partly because I’m delaying trying to write about my third MM movie of this year’s festival, The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman, about which I have virtually nothing to say except, huh? There’s a lot of talk in genre circles about that supposedly fun style called the mash-up. To bandy the word about is to offer a supposed explanation as to why some directors never settle on a tone within a movie, or it’s used as a cultural explanation for why Bollywood films will stick a musical number in the middle of a car chase in the middle of a family slapstick comedy in the middle of a horror movie. What it too often really means, though, is a headache-inducing collision of discordant elements with no rhyme or reason. Like, for example, in The Butcher, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover which throws loads of elements of Hong Kong and mainland China cinema into a messy unstirred stew. From wu xia pan to mo lei tau; from the cooking comedy to the Shaw Brothers chop socky; from the shameless, bellowing, mugging of repulsive bulbous characters with unfortunate facial hair to the ingénues in silk dresses coyly hiding behind fans; from deliberately-artificial soundstage work to Scott Pilgrim-style fight sequences...this flick has them all, just not in any understandable form. I have no idea how it played at midnight; I saw it at 3 in the afternoon and nodded off a couple of times, or I think I did.

Even more baffling, is that The Butcher and Carol and Ted and Alice is apparently going to get a mainstream release, four or five years after Kung Fu Hustle flukily put Steven Chow at number one in North America for a week. Doug Limon is credited as a producer, and not just on the English poster à la “Quentin Tarantino presents Hero” but within the opening Chinese credits. Not sure how the Bourne Identity director got mixed up in this mess, but he may want to rethink. (* 1/2)

TIFF 2010 reviews: MODRA

2010-09-16T17:34:00.001-04:00

At this point of the week there are relatively few non-gala premieres left on the schedule, so I imagine Ingrid Veninger's MODRA (all caps as per the Program Book for reasons I’m not quite sure of) will be my last for the year. I was downtown a bit early and dropped by the box office to see if any tickets had gone back on sale for the final showing of The Trip, or Jucy, or Good Neighbors, but no such luck. (UPDATE: over lunch on Thursday I bussed over to the box office again for one more stab, resigned to swapping my The Big Picture ticket for Cold Fish, which I did sort of want to see as a fourth choice, and managed to snag the very last The Trip ticket for Sunday. Sweeeeeeeet.) Heading back along King St past the Lightbox I passed John Sayles walking west; Amigo got a one-star review in the Eye this morning, I can’t help but wonder how the premiere went.

Anyway, I wound up being first in line for MODRA not by design. The only other time I’ve been first was for Lou Reed’s Berlin three years ago; that was definitely on purpose. I finished off the Ian Rankin novel I’d been plowing through and had cracked open a collection of Nick Hornby columns when we were finally let in, along with what seemed to be several dozen of the director’s family, in keeping with the spirit of the movie we were about to watch. From its opening shot of the Toronto skyline onwards, MODRA is the kind of film that sort of demands you like it, that it’s your patriotic duty as a Torontonian to sing its praises. Veninger seems pretty cool; I looked up her imdb page and she’s got the chops on both sides of the camera going back many years. Still, there’s a forced-cliquish Queen West feel to the whole affair that I know bugs me more than it does others. I guess I sort of feel that movies are to be made and then set loose on strangers rather than screened for family and friends. Even writing this the morning after the premiere I feel the tug of emotional blackmail, knowing that any complaints will only be seen as churlish and I should be celebrating its very existence. It’s a shot-on-HD, microbudget story of a girl’s trip to visit relatives in Slovakia, bringing along on a whim a slightly hyperactive dude she doesn’t know very well from her high school. The girl is played by Hallie Switzer, the director’s daughter, which could have been more than a little ick as far as the teen romance side of the equation goes (“A little less tongue on this take, honey.”) but MODRA is one of the most chaste teen movies I’ve ever seen (at least between the leads) so that wasn’t much of an issue.

As it stands, the film still plays somewhat like a home movie that found itself scripted; seemingly half the cast are relatives of the director and star, and sometimes the non-pro acting works in a vaguely Cassavettes kind of way (other times, it seems as if the non-English-speaking Slovaks are reading their lines phonetically off of cue cards), but far too much of the footage seems like she really wanted to give Eastern-Bloc small-town relations shining moments on the big screen, forward narrative momentum be damned. This is especially noticeable in a series of stare-straight-ahead full-on facial shots early in the movie as characters are introduced, a stylistic tic that thankfully doesn’t reoccur. Having dissed it thus far (I’m sorry! really!) I do have to say in MODRA’s defense that both the dialogue and the performances of the two lead actors never step wrong, not even once. Switzer and Alexander Gammai give two of the best performances I’ve seen at the festival, Unforced Naturalism division; there’s not a frame onscreen during which they lose character or act as anything even remotely unlike mixed-up, lonely seventeen-year-olds trying to puzzle out their attractions. So it’s a mixed bag. (**1/2 but what do I know, I suspect it’ll win best Canadian feature anyway)

My entire festival this year will have been spread across only three theatres—the Scotia, the Ryerson Auditorium and the AMC Yonge-Dundas—and I’ve been missing the geographic variety. Nothing at Isabel Bader or the Winter Garden, and nothing at the Varsity, which is down to just two devoted festival screens this week, which considering the great TIFF times I’ve had there in the past is a real heartbreak surpassed only by the complete elimination of the Cumberland as a venue. The AMC emerging as fest central is especially aggravating, and one of the main reasons was on display last night. Unless I’ve been misinformed, all the theatres at the AMC are digital projection—no celluloid. Which means that, sure, the Pixar and James Cameron movies look great, but everything else has a slightly unsettling clean look to it, and as an audience member you’re at the mercy of the bloody computer servers. The server crashed before the 22 Mei screening I was at, and Colin Geddes had to vamp with audience participation until it was rebooted. And MODRA, whose HD video limitations turned the AMC 3 into one big TV screen, kicked off with a DVD-skipping blip of static and misplaced frames (and a cry of “You didn’t just see that!” from the director). One would think a festival run by and for the true aficionados of this city would have better options.

TIFF 2010 reviews: Insidious

2010-09-15T14:17:00.005-04:00

As the Midnight Madness program this year seems, to my mind, to be a huge improvement over the ’09 fest, I upped the number of flicks from that section in my selections this year...and then suffered through Vanishing on 7th Street. Still, it had been nagging at me that despite the dozen or more MM movies I’ve seen at TIFF over the past few years, I’d still come up short on the full-on Ryerson-at-the-witching-hour experience, and with one more day off in my holiday, I decided to check out one of the premieres. And perhaps Insidious wouldn’t have been my first choice out of the ten, but that’s what was on at 11:59PM Tuesday night. I figured if nothing else it would be an experience. And it was, in a ganja-smelling, beachball-flying, 300-lb biker chicks in spandex kind of way. It was also one of the best horror film experiences I’ve had in a theatre in ages, from an unlikely source.

Toronto is where, as the story goes, a flick called Saw made its first big audience impression. It wasn’t the first torture porn movie, you can trace the theme back to the late fifties with Hershell Gordon Lewis and I remember seeing more than a few video sleeves at Suspect back in the day of European PAL dubs with cover art depicting some hapless soul strapped to a chair while a masked figure prepared to go to work on them with something burning or stabby. But Saw, sadly, kicked off the trend in horror that’s fortunately running on fumes these days, inspiring a franchise that few of even the hardcore followers give a crap about any more. Of all the TP movies that have been pinched out since 2004, I’ll stand by only the Hostels as genuinely solid movies. Still not actually scary in any way other than inspiring unease over violations of the flesh, but at least well-made and acted. So last night was a homecoming of sorts, as Leigh Whannell and James Wan arrived to the reception usually accorded, I dunno, writers and directors who don’t sound like overgrown and hypercaffeinated Australian frat boys, or rock stars, by an audience that probably 50% of whom had been in the very same room at that Saw premiere six years ago. This program does inspire loyalty; and it’s definitely a different crowd from any other screening at TIFF, despite the occasional “oh, people have been getting serious all day, then they unwind with something wild at midnight” claims that I’ve seen flogged.

I can lay a fair bit of blame on the Wan/Whannell team for what they started (and, seriously, I don’t think I’d ever want to hold a conversation with either of them) but I will say that Insidious is an utterly merciless scare ride. Which no doubt has plenty to do with a receptive audience: I’m sure if I saw this on some sunny afternoon at the Silvercity Eglinton in a half-empty theatre it wouldn’t have been a tenth as effective as it was in a packed, eager and (let’s face it) mildly toasted Ryerson auditorium. I haven’t heard screams like that in there since It Might Get Loud, and yes, they were earned. Insidious is one creepy-assed haunted house movie...sort of. It neatly veers off from the standard haunted house tropes so to say anymore would risk too many spoilers, but it’s definitely a white-knuckle ride. (***1/2)

Finally got to bed around 3:30, and I’ll fully admit that I was worried about being creeped out alone in my apartment, but general ingrained scepticism serves me well. I got maybe four hours of sleep: I had a last-minute early-morning dentist appointment and had to get up at an unfortunately reasonable hour. One more tonight on my last day off, then nothing until the weekend (hopefully I’ll be able to make one more ticket trade).

TIFF 2010 reviews: Womb

2010-09-15T12:46:00.002-04:00

The Hungarian/German/French co-production of Womb was one of the few can’t-miss picks for which I actually got a ticket in the draw this year, so needless to say it was the only screening I’ve been to so far in which none of the stars, in this case the only reason I wanted to see it in the first place, made it to Toronto for the premiere. I gather they’ve already done their festival duties, as Womb has played various European festivals already. The print was even fairly scratched up all the way through the opening credits; it’s rare to see anything less than pristine pass through a projector at TIFF, this film had obviously seen its share of projection booths already. Oh right, the stars: Eva Green and Matt Smith. Which for a dual James Bond/Doctor Who geek was the cast of the festival. Not sure how many other Vesper Lynd aficionados were in the audience but there were definitely a few fans of the Doctor: I was right behind a woman in line who proclaimed “If they announce that Matt isn’t here, and you hear a ‘Son of a BITCH!’, that’s me.” and also saw a guy unfurl a twenty-foot (or as near as) knit scarf in line, only seven actors behind the curve.

So no stars to ogle, but that’s not what the festival’s about, right? (Right?) Which is okay in this case, because Womb is actually pretty damn good. I realize that I haven’t been summarizing movies in these blog posts because I figure anyone interested will read the blurbs on tiff.net, but this one’s easy: a woman gives birth to the clone of her dead lover. I suppose the Hollywood studio pitch might be along the lines of “Spanking The Monkey as envisioned by Philip K. Dick,” and then you’d feel the kiss of concrete on your cheek as security flung you out the front gates onto Melrose. It’s not an easy movie to warm up to: it’s practically silent, I doubt there’s more than ten script pages of actual dialogue, though the resulting film doesn’t fall into the “Look at my potato” school of filmmaking trap that so much eastern European cinema succumbs to. Despite the subject matter, there’s remarkably little ick factor...I mean, think about it...there really isn’t any incest happening, and it’s shot so clinically as to make Dead Ringers seem positively loud and goopy by comparison. As for the two leads, even ostensibly aged to her late forties (the makeup effects in this movie give new meaning to the word “minimalist”) Eva Green on the big screen still has a smile that’s like standing a bit too close to the sun and remains one of the most captivating actresses working today. Once you get take in the fact that her character is most likely completely insane from about the half hour point onwards, it's a brave performance. This is the first non-Doctor thing I’ve seen Matt Smith in, and though the guy may not have a lot of arrows in his acting quiver that I can see—“gangly babbling genius” and a degree or two to each side of that seems to be his range—but it does suit the character here and he’s a surprisingly engaging big-screen presence. So if heady, realistic science fiction is your thing (if you liked Primer, you’d probably dig this), you could certainly do tons worse. (***1/2)

TIFF 2010 reviews: Submarine

2010-09-14T15:39:00.004-04:00

Not once have I actually gone to any of the festival screenings of films that have won awards at TIFF. Sometimes one can pick up on the buzz, the news of Slumdog Millionaire of Juno enrapturing audiences and getting a healthy shove towards award season spreads meme-like through the ticket holder and rush lines, but not once have I actually caught any of the festival hits during the run of TIFF. Today’s screening of Submarine made me think I was witnessing this year’s surprise in the making. Imagine a Wes Anderson re-imagining of the early Adrian Mole books and you’ve got the wonderfulness that is Richard Ayoade’s debut feature. Ayoade is probably best known to Anglophile hipsters from TV shows like “The Mighty Boosh” and “The IT Crowd,” on both sides of the camera; he’s your standard BBC-produced actor-writer-director. Submarine was one of my gotta-see picks, but I actually traded a premiere ticket for this second screening (damn Sunday night scheduling, with count ‘em FOUR flicks I wanted to see all playing simultaneously the other night). It made the list due to, well, being set in my beloved Wales. I’m a man of simple pleasures. Plus it stars Sally Hawkins, who’s rapidly becoming one of my absolute favourite British actresses.

The whole cast is stellar: Cymru native Craig Robinson stars as this year’s cinematic Holden Caulfield, and shares a scene with his Hawkins that’s a master class in whipcrack comic timing and reaction shots. Also on hand is Noah Taylor, all grown up from his earlier arthouse starmaking roles in The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting; Paddy Considine, an absolute riot as a bullshit-peddling self-help guru with the world’s reigning champion comedic mullet (Submarine is set in late 1986, so it’s not just an ironic affectation) and, though I hadn’t made the connection until she first appeared onscreen, Yasmin Paige from "The Sarah Jane Adventures" who, if Matt Smith shows up at the Womb premiere tonight, makes this quite the Russell T. Davies’ casting office day for me.

The main reason I was pissed for not getting the opening night of The Trip in the ticket draw was missing what I assumed would be the funniest Q&A of the festival. This one made up for it. Ayoade was already playing to an adoring crowd when he riffed on the various viewers sidling up the aisle and was typically British in his self-deprecating comments as to his directorial skills. In all honesty I don’t know if Submarine is bound for the Audience Award this year; the programming assistant who intro’d the screening did say that there had been a bit of a groundswell after opening night and the director and cast were suddenly finding themselves doing a fair bit of press, so maybe I’ll be cheerfully proven wrong. At any rate, it’s a complete gem, the best thing I’ve seen so far. (****)

I waited to say hello to Robinson and Paige afterwards, and they charmingly posed for a pic together. Turns out Robinson’s from just near Cardiff and seemed pleased when I mentioned that I was in love with the town and was looking forward to going back. I also think I surprised Paige by mentioning my Sarah Jane fandom; I actually just watched the ep. yesterday in which Maria and her dad move to America and I couldn’t resist asking if she returned later in Series 2. Sadly, no. Oh well. I parted with a “Croeso i Toronto,” which got a smile from Robinson, though I suspect I may have mutated the “T” a bit, dammit.

Okay, back out to grab an early dinner, hit the box office to see if I’ll be going to Midnight Madness tonight, and to the Scotia to get in line far too early for Womb.

TIFF 2010 reviews: Vanishing on 7th Street

2010-09-13T21:32:00.002-04:00

Oh well, first dud of the festival, and it always seems to happen around flick four for me. Had my first mid-day Midnight Madness screening today, Brad Anderson’s Vanishing on 7th Street. MM has long been one of my favourite programs of TIFF; I’ve seen at least one of its shows every year since ’05, peaking two years ago when I saw six out of the ten, the heaviest concentration of any fest program. That burned me out a bit, especially a certain French torture-porn experience I won’t rehash, so last year I dialled it back to two, and wound up batting .500 on my picks. I’ve got three on my docket currently, though I’m debating cranking the caffeine and actually going to a proper 11:59 PM tomorrow night if tix are still available, after all I do have Wednesday off work.

But enough OCD trivia. Anderson’s probably best known for The Machinist, which was an earlier entry at Midnight Madness that was notorious for Christian Bale starving himself down to 110 pounds for the shoot, and then having to bulk back up again to play Batman immediately afterwards. I haven’t seen that one, but I’ve heard such good things that I was willing to give this one a shot, as the synopsis had a certain creepy Omega Man read to it, and sounded like my favourite type of horror movie, an atmospheric cranking up of tension in a surreal cityscape. In his introduction, Colin Geddes mentioned that Anderson had flown back to L.A. immediately after the midnight screening the other night and was in fact on the set of his new film as he spoke, but...a couple of the stars were in the house (just for an intro, not hanging around for a Q&A). And out came Toronto’s own Hayden Christensen and the always lovely Thandie Newton. I’d make “Mannequin Skywalker” jokes but, in all honesty, I re-watched the prequels again recently and can’t really blame Christensen for his performances, there’s really nothing the greatest thespians in the world could do with Lucas’ dialogue.

Anyhow. Creepy atmospheric end-of-world eternal night horror flick, right? Sure, except for the horror part. Though it starts off strong, with some genuinely memorable set pieces—a suddenly pilotless airliner crashing into the Detroit skyline in the far background is particularly effective—things go south in a hurry as the four main characters (our two guests plus John Leguizamo and 14-year-old first-timer Jacob Latimore) hole up in a bar and freak out every time the lights dim. I hate to say it, shadows just aren’t scary unto themselves, and an hour and a half of “Stay in the light! Oh no, my flashlight’s dying!” gets really repetitive. “Silence In The Library” did this so much better; the Vashta Nerada put these darkness monsters to shame. And while I hate to whine about a movie for not serving everything up neatly on a platter, there’s never any resolution or explanation as to why nearly everyone on earth went poof when the power went out, and by the time the end credits rolled that payoff is about all that would have made up for the preceding hour and a bit of tedium. Might be the Rapture, might be a cosmic reset button was pressed, there are references to the “vanished” Roanoke colony but that’s left only vaguely resolved.

At any rate, I know I wasn’t the only one disappointed. Not once did I hear a sharp intake of breath indicating fright in the audience; I heard one oddly curious “Oh!” (and one might even drop the exclamation point from that word) at the initial mass vanishing and then near-silence for the rest of the screening. Maybe it was more effective at midnight. (*1/2)

My day, sadly, did not get better. I’d like to be blogging about 22nd of May , the first Belgian film I’ve seen since Man Bites Dog, but I had some bad food court Thai for dinner and the first half hour of the movie was hand-held shakeycam so I had to leave the theatre and get some air to head off the potential peristalsis. When I got home I re-read the synopsis in the Program Book and decided that it had possibly not been the wisest choice after all; as I’ll be in Belgium eight weeks from tomorrow I wanted to see something in Flemish but a surreal Rashomon-like philosophical thriller done entirely in nausea-inducing whip-pans wasn’t the ideal vacation preview.

Two more tomorrow (possibly three if I can score a ticket to Insidious), including a Welsh comedy—sadly not in Welsh—and that Hungarian science fiction flick starring Vesper Lynd and the eleventh Doctor. So I’m psyched.

TIFF 2010 reviews: Machete Maidens Unleashed!

2010-09-13T00:16:00.001-04:00

Two years ago one of my absolute favourite films of the festival was this documentary called Not Quite Hollywood, a whiplash-inducing tour through the glory days of Australian exploitation cinema. A rare Midnight Madness doc, it was as wild a ride as any other flick I saw that year, and (temporarily, at least) renewed my love of great trash cinema, which had been waning in a morass of semi-respectable mainstream viewing habits and the death of VHS. Plus, I won a copy of the companion guide to Ozploitation when director Mark Hartley liked my Q during the Q&A following the screening, so I was actually pretty psyched to catch the Aussie director’s latest exploration of the world’s cinematic underbelly, Machete Maidens Unleashed!, a survey of the glory days of Filipino trash cinema. Which is, when all is said and done, really only part of the story. What the doc is truly about is the American style, specifically the Roger Corman school, of low-budget filmmaking, specifically as it applied to shooting in cheap locations, even in a country under a fascist dictatorship such as the Philippines.

And it was, as you can imagine, a great ride once again. I can’t rave quite as much about this one as I did about Not Quite Hollywood, I suppose because there were fewer films on display here that I’d be curious to actually see. I rambled on in my 2008 review about how I didn’t leave trash cinema, it left me, so I won’t rehash it here, but the flicks excerpted in this year’s montages are more the type of junk I’d rather see Mike Nelson and the ‘bots decimate verbally than actually sit through myself, though the record-setting abundance of T&A in the clips would no doubt disqualify most of these movies from SOL screenings. What really stuck with me from this screening was, once again, a sad sense of a bygone era the likes of which we’ll never see again, when one could rise through the filmmaking ranks of Hollywood by starting off sweeping floors at New World pictures and moving up to a director’s chair in a few months. Or when a word like “exploitation” hadn’t been Dworkin’d to death and could be used in the spirit of fun and daringness. The drive-in era was already winding down when I became a movie viewer, and the death of VHS and straight-to-video cheapshit actioners sealed shut forever a certain brand of filmmaking for which I have completely unearned affection. Much more than a tour through the wacky cinema stylings of southeast Asia, Machete Maidens Unleashed! is much more elegiac and melancholy than I think Hartley intended it to be. When I spoke to him after the show and commented that I wish I’d gotten to L.A. twenty years earlier because of the opportunities that were simply not there anymore by the time I arrived, he laughed and said “Well, imagine being born twenty years too late on the other side of the world!” Point taken. (***1/2)

Two movies to look forward to on my first official vacation day: a Midnight Madness creepy sci-fi flick and a Belgian crime drama. That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout.

TIFF 2010 reviews: Beginners

2010-09-12T23:46:00.001-04:00

You know that whole “feels like” concept that everyone’s always on about at work, that thing that kind of feels like air-filling chatter to mask existential unsettledness? “I can’t believe this is Tuesday, it feels like a Friday already!” “Oh my god, it’s only 11? It feels like lunchtime!” I had that vibe for about half of today. I suppose it’s because, as the TIFF begins every year the Thursday after an always-shifting Labour Day, it kind of slides around the month of September from year to year. It’s already the twelfth, and despite having been to only one of my eleven planned screenings, the overcast skies and blustery breezes that signal the official start of autumn in this city, some part of my brain kept telling me that the festival was in winding down mode.

And maybe it was, sort of. The opening of the Bell Lightbox, a gargantuan fiveplex cinema and gallery with unfathomably expensive condos attached, that has been talked about endlessly for the past few years of the festival, finally came to pass with a ribbon-cutting and block party, and the doors were flung open for the public to explore. Not sure exactly what one expects from a building that’s supposed to celebrate Canadian film by bringing it to the masses right downtown...it’s not like film fans are going to be able to walk in off the street and chat up David Cronenberg in the bookstore or get popcorn refills served by Bruce McDonald (well, maybe they will at that...). When all is said and done, it is a mighty impressive building, but still one that comes off as a big, clean, movie theatre with a moderately academic feel. The initial programs already feel a bit too indebted to The Canon Of Great Cinema—round-the-clock Rules Of The Game screenings to begin immediately and coming soon, the moderated debate “Citizen Kane: best movie of all time or the greatest film ever? Discuss!”—but I don’t know, maybe the staidness will dissipate in time. Right now the whole thing seems a bit anticlimactic.

Anyway, I only stayed long enough to catch a glimpse of Jason Reitman in the press gaggle, check out the bookstore, collect my free thumb-sized cupcake and hear some band from Quebec with an unclear connection to the whole affair rocking out on an adjacent stage. Fortunately, I had a screening at three so I was unavailable to hear the Surprise Special Guest, smug and annoying rapper K’Naan (What? You were expecting Springsteen?) and the inevitable performance of his metaphor-mangling flag song.

That screening was of Beginners, a touching and subtle dramedy by Mike “not the guy in REM, the other one, dammit!” Mills and I really wish I hadn’t made that connection because I’ve been humming “Texarcana” ever since I did. The film, somewhat autobiographical apparently, stars Ewan McGregor as a Los Angeles graphic artist mourning the death of his father, who had outed himself in his seventies and is played in flashbacks by Christopher Plummer. While grappling with his emotional upheaval, he finds himself involved with a visiting French actress played by Mélanie Laurent, which is exactly how I hope I’ll be able to get through the loss of my parents, with a gamine-like European woman dropping into my life and shagging me silly in a five-star hotel for a few weeks.

Actually...that’s undeserved snark. The movie is really an incisive exploration of the themes of grief and healing, of children coming to terms with the fact that their parents had rich inner lives of their own, all set in the nooks and crannies of L.A. that don’t get seen on the big screen that often. The movie never becomes a Gay Film; that aspect of the father’s life is a dominant theme, but despite plenty of Dolby-loud smooches between Plummer and a creepily youthful-looking Goran Visnjic, Mills simply presents it as an honest and important part of a well-lived life. The title is a bit of a misnomer: the film isn’t so much about beginnings at all, but about endings, of letting things go...and then moving on so I guess it is about beginnings in an ourobouros kind of way, but the film maintains such a fantastic mood of final steps into maturity and understanding that it’s much more a sunset film than a sunrise one, if you know what I mean. (***1/2)

Good Q&A afterwards: McGregor is sadly in Scotland on another shoot so he couldn’t make it and Plummer was also MIA at least for this screening (it premiered last night) but the luminous Mélanie Laurent was on hand as well as a couple of supporting players, all heaping praise on Mills, who absolutely deserves it. I ran into him near the limousine pickup spot as I was heading to dinner and we chatted a bit; I was wondering if a bookstore that makes a few appearances in the movie is the one I loved when I lived in L.A., not too far from Hollywood and Highland (it wasn’t, but he knows the one I was talking about). Off to Zyng for some Szechuan noodles and then some crazy Filipino exploitation fun.

TIFF 2010 reviews: Daydream Nation

2010-09-11T08:46:00.002-04:00

As it’s been for the past couple of years, my personal TIFF experience started off a bit anticlimactic this year, as I had no screenings on night 1 of the festival. So once again I bolted from work at quitting time, wolfed down just enough nosh to stay awake and landed a decent spot in line outside the Ryerson, which is usually an uneventful tradition, however Brian DePalma happened to walk by at one point. I called out a happy early birthday to him, which earned what may have been a slightly nervous laugh. DePalma doesn’t have a movie in the festival this year; coincidentally I was at the premiere of his last movie at the very same theatre at the 2007 fest (Redacted, which at the time I thought was a decent throwback to his early guerrilla-style political comedy work but upon reflection was more like being trapped in dinner theatre improv hell in the Iraqi desert).

Anyway, my first movie of TIFF ’10 was Mike Goldbach’s Daydream Nation, part of the Canada First! program. And it was…a very frustrating film. I really wanted to love it: so much about it seemed to be on my wavelength, from the millennial adolescent themes to the stellar casting--more on Kat Dennings in a moment--to the fact that it’s named after a Sonic Youth album (Goldbach also named his lead male character Thurston…dude’s a serious fan). And parts of the movie do attain a certain transcendence: Daydream Nation has so many haunting visuals it achieves a near dreamlike sense of sadness and surrealism. Its sense of apocalyptic dread is much more finely attuned than even, say, Donnie Darko; it evokes a sense of psychic pain and adolescent anguish like little else I’ve seen of late. And the dialogue glows with wit in a manner that sidesteps the cloying trap of post-Diablo fest fare, except for an odd moment where Dennings’s character Caroline repeats one of her screw-the-world diatribes verbatim to no registered effect. Killer TIFF-centered moment: Caroline insults her new small town home as having “more incest than an Atom Egoyan movie,” which is the kind of line that at this festival earns wincing, laughing “ooooohhhhhs” followed by glances around to see if Egoyan happens to be in the audience. I’ll state for the record that he wasn’t, which I know because ten minutes after the screening let out I passed him on Yonge Street heading in the other direction. It’s that kind of week in Toronto.

Unfortunately, the oppressive (and once again, I’m saying that as a compliment) atmosphere of the visuals can’t cover up the somewhat patchwork nature of the script. I got a sense of a bit too much scattershot spitballing, that Goldbach fell into the trap of putting every idea he had onscreen in case he didn’t get a chance to use it in a second film. I had enough caffeine in my system that I know I didn’t nod off, yet on several occasions I felt lost, like scenes had been excised from a longer cut with less grace than was needed. Flashbacks are bungled just enough to cause temporal confusion; onscreen titles are used, but so sparingly that they seem like an aesthetic choice he couldn’t bring himself to totally commit to; there’s a serial killer subplot that comes and goes with little enough comment that it feels like it’s only there for atmosphere; a Taxi Driver homage pops up confusingly and then vanishes again. For all the many producers involved, what Goldbach needed was someone to tell him “You’re almost there. Just one more tightening-up pass through the screenplay and it’ll be on much more solid ground.” He didn’t have that producer.

What he did have, however, is Kat Dennings, who was the perfect choice for Caroline, embodying too-much-too-soon voluptuous adolescent sensuality crossed with an anarchic spirit and hard-shelled wit. Dennings follows through on the promise of earlier roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist; this could be her Ellen Page-style breakout role, though Daydream Nation betrays its Canadian origins much more than Juno did and I have my doubts about American audiences so quickly embracing an inky-black comedy that namechecks Egoyan in its punchlines. Casting all around is impressive, it should be noted; she’s been MIA from mainstream screens for so long I’d forgotten what a vibrant screen presence Andie MacDowell can be with the right material. Josh Lucas also strikes the right notes as a teacher with boundary issues that he makes the excesses of his character more plausible, and Rachel Blanchard has somehow grown out of teen comedy nitwit roles into deeper-than-she’s-letting-on supporting player status.

So it’s a mixed bag. But still a decent opener for the festival this year, and deserving for the most part of the critical praise it’s been getting. (***)

No screenings today unless I score a ticket for Lapland Odyssey in the rush line, then two tomorrow plus the Bell Lightbox opening street party.

TIFF '10 - The mixed bag results of the ticket draw

2010-09-06T20:26:00.001-04:00

Apparently it’s a bit harder this year to keep the blogging momentum going. I suspect that in previous years I’ve nattered on far too much and no longer feel the need to chronicle every last firing of the synapses as pertains to the festival. As well, this year has gotten off to a bit of a rocky start in terms of the ticket draw, and my heart’s in it all maybe 15% or so less than usual.

So I’ve got my schedule worked out for the most part. Bad news first: I rolled snake eyes in the draw again this year. My form was in box 3 and it was box 9 that was chosen to start the processing. I still had hope for a while, though, considering that in 2008 I was in the dead-last bin to be worked on and still had a pretty stellar year. And who knows, I could well look back on TIFF ’10 on the evening of the 19th pleasantly surprised at some unexpected treasures that fell into my lap. Thing was, the festival two years ago had a couple of things going for it. First off, aside from Adam Resurrected, there were no absolute must-see screenings that year (and that one was more for the presence of Paul Schrader than the film itself; the fact that the movie was terrific was a bonus) so among my 18 picks (two 10-packs and two tix for a pair of titles) there was little heartbreak ultimately even with my lousy positioning. Plus, as is no doubt often the case, some of my second picks wound up knocking my socks off. To this day I have no idea how It Might Get Loud wasn’t completely sold out in the first round of picks.

This year, I only bought one ten-pack so the margin of error was a bit slimmer. And I must say I’m sorta glad I did because even if I had twenty slots to play with, I seriously don’t know if I could have banged together a screening schedule. Are there twenty movies at TIFF ’10 I’d love to see? Easily. Do half of them all seem to be screening simultaneously? Yup. Sunday at 8PM there were four movies for which I wanted tickets. So I got six out of my top ten picks, and due to the backups I was forced to settle for, the volunteer ticketers gave me overlapping screenings, so I was making trades the next evening. And worst of all, my absolute top pick of the year, Winterbottom’s The Trip, was not one of the ones I got. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon onstage for a Q&A (I imagine) would be the funniest evening of the festival. Keep your Springsteen, this is one I would have camped out for. And it was going to be on my birthday, no less, almost as fortuitous as the Lou Reed concert movie being the bestest present ever at the 2007 fest. I also didn’t get Brighton Rock or the opening night of the new Mike Leigh. I know the latter will inevitably play the Cumberland this fall (if the theatre is still standing by then) but on the off chance Leigh, one of the reigning masters of the form, would be in town, opening night was worth shelling out for.

Sigh. So the only Can’t-Miss I did get was the premiere screening of Womb, which I’m intrigued about for casting reasons only: Eva Green and Matt Smith. Considering I’m proudly both a James Bond geek and a Doctor Who nerd, the merest possibility of Vesper and/or the Eleventh showing up for a Q&A makes me all Quigley down under. What else...my weekend kicks off with Daydream Nation, which is apparently a bit more press-worthy than I’d figured, as Kat Dennings is on the cover of both Now and the TIFF Now insert this week. Then I’ve got nothing on my b-day for the first time since, I think, 2003, and though I’m being taken dancing at Synthpop Saturday that night, I’m still going to check in at the box office off and on in case any Trip tix get released. Beginners (Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer); Machete Maidens Unleashed! which I’m actually quite looking forward to as I saw Mark Hartley’s earlier appearance at TIFF two years ago and Not Quite Hollywood was one of my favourite movies of that fest; three Midnight Madness flicks this year as, like I’ve mentioned, it’s a much better crop in that program than there was last year; and I went by the BO this morning and picked one up for The Big Picture which brings my total to eleven, unless tix for Jucy, Brighton Rock, Lapland Odyssey or Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame come back into availability.

So that’s where it stands right now. Three days until TIFF ’10 begins, four days until my first screening. Come on Festival...there’s an uphill climb ahead to win my heart back, but I have faith.

TIFF '10 - choices, choices...

2010-08-24T20:56:00.001-04:00

Man, was it hard this year.

I really hope this residual lack of enthusiasm on my part dissipates soon. Waking up this morning (hell, yesterday for that matter) I felt some of the old TIFF giddiness, that sense that Program Book Day is like my Christmas and Birthday wrapped up in one, that the Highlight Of My Fall was fast approaching and the textbook-sized book that seems to retain that fresh ink smell through years of sitting on my bookshelf (except for last year’s, which still has the faint aroma of paint as it spent enough time in The Tent at Nathan Philips Square) was just waiting for my annual excited lunchtime pilgrimage and “oh, is that my phone?” afternoon perusal. Note to the organizers: when the Bell Lightbox is fully open and serving as TIFF HQ, will we once again have more than one year in a row where the box office is at the same location? Anyway, 12 noon hit and I was racing down King St. to the corner of Peter, already seeing the crowds perched on planters filling out their ticket forms. I turned over my tickets and was handed the Program Book and form. No swag bag this year? September 2nd apparently. Hmm. And tradition takes another whack in the nads.

Anyway, the afternoon passed as it does every year, scanning the book, highlighting potential titles in the index and cross-referencing with the schedule. I have to say, there are a few Absolute Can’t Miss titles this year. I already mentioned The Trip, which has its first screening the evening of my birthday. Womb stars both Eva Green and Matt Smith and seems like a creepy, vaguely science fiction experience but with that cast I’d be all over it no matter the genre. Submarine: set in Wales and starring Sally Hawkins and Patty Considine? Sold. Observations...no Dialogues this year? Shame. Bruce freaking Springsteen is a Maverick guest? Y’know, tempting, but I know that’ll be the hot ticket of the fest, no sense getting excited about it. So I won’t see any up-close-and-personals this year. Oh well. There are actually a few Midnight Madness titles I’m into this year, Colin Geddes really turned it around after last year’s sequel- and Megan Fox-heavy program. It’s also cool to see directors like Mark Hartley and Takashi Miike in the supposedly more reputable programs after tenures in MM.

Then comee the evening, and my usual joyous playing with spreadsheets to plot out a schedule. I’m only taking three days off this year rather than six, but with the TIFF going to eleven days for 2010 I figured I would still have a sked with plenty of gaps. I’ve got my book of ten and I’ll try and pick up two or three more once the individual tix go on sale. And then the gambling comes in. I’m thinking I will probably be able to score a ticket for a later screening of Machete Maidens Unleashed! so I shouldn’t waste a draw choice on that one, right? And I run into a fairly big hurdle...I can’t make what I want to see fit! I’ve got all these days with two movies eight hours apart, or there’s an evening with four movies all at once I want to check out and I can’t decide which one is least likely to play the Varsity in October. Worst of all, on one of the days I’m taking as vacation, I’ve got one screening, in the evening! I might as well go to the office and bank my holidays.

Crap. Oh well. I’ve pounded out a top ten picks and ten backups. Here we go, top ten picks:
Daydream Nation
Bad Faith
The Trip
Beginners
Submarine
Vanishing on 7th Street
Another Year
Womb
Brighton Rock
Red Nights

And my 2nd choices:
Easy Money
Machete Maidens Unleashed!
Client 9
The Big Picture
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
22nd of May
Modra
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Dhobi Ghat
13 Assassins

Some of my backups really should have been among my main picks. If I don’t get into Dhobi Ghat that’ll be the umpteenth year I haven’t caught an Indian movie. And Herzog in 3-D? Meh, who knows, two years ago I wound up with opening night of It Might Get Loud as a fallback pick, so I could well be surprised. So of my main ten...one Canadian film, only one (!) with subtitles, two MM, no documentaries, and a Mike Leigh film which I know will play in the fall but part of my resolution list for this year is to catch at least one high-profile big-name director and I am a huge Leigh fan so if he shows for a Q&A and Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent join him onstage I’ll have had a great night.

Cross your fingers for a fortuitous bin number, and away we go.

TIFF 2010...the early days

2010-07-28T13:01:00.004-04:00

It’s been far too long. Last November is when I updated this blog, and that was about the trip to Britain rather than strictly cinematic ponderings (gotta say, I was surprised when Harry Brown finally came out theatrically here and was greeted with critical dislike-up-to-indifference and commercial meh), and as I guess is appropriate for someone who’d essentially thrown in the towel when it comes to pursuing writing as a career, I’m worried about the “use it or lose it” mental muscle atrophy. So, with a bit over six weeks to go before TIFF, a whack of titles for the Galas and Special Presentations have been released and the slow rev up into pants-wetting celeb worship as practiced by our supposedly savvy and jaded local media can begin in earnest.

There’s also, on my part, a bit of an emotional reticence to dive right in to festival raves. As both my faithful readers know, last year was my first time at the Toronto International Film Festival where I sorta, well, had a lousy time. Of my fourteen presentations, only one was an unqualified knock-my-socks-off rave, and that was a Q&A rather than a screening (In conversation with...Michael Caine). I did see a couple of terrific films that I’d unhesitatingly recommend: the awesome Aussie horror flick The Loved Ones and the Israeli thriller Kirot which, oddly enough, the distributor of apparently read this blog and emailed to ask if a line of my rave could be quoted on the domestic release DVD case, which blew my mind, but after assenting, I never heard another word..but nothing that just set my brain afire the way some previous years’ screenings had. I also saw a whole lot of “well, okay, I guess...” and even one that I actively hated, another Australian movie, the screen adaptation of the musical Bran Nue Dae, which to me rang of minstrelry. Add to that a gap-filled schedule, insomnia, scorching weather and far too many screenings in the loathed AMC Yonge-Dundas Square googolplex, and I was actively pissed off by the end of the week.

At any rate, my co-workers know that I always book off six days, Friday to Friday, for the fest in September, and since I don’t ask for much when it comes to holidays they cut me the slack. One approached me in January this year with some news...she’s gotta go to a wedding in Russia the first week or so of September. Which pooched at least some of my planned days off. And the thing is , I didn’t respond with a “well, I might just have to quit” terror like I might have in previous years but a sigh of acquiescence...which should really tell you how bummed I was after TIFF ’09. As it worked out, she’s coming back during the first weekend of the festival, so I would only be kept from late screenings on opening night or daytime shows on the Friday, but even still...this year I’m only taking three days off, Monday through Wednesday. I mean, by that point all the stars have gone home anyway, and once you’re past the mid-point, there’s a lazy coasting vibe that settles in and the lack of urgency makes for a certain sadness in the screening lines.

So I’m approaching this year with a different attitude. I’m changing my game plan a bit: probably limiting myself to twelve shows but we’ll see for sure once the entire schedule is posted on August 24th; going to try and focus on screenings that look like fun rather than “I really oughta...”; might even try and spot a genuine movie star or two instead of gooning over Antipodean directors who are more starstruck at their surroundings than I am. I’ll maybe dive back into Midnight Madness: in 2008 I saw six screenings in Geddes’ program and am still reeling over Martyrs (last time I mention it! promise!) so I dialled it back last year and only batted .500 in my picks (but still? Jennifer’s Body as the opening night MM flick? I know the festival has a strong Juno connection, but seriously, dude...).

Enough out of me for now. The Gala/SP lists went up, plus some of the Masters program, and even though I don’t go to galas and I skip Special Presentations if they’re the upper-tier priced ones at the Visa Screening Room (that price hike, dating back to TIFF ’08, still smarts as that’s by far my favourite place in Canada to watch a movie), but I still might try and catch a few Winter Garden SP screenings and it’s always worth previewing my autumn viewing plans.

So of the Galas, there are a few I know fer shurr I’ll be catching when they hit theatres later one: the new Aronofsky, Black Swan; Barney’s Version because was there ever anyone more needed to star in a Mordechai Richler adaptation than Dustin Hoffman?; Casino Jack, starring Kevin Spacey as Jack Abramoff...is it just me or are film biographies being churned out far too close to the events portrayed these days? Maybe Oliver Stone started it with W., but we’ve also got Fincher’s upcoming Mark Zuckerman biopic which was announced even before the latest round of privacy indignation. Look for the G20 docudrama Rubber Bullet starring Ellen Page as Kelly Pflug-Back and John Travolta in a grey wig as David Miller, as the opening night gala film for TIFF ’11. Right, sorry...The King’s Speech and The Town are also must-sees.

As for the SP’s, there are a few I’m really hoping are Winter Garden bound. Winterbottom (appropriately enough) is back, and while I didn’t think Genova was his greatest work, he’s re-teamed with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for The Trip and that’s one I’ll pay scalper prices to see if the three of them are onstage together for a Q&A. Mike Leigh is (inevitably, one might say) coming with his latest, and considering how much I loved Happy Go Lucky from a couple of years back, it would be great to hear a true master present his work. This is the year, I promise (and I know this is violating my “I’m not going to see a movie because I really should see it” rule) that I check out a genuine Indian film, and Dhobi Ghat sounds pretty sweet for that exploration. Made In Dagenham, Never Let Me Go, Outside The Law, the new one from John Cameron Mitchell (from Shortbus to Nicole Kidman in one movie? Right on, dude.), Tamara Drewe from Stephen Frears...shit, there’s A LOT that I want to see this year, and they haven’t even announced anything for Canada First! or Contemporary World Cinema yet.

So this could be a good year, the kind of redemption I need from the festival. As long as this bloody heat wave breaks before then...

I'm a stranger here myself: report on the U.K. trip

2009-12-06T18:49:00.004-05:00

I know I was trying to keep this a movie-oriented blog, but I do write below on the experience of seeing films in London and Wales...anyway, enjoy.

I’ve been back two weeks now as I post this, back to the grind of Toronto and the office after eight days in the U.K. And it’s been pretty much as I feared all the way back in the summer when I made my airline reservations: I fell so in love with the place that I didn’t want to leave. It’s silly and melodramatic; I was actually choking up at Gatwick when I called Genevieve to let her know I’d made it to the airport after one last day of sightseeing and souvenir shopping. Breakups haven’t hit me so hard. Crazy, right? I still can’t explain why I was so affected, why the Small Island, as Bill Bryson called it in a book which filled me with no small amount of dread when I read it a week before departure, got so far under my skin. Maybe it all comes down to one simple fact: I got it. Within a day of boots on the ground, I felt I was making my way as a tourist through a society and culture that made some odd sort of sense to me. By contrast, I’ve lived in Toronto for almost a decade, was in Los Angeles for four-odd years before that, Montreal for university and a youth in Ottawa and all of those cities, to this day, leave me somewhat baffled. Granted, most human behavior does that, but far too often I feel like an alien trying to decipher why those cities work (or more often don’t work) the way they do. I can’t claim to fully understand London, there’s no way one could after only a week. And I’m sure there’s plenty that would get me completely flummoxed upon lengthy exposure (and I will admit to a small sampling of that, see the section below on the topic of plumbing). But there’s just such a certain ease in living in the U.K. that impressed me and made me feel at home to a sudden and strange degree.

Some of it was just the little things. Take the London Underground (and you must). Compared to Toronto’s anemic two routes, the tangled, dozen-route spider web that jumps off the map is intimidating at first…but five minutes in one realizes that it really can get you anywhere you need to be. And things are a lot closer than you may think; often a few stops within central London including a transfer can be skipped with a brief walk. And such interconnectivity makes it a snap whenever there’s a station closure or track repair: a detour doesn’t take you that far out of your way. Other legends disproved: did you ever hear the expression “In London, you’re never more than thirty yards away from a rat”? Compared to Toronto, or even Montreal, the Tube is clean enough to do surgery on. In my experience, only Washington D.C.’s subway is cleaner, and it’s illegal to eat while riding that one. I never even saw a hint of the capital’s legendary vermin the whole time I was in London, yet the first day I was back in Toronto, I saw soot-blackened mice running around on the tracks at the Eglinton station. And by the way, that very day the stretch of the Yonge line between Bloor and Queen was shut down due to a power failure for several hours, until the TTC managed to spread the same failure to the track between St. Andrew’s and Museum. Enjoy the walk.

The sense of the city making sense comes in bits and pieces. Sticking to the Tube for a moment, if you step off a train and are looking for the way out, there are illuminated signs saying, and I quote, “WAY OUT”. Seriously. Not “This way to (whatever) street,” but a straightforward “WAY OUT” lit up in green. How about when you need to see a man about a horse? Looking around you won’t spot a sign for “rest rooms” or “washrooms” or any other euphemistic appellations. Just “TOILETS”. No beating around the bush here. It’s a tiny semantic thing, but for a big function-over-form guy like myself, it struck a chord. And speaking of British toilets, what with their smart avoidance of the North American-style automatic flush radar sensors that give you a ride on the enema express if you so much as bend over to tie a bootlace, I must also mention their hand dryers, these clamshell contraptions into which you insert your hands for about eight seconds while air blasting at hurricane speeds dries your hands to a Sahara degree, and you get to thinking that the designers of the wheezing, asthmatic dryers that serve Canadian public johns and never fail to leave your hands awkwardly moist, they just didn’t give a shit about their work.

This sensibility seems to extend to the locals, which is possibly the thing I liked most about being there. In addition to being generally helpful and friendly without ever descending into obsequiousness, the Brits and the Welsh seem to have made an art of, well, just going about their day-to-day in an efficient, non-obtrusive way. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean, but as an experiment, just try to walk around Toronto on some busy weekend afternoon. Count how many people get to the top of an escalator then stop in their tracks and look around absently while other riders trip over themselves piling up behind them. Or how many couples hold hands and spread themselves out, weaving back and forth in front of you as you try and squeak around them. Or make your way to the back of the Queen streetcar past someone wearing a huge backpack blocking the aisle, staring vaguely ahead then barking at you if you try to nudge past. Okay, so I’m a misanthrope. Whatever. In England, wherever I went, life seemed to chug along without any of these inconveniences that no matter how minor, can add up over the course of a day to the extent that hermit life seems a viable alternative. Londoners are alert, street-smart and aware of their surroundings. Once again, a subtle, surely unconscious thing that makes worlds of difference. I sometimes suffer from claustrophobia in crowds to the point of hyperventilation, and that was barely an issue the entire time I was in the U.K. I'll concede that Harrods was pretty bad, and I imagine that the week before Christmas must be like a Tokyo subway during rush hour in there, but that was really the exception.

Having been fed a diet of British movies and books growing up (part and parcel of being Canadian), I’d been worried about having to deal with shillings, farthings, ha’pennies, guineas, crowns and the legendary three-part price tags, but a quick wiki search dispelled that conundrum, as England went to decimalization in the early seventies. Whew. The coinage is a bit excessive, especially considering how nothing can really be bought for a pence (I think Canada and the U.S. could also stand to be rid of the penny), but it barely matters, as the VAT is included in purchases. Go into an HMV and you’ll see CDs for £6 or books for £5 and (miraculously, to an Ontarian who’s had two decades of national sales tax upon provincial sales tax and is about to be subjected to a harmonized tax) that’s what you pay! Here’s a fiver, and walk out with your product. No muss, no fuss. Add the concept of virtually no tipping in restaurants, and a day and a half in you’re wondering why the rest of the world seems to miss the point.

Yes, England, or at least London, is more expensive than here. Still, the universal law of salary does apply: while you may be required to take a flatmate, even out in the suburbs, Genevieve said that after the initial shock, when you’re getting paid in pounds it all sort of evens out. Some expenses were my own damn fault. I didn’t bring my cell phone with me, which I still think was a sensible move. On a trip to New York City a couple of years back I got absolutely raped on roaming charges, and I shudder to think what Rogers would have gleefully dinged me for any overseas calls. So I used phone booths, which they still have in abundance over there, unlike in North America, where every glass-enclosed pay phone was stripped of its shell by the end of the nineties (and no, not all London phone booths are plastered to an opaque degree by postcards advertising transsexual prostitutes; the number is closer to 85%). However, the U.K. is, I discovered, a cell phone based culture to the degree that of the half hour of commercials that precede the feature in a movie theatre (half an hour? Yes, more on that later), twenty minutes tend to be devoted to cell services, apps and blackberries. Which all have a different area code than central London, hence when you plug a pound into a phone box to call a friend you’re basically always calling long-distance, a countdown clock starts ticking and the pence remaining indicated on the LCD screen plummets like the Dow in 2008 so that you’re scrambling for more change almost immediately.

Likewise on the price front, I’d heard endless horror stories before I went: “We ordered a tuna fish sandwich and a Coke at a cafe, and later we did the currency conversion and realized it had cost us $18!” Bollocks. The exchange rate when I went was not nearly as bad as it has been in past years, and the difference was negligible. Most of my pub meals would have cost even more in Canada, I suspect, figuring in tax and tip. My round-trip bus ride between Cardiff and Caerphilly was £3.90. Movies at some theatres, even on a weekend evening, were cheaper than Toronto. WHSmith (and there seems to be one in every major train station, and four within just the south terminal at Gatwick) have virtually every bestseller marked down to cheaper than BMV would stock it at here in Toronto. (Hmmm…could there be a correlation between plentiful cheap reading material and a savvy and intelligent population? One can’t help but wonder…) But a pay phone call still costs you four bucks if you want to actually finish your sentences. So it’s hit and miss.

One forgets how much England has permeated our consciousness until you’re there and every tube stop, neighborhood and town brings up the memory of some song or book passage. I was staying with friends in Streatham in south London, and the radio station in my brain kept spinning “Stay Free” every time I was in the area (“…at weekends we’d go dancing down Streatham on the bus…”). The tube stop at which I’d catch the double-decker bus home was in Brixton (“When they kick at your front door/How you gonna come?...”) And oh yeah, I don’t want to go to Chelsea. It’s also impossible to walk past the MI-6 building overlooking the Thames without humming the James Bond theme or possibly some Morrissey track from “Vauxhall and I” (or, for that matter, wondering why the Thames is pronounced “temms”), or through Waterloo without thinking of Ray Davies and his sunset. The train ride back from Wales passed by the connections to towns I only know from Douglas Adams books (“Ford wasn’t from Guildford after all…”, “I’ll take you as far as the Basingstoke roundabout.”) By the time I walked past Notting Hill up Portobello Road and wound up at the Rough Trade record label’s flagship store, I was in cultural memory overload.

Okay, a few more notes on my trip in no particular order. First, and maybe this should have come first, a big shoutout to Genevieve and her husband David, who graciously let me crash on their living room couch for five nights. I know Gen from when she starred in the short movie I made back in 2002, then she subsequently got accepted into a drama school in London, and her awesome hosting made my trip wonderfully low-stress. I arrived during a particularly heavy work week for both Gen and David, so I didn’t get to see nearly enough of them, but I couldn’t have had lucked into a better living arrangement. Endless, endless thanks.

The British moviegoing experience. One thing that impressed me about Leicester Square was that if you do a slow turn in the middle of the park, there are at least five movie theatres within view. My second full day in London I caught an opening day matinee of 2012 at the VUE and it was…well, different. First there was the snack bar. Here’s my actual exchange with the guy behind the counter.
“Hi, I’d like a small popcorn.”
“Certainly. Salted or sweetened?”
“Um…salted?” He brings it to me and I have to ask, “I’m sorry, when you said ‘sweetened’, what did you mean exactly?”
“Oh, it’s, ah, sugared?”
Here is one of the few things in Britain that left me gobsmacked.
“Ah. Okay, sorry, that’s just weird. I’m Canadian, and I’d put butter on my popcorn.”
“Butter? Ewww!”
I kid you not.
Anyway, like I said, if you think there are too many commercials before the flick at your local Cineplex Odeon, you have no frikkin’ idea. David told me later that it’s standard practice to show up for a movie twenty minutes or more past the announced starting time as you know you’re not going to miss anything. And ready for the japander.com website, there were a couple of Lost In Translation-style commercials for which George Clooney and John Malkovich (for some coffee brand) and Sigourney Weaver (for what I think is a cell phone video game app) got some quick overseas dough. And if you fear that Canada is turning into a nanny state, I should point out that every single onscreen commercial was rated by the British film classification board and branded with the ratings logo in the lower left corner. When the film finally started, we got the full censor’s certificate and rating on the screen. To go to such extremes reminds me of how, when I lived in L.A., a stationery store would have to get a restaurant health inspector’s certificate in the window if it had one rack of breath mints at the counter. As for the movie, well, it’s certainly Emmerich’s best, which is to say it’s ludicrous and overwrought from beginning to end, but at least has a classier bunch of actors than he usually gets, including Thandie Newton (still one of the great screen goddesses of our age) and John Cusack (getting’ paid, Malkovich-style).

Sunday night in Cardiff I checked out Harry Brown at the ginormoplex visible from my hotel window. I missed the movie when it played TIFF this year, though I did catch Michael Caine’s Q&A a day or two later. As far as I know there’s no distributor for Harry Brown in North America, which is a shame, because it’s one of my top movies of the year, a grim but still touching revenge thriller in which Caine goes Bronson-style vigilante on a gang of drug dealing hoodies just a couple of tube stops away from where Gen and David live. Michael Caine just rocks the joint as a retired Royal Marine who’s been Pushed To The Edge; it’s one of his best performances in ages and a pretty kickass action role for a guy in his seventies. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was also playing in Cardiff, and I kind of regret not seeing it, as it’s not out here in North America yet. The different release schedules of major films is a bit disorienting: I saw the trailer for the “upcoming” Law-Abiding Citizen, and Where The Wild Things Are will be arriving in the U.K. in mid-December. On the other hand, The Boat That Rocked, re-edited and re-titled as Pirate Radio for its North American release of a few weeks ago, is already on DVD over there, as is that new biopic of Queen Victoria, which will be coming out here during the Oscar rush next month.

Getting around: I’ve already gone on at length about how easy it is to find your way around London on the Underground, but as further proof, here was my first day in a city in which I had never set foot before. I arrived at Victoria Station on the Gatwick Express by around 10AM. I dumped my suitcase at Left Luggage (£8 for the day), bought my train ticket to Cardiff and a weeklong Oyster Card (an all-purpose transit pass for the tube and busses) and began walking. By early evening I’d seen Westminster Abbey and Cathedral; Parliament and Big Ben; taken a ride on The Eye; checked out the Harry Potter platform at King’s Cross station; passed through part of the theatre district; explored Trafalgar Square; located a few decent cybercafés, bookstores and souvenir shops; and plotted out my next day’s walking tours. I’d also taken about a hundred photos by the time night fell and the rain finally started and I caught an overland train to Balham station. Oh yeah, here’s the thing about the night: I guess it’s because the British Isles are substantially north of Toronto that the sun, at this time of year, is always relatively low in the sky, so the midday haze both over Waterloo Bridge and Cardiff Bay had a glorious sunset glow to it, and actual sunset would occur a bit after four PM. Weather-wise, England was pretty much how I’d imagined. I’m pretty sure it rained every day I was there, everything from prickly mist to frog-choking downpours, but there was also never a single day without some clear skies and sunshine. I’ll take that any day over your typical Toronto November weather, all frigid and windy, or Montreal where I’m sure it was already snowing as I was walking up Regent Street with my Spring jacket zipped halfway up.

The British seem to travel everywhere. All through the tube system, the wall posters that aren’t advertising theatre shows (“James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Sanaa Lathan and Adrian Lester in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or the unsettling sight of Captain Jack Harkness all dolled up for La Cage Aux Folles) or the new Queen best-of CD, plug vacation destinations. “Come to Syria!” is not, I’d wager, an advert you’ll see anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. Everywhere in Eastern Europe is a viable destination. Every town, including Cardiff with its 300,000 population, has an international airport. Plus they’ve got all these little charter airlines all over Europe with insane deals. On the walk to my gate for departure I saw a billboard for a Norwegian airline offering Oslo-London flights for £28. When I was considering Edinburgh as my side-trip I found a £5 flight from Gatwick. Okay, there are no doubt some extra fees, but anyone who’s ever paid a few hundred bucks to fly one way from Toronto to Ottawa and spent so much time waiting in lounges and on the tarmac and stuck in traffic on the 425 that you figure it would have been quicker and cheaper to just rent a damn car and drive there yourself, would find this place a paradise of bargains.

I know I’ve gloried in British plumbing already, but I’ll also add my voice to the chorus of befuddlement at the sinks in that fair land. One sink, two taps, two faucets. Wha-huh? I caught a standup comic my second night there (also my third night, as he was the compère at the second comedy show I went to), a New Orleans ex-pat who’d told me he’d been living in England for nine years, who did a bit that slayed the audiences both nights. To the best of my recollection, here’s how it goes:
“Winston Churchill visited Moscow for a summit with Stalin and observed these fascinating sinks in which all the water came out of one tap, and you could adjust the temperature to your liking via two knobs, one for hot water and one for cold water. He was so impressed that he wrote about it in his memoirs. Why is Britain still the only developed country in the world where people think it’s normal to wash your hands like…” And then he mimes sticking one hand under a tap and wincing as it gets scalded, then the other hand under the other tap and shivering as it’s chilled, then repeats the action and finally yells “Fuck it!” and stomps off. The audience howled and applauded, so they're obviously aware of the silliness yet I don’t see any populist uprising demanding rational plumbing. Maybe they figure they’re at least better off than the Welsh. I had to call down to the desk at my hotel in Cardiff to get the sink in my bathroom (sorry: in my toilet) explained to me, what with its two horizontal knobs sticking out of the faucet, each with a release button and latch, one of which, as I learned, controls the intensity of the water and the other of which is actually marked with temperature gauges. For a country that once conquered half the world, you’d think the British could get this sorted out.

If I had to pick one highlight from the trip it would be the glorious, glorious city of Cardiff. I knew I wanted to take at least one side-trip while in Great Britain, and had considered Edinburgh, but that would have involved another flight or a seven-hour train ride, and I couldn’t really think of anything much I wanted to see there…oooh, castles. Well, they have those all over the place, including in London. And Napier University, which would have just been for wistful what-if wondering (I’d considered going there for post-grad film school if I hadn’t gotten into AFI). On the other hand, Cardiff did have the biggest Dr. Who museum and looks pretty damn spiffy on Torchwood and it’s only two hours away by train, plus I stumbled upon a great bargain at a hip hotel through Frommer’s so Cardiff it was! I just couldn’t get enough of the place, from its bilingualism—it’s so rare to see a sign not in two languages that to see something just in English tends to jar you to a stop—to its magnificent town centre and brand new shopping complexes that seem to have had the wrapping taken off an hour before I arrived, to “the Hayes,” the town centre pedestrian stroll…

Then there’s The Bay. I got to the hotel a couple of hours before check-in so I left my duffel, got a map from reception and took a half-hour walk down to the Red Dragon Centre, the entertainment complex that houses the Dr. Who Museum. Yes, I’m a nerd. Deal. And yes, the Red Dragon is all over the place, on every bit of tourist merchandise, the Arena, the Stadium, the Brains Beer brewery, and possibly on a tattoo on my arm someday. Interestingly, Wales’ is one of only two flags in the world whose design features a dragon, the other being Bhutan. Anyway. The Dr. Who exhibit, except for a mural depicting all the previous Doctors, is devoted entirely to props and costumes from the 2005-onwards relaunch, and has a curiously small gift shop. The exhibition is coordinated, I believe, from a shop on The Strand back in London which I visited on my last day in country and where bought even more Dr. Who junk (Torchwood mug and playing cards, and a hardcover episode guide) to weigh down my luggage. The next day was my required castle excursion, to the painfully charming town of Caerphilly (where, of course, the Cheese Shop sketch kept running through my head) and the kind of millennia-old battlements that scatter the countryside like they were sprinkled randomly like pizza toppings across the crust of the isles. Seeing as how it was a chilly, windy Monday morning in November, there were about nine people total touring the castle, including a Japanese family with whom I used my fractured nihon-go to ask if they’d get a photo of me with a turret in the background, and a Filipino couple who, of course, have relatives in Mississauga. Wales, overall, made a huge impression on me. The populace, if it’s at all possible, were even nicer and friendlier than Londoners; the language, when you hear it--and if you want to there’s a TV channel entirely in Welsh which I kept flipping back to in awe--is hypnotic; and except for the HMV on Queen Street in Cardiff filing artists alphabetically by first name (yes, Lou Reed is in the L’s), it was the kind of town in which I’d love to put down roots.

So where does that leave me? Homesick for someplace I spent eight days in, unfortunately. I know I’m going back as soon as I can…the coming year is going to be a frugal one so I can save up for a longer stay in Cardiff, some more London theatre experiences (number two on my greatest hits of the U.K. was seeing We Will Rock You at the Dominion) and hopefully Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh…once the British Isles get in your blood, they’re there for good. See you soon.

TIFF 2009: the wrap-up

2009-09-20T19:24:00.002-04:00

Maybe the problem was me. Maybe I was just the victim of some weird statistical clustering in that my fourteen film selections out of the several hundred available from which to choose were merely “solidly entertaining” down to “you’ve gotta be kidding me” and there are, out there across the GTA, dozens of other festival regulars with ten-packs who saw nothing but gems and are currently proclaiming in their own blogs that TIFF ’09 is the best year ever. I don’t discount that possibility out of hand. I do, however, have to be truthful and say that this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was a big letdown for me.

Part of it may be that I’m stuck in the past. It’s not a long past, to be sure: 2009 was only my seventh TIFF, only the fourth for which I purchased ticket packages and booked a week off of work and made the festival my late-summer holiday. I don’t remember TIFF when it was still called The Festival of Festivals, or when all the screenings were in Yorkville, hell, I don’t even go back far enough to remember when the Program(me) Book was published in black and white. I’ve just been going long enough to know, in ways that barely need articulating, the rhythm of the festival’s unspooling, and when something might be amiss.

In 2007, my favourite year of all my fests, the word hit the street in very short order: Juno is the breakout of the year. That was also the year of No Country For Old Men, the year the Ryerson auditorium sang “Happy Birthday” to Dario Argento on the first night of Midnight Madness, when Young People Fucking and Walk All Over Me were must-see refreshing blasts of Canadian kink following through on the promise of Shortbus, when there was an unofficial double bill of Joy Division movies...it was, in my memory, the year where there was a wonderful overlap between movie star hype and quality world cinema that spilled over onto the streets of downtown for ten days. There was joy in the air that year, quality and excitement that created an almost tangible buzz. And maybe it’s unfair of me to compare subsequent festivals to that one, but as long as the hype machines are out there trumpeting how “this year is the strongest year in memory”, they have it coming.

2007 had Juno. 2008 had Slumdog Millionaire. 2009 had...don’t say Precious, please don’t say Precious. Ungainly title aside, no film was more hyped, and no film could be more predictable as the Audience Award winner. With wins at Cannes and Sundance before this town, there’s already talk of the Oscar push. I wouldn’t count it out, but is the nation really going to embrace something so far along the misery index? What other possibilities are there? Up In the Air, I suppose, which I am really looking forward to seeing. Darwin, at this point, doesn’t even have an American distributor, and early reviews are middling. Dr. Parnassus will be a curiosity piece; since Ledger already got his posthumous Oscar, expect it to have a steep dropoff in its second weekend and to be ignored come awards season.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Here’s my week in review:

Best of the fest
I actually did enjoy several of the movies I saw this year. I won’t be seeing them again, but I’d recommend them to anyone
An Education
Timetrip: Curse of the Viking Witch
The Loved Ones
Kirot
L’Affaire Farewell

Middle-of-the road
Still worthwhile, I’m glad I saw them even if I didn’t love them.
Solitary Man
The Disappearance of Alice Creed
The Most Dangerous Man in America

Near-misses
Cleanflix
Fish Tank

Uh...no
La Donation
Survival of the Dead
Bran Nue Dae

Films that, in retrospect, I really wish I’d either had a chance to see, or made the effort to see
Daybreakers, A Town Called Panic, Antichrist, Suck, Glorious 39, Cracks, The Joneses, Harry Brown, Leaves of Grass, Partir, Mao’s Last Dancer

Random thoughts on the festival

I didn’t see any screenings at the Cumberland this year. If the longstanding threats are followed through with, and the theatre is razed to make room for another much-needed Yorkville condo tower (eye roll) I may never enjoy TIFF shows there again.

Why did Space not sponsor Midnight Madness this year?

Are you sure we're at the right movie: Solitary Man, A Single Man and A Serious Man...hey, I didn't know Michael Douglas worked with the Coen brothers! Oh, wait a sec...

The pirate noises are a tradition that already seems to be on the wane. It was pretty funny when it started in 2007, though.

The pre-film montage of sponsors was sort of interesting this year, though as I'm sure it is for everyone who sees more than ten movies, it's pretty exasperating by day four. The excerpts of old footage showing Toronto on film actually inspired applause during several of my screenings. The Cadillac ads where the guy pitches rehashed script ideas (“This one’s about a shark that terrorizes a seaside town. It’s called...Death Shark!”) never get old for me. The NBC/Universal Volunteers one, though...thank god for the volunteers, that’s not what I’m saying, but that clip is at least three years old, and I’m always distracted by seeing the same actor who plays the spotlighted volunteer also sitting front row stage right applauding himself.

Resolutions for next year

1. TIFF 2010 is going to be all about fun for me. I’m going to see a lot fewer movies that are good for me and more movies that offer pure silly pleasure. I’m going to see fewer movies set in depressed northern Quebec towns and I’m going to make a concerted effort to fill my selection booklet with Canadian vampire comedies and movies in which Nick Cage flips out with an iguana.
2. Though I still won’t be shelling out for any Galas, I’m rescinding my rule about skipping the star-laden Special Presentations. I heard too many stories of great films and fun screenings to write them off completely. So Clooney’s movie will be out in November. I cherish the experience of a great audience too much to discount the potential joyous evening.
3. I won’t book a full week off of work any more. With the festival practically winding down by Tuesday and daytime screenings during the week being half-full with seniors’ outings, I’ll conserve my days off and fill my first weekend and evenings with films instead of sticking myself with do-nothing Thursdays.

And that’s it. Only fifty or so more weeks...

TIFF 2009 Reviews: Bran Nue Dae

2009-09-19T15:17:00.003-04:00

So this is how it all ends? Not with a bang, but with a simper?

Last year, recapped: the final Saturday of the 2008 festival, a muggy day that gave way to storm clouds and a cold autumn rain, I saw three movies to close out my marathons, one of which was the French nightmare Martyrs. Though I'd seen a few terrific films at TIFF '08, I was still already feeling a bit burned out and let down after a truly top-to-bottom spectacular '07, and to end it all with an hour and a half of grisly bodily mutilation and torture was not, to put it mildly, a good move. So this year, not even knowing how disappointing I'd find my screening choices, I was determined to walk out of my final film in an upbeat mood: no dead children, no documentaries about Kafkaesque legal situations, no decaying marriages...just something fun and happy. Hey! There's an Australian musical! Brilliant.

Uh...no.

Bran Nue Dae is apparently based on a hit stage play from Down Under, and has been translated to the screen with a thudding obviousness that can only make me wonder how it was a hit in the first place. With a storyline that seems plotted by an eight year-old and song lyrics straight from the "let me put too fine a point on that" school of unintentional comedy and song after song that ends after one verse, Bran Nue Dae could have been deliberate tourisy camp, a giddy self-knowing nostalgic romp in the vein of Grease. But even the slight pleasures of decent tunes and a couple of solid singing voices are steamrolled by Geoffrey Rush who apparently thinks he's doing The Rocky Horror Show and patronizing overacting on the part of most of the Aboriginal performers that borders on minstrelry. (*1/2)

What a way to end the week. Crap. I think I'm going to catch a late show of Jennifer's Body tonight and I'll do a full-festival round-up in the next entry.

TIFF 2009 Reviews: Timetrip - The Curse of the Viking Witch

2009-09-18T22:32:00.003-04:00

Emerged from the AMC and what little overcast sky there had been had completely dissipated, so I walked back north under a flawless blue, dammit. I really miss the Varsity, I realized; only two of my screenings were there this year, as opposed to 2007 when pretty much half were. Bloody AMC siphoning off screenings. I was standing in line when Arsinée Khanjian appeared at the top of the escalator, and I would have gone over to express my fandom to one of the great screen goddesses of our time but she headed downstairs before I could duck under the ropes. Oh well.

Down the line a bunch of kids were, for no reason I can explain, singing Abba songs. Right, this was my first-ever Sprockets Family Zone screening, so my first TIFF experience where under-eighteens were both allowed and encouraged. I was a bit worried about this; early in the festival I’d heard from someone in line next to me that she’d gone to a Sprockets show in a previous year, and the festival had stationed someone with a microphone in the theatre to read aloud the subtitles for the benefit of the wee ones. This lead to a pre-emptive investigation on my part, I managed to stump a few people at The Tent but eventually got a phone call saying that, no, there wouldn’t be simultaneous English translation and I wouldn’t need to trade in my ticket. Still, the projector bulb did get switched off for a minute or so after one reel change, so Thespis wasn’t entirely thwarted.

Despite all that, Timetrip: The Curse of the Viking Witch (VØlvens Forbandelse) turned out to be, though not necessarily the best movie I saw at TIFF this year, certainly the most enjoyable time I spent in a darkened theatre since opening night eight days ago. I guess I see my fair share of current children’s movies...I always check out the latest Pixar, and I sorta liked Monsters vs. Aliens, plus I’ll usually take my little brother to a flick when I visit Ottawa. My own take on it is that H’wood churns out three kinds of movies for pre-teens these days: the computer-animated stuff that’s geared just as much for the parents and at its best operates on a few different levels of thematic understanding; pandering and obvious life-lesson slapstick (you couldn’t drag me to the upcoming Old Dogs if you shoved hooks through my eyelids and yanked); and Troublemaker Studios’ filming of Racer Rodriguez’ bedtime stories. This wonderfully fun film from Denmark, on the other hand, is something I haven’t seen in a while: a solid SF/fantasy tale that assumes the audience is as smart as its characters and delivers its entertaining thrills and spills without a trace of condescension.

It also bears mentioning that religious history plays a key role in the plot, and the way it’s handled pretty much guarantees that Timetrip will never see the inside of an American movie theatre. The story is kicked off by a tenth-century Danish soldier refusing to reject his conversion to Christianity and thus being cursed by his former lover, a witch who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nina Hagen circa “Get Your Body,” to immortality. To actually tackle the demise of pre-Christian pagan beliefs in a children’s movie and not treat it evangelically seems, in a year where the Darwin biopic Creation reportedly can’t secure a U.S. distributor because nobody wants to risk releasing it in flyover country, and a couple of years after The Golden Compass was run out of town on a rail for daring to be written by an avowed atheist, even a seriously demented dubbing job can’t save this one from the inevitable knives. A sixteen year-old and his younger sister chase a magical crucifix through Danish history, yet their faith is never even an issue, no belief system is ever proclaimed by the filmmaker to be superior to another, and the villainess acts out of a sense of jilted injury rather than theological inflexibility. The religious story points are there, but the beliefs of the audience have no bearing on one’s level of engagement with the story. Like I said: respect for the audience. (***1/2)

TIFF 2009 Reviews: L'Affaire Farewell

2009-09-18T21:15:00.003-04:00

Man, I really wish it would rain. If nothing else, this TIFF will be remembered for the unprecedented gorgeous weather that persisted for its entire run. It’s especially notable in comparison to last year’s week-long Dagobah-in-July mugginess. Personally, I find it all a bit unsettling; just one day of lining up in the rain would help ease us into the autumn, the festival being that sad occasion where the serious moviegoing population of Toronto exits the AMC on the second Saturday night after Labour Day into a light drizzle and sighs “well, that was summer.” The natural transition point of the seasons has been well out of whack for two years in a row now. I blame Al Gore.

Anyway, day 9. After swinging by Hollywood Canteen to pick up a flyer for next week’s memorabilia show—I never go to those but it’s got three Bond-related guests, including George Lazenby, lined up—and taking care of some banking, I meandered down to the AMC for another movie that’s been getting quite terrific advance praise, Christian Carion’s L’Affaire Farewell. Early arrivals were herded back down the escalator to the food court and lined up in a vacant room overlooking Yonge-Dundas Square, where Don’t Look Back played under the makeshift bandshell, then we headed back up stairs after a while and ¾ filled the theatre...I’ve never seen so many unfilled seats as I have this year. I imagine it’s economic, fewer people seeing fewer films, but it’s also that time of the week.

I should state right off the bat that I have no idea if this cold war thriller is based on an actual event. I sort of assumed it was, but it occurred to me later that it’s the kind of story that would remain classified for decades if it were true, so if it is based on real people, it’s no doubt been changed beyond recognition. The film itself is terrific, I’d say its relation to other spy movies is like Donnie Brasco’s relation to other gangster movies, namely that it shows the mundane yet still deadly day-to-day workings of a certain mysterious business, with all the cinematic excitement stripped away. Farewell exudes authenticity. There’s not one moment over the course of the film when you aren’t convinced that real life espionage behind the Iron Curtain carried on exactly as its portrayed.

It’s also got some very curious casting. Director Emir Kusturica plays the Soviet government official leaking state secrets, Willem Defoe (in one of three movies he’s got at TIFF this year) plays the head of the CIA and Fred Ward plays President Reagan without the slightest hint of parody or irony, and actually manages to look uncannily like the 40th president. And oh yeah, there’s David “Hutch” Soul as another White House aide. Yeah, that credit kinda made me do a double take as well.

Anyway. Pretty solid film, a great dissection of realpolitik and a pretty perfect time capsule of a bygone era. Not a bad pick. (***1/2)

TIFF 2009 Reviews: La Donation

2009-09-17T19:15:00.005-04:00

Every year, I try and see at least one Canadian movie at the festival, either in the Canada First! program or Reel to Reel or wherever it happens to fall. This year, though an oddity of funding and immigration, Survival of the Dead counted towards that goal, but I also wound up seeing Bernard Émond's La Donation (The Legacy). I'd actually been looking forward to this one since I read about it in the Program(me) Book, for reasons that now seem a bit baffling to me. Homesickness for Québec? Well, I only lived in Montréal for four years and barely ventured off the island. I guess it was just my attempt to guarantee myself something humanist and low-key amidst the British kidnappings and Australian serial killers. Of course, I wasn't really in much of a mood for low-key and humanist by the time 3PM on TIFF Day Eight rolled around. An early morning oil change turned into a $371.00 repair job, I missed lunch, and I raced to make it to the Scotia in time for the lineup. Plus I've been reading "Downtown Owl" over the past couple of days and my mind was already floating in a haze of elitist sadness about what life is like in a town of less than 800 souls.

This seems an opportune moment to bring up something that's puzzled me for ages, or at least I've found oddly frustrating. We in North America have a strange idea of what constitutes an "art movie" and by extension a "film festival" movie. Basically, any foreign language film, no matter how mainstream it is thematically, qualifies for that particular millstone of categorization. There's a story, which may be apocryphal but probably not, about a film distributor in the mid-eighties who was shopping A Better Tomorrow around in search of an American distributor. This U.S. studio exec sat patiently through John Woo's classic Heroic Bloodshed epic, the film that made Chow Yun-Fat a megastar across Asia, and when the lights came back up shrugged to the rights holder and said: "I can't do anything with it. It's an art movie." To which the poor guy said "What the fuck are you talking about? It's an action movie! In fact, it's got more action than Lethal Weapon! Are you crazy?" and the exec calmly pointed out "It's all Chinese people. That's an art movie."

True, this was about eight or nine years before the underground following of HK would spill over into a couple of years of mainstream box office acceptance of dubbed Jackie Chan, and more than a decade before Crouching Tiger accomplished the long-sought-after CrossOver. But it's indicative of a mentality that still, I think, affects distribution thinking, not to mention festival programmers. There are always a few Indian movies in the TIFF lineup, often even as a gala, and every couple of years one sneaks through the ramparts to wind up with some sort of low-level distribution. I wonder, though, if these films, are the truly brilliant ones that deserve to break out of the Bollywood pack. Or if you could grab any well-directed non-hacky yet still utterly generic Indian film, put some solid subtitles on it and peddle it as the next arthouse hit. I suspect this theory runs smack up against the other theory I spouted a few days ago about how we can learn more about a country's culture through its genre cinema than its pious nationalist cinema. But my point is that what we in this limited market think of as an art movie, or a film festival selection, is, for its country of origin, Just A Damn Movie.

Which brings me to Québec. It's the sad cliché that Canadians don't go and see Canadian movies. It's such a cliché in fact, that it barely bears rehashing here. We've gotta be the only country in the world where our own movies go straight into the arthouses for the most part. Yet, just five hours east of here there exists a Distinct Society that supports its own vibrant self-contained industry, films made for and by Québecers with very little eye on the commercial markets beyond the borders of the province. On one hand it's admirable, on another hand it`s indicative of a certain insularity that results in separatist ideology. But on a third hand, it baffles me when I see some Québec films, because I have no idea what audience they’re aimed at, but then again I’m not from la belle province and I don’t claim to understand what makes them tick cinematically. In 2006 I saw a film called Dans Les Villes at TIFF. I just scoured my old MySpace blog to dig up my review of it:

Oh, jeez. Never would I have thought that Montreal could seem as hideously unromantic onscreen as it does in this movie. A bunch of miserable, suicidal, blind, insomniac and senile Quebeckers walk rainsoaked streets, cross paths randomly and drink a lot of coffee and wine. For an hour and a half. Truth be told, it's actually quite well-directed, but to what purpose? I'm enough of a believer in film as a necessary art that I think if you've got the chance, you make a film to tell the story that you want/have to tell, and Québec has a long and justifiably proud history of supporting their homegrown filmmakers at the box office. But who is going to want to watch this? Who in god's name is this film meant for? “Marie-Joseph! We must hurry if we are to get to the cine for the new Catherine Martin film! I've heard there's no dialogue for more than sixty minutes, and Robert LaPage stares at a wall for half an hour! We don't want to be at the back of the line!”

Okay, La Donation isn’t nearly as bad as all that. In fact, it’s the most atmospheric film I’ve seen in ages, completely immersing the audience in the mood and tone of West Abitibi with a skill that Alan Rudolph could take notes from. But oh Buddah is it sad! Its portrayal of a cold, grey community that is slowly dying from lack of industry and general old age is utterly heartbreaking. And in keeping with the aesthetic of misery, the lead actress maintains a rigid squinty emotionless mask for nearly the entire running time. There are at least four deaths over the course of the film, many more tales of wasted lives and dreams deferred, and an oppressive gloom that penetrates every frame. And is this mainstream Québec filmmaking? Is there an audience for this, enough of one to make back its budget?

But dammit, like I said, it’s so freaking well-made that it could only be totally intentional. Still, the director stood up beforehand and explained that it was the third part of his trilogy dealing with faith, fate and charity (a triptych I wasn’t aware of), and maybe that’s what tipped the scale for me. As soon as he provided that key, I couldn’t help but flash back to Kieslowski`s Trois Couleurs trilogy, a trio of films that coincidentally came out when I was living in Montréal, and Faraway, So Close!`, a film which I always associate with Bleu, Blanc and Rouge because they all shared a certain vibrant thematic and tonal aesthetic that I came to associate with post-unification European cinema. And La Donation just seemed so freaking dour and sad in comparison. (**1/2)

So I don’t know. All I know is that it’s not the movie I really needed to see today. I’ve got three more to go: a French cold war thriller, a Danish kids’ fantasy and an Australian musical. Come on, TIFF...blow me away!

TIFF 2009 Reviews: The Loved Ones

2009-09-15T19:30:00.002-04:00

Now THAT'S what I'm talkin' about!

I am officially back in the Midnight Madness groove. Sean Byrne's The Loved Ones is one of Geddes' best finds of recent years; in fact it serves much like a compendium of tropes and aesthetics that define the most notable MM flicks of late. It's Australian (Not Quite Hollywood), it stars a bunch of good-looking young Aussie actors and is set is a creepy, forboding suburb (Acolytes), it flirts with the depravity of torture porn (Saw, Hostel) but injects some tension-releasing inky black humour (Severance) and surreal nightmarish camera angles (take your pick of Miike's offerings). One of the actresses is even a near-doppelganger of Megan Fox although, you know, real. Personally, I thought Wolf Creek was an overrated bore, but The Loved Ones, along with last year's two Australian MM offerings, restores my faith in horror from down under.

What is it about the other side of the world that seems to revitalize horror every few years right around the time that the American scene seems to forget how to thrill and chill? As our multiplexes get such hackneyed junk as A Haunting In Connecticut, and All The Boys Love Mandy Lane doesn't even get a Canadian release, and just the ad campaign for Sorority Row is giving me dull Valentine flashbacks (Does anyone remember that one? David Boreanaz and Denise Richards' boobs, towards the ass end of the post-Scream American slasher trend early this decade? Yeah, I didn't think so...), and somebody insists on continuing to give Rob Zombie money to piss all over one of the few decent franchises in the whole stinkin' genre...we need some fresh blood. As it were.

And Byrne might as well be a player in a potential Oz invasion. He was a wonderfully shaggy and event-struck presence at the afternoon screening--he had a certain "holy shit, I can't believe I'm at this festival!" nervousness happening as he took questions. He cited the usual early-seventies influences but also mentioned that he was shooting for some Lynchian "peel back the veneer of polite society" surrealism which is always a risky proposition, but to his credit he pulled off a certain type of creeping dread not too dissimilar to Lynch at his creepiest. Yes, The Loved Ones has more than its fair share of rendered flesh and bloody viscera, but it has the simple goal in mind of scaring the snot out of the audience in addition to grossing them out. In the characters of Lola Stone and her father, Byrne has created two of the most unsettling yet hypnotic horror film villains in years; they're not supernatural boogeymen, but nor are they the "you'd never have imagined" quiet types who are supposed to lend "realism" to far too many lousy horror flicks with pretentions. They're monsters, plain and simple, and the mere thought of being at their mercy is frightening in a downright primal way.

Good on ya, mate. (***1/2)

TIFF 2009 Reviews: George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead

2009-09-14T16:30:00.004-04:00

Before I go any further...the title? Is that official? It's annoying enough when John Carpenter does it, are we to infer that the possessive is to distinguish this flick from the other Survival of the Dead? Just wondering.

I really don't do well with not being at work in the middle of the day. I know I've got the week off for my festival holiday ("Merry TIFFmas!" as Roxy put it to me the other day) but taking the TTC in the mid-afternoon and being in my well-lit apartment while the rest of the world works...it reminds me too much of the last time I was unemployed and it freaks me right the hell out. So I supect I may break a promise and cave to pick up another ticket or two just to keep myself out of the house and occupied between now and Friday.

As I settled into practically the same seat for a second show in a row in the Scotia 2, I engaged as usual in the "What have you seen that you've liked?" conversation and found myself chatting to Joshua Ligairi, one of the co-directors of Cleanflix. And now I feel like a bit of a tool for dissing his movie on this blog, 'cause he's a decent and soft-spoken guy. I mentioned how I thought the parallel between Hollywood's capitalism values and Daniel Thompson's viewing Provo Mormons as little more than a viable market was an odd one (he also confirmed my suspicion that Thompson is not a practicing Mormon), and told him I was surprised that he hadn't shown some of the directors the hacked-up versions of their films and got their comments on camera. As close as they got, it turns out, was when they interviewed Neil LaBute on the set of Lakeview Terrace. While on set, Ligiari and James showed Samuel L. Jackson the Cleanflicks version of Pulp Fiction, in which every bit of profanity had been excised...with the notable exception of the n-word. Jackson was quite incensed, and it was all I could do to not ask "Why the hell isn't THAT footage in your movie?"

Anyway, back to George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead. Seeing this movie violated one of my general festival rules, namely it's coming out in theatres this fall anyway. I wound up with a ticket for a couple of reasons: I had changed my mind on Tanner Hall and wanted something earlier in the day on Monday; I wanted to show some love to Romero in honour of his becoming a passport-carrying Canuck and Hogtown resident; and despite my Midnight Madness overdose of last year I felt odd only seeing one MM flick this September. Romero couldn't show up for this morning, which was a bit of a surprise, but Colin Geddes conveyed his regrets, and regaled us with tales of the mini-Zombie Walk of this past weekend.

And then the movie started, and a kind of disappointment set in. Romero's never been a filmmaker with a distinct visual style, but he's always been a perfectly good no-frills director as opposed to a no-style hack. That artlessness is still on display here, but I have to say, for the sixth part of a walking-dead saga that's now been unspooling on screens for 41 years, the wheels are really starting to come off the wagon. Talk all you want about the sociopolitical subtext of Romero's films, and I concede there's always something there, the fact is one goes to a zombie flick for the trashy fun of seeing splattery gore effects and creative vivisectioning done with verve. There may be political comment going on, but it needn't get in the way of the money shot. Survival is like the Home Alone of zombie movies: an hour and a half of unfunny mugging which leads to a marathon of slapsticky ultraviolence to close out the affair. And fair 'nuff, the splatter is at times quite inspired, though a bit CGI-heavy in a couple of shots...part of the charm of revisiting Dawn or Day is seeing the amazing old-school latex work by Savini and his crew, who are missed terribly. But to get there we have to wade through Kenneth Welsh and Richard Fitzpatrick putting on elaborately silly Irish brogues and reenacting John Ford-esque rivalries that seem airlifted in from another movie, a gratuitous Strombo cameo and a rather perfunctory military group and their not terribly original internal bickering.

It breaks my heart. I really wanted to have a blast at this movie, especially since Romero is such a groundbreaker in the genre that I love so much and which has been such a huge influence on my life and writing. But my heart's just really not in it. (**)

TIFF 2009 Reviews: Solitary Man

2009-09-14T15:53:00.006-04:00

This late festival schedule has really messed with my internal clock. With Labour Day a full week into September the festival is running as late in the calendar as it ever does and I keep feeling like things ought to be winding down. They're not, really, this is only day five of ten. Still...my personal screening schedule is a bit front-loaded this year (I'm two thirds done) and now that a fair chunk of the festival screenings are second showings, that sad autumn sense of clearing out of town is already creeping in.

Today, for instance, I had an early morning show of Solitary Man, one of a bizarre type of independent movie that seems to exist solely for the purposes of festivals, that one can only imagine being financed with pieced together foreign pre-sales. I wanted to check it out solely for the cast: Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon, Mary-Louise Parker, Danny DeVito, Jesse Eisenberg, Jenna Fischer...this is one heavy-hitting collection of actors. Not a single one of which were at the screening, nor were the co-directors. Something is very noticeable as the movie unspools: except for Douglas, none of the actors has more than three or four scenes. That tells me this was a hiatus movie, something the actors signed up for because they had a couple of weeks off as some point between other bigger projects or TV seasons. Before I sound churlish, let me add that I don't see anything at all wrong with this. Solitary Man has a good script, and these fine thespians obviously responded to the material. As well, I can testify from my experience with actors that in general, they jump at any chance to hone their craft. A serious actor doesn't check out for a month's vacation; if their agent says "Since you're in New York anyway, do you want three days on this picture? Soderbergh's producing." it's a no-brainer. For all the crap that actors take, the good ones work as hard as anyone, and as often.

Michael Douglas is an interesting guy to watch, but for the past few years I've seen all his performances through an odd lens. I crewed on The In-Laws when it shot here in Toronto, and saw him acting from up close most days for three straight months. Douglas was never a favorite actor of mine--he does hold a certain iconic place in my mind for Romancing The Stone--but I was a huge fan by the end of the shoot, mainly for his personal character rather than the performance (The In-Laws had a sensational cast and a very good director, yet anyone who's seen it can testify how lifelessly it just sat there on screen...I'm still mystified what went wrong there.) Douglas was an absolute pro, fascinating to watch in process, as well as being a very classy guy with fans. I never had a full conversation with him in three months, but I gathered that he appreciated my not crowding him and was ultra nice to my date at the wrap party. So anyway, whenever I see him in a movie since, I find it hard to just sit back and watch the performance, instead I watch his scenes unfold and envision him pacing in front of his trailer holding the sides (shrunken script pages for the day), committing every word and pause to memory, playing out the body language. Douglas isn't really the type to vanish into a role, which is fine, most aren't, but throw in my own experience and I always see him acting.

Anyway. The movie is fine, it sort of reminded me of The Girl in the Park from TIFF '07 in that it's set among a certain strata of New York society and is directed in very sleek and classy way. It's a solid actor's showcase, and everyone in the cast gets a solid scene or two to shine without playing to the rafters. Susan Sarandon is as glamourous and stunning as ever; she's going to be a knockout at eighty, I suspect. The story of a profoundly self-destructive man on his final slide from Captain of Industry to pariah is touching and more than a little timely--economic fear informs almost every scene and despite Douglas' character having brought it all on himself one does feel sympathy for him. Its ending is one of those final shots that's simultaneously perfect yet also frustrating in its open-endedness, which is pretty much par for the course with these movies. Not a classic, but I'm sorta glad I saw it. (***)

TIFF 2009 Reviews: Kirot

2009-09-13T23:33:00.012-04:00

Oh wait, there's more? Yeah, Michael Caine and Sam Neill weren't enough for one day.

I barely travel. I'd love to see more of the world, but the fact is that except for a couple of solo drives across the U.S., four years living in Los Angeles and drives though the dull stretch of central Canada between Toronto and Montreal, I haven't seen much of the world. I'm planning a trip to England and Scotland this fall, and that will, due to finances, likely be the last big voyage I take for a long while. So every time the Festival comes around, I make a point of seeing a whack of foreign movies. Lest I seem like one of those assholes that I used to rent to when I worked at the independent video store that shall remain unnamed, I don't look down on American movies. I love 'em to death, and I don't automatically call foreign films "better" because they're subtitled. I just think they shouldn't be avoided, and should be celebrated whenever possible as a chance to see parts of the world in which I'll never actually set foot.

Which brings me to my big Unifying Theory of the Foreign Film that I've worked out over the past seven years of TIFF. To wit: you can learn more about a country's culture by watching its genre movies than any so-called "national cinema" that it may have on offer. Celebrations of Old Country, nationalist paeans or simply self-consciously "look at meeeee!" movies can be fine, I guess, sorta, but one has to suspect the motives of the filmmakers. But you take an Ed McBain-esque murder mystery and set it in Reykjavik, or locate your haunted house in Joburg, or have your aliens invade in Sao Paolo, you're offering every other culture that's checking out your movie a baseline from which to see what's uniquely yours and why. So this year, with the festival's inaugural City to City program on the docket, I decided to see what happens when you set a feminist mob thriller in Tel Aviv and checked out my first Israeli film, Danny Lerner's Kirot.

I should also bring up the kosher elephant in the room and mention that tonight was another first for me. It was the first time I'd been to a TIFF screening with a visible police presence, and one for which the street had been cleared and a fenced-off blast area was established in front of the theatre. Before the show, a small film crew was going down the line, interviewing people waiting in line. They were with a Jewish organization whose name I didn't retain, and were putting together a documentary to send around to other film festivals to try and convince them that the outcry over the Tel Aviv program here didn't reflect the views of the audiences and that they shouldn't avoid booking the films for fear of boycotts. A noble goal, but I still hung back and didn't offer myself up. This is how terror works, isn't it? I don't dare go on video and point out that Tel Aviv was already a city when the Palestinian state was established, despite the timeline that the anti-Israel protestors are claiming, so it wasn't built on land stolen from the Palestinians, and oh yeah, considering Israel is pretty much the only country in the entire region that actually respects human rights to any great degree and doesn't, you know, cut your head off for being gay or wearing pants if you're a woman or phoning the pizza place before everyone's agreed on the toppings or whatever else, it seems a bit odd that so many sheeple on the left are jumping on the anti-Israel bandwagon. Make an honest argument against the forced resettlements, there's a case to be made. But the protest against the film festival and controversy defies logic or common sense. I will fully admit that I don't know nearly enough about the issues at play here...but, judging from the muddle of the protests, I'm not the only one.

Also, I was wearing my Miskatonic University t-shirt today, and since H.P. Lovecraft, despite being a great writer, was sadly a big honking anti-semite, I didn't feel like sending mixed messages. But it was mainly the fear thing.

ANYWAY...Kirot stars Olga Kurylenko from Quantum of Solace as a Ukranian in Tel Aviv, enslaved by the Russian mob, who is shoved into a sideline as a hitwoman to earn back her passport. Along the way she becomes BFFs with the abused wife across the hall played by singing star Ninet Tayeb. The movie is largely about the friendship and mutual support between the two women, but also tells a taut, violent mob story. During the Q&A, Lerner expressed his own dissatisfaction with self-consciously nationalist cinema; he said there are virtually no genre films made in Israel and he wanted to make one. I would have loved to ask him who his influences were on the action scenes, because, speaking as a connoisseur of the gun fu, they kicked ass. No slick overedited operatic shootemups a la Louis Leterrier or later-period Kirk Wong, the copious scenes of stunning violence (with Kurylenko decked out in a leather trenchcoat not unlike Zoe Tamerlis' in Ms. 45, and I don't think that's accidental...no knock on Carrie-Ann Moss, but Kurylenko would have made an awesome Trinity) are brutal, gritty and like a jolt of adrenaline. Kirot is a killer thriller, and Lerner could do worse than being recruited to helm some old-school ultraviolence for H'wood.

Real brief Q&A, at which Kurylenko didn't show as she's in Argentina on a shoot, which makes zero for three as far as Bond girls sightings go this year (no Rosamund Pike at An Education, no Gemma Arterton at Alice Creed, and I heard Eva Green wasn't at Cracks this morning either), but Ninet Tayeb was in the house, looking a total knockout in contrast to the constantly black-eyed housewife we'd just seen onscreen. How does one say "hubba hubba" in Hebrew, anyway? At any rate, awesomely good flick. (***1/2)

TIFF 2009 reviews: In converation with...Michael Caine

2009-09-13T22:34:00.010-04:00

Finally! Four days in, and a day that was pretty kickass from beginning to end. Early afternoon I was at the Isabel Bader Theatre for the only In Conversation... of the year (Chris Rock's presentation was "An Afternoon With..." for reasons that are clear to somebody but not me), a couple of hours with a genuine living legend of the silver screen, Sir Michael Caine. He's at TIFF with a new vigilante flick, Harry Brown, which I didn't see at its SP premiere but which I'm now really hoping gets picked up for North American distribution. Sir Michael talked about it quite a bit, taking great care to explain that it's not a simpleminded Bronsonesque revenge story, but how it's a very cinema verite look at the very neighborhood where he grew up and what it's descended into since crack and guns took over for simple British boozing as the escape of choice.

From there it was back to the beginning, steered as well as he could by Canada A.M. co-host Seamus O'Regan, whose show I've never actually watched--I think I'm either at work or tuned to CNN when he's on--but who acquitted himself fairly well (not sure why Noah Cowan or Piers Handling didn't do the honours, but at least they didn't tap Ralph Benmuergi or someone equally crap for the gig). Caine retold the classic story of how he came up with his stage name (you've heard it...it ends with the punchline "I could have been Michael 101 Dalmations!"), and lovingly detailed early gigs and tales of Hollywood of yesteryear. The occasion actually kicked off with a good ten minutes on his friendship with Cary Grant, and when he mentioned Red Buttons I got a bit worried that he was in a morbid reminiscing mood and wasn't going to talk about anyone who was still alive. I think he sort of caught himself at this as well and kicked the energy level up a notch.

Sir Michael is, as one can imagine, a brilliant storyteller. The old cliche about "had us in the palm of his hand"? Yeah, that's it. From beginning to end. And hilarious as well; poor Seamus was practically falling off his chair. After covering Zulu and The Man Who Would Be King, O'Regan looked at the clock and sighed "Oh my god, it's quarter to two and I haven't even got to Alfie yet!" which was his biggest laugh line of the day.

To go on recapping wouldn't do he afternoon justice. The Q&A went out to the crowd, and folks asked for stories about their favorite Caine movies--incidentally, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is his favorite of his own comedies, a fine choice, if you ask me--and in typical Toronto fashion no one was tactless enough to bring up Jaws: The Revenge or On Deadly Ground (when Max von Sydow was here two years ago nobody brought up Strange Brew, which was actually kind of a surprise). Second last question came from a surprise visitor in the audience, Sam Neill, who I would later learn has actually been popping up all over, showing up at the premiere of Beautiful Kate to show support for some friends and fellow Aussie filmmakers. He's also got a Midnight Madness flick in the program this year and I know he's been in town filming something new for the past few weeks so Neill is doing what I keep complaining that most stars don't do, he's actually taking advantage of his time here and enjoying the festival instead of beating a quick retreat after his duties are done. Anyway, Neill's question was about technique, as he pointed out that there hadn't been any questions about, you know, acting. So Sir Michael gave his tips on eye direction and focus in regards to the camera when shooting dialogue scenes (I really should have been taking notes) and managed to turn even a somewhat clinical explanation of filming technique into an engaging story. Which just proved...a great actor can read the phone book and keep you interested. Huge standing ovation, no surprise. The man is loved here. The afternoon showed why. (****)

Anyway, so I went up the north aisle and there, standing at the door on the opposite side of the auditorium from where he was sitting, talking to a fan, was Sam Neill. Cursing myself for not being more prepared with my Bis ans Ende der Welte poster, I approached him.

"Mr. Neill?"

"Yes?"

"I have to tell you, sir, that Until The End of the World is my favorite movie of all time."

He registered a bit of surprise. Not one he's cited that often, I'd wager.

"Really. You know the director's cut of that is eight hours or so?"

Duh. I think I've seen four different cuts of that movie and the Wenders retrospective of that one was the only near-religious experience of my life. I didn't say that.

"Yeah, I know! I was at the premiere in Los Angeles for that! It was amazing." Then I went sheepish. "Um, could I trouble you for a photo?"

A volunteer snapped a shot as my face, already giddy from the fun afternoon and the fact that I'm standing next to Eugene Fitzpatrick himself, twisted into as close as I get to a smile when facing a camera lens. I thanked him profusely and headed for the door.

Off to Yonge St. to check email at a cybercafe, then hop the TTC uptown to Vortex, where I find a used copy of Bowie's Stage CD (the 2005 reissue with the set list order corrected and the deleted songs reinserted), then back down south for some food court noms and a walk up to Isabel Bader for today's second show.

It was a good day.

TIFF 2009 reviews: The Disappearance of Alice Creed

2009-09-13T08:24:00.003-04:00

When was the last time you heard an audience applaud a plot twist? Been a while for me, actually I'm kinda stuck to remember witnessing that...ever. The identity of Keyzer Soze, Dil having a dork...shock indeed, but not cheers and clapping. That did happen, however, during the premiere of The Disappearance of Alice Creed. The movie's not quite as brilliant as all that, but it's still a solid piece of suspense filmmaking, one of the few thrillers of recent decades in which the term "Hitchcockian" isn't inappropriately applied. Three people in one apartment, and two big reveals that more or less form the dividing lines between acts are the basic elements that let the movie serve as a definitely above-average genre exercise.

This was one of the movies I chose entirely for the cast. On one hand you've got Gemma Arterton, who was quite the knockout as one Strawberry Fields in the last Bond flick (she's the one who gets drowned in crude oil post Bond-boff), and on the other you've got Eddie Marsan, who rocketed into the arthouse consciousness as the short-fused driving instructor in Happy-Go-Lucky last fall. There is a third hand here, a young Scotsman by the name of Martin Compston, but I didn't know anything about him going in. Anyway, if nothing else I figured we'd be in for an evening of solid British performance intensity even if the storyline sounded a bit too torture-porn for me.

To his credit, debut director J Blakeston (yeah, that's "J" with no period, like Harry S Truman or Homer Jay Simpson) acknowledged the TP-word early on and pointed out that just when the audience thinks that we're in for Roth Redux, he pointedly turns back from the brink. Blakeston seems a smart guy, with an oddly Tarantino-esque backstory (writer for hire, wrote something deliberately small-scale so that he could shoot it for next to nothing until he lucked into financing) and he won me over in his introduction by saying something I've been waiting years to hear from a visiting filmmaker or actor: it's his first time to TIFF, he absolutely loves it and he's going to come back. Which may seem like your basic audience flattery, but the fact is, while the bigwigs do love to come to town during our annual three weeks of good weather and appreciate the good audiences, they tend to race off to Pearson once the required velvet rope bash and Sassafraz lunch are done with. Blakeston is the first guest who's expressed genuine fandom (okay, actually, I'm remembering Jon Hewitt last year, who attended a whole whack of Midnight Madness shows besides his own, so there's two), plus he comes across as a weird combination of Jim Parsons and Billy Corgan, so he didn't have a hard time winning over the crowd with his enthusiasm.

So anyway, pretty solid thriller, twisty and surprising, good performances...didn't set my mind on fire, but you could do a lot worse. And I swear, I am dying for a light frothy comedy right around this point. An Education was sweet, but the four I've seen since have been mature and serious at best, intense and opresive at worst. Mercifully today I've got...an Israeli/Russian revenge thirller. Le sigh. (***)

TIFF 2009 reviews: Fish Tank

2009-09-12T17:35:00.004-04:00

There are times when I think being a movie critic would be the greatest job in the world. To see everything that gets released, to have a paid public forum in which to rave and encourage or in which to lay waste to a, well, waste of celluloid; to travel to festivals around the world; to interview filmmakers both legendary and on their way up...it seems like paradise. Then I'm faced with something like Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, the source of some unofficial buzz so far at this year's TIFF. When I say "unofficial" I mean, I haven't read much about the movie in the way that, say An Education or Up In The Air are getting early Oscar buzz. I have overheard a lot of people in lines talking about it, though, and I've heard from more than a few folks "yeah, wanted to see that one, but it was sold out." Anyway, the critic's dilemma: I have absolutely no idea what to say about Fish Tank. Every time I think I've got a handle on it I wind up deleting the paragraphs with "no, that's not quite it." This is one damned elusive film.

Once again, as was the case with Cleanflix, I feel like the Program(me) Book description isn't quite bang on. Storywise, yeah, no lies there. But rather than a feminist Loach movie with a hip-hop undercurrent, Fish Tank plays very self-consciously hand-held and frustratingly free-form. The director, Andrea Arnold, is actually from my film school alma mater, the AFI, though I don't remember her from my year. This is definitely not what the school was trying to turn out from their director's program (thank god, actually...the AFI was going through an unfortunate cookie-cutter period when I was there, I felt), the biggest influence on the film seems to be Cassavettes...or rather an intervening generation of directors who themselves were influenced by Cassavettes, if that makes any sense. Cross that with the misanthropy of a Todd Solondz and an improvisation-to-script style modeled on Mike Leigh and you're in the ballpark. Though that final comparison falls apart when one remembers that Leigh's characters end up with poetry in their mouths while Katie Jarvis (who is great, don't get me wrong) has little beyond "fook you, ya coont!" ad nauseum. So basically: two hours of unsympathetic people with serious sexual boundary issues being horrible to each other in grey British ghetto settings. I might add (SPOILER ALERT) that I have to wonder what problems with infidelity are plaguing the English zeitgeist of late, as this is the second film out of the four I've seen at the festival so far in which a 16-year-old British girl discovers that the guy she's been screwing is married with a kid in the suburbs. I will be very disappointed if Alice Creed finds out the same thing tonight.

There's also a disturbing and inescapable racial undercurrent to the film: both Jarvis' Mia and her mother are protrayed as products of Black popular culture through their musical obsessions (hip-hop and reggae, respectively) and Michael Fassbender's character introduces old-school soul (specifically Bobby Womack) into the mix. Yet the film is populated entirely by white characters, belieing the melting pot that is modern Britain. That's a charge that may be getting tired; it was well over ten years ago that Notting Hill received flack for the same problem (the eponymous neighborhood in that film has a huge immigrant population in reality yet was portrayed through a Mayberry lens on film), but it lent an odd tilt to the proceedings. Anyway...don't believe the hype. (**1/2...I do have to credit the great perfomances)

TIFF 2009 reviews: The Most Dangerous Man In America

2009-09-11T23:15:00.004-04:00

I have to admit, I knew practically nothing about Daniel Ellsberg when I picked up my ticket for The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. I knew the name, he's namechecked quite often in Nixon, still my favorite Oliver Stone film (and one I'm obviously going to have to revisit again when the festival winds down and I can spare the four hours), but I had little inkling about what precisely the Pentagon Papers actually were. It's not my fault: as a Canadian I never once heard discussion of recent American history in school, not to mention the fact that in my lifetime there's been Iran-Contra and the Valerie Plame Affair (yellowcakegate?) and a dozen other scandals that seem simple enough when you first hear about them but are then obfuscated by both the media and the governing party of the day until they're impenetrable messes incomprehensible to anyone but inside-the-beltway types with a vested interest in their book deal at the other end of it. This mostly-terrific documentary explains it all pretty clearly, and despite its objective, talking-heads-heavy style, shows Ellsberg to be a genuine American hero without descending into hagiography.

I'm wary about going into too much detail, as with a heavy fish dinner sitting in my stomach and another round of insomnia in the wee hours this morning I drifted off several times so I'm not totally qualified. I may have to start making Red Bull part of my nutritious breakfast to get through some of my late-evening screenings. At any rate, it's worth commenting on the crowd, which gave the subject of the film a long and heartfelt standing ovation when he was introduced at lights-up. Also there's Ellbserg's wife Patricia, who planted a huge kiss mit tongue on him as they stood at the front of the auditorium, and who is revealed in the film to be a key moral fork in the road for him, opening his eyes to the system he was a part of and the dominos he'd helped to start to topple. Daniel Ellsberg played the crowd the way Michael Moore wishes he could; positively evangelical in his activism, being 78 years old hasn't sapped him of one iota of energy or passion. True, it was a crowd already predisposed to be on his side politically (at one point he asked how many people had seen Errol Morris' The Fog of War and easily 90% of the audience shot their hands into the air and that pretty much says it all) but the crowd was in his hands no less than the Ryerson auditorium was in Jimmy Page's hands at It Might Get Loud last year. Though I had to take off, I gathered that Ellsberg was willing to entertain questions and lead group discussions in the Varsity lobby until he got dragged off. I passed by the throng on my way to the door, got a couple of pictures and felt more than a slight rush of being in the presence of a true icon of American history. A very odd night. (***)

TIFF 2009 Reviews: Cleanflix

2009-09-11T22:31:00.007-04:00

I did really want to love Cleanflix, truly I did. I didn't dislike it, but it's still a moderate non-recommend. The problem may be one of expectations: the filmmakers could have take their investigation and the material in at least three directions that I can think of, and they chose to go the least interesting route.

Okay, sidebar here, then I'll get back to the movie. I need to talk a bit about the screening venue. The AMC at Yonge-Dundas Square is without a doubt one of the best-appointed theatres I've ever been in. The seats are wide, plush and comfortable, with plenty of leg room. The rooms boast brand spankin' new digital projections and sound systems, so I've yet to see a movie there with less-than-stellar image and sound (though come to think of it, last summer's Godfather reissue was a bit grainy). With the steep stadium seating there's not a bad seat in the theatre. And I hate the place, and try to avoid seeing movies there if I can at all help it during the rest of the year. I hate that it charges a higher admission than anywhere else in the city, that it's got a lousy snack bar, that the time-waster magazine "Tribute" that they distribute in the lobby is an ugly piece of crap that seems to be designed for people whose lips move when they read US Weekly. And I hate that often it's the only place in town--or often it's one of two places the other being the equally execrable yet still cheaper Canada Square--that shows a number of smaller-release films and as a viewer I don't have much choice in the matter than to sit in a virtually-empty screening room for a Saturday matinee. I will concede that it's a convenient location for festival screenings, but when the Lightbox is finally complete hopefully TIFF can lose it as a venue. Maybe in a few years when it's a bit more broken in I won't feel such antipathy towards the place, but right now, less than two years into its existence, attending the AMC at Yonge & Dundas is like seeing a movie in a clinical, sterile and friction-free environment.

And speaking of clinical, sterile and friction-free, the "International" theme of the festival now takes us to the Utah Valley, where freshly-scrubbed and ultra-judgmental (emphasis on the "mental") white people insist that Hollywood is in the business of foisting its values on a godly world that simply knows better what makes a good movie. Cleanflix is (sort of) about the variety of companies that sprung up in Utah in the past decade or so that rent or sell bowdlerized versions of mainstream movies, DVDs and videotapes in which all blood, sex, nudity or even oblique references to human anatomy are excised so as not to poison innocent Mormon minds. This is all done, of course, in clear violation of U.S. copyright law, and the DGA rightly won injunctions against the dealers to get them to stop the practice (which, needless to say, goes on largely unabated anyway).

To my mind, the filmmakers could have gone a few ways with this. As members of the Mormon community themselves, but obviously not on the side of censorship, Ligairi and James could have explored the moral value system of the Church of LDS and examined why committee decisions by the Elders are treated as holy writ carried down from the mountain, why the entire community seems to be raised in fear of exposure to any cutlure that brushes roughly against their established beliefs. There is a bit of this; one former LDS filmmaker expounds on how Mormonism is not a religion for self-examination or philosophizing. They also could have examined the artistic side of the equation, gone in-depth on the subject of the censored movies, what got changed and why, maybe shown the Cleanflicks versions of their films to H'wood directors and gotten their reactions. As it is, the only director who seems to have sat down with the filmmakers is Neil LaBute, who famously left the church and is quite eloquent as to why. Many other directors appear onscreen, but judging from the video quality, this all seems to be found footage.

The tack the directors took was to focus on one player in the mess, a video store owner who, due to his love of being on camera for this film or for local media, became one of the public faces of the controversy as he ran his store, reopened it after the first injunction, got shut down again and eventually got busted soliciting sex from a couple of fourteen year old girls. I don't know if the movie ever explicitly states he's a Mormon. I'm not sure he is: he says "shit" a couple of times on camera and mentions the market for the movies much more than any moral issues he himself takes with the product. Which is, I guess, the big irony that the directors simply never bring up (or maybe they didn't notice it): anyone who's worked there, or who pays attention at all, knows that Hollywood has no moral agenda. The town as a collective whole does not foist any particular brand of morality on the world. The city produces and distributes with one goal in mind: profit. The same industry produced Showgirls and Passion of the Christ. Hostel and the Tyler Perry movies. The 10 Commandments and Five Easy Pieces. So the Cleanflix directors focussed on a guy with no moral stake in the game who violated copyright law to make a big profit, just like the system he's ripping off...and this is never pointed out! There's a missed opportunity here on several levels, I think. (**1/2)

TIFF 2009 reviews: An Education

2009-09-11T04:56:00.007-04:00

It's my birthday, and after nodding off in front of a Buffy DVD upon arriving home from the opening night of the film festival, I've been awake since four. Ain't insomnia a hoot? Le sigh. So thus my reports begin, and I lead off with battling omens. On one hand, I darted into the washroom before grabbing my seat for Lone Scherfig's An Education and upon leaving the stall caught my favorite dress shirt on the door latch and with a horrifying riiiiiipppp it was torn from waist to armpit. On the other hand, my TIFF '09 experience began with a warm and wonderful human comedy filled with terrific music and performances, the kind of movie that leaves you with a goofy smile on your face but without the bitter aftertaste that one often gets from nostalgia pieces.

Part of the Special Presentations program, the movie is Scherfig's fourth, the first I've seen of hers, and is helmed with the sure and classy hand that seems to be the trademark of Nick Hornby adaptations (see: Stephen Frears, Chris Weitz). Hornby's the reason I went at all, to be honest; I saw his name as screenwriter and went "Sold!" I'd been a fan of the film version of High Fidelity for ages, thought it was one of the best movies of 2000 and the decade, but never got around to actually reading the book until a couple of years ago. It was one of those novels that, fifteen pages in, I realized I'd be burning through the author's entire oeuvre immediately, which I subsequently did. An Education is actually an adaptation; during the Q&A Hornby explained that after Fever Pitch he has no interest in adapting any more of his own work as it involves,as he put it, "unwriting" something he's spent years writing, removing three quarters of his own work to fit the confines of a screenplay. Fair 'nuff. I'm not sure how many more adaptations we'll see of his work...High Fidelity and About A Boy are pretty straightforward, but How To Be Good and A Long Way Down seem somewhat unfilmable.

Anyway, not much to say about the film beyond sweeping admiration for the cast and the casting director who pulled this astonishing group together. Nobody, from a flawlessly-accented Peter Sarsgaard to Alfred Molina, who tends to walk off with the biggest laughs in all of his scenes, to the screen-siezing cameos by the likes of Emma Thompson (with her funniest deadpan ever) and Sally Hawkins (whom I'm still convinced was robbed of an Oscar nod for Happy-Go-Lucky), ever sets a foot wrong. And then of course there's the masterful star-making turn by one Carey Mulligan, who walks off with the audience's hearts and sympathies within moments of stepping onscreen. Mulligan had a small role in the brilliant adaptation of Pride and Prejudice a few years back (alongside Rosamund Pike, who also deserves credit in this movie for demolishing all of her scenes with a hilarious dumb blonde act) and starred in one of my favorite Dr. Who episodes but is now officially a Screen Presence To Watch. It's worrisome that she's reportedly dating Shia LeBeouf, it's a warning sign that she's about to get sucked into the H'wood tabloid mill, but then she does come across as smart enough to avoid those pitfalls.

So...terrific movie, fun and well-paced Q&A, and despite the draft from my expired shirt, a good start to the festival. Two documentaries today and a couple more onscreen trips to Britain tomorrow. And we're off...
(***1/2)

(star ratings out of four in honour, as usual, of Roger Ebert, who's in town for the fest, and whose TIFF blog is essential reading every September)

The night before...

2009-09-09T20:23:00.003-04:00

24 hours from now I'll have finished watching my first movie of TIFF 2009. I'd like to say it snuck up on me, but then again I'm the guy who booked the 11th through the 18th off work back in freakin' January, so my protestations of time just a-whippin' by would no doubt ring a little hollow. This year I've got fourteen tickets, and I'll be calling it quits at that, I'll resist impulse buys just to fill any holes. In addition to my package ten, I swung by The Tent after the early close on Friday before the fam arrived at their hotel and picked up four more: Fish Tank, Solitary Man, Tanner Hall and Bran Nue Dae...then on Monday I traded in Tanner Hall for George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead. TH is actually getting some good reviews already, but I'd come to the realization that I was really going to miss the fun of Midnight Madness this year. So okay, sure, it's not an 11:59PM showing, but it'll still be packed, I'm sure Romero will be there (as he lives in town, where else is he going to be?) and the MM crowd is always the best at the fest, even if it's a 9AM screening (this one's at noon-thirty, but you see my point). I'm also violating one of my TIFF tix rules, namely "don't plunk down a sawbuck for a flick that's hitting the Scotia by November anyway" but I felt like showing the love. Turns out An Education got some raves and Oscar buzz at Venice and it's actually got a fall release date lined up as well. Two out of fourteen, shrug.

My analytical sense wants to know...here's the breakdown.
Documentaries: 2
Subtitled: 4 (really low compared to last year)
Canadian: 2 (counting Survival of the Dead, I'd put it there even if the Program(me) Book hadn't listed it as such)
Potential Bond girl sightings: 3 (would have been 4 if I'd gotten Cracks)
First time at specific programs: 2 (my first Sprockets and City to City screenings; I have yet to see a Wavelengths or Short Cuts Canada presentation)

Anyway...charging the batteries in my camera, double-checking that tomorrow's ticket is in my wallet as well as a stack of business cards for trading blog addresses, one more day of work before my vacation starts...see you soon.

Things falling into place...

2009-09-02T19:46:00.004-04:00

Short update today...got the email yesterday afternoon, and for the third year out of four in which I've been participating in the ticket package lottery, I got my top ten picks. So it looks like I'm kicking off my TIFF '09 with the 6PM screening of An Education next Thursday. Especially pleased with getting the Michael Caine Mavericks show.

Spent an hour or so last night doing round 2 of the Program(me) Book ritual, namely going over the schedule to find which of my backup picks will fit into the gaps and discovering other possibilities. I'm a bit fuzzy (and the TIFF website is a bit vague on the subject) as to whether Special Presentations, when purchased as individual tickets from September 4th onwards, are still twice as pricey as regular screening tickets, and if that also applies to subsequent screenings of the films--speaking of which, a lot of the Special Presentations don't premiere at the Elgin this year, which seems odd. If they are, that rules out Cracks and Solitary Man. Still, even though I still have to keep blocks of time free for a dentist appointment and the Nick Cave book signing, I can squeeze in four or five of the following: Fish Tank, Bran Nue Dae, Giulia Doesn't Date At Night, Tanner Hall, The Search, My Tehran For Sale, and Hipsters. Gotta rank those before I line up at the tent Friday...Tehran definitely, Tanner Hall as well on the off chance that Amy Sedaris will show up.

8 days 'til TIFF

A diversion: FanExpo 2009 wrapup

2009-08-31T20:59:00.018-04:00

Ticket order forms were all due in to the Big White Tent today, and the box lottery has revealed that they're starting with (drum roll buddabuddabuddabudda) box 48 out of 54. Which is not that bad for me, as I was in box 6. If I'm in the (counting on my fingers...carry the one...) thirteenth box, I actually stand a pretty good chance of getting most of my top ten, which is pretty sweet, and a nice karmic turnaround from last year when my form wound up in box 8 and the wheel landed on box 9 to start processing. Hopefully I'll get the email within the next day or so letting me know. The 'rents and the little brother arrive in town late afternoon Friday, that'll give me time between the early close at the office for the holiday and their check-in to line up for another four or five tix to fill in the gaps.

My autumn has two big high points: there's the TIFF season, obviously, which in addition to the ten days of holiday and cinematic bliss surrounding my birthday stretches back to late July and the first dribblings of program leaks and the filmgasm that is Program Book Day. And then the cherry on top of August is the weekend before Labour Day, when the Convention Centre is taken over by thousands upon thousands of nerds, geeks, dweebs, genre TV stars, B-movie headliners, local shot-on-DV horror film producers, women with a pound of metal in their face who sell baby clothes with severed-head logo patterns, the really hot eighteen-year-olds who somehow didn't exist when I was in high school who love nothing better than to walk around the hall painted green or in a form-fitting black spandex catsuit for three days, burlesque dancers, promotions/marketing folk who were blessed by gypsies as children and now get to flog slasher flicks and hold screaming contests and indulge their movie night party jones...basically everyone in the eastern half of Canada and the nor'eastern States who lives for the freaky and fun and heroic and spooky and the chance to leave behind real life's sadness to immerse themselves in fantasy and creativity and shared joy of nostalgia and dreams about what the future holds.

My people, in other words.

I've been going to FanExpo regularly since 2003, and cliches be damned, it does seem to get bigger and better every year. Last year is a bit of a haze for some reason...I remember taking a few hundred photos and I cosplayed as Captain Marvel, but I don't have any solid memories to grasp. Maybe it's because 2008 was the year I gave up on autographs from the stars. $20 was a rubicon I couldn't cross. I was fine with that...a sawbuck for an 8X10 glossy, a personalized sig, 120 seconds of conversation and a quick photo isn't too exorbitant, the memory and photo and thrill last. But like the American movie ticket price of $10 or the trillion $ for the new health care bill, there came a wall, and I hit it. From the white t-shirted volunteers who would chase you down and demand that you not take any shots of Adam West from across the aisle without coughing up the green to the separation of sig and pic into two distinct and accumulating fees and lines, the Special Guest portion of the weekend has been priced out of the range of all but the hardiest and most obsessive completists. I'd considered limiting myself to one this year, and had settled on Emma Caulfield, but I got to the front of the line, saw that a sig and no pic would cost me most of my grocery budget for the week and I realized there was no way I could justify such an expense to myself, no matter how much I adored Anya and longed to bask in the two-degrees-away-from-Whedon glow. So I snapped a quick pic and skedaddled.

Didn't do much shopping this year...got a couple of TPBs (Preacher vol. 4 and Essential X-Men vol. 7), one independent DVD of a webseries set at a comic book shop from a bunch of quite cool folks to whom I gave a copy of my own short superhero film the following day, a trio of books from Burning Effigy Press, and a Harleen Quinzell-as-The Baroness signed headshot from the stunning ladies at NerdGirlPinups.com. With the England trip coming up in two and a half months, I'm not splurging on as much stuff as I would have in previous years.

And then there was the cosplay. Really, the reason I go every year. It's comic book characters made flesh...it's as close as one can get to immersion in the world of comic books, a world which is, let's not forget, infinitely more interesting than the one we're stuck with. I went totally mainstream this year: old-school Spider-Man. The result was my favorite Halloween-for-grownups experience of all time. The photos started minutes after I got in line on Saturday morning, as I posed with a Rogue and Wolverine in the next swoop of the line's S. I got pulled off the floor by Marvel's marketing head (I think) Arune Singh, who insisted on taking photos of me posing with Captain America's shield. I was shot with one arm around (purple) Catwoman and (comic) Silk Spectre 1. A pair of Kevin Smith lookalike brothers from the east coast sandwiched me for another photo to the delight of the lobby. And the kids...seriously, the best part. One four year old literally ran up and leapt into my arms to pose for shots. I'm just some anonymous schmuck, but that kid is going to kindergarten tomorrow morning and when asked "What did you do this summer, Matt?" is going to be able to stand tall and with eyes wide proclaim "I met Spider-Man!" and there won't be a dry seat in the room. I still don't know if I want kids of my own, but even I have to admit that's pretty cool.

Anyway, I only lasted about four hours in the suit before the dehydration, pressure on the sides of my head and the creeping headache that always results from going without my glasses for extended periods of time (oh, astigmatism, thou art a bitch) made me cave, so I stripped out, and immediately ran into an adorable blonde dressed like the Black Cat. Grrrrr...... Other faves: a couple of unrelated Cassandra Cain Batgirls absolutely rocked the house. Ashley and her Steampunk X-Men group that would go on to win Best in Show Overall at that night's Masquerade. The Orion Slave Girl; an awesome Captain Jack Harkness making Ianto jokes; a six-foot-tall Emma Frost; the 501st Legion and their virtual army of Lucasfilm-quality costumes, props and droids; a half-dozen Harley Quinns ranging from classic flavour to punked out and gender-fucked; the Buddy Christ (actually a high school bud of mine in for the weekend); plenty of Catwomen in all purrmutations; more than a few Dr. Horribles; a female Indiana Jones...this year's costumes were as stellar as they come. San Diego...try on Toronto for size, suckers.

Before you know it, though...the crash. You know the drill: it's Sunday afternoon, you've once again paid over five dollars for a muffin and a soft drink just to keep some energy going, you've seen every booth twice and not turned up a single piece of Godzilla merch in the whole stinkin' hall, you're starting to take photos of the same people over again, some of the booksellers are looking a bit sparse and Artist's Alley is starting to pack it in. You want to weep. Another fifty-two freakin' weeks until you get to have this much fun again.

Thanks to everyone who made this year so amazing: Tina, Ashley, Monica, Liisa, Susan, Willow, the guys at The Comic Book Store: The Series, the ladies at NerdGirlPinups, all the folks at HardcoreNerdity, everyone in the Steampunk X-Men, the Kevin Smith twins, that three year old who astonished his parents by hugging Spider-Man with the joy of a hundred dreams in his eyes, Emma Caulfield for those cheekbones, that Austin Powers dude who knew when to break character, and everyone who squeezed into a zentai suit or painted themselves green or just, you know, showed up to be a big nerd all weekend (gabba gabba one of us...). I'll see you next year.

In record time...top ten picks and backups

2009-08-25T20:33:00.003-04:00

Okay, that was fast. Dunno if it's a record, but I did hit the ground running with plenty of prep this year.

The festival changed the format of the order form: instead of the colour-coding by double-ended highlighter (which hasn't been included in the bag since 2006 anyway) you now write a screening code for your second pick under each first pick. I know there's been enough confusion in the past but this shift still seems odd to me. No matter.

As I mentioned earlier, blogs written by The People aren't being linked from the festival site this year, so if anyone does read this it'll likely be FB friends who may not be here in Toronto. I won't prattle on with details (oh who am I kidding...) but short version: I bought a 10-pack of tickets, so I chose my top ten movies (with specific screening times) and ten backups in case the first ones are sold out. Except for the Michael Caine afternoon, I don't think many of my top ten are big ticket festival items (ie: no Clooney, Coens or Michael Moore) so I may be on fairly solid ground. That said, I also plan on buying four or five individual tickets when they go on sale, so ideally I'll still be able to catch a handful of my backup picks, and even possibly some of what I don't get in the first ten at different screenings if the ones I've requested are sold out. I drop off my order form after work tomorrow, and next week sometime I'll get the email telling me what I got. Anyhoo...

My top ten picks (check out the summaries on the TIFF website if you're curious):

An Education
Cleanflix
The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
The Disappearance of Alice Creed
in conversation with...Michael Caine
Kirot
The Loved Ones
La Donation
L'affaire Farewell
Timetrip: The Curse of the Viking Witch

My ten backups:

Fish Tank
Five Hours From Paris
Solitary Man
Cracks
Mall Girls
Giulia Doesn't Date At Night
The Search
Slovenian Girl
My Tehran For Sale
Hipsters

So what's the breakdown? No Dialogues this year (Joe Dante might be cool, come to think of it), no Canada First!, and I'm going to a Sprockets screening for the first time, that Danish kids movie that looks like fun. Four of my top ten are not in English, and two of those are in French; seven of my runners-up aren't in English. Only one Midnight Madness flick in the whole batch. Did Martyrs turn me off that program so much? I doubt it, it's just that of the other nine this year, three or four are definitely hitting screens later this summer and I've already seen Ong-Bak 2. I've got some huge gaps in my screening schedule, but I'll no doubt fill them somehow. Even if it's not with #s 11-20, as there are plenty of others in the book I wouldn't turn up my nose at. I've got nothing from Hong Kong in either list this year, but if I wind up squeezing Vengeance or Accident into a hole in my schedule, no complaints.

Made it through Station To Station and most of Buddah of Suburbia while bashing this out. Exhausted. Another annual tradition passed.

3 days 'til FanExpo
16 days 'til TIFF

Program Book Day! and planning the schedule

2009-08-25T19:32:00.003-04:00

Partway through the process, and before my eyes go crosseyed from the Excel, some first impressions.

Superficial stuff first: love the program book cover this year, the motif that appears in variations throughout the materials of enraptured audience members instead of vague abstracts or modern-art surrealism. The people's festival indeed, illustrated. Looks like the bag is made of better material than it has been in the past two years as well, with a flat bottom to boot (okay, this seems irrelevant, but I save 'em as souvenirs and last year's was made of some fabric barely a notch up from crepe paper). Got a second Stella Artois glass, assuming they remain a sponsor, after TIFF '11 I'll be able to serve pilsner for four. Took the traditional big whiff of the book and...hmmm. Paint. The Nathan Philips Square TIFF tent's new expansion just got a fresh coat recently, it seems, and the glorious new-ink-and-cinema scent of the program book is subsumed by the odour of white latex paint. Got back to the office, gave the enclosed promotional sample cosmetics, coffee, popcorn and cherry/pomegranate power water to co-workers and began highlighting titles in the index.

I suppose the Kindle may be different as it's not so much for the interactivity, but I must say that books, ie: solid paper-based blocks of info you can hold in your hand, can't be disappearing any time soon. Sure the whole film list has been up on the festival site for a few days and bouncing back and forth between links there has been helpful, but actually being able to study the summaries and credits caused a small shakeout and huge additions. 25 titles highlighted in the index based on the cover-to-cover I did at my desk. And now comes the winnowing.

Still nothing for me from India this year, the one that looked great, What's Your Rashee?, is a gala. Didn't know anything about An Education until...screenplay by Nick Hornby?!? I'm there. Quite a lot in Reel To Reel I'm curious to see, but oddly enough there's nothing in Canada First! that's grabbing me. The afternoon with Michael Caine is on my list, but the movie he's selling isn't. I suspect his Q&A will be sold out, or at least I'm bracing myself for settling for a second pick that day. The first screening of one of my gotta-see's conflicts with the Nick Cave book signing, which is a drag, but maybe Willem Defoe will stick around for the second screening. Still sort of regretting not doing two ticket books, but pragmatism must rule.

Okay, back to the spreadsheets...

Film list day

2009-08-20T21:26:00.002-04:00

With mind reeling from finally watching the Series 4 finale of Dr. Who (god, could I have a bigger crush on Eve Myles?) time to tackle the fully-posted TIFF list. Oy. Once again, regretting only getting a ten-pack, even with the four or five individual tix I plan on picking up I'll still miss a lot.

A few things I noticed: no Baltasar Kormákur movie this year, in fact only two Icelandic films, one of which is a documentary largely in English (judging from the trailer) and the other a multinational co-production starring Brian Cox and Paul Dano so I guess no whimsical Reykjavic family dramas starring lovely elfin redheads for me this year; no Takashi Miike; still no Palermo Shooting, which has been in the can for so long I'm sure we'll have to wait for his next film for another Wenders appearance at TIFF. There are, as usual, new offerings from the Coen brothers, Carl Bessai, Johnny To and Steven Soderbergh.

As for what I want to see...okay, here's the tentative list of the twenty movies I'd most love to see, the Can't Miss ones marked with an asterix:

Five Hours From Paris

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

The Misfortunates

Accident

The Loved Ones*

Timetrip: The Curse of the Viking Witch

Daybreakers

The Most Dangerous Man In America

Ape

In conversation with Michael Caine*

Cleanflix

L’affaire Farewell*

Blessed

Defendor

Giulia Doesn’t Date At Night

Fish Tank

Hipsters

Collapse

La Donation*

Kirot

So...more than the usual quota of French-language films on the list...and shit, no Indian movies. I'll have to look deeper once the book comes out. Only three Midnight Madness movies, as I figured I'd be cutting back this year, but as I suspect that Daybreakers will get a regular release I'll probably pass on it for the fest. With the Danish time travel flick, that could be my first-ever Sprockets Family Zone screening. First Israeli movie as well. Michael Caine? Oh wow...that's gonna rock, I suspect that'll be one of the fest's hottest tickets.

Got an invite today on FB for Nick Cave, apparently he's doing a reading/signing of his new novel at Indigo at the Eaton Centre in the middle of the fest. That's going to poke a hole in my schedule, for sure. Does Cave have a movie in the festival as well? Has anyone snatched up the rights to "And The Ass Saw The Angel" yet?

How come the rain didn't cool everything off?

8 days 'til FanExpo
21 days 'til TIFF

A sense of order

2009-08-17T20:32:00.004-04:00

I was just sitting here sweating my way through a marathon of Dr. Who season 4 DVDs, and realized that it's only three days until the full film list goes live. It's well past time for an update, as the summer is cresting and the accelerated race through my glory weeks of FanExpo/TIFF is nearly upon us. Funny thing, if you go to the festival website, the list of films is already pretty comprehensive. Have the announcements been more thorough and spoilerish this year or is it my imagination? There's always been that glut of reveals every year regarding when Clooney will be arriving and whatnot, and even though I don't get a paper at work anymore, I seem to be picking up a steady stream of such news via osmosis this year. What is there left to unveil on Thursday?

Anyway, I'll get back to the current list in a minute, but first some housekeeping, which may be crying into an abyss for all I know because the TIFF09 website has yet to announce any links to fan blogs. For the past three years I've answered the invitation to link my blog (first two years on MySpace and since last year here at blogspot) and enjoyed a few readers. Not tons, but I don't need tons, I just think it's cool when strangers tune in for whatever reason. My dream job is film critic; real life doesn't really afford me the opportunity, and the rise of the internet has, sadly, rendered such an occupation as it's been commonly defined since the thirties to a degree obsolete. So for two weeks a year I can immerse myself in cool foreign and indie fare, dissect and analyze and assign arbitrary star ratings...oy that sounds callous. I love movies, and I love to talk movies. If one person checked out Not Quite Hollywood, Son of Rambow or The Burrowers because they were sampling fan blogs via the TIFF website and took my rave at my word, I suppose I'll never know (MySpace used to count fifty-plus readers a day during the festival but nobody ever left comments), but part of me would be greatly satisfied.

At any rate, I used to have readers, I have a couple of subscribers here and my fingers are crossed that a few more film fans will join me here later on. Thus, I'd like to tell the assembled multitudes my basic rules...well, traditions, really...for how I pick movies for the prime festival experience.

1. No galas. They're not worth the money, all the movies are going to play in theatres later (some notable bombs excepted, and I'm looking at you, Edison), and without a high-priced donor pass, you wind up in the nosebleed seats. Fuhgettaboutit.
2. By the same token, nothing that's going to play theatres in the fall anyway. Sometimes one can't tell; the star-studdedness of a film is no longer any guarantee that it's arrived at the festival with a distributor or that it'll pick one up after the premiere. But I've seen festival premieres announced long after the trailer for the same flick has been playing for months. 2007 was an odd festival in that regard: from the festival's second Friday through the Sunday after wrap, I saw three movies outside the TIFF that had premiered at the festival mere days before (Eastern Promises, The Brave One and Across The Universe).
3. Try to see at least one of the following: documentaries, "In Conversation With...", Dialogues, Canadian movies, and if at least half of what I see isn't subtitled, I'm not trying hard enough. Every year I swear I'm going to see something from India and it never seems to happen. I've had good luck with Iceland in the past, and if there's anything filmed in the Welsh language, I'm so there.
4. I'm not quite the starfucker I was as a young lad (especially when I first moved to L.A., I was pretty insufferable then, actually) but if anyone I've actually worked with or for is in a movie at the festival, I try to check that one out to say hi. For the record, I've crewed on two feature films, a low-budget indie called Lovelife (1997) and the remake of The In-Laws (2003), worked for one major actor (who shall remain nameless) and interned for a multiple Oscar-winning director (ditto), plus I met or knew tons of other creative folk who may be passing through town in September.
5. My favorite director is Wim Wenders, if he comes to town, I'm in the front row. Plus I've now got a cool Bis ans Ende der Welt poster that I'm dying to get autographed, and if anyone has spotted Sam Neill around town while he's filming, I'd love a tip or two.

So I just went over to the site to comment on the list and while I was there they took it down for updating! Dagnabit, they did that the other night as well! Okay, I'll go through the list again later this week.

11 days 'til FanExpo
24 days 'til TIFF

More picks and a semi-retraction

2009-07-23T20:40:00.004-04:00

As I type this update I've got the Live Aid DVD box set playing, found it used at Refried Beats yesterday. Loving the Wembley stuff (my hero Paul Weller rocking an entire stadium...wowwowwow) but since all I've seen so far of Philadelphia is Bryan Adams the U.S half is less than stellar so far. Seriously, did every male rock star in 1985 have ginormous hockey hair? Oh, here's Nicholson introducing U2. This could be good...

Right, the fest. Two more programs were (partially?) unveiled today but before I get to those I have to confess I've sort of come around on the issue of Jennifer's Body opening MM. Despite the presence of Megan Fox, whom I'm still not convinced is an actual living, breathing human being and not a s1m0ne-like computer simulacrum created Weird Science-style by wrapping a bra around Michael Bay's head and shoving Maxim photo spreads into a CPU for replication, which hangs an unassailable mainstream cred millstone around the neck of the whole affair despite the inherent coolness of Diablo Cody and thus not exactly in keeping the the renegade nutball spirit of Midnight Madness, I realize that this opener represents an elevation of the MM program in the estimation of the programmers. Jennifer's Body could have been a Special Presentation; shit, Zack & Miri was last year, and as I said before Cody has earned her status as a star of TIFF. But an actual high-profile star vehicle brings press and critical attention the the Midnight Madness program in a way that even, for instance, Borat and his peasant-hauled oxcart arrival in 2006 wouldn't. I guess to some degree this means that MM isn't just for the fringe-dwellers in the festival crowd any more, which is sad, the way a favorite band suddenly going from the clubs to the arenas always hurts, but as long as this isn't a harbringer of future programming trends (I shudder at the thought of MM gaining, say, Bob Weinstein as a primary sponsor), it's actually a good thing.

(Live Aid interjection...okay, July 13 1985 was officially the moment that Bono's self-satisfied messianic impulses leapt into the driver's seat permanently. And may I say again, dude, THAT FUCKING HAIR!!!!!)

Discovery and Vanguard titles hit the website today, there are a few more that range from tempting to gotta-see for me. There's a lot of misery on parade as well, which is always a big turnoff for me. I'm hoping to see some more cool Scandinavian work this year (I've had generally good luck with Icelandic picks over the past three TIFFs) but, and call me narrow-minded if you must, I'm steering clear of dead kids, abusive parents and addiction tales that are promised to be even an iota less cheery than Trainspotting (which is one of my favorite movies, dead baby and all, but I hadn't reached my saturation point on that particular subgenre yet when the movie came out). Which is hard because a quick scan at the summaries for Discovery alone reads like a depressive's diary, half the titles involving one or all three of my no-gos listed above. Samantha Morton, one of my favorite actresses and one of the most luminous screen presences of my generation, is bringing her directorial debut The Unloved to Discovery, but..."the stark portait of a young British girl plucked from her abusive family and thrown into the hands of government care"? Le sigh. I dunno, maybe I'll have to for Morton, but...

So the cool stuff that jumps out at me so far is...Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's My Dog Tulip, because I'm definitely looking to see some cool animation this year; Leon Prudovsky's Five Hours From Paris; J. Blakeson's The Disappearance of Alice Creed, as it stars the amazing Eddie Marsan from Happy Go Lucky and Gemma Arterton from Quantum of Solace, one of the most underrated Bond girls in the entire franchise; The Misfortunates, because drunk rambunctious Belgians sounds like a fun evening; Accident because...ah! I told you Johnny To would be here! Okay, he produced it, but it still counts.

36 days until FanExpo
49 days until TIFF

The opening salvo of Midnight Madness

2009-07-21T19:00:00.003-04:00

Last year fully a third of my TIFF screenings were part of the Midnight Madness program. Bear in mind I have never actually been to a midnight premiere at the festival, as my sleep cycles are whacked out enough and during the fest I'm coasting on caffeine and Szechuan fumes as it is--despite my best efforts I just know I'd fall asleep at the Ryerson and I suspect that's not a crowd you want to find yourself unconscious in the middle of, love 'em though I do. Still, I'm pretty sure that every year I've attended the Toronto Film Festival I've seen at least one MM flick during a day/evening screening, and last year I hit a certain saturation point. I wrote at length last year about how Not Quite Hollywood reaffirmed my faith in the joys of Cinematic Trash so I won't rehash it here, nor will I relate how the penultimate film of my TIFF '08 was Martyrs and how it made me question my own latent censorious nature. But while MM is the first program at the fest to be fully listed on the website and thus I couldn't help but wait with bated breath for the update, I was approaching it with trepidation this year for some very French, skinned-alive reasons.

Damn that freakin' Colin. Because the bastard with the best job in the TIFF organization seems to have done it again. Of the ten, there are at least eight that I know I'm going to see eventually, a few that I'll definitely try to see if I can come September and three that immediately made the "absolutely must see" list that I'm sketching before Program Book Release Day. It's not your typical MM lineup, either: there are no documentaries, there's nothing from Hong Kong (though if this year is like any of the last few, I'm sure Johnny To has two or three films scattered throughout the other programs), there's no Gallic torture porn. On the other hand, it appears the opening night flick is Jennifer's Body, the trailers for which are already playing in the Cinemultiplexes. Every year there's at least one MM premiere that ends up being an unexpected hit in mainstream theatres later that fall, but it's typically a surprise that's to some degree discovered at the festival. I've been going to TIFF since 2003, and looking back through my well-thumbed program books I see Ju-On (2003), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), Borat and The Host (2006), Diary of the Dead (2007...okay, not a huge hit but I did eventually see it at the Scotia) and JCVD (2008). For a studio-backed flick written and produced by an Oscar-winning success story from just two years ago to be opening MM this year...subject matter be damned, considering how TIFF introduced the world to the brilliance that is Juno ( I say that without irony, I fucking love that movie) in 2007 one would think Diablo Cody would be walking the red carpet at the Visa Screening Room at least instead of waiting for her introduction next to a bank of gym lockers at the Ryerson.

ANYWAY...so my gotta sees this year so far are The Loved Ones, A Town Called Panic and Daybreakers, the last of which I may actually try and stay up late for the premiere on the off chance that Sam Neill will show up. Solomon Kane and Bitch Slap are possibilities for impulse ticket buys later in the festival to plug holes in my schedule as they occur.

Hey, they announced the documentary list, or at least seventeen of them. What's cool there...Cleanflix, about that weird Mormon company that hacks up movies for the sake of people whose heads explode at the mere whiff of an f-bomb, that just made my list. The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. I am so all over that one. And The Topp Twins has one of the most enticing one-line descriptions I've yet come across, that's a strong possible there.

Alright, I'm officially excited.

38 days until FanExpo
51 days until TIFF '09

The countdown begins...

2009-07-19T15:41:00.001-04:00

I can’t believe I let this go for so long. Or maybe I can…getting linked to through the TIFF site drives my traffic well above its usual two readers, and who wants to spew into a vacuum, so naturally I’ve slacked off. But we’re now less than eight weeks out, the summer days and weeks racing by at a frightening pace, draft after draft of movie-themed bile and bilge getting tossed and/or forgotten without ever seeing pixel to screen, and as I battle a humid bout of SAD under the overcast Toronto sky, I figured it’s time to get back to it, no?

So to get caught up: ticket packages have been on sale for a couple of weeks now, and I did get mine, after a few false starts. Went up to 55 Bloor on my lunch break and, oh yeah, not there any more. My bad, I forgot. Sign on the door sez go to 2 Carlton so I hop back on the subway and get off two stops south. Only to be told, “Um, we’re just a phone bank, you’ll have to go to” and here’s where I buggered it up again because I could have sworn the guy said Yonge/Dundas Square, where the ticket pickup and box office was last year. Next day, attempt two, I’m wandering the food court like an idiot, wondering if the fates once again have it in for me. Fortunately I’ve got the latest mailing in my bag, which I should have checked in the first place, and whaddya know: Nathan Phillips Square. In other words, six or seven blocks away from any festival screening room, yards from striking city workers, and basically not in any particularly sensible spot. Couple of days later at lunch I finally hike over there and buy the 10-pack.

I think I burned myself out last year. My end total was something like eighteen screenings (I got two 10-packs and brought friends to two films). I’m a film nerd, or at least used to be, but at that pace they start to blend together and one’s stomach becomes a solid tumor of food court Thai that doesn’t clear out until Halloween. I’ve often been envious of the 30-screenings folk and the critics who achieve the same saturation level, but I suspect that I’d be throwing in the towel around Wednesday if I seriously attempted it. So this year, the plan is one 10-pack and four, maybe five additional individual tickets once they go on sale on September 9th, and hopefully no three-flick days.

Of course, the closer the day actually gets, I’m sure I’ll change my mind again. As both my devoted readers know, the three week stretch surrounding FanExpo (weekend before Labour Day) and the end of TIFF is the absolute highlight of my Toronto year. There’s the day the Program Book comes out (August 25th this year), which to me is like Christmas, New Year’s and every birthday from ages four through twelve all rolled into one, an evening of spreadsheets and schedules and cross-referencing and picking my top ten and backups sometime around two AM, then three days of nerding out at the convention centre, the annual family visit over the holiday and then six days off work and lugging notebooks, scripts and my camera all over hell and gone for those magical screenings.

My impressions so far? Can one have any, two months before the fest? Of course….of note so far:

Yes, I know I just finished bitching about it, but the box office situation is a major bugger. I really hope there will be more than one spot to buy same-day tickets during the festival, and that it’ll actually, you know, maybe be at one of the screening locations.
Last year was stage two or three of the TIFF’s gradual elimination of the Visa Screening Room Special Presentations from accessibility to the hoi polloi. A couple of years back, you could still get SP tickets as part of your packages, but if bought individually they were hiked up to gala price. Then last year all the SPs were priced out of range, unless they were premiering in the Winter Garden screening room, which seemed to be decided rather arbitrarily by the programmers and what movie was screening where was only evident when one looked to choose their package picks. Rumour has it this year the general rabble will be able to view movies in the best screening room left in the city (since the Uptown fell), though we will be relegated to the balcony lest the donors get student-stink on their Armani. Which isn’t terrible, the Elgin theatre is still a dynamite place to see a movie from any altitude, though if you have vertigo you may want to wait for the second or third festival screening.
The initial titles released on the TIFF website (largely SP, but a few other programs as well) are by and large droolingly enticing. And this Tuesday the Midnight Madness program is unveiled. Last year I saw six of the ten MM flicks, though after my experience at Martyrs I’ll definitely choose a bit more sparingly. Colin Geddes still has, I’m convinced, the best job in the festival, and if he finds anything this year half as glorious as The Burrowers or Not Quite Hollywood it’ll make up for any duds in the rest of the fest for me.
In the past two years, Time magazine did two features each year a week apart on the fest, in fact in 2007 it made the cover of the Canadian edition (and just that edition, I’m fairly certain). Now that Time no longer publishes a Canadian version, I wonder how in-depth the coverage is going to be.

That’s it for now. I’m going to focus a bit more on this blog over the next couple of weeks with memories of TIFF past, my impressions of the summer blockbuster season so far and a blow-by-blow FanExpo report so stay tuned.

The Academy Award nominations - reactions and predictions

2009-01-24T18:38:00.003-05:00

So the Academy Award nominees were announced this week and it’s easily one of the more predictable years in memory. There’s actually not too much to actually complain about, mind you, it’s just that there were no real stunners. I’m a bit surpised at the complete shutout of Gran Torino; since Eastwood hinted that it would be his last time in front of the camera I was sure the Academy would have thrown him the acting Oscar he’s never won. He wasn’t even nominated for Best Song, which was just as big a head-scratcher. Best Song is one of the odd categories where there isn’t a mandatory number of nominees, and this year there’s a grand total of three, two from Slumdog Millionaire and the Peter Gabriel number from Wall-E, any of which would be worthy winners, but “Gran Torino” definitely should have made the cut. The Eastwood flick was one of the better surprises of the year, especially coming from a director who’s spent more than a decade cranking out ponderous solemnities based on the kinds of novels that businessmen buy at airports (I mean, really, Bridges of Madison County was the last masterpiece he directed) and one could say that it was just a year of oddly dense quality that shuffled some worthy entries off the edge of the bench, but that doesn’t explain the Best Picture nod for The Reader. Nor does it explain the passing over of Rosemary DeWitt, Bill Irwin and Debra Winger for Rachel Getting Married; of Colin Farrell for In Bruges; or in the most egregious oversight of all, of Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky, mere weeks after she won the Golden Globe.

Anyway, I could rant, but instead of descending into my annual pissing and moaning I’ll instead refer you to the best online discussion I’ve come across so far, between Troy Patterson and Dana Stevens on Slate. Stevens is rapidly becoming my favorite film critic since David Edelstein decamped for New York Magazine and his postings became oddly sporadic and truncated, and this year’s Movie Club was terrific as well under her leadership.

So my predictions for the main categories:

Best Actor
Should win: Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Will win: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Best Actress
Should win: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Will win: Kate Winslet, The Reader

Best Supporting Actor
Should win: Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
Will win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Best Supporting Actress
Should win: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Will win: Viola Davis, Doubt

Best Director
Should win: Danny Boyle
Will win: Danny Boyle

Best Picture
Should win: Slumdog Millionaire
Will win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

We’ll find out in four weeks.

2008 - The year in review

2009-01-06T20:15:00.006-05:00

Alright, I’ll get it out of the way first, then will come the overanalysis and dissection. Beloved readers (yes, both of you), my Top Ten movies of 2008 (A caveat: I include movies on my list that I saw that were either released in Toronto theatres or played at this calendar year's film festival, whichever came first. This is why Son Of Rambow was on last year's list--topped it, in fact--even though it only opened here in 2008):

1. In Bruges
2. Rachel Getting Married
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Happy-Go-Lucky
5. Wall-E
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
7. American Teen
8. Not Quite Hollywood
9. Religulous
10. It Might Get Loud

And the runners-up (in alphabetical order)

· The Burrowers
· Forgetting Sarah Marshall
· Frost/Nixon
· Gran Torino
· Hancock
· Iron Man
· Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
· Let The Right One In
· Pineapple Express
· Redbelt
· Synecdoche, New York
· War Inc.
· The Wrestler

There’s no way to describe the past year in movies without the adjective “weird” popping up somewhere in the text. Well, maybe not “weird” per se, but there was a lot that seemed just a little off. Which was not always a bad thing. I may lose my Cinema Nerd Guild union card for admitting this, but to my utter surprise, everything in the upper half of my top ten this year is also showing up on plenty of critics’ lists. How’d that happen? I’d mourn the passing of my tetchy obscurity-love, but there’s actually something refreshing about being able to engage in serious debate about the titles that moved me this year, instead of trailing off so often into “Well, I saw it at a festival, it’ll be on DVD eventually, I guess…” (my next blog entry will revisit the past decade of my top ten lists to see what’s held up and what I’d throw overboard in retrospect so you’ll see what I mean).

Here’s something else bizarre: until I caught Benjamin Button on January first and had to regretfully nudge the Joe Strummer flick off the back end, my top ten this year was evenly split between fiction features and documentaries. One through five and six through ten, respectively, and that was a complete accident I only noticed once I’d juggled titles around for a while. Who knows, if I’d gotten around to seeing Man On Wire or Encounters At The End Of The World, which are showing up on a lot of critics’ lists, my own decalogue would have been even more doc-heavy. Speaking of which, can someone explain to me how, in this nearly-unprecedented age of documentaries actually making some bank at the box office, American Teen tanked so badly? Staged insert shots aside, little else this year could touch it for sheer drama, and there were few people who were such a luminous presence onscreen as Hannah Bailey. I'm baffled, frankly.

Then of course, there’s this year’s TIFF, which I dissected enough during its run (scroll down if you care) but which was enough of a near miss this year to cast a curious shadow over my autumn’s mood. At least, what I actually saw left that aftertaste. Looking over my top ten, I see six titles that premiered at the Toronto fest, even if only two of them were festival screenings that I actually saw. Who would have ever figured that a Danny Boyle flick, set in India and structured around a game show, shot and cut in his typical Trainspotting-esque hyperkinetic style would be a leading Oscar contender at this point? Or that Jonathan Demme would beat a retreat from his recent lefty documentaries and ill-advised remakes to re-embrace his uptown vibe, Dogme-style, and return to his humanist roots, and lead Anne Hathaway by the hand towards critical reevaluation?

How about the other big genre story of the year, namely the domination of the superhero saga? 2008 truly was the summer when Marvel fans could rejoice at their beloved comic heroes getting proper big-screen treatment. The Marvel Studios five-year plan to unveil a series of interconnected blockbusters has finally borne fruit in not just bringing respectful comic adaptations but also comic books’ hypertextual nature to the screen. Even Punisher: War Zone, not part of the Avengers continuity with its Marvel Knights banner and hard-R rating, was done right. Third time’s the charm, apparently: the filmmakers--a big shoutout to my former kickboxing instructor Lexi, who graduated to the directing big-leagues by lensing this one--were positively reverential towards Garth Ennis’ groundbreaking run on the title and made an adult action flick that’s much more than a guilty pleasure.

As for other comic movies, I loved Hancock, even if the ending battle was a bit of a muddle and the DVD release gives away the huge plot twist in its cover art. Then there was the elephant in the room, the second-biggest (worldwide) grossing movie of all time at this writing, The Dark Knight. Which didn’t even come close to making my list. While I will gladly concede that Nolan’s sequel contained a half-dozen movies’ worth of images that are seared into my memory, I wound up ultimately underwhelmed. Perhaps if it were shorn of half an hour, the botched Scarecrow cameo, the life-is-a-pile-of-shit ending and the too-often leaden pacing, the narrative could have matched the visuals for sheer impact. While I wouldn’t begrudge Ledger his posthumous Oscar, The Dark Knight is this year’s most overrated movie.

Or maybe that’s The Wrestler, which I still think is pretty terrific, mind you, but isn’t quite the masterpiece that many are claiming. Yes, Rourke is staggering, even once you strip away the meta-meanings of his portrayal. But the character of his daughter, ably played though she is by Evan Rachel Wood, is a paper-thin one-and-a-half notes, and the final reel gets almost unbearably mawkish. The final shot is one of the year’s biggest miscalculations, I think.

What The Wrestler gets absolutely right, on the other hand, was part of a bigger trend this year in utterly glorious cinematography. I suspect it has a lot to do with increasingly widespread use of high-quality video cameras, but this year’s images were as brain-ticklingly evocative as I can remember. I walked out of Gran Torino, Benjamin Button, Choke and countless other movies this year feeling like I was waking up from a dream, that I could still smell the settings and reach out and touch the peeling paint on the walls of the sets. Not that these were flashy films by any means, on the contrary their utter lack of visual affect was what lingered. Even a big-budget event film like Twilight was visually stunning; the rolling hills and forests of the Pacific Northwest were more expressive characters than the background Cullen brothers.

Okay…a couple more tidbits:

Worst miscasting: William Hurt in The Incredible Hulk. Overall, I had a blast at the flick, and I know they made a point of recasting absolutely everyone from the Ang Lee misfire, but replacing Sam Elliott with an actor you don’t believe, for a second, could ever even enlist in the military let alone become a cigar-chomping, hard-as-nails general was a rare misstep.

Barf-bag please! I actually didn’t make it halfway through Cloverfield. The trend towards feature-length handheld was bad enough, but incorporating whip-pan POV video into the narrative form is an aesthetic phase that needs to end as soon as possible.

Not as bad as all that: Speed Racer. Okay, yeah, it was junk, and probably killed what remaining goodwill the Wachowski brothers still had in Hollywood with its colossal kah-beuhm of an opening weekend. But it was genuinely daring filmmaking, an experiment that failed but failed with verve and ambition.

Okay, that’s nice, can we get back to business, please? Daniel Craig himself has said that he hopes the Bond films bring back such mainstays of years past as Q and Moneypenny, and after the skillful but dour Quantum of Solace, I couldn’t agree more. Let’s just agree that the franchise reboot was successful and lighten the fuck up a little, please?

Surprise of the year: Ghost Town looked like something you’d have to drag me to with hooks through my eyelids, a horribly clichéd rom-com with a hackneyed, “what, again?” premise. Man, was I wrong on that count. It turned out to be hilarious and affecting in equal doses, with stellar performances from all the leads and a burnished glow on its images of New York that lingered in the memory.

As for 2009…only eight more weeks ‘til Watchmen! Woo-hoo! And seven months (grumble grumble) until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. There’s also Michael Mann’s Dillinger biopic, Tom Twyker’s The International, James Cameron’s Avatar…and I have no idea what’s on deck for the 2009 TIFF. So while 2008 had its high points and hidden rewards, this year could very well handily blow it out of the water. Can’t wait.

TIFF 2008 wrapup (and revisiting the film that won't die)

2008-09-16T20:43:00.003-04:00

This fest-end wrapup has been a bit harder than usual to get going on. Not sure exactly why that is, probably just a struggle to balance my more generic rankings of viewings with my more confused ongoing feelings about Martyrs and my mixed emotions about the various controversies the TIFF engendered this year. Over all it was a good year…on average. I saw eighteen films at TIFF 08, a personal record for me (although last year I saw the same number during the period of the festival due to three others in regular theatre admissions) though certainly no record-breaker as far as TIFF regulars go. In fact, I hate to say it but I may actually scale back next year to a single ten-pack and a few extras. My point is that with so many films within nine days there had to be a few duds along with the spots of brilliance and (most of all) the Interesting Viewing Experiences, same as every year.

There certainly wasn’t, however, something I saw that really knocked my socks off. I did give four-star reviews to, and still continue to rave to my friends about, three films: It Might Get Loud, Not Quite Hollywood and The Burrowers, the first two of which at least I’ll definitely acquire on DVD at some point. But while my experience at those films was an absolute blast, a wild and fun few hours with chills and thrills, none of them really achieved a certain transcendence. Which seems like a tall order, I know, but it’s certainly something that’s attainable, that’s why I and no doubt most of my fellow audience members fell in love with the cinematic art form in the first place. While Not Quite Hollywood renewed my love of a certain aesthetic of fun trashy cinema, last year’s Son of Rambow went that much further to tap into something primal in my love of movies and my memories of how the movies have shaped me.

It also didn’t help, and of course this has nothing to do with the festival itself, that the weather was uncommonly pissy this year. In my experience, part of the joy of the festival is the way it eases us out of summer into autumn. You attend opening night in a t-shirt, tanning yourself under a blazing post-labour day sun, there’s maybe one day of rain somewhere around Wednesday, and you emerge from your final screening Saturday evening into a brisk fall evening, wrapping your jacket around you and debating Halloween costumes. I found myself carrying an umbrella in my bag every day this year, and the final three days were a muggy, sticky, tropical stew. Such meteorological misery does no good for filmic enjoyment.

And what of the stuff we can lay at the feet of the festival organizers? I laid off the TIFF board during the run of the fest, but many others laid into them. The Sun had a front page headline on the 6th blaring “FILM FEST ELITIST” and the article inside gave voice to many of the complaints of the regular fest-goers about the newly-established class system and inequities in ticket distribution. Piers Handling frowned his way through a response the next day, some of which I was on board with and some of which smacked of “well, we haven’t raised the prices on ALL the programs.” Unlike many, I’m split on the validity of some of the changes. As for the donors getting first crack at the ticket draws, um, (kaff kaff) I kinda thought they did already, so that wasn’t as big an affront to me as it was to many. And despite my bitching about being in the very last bin processed for the draw, I probably overreacted because a) I got thirteen of my top eighteen picks anyway and b) it really is a pretty fair way to distribute.

When it comes to people completely striking out with their picks, I’m of two minds. With the woman I was next to in line on pickup day who got zero out of twenty, I still have to wonder about computer or human error, however I have no opinion on the high percentage of folks who didn’t get very many of their picks. While I’m sure some of the disappointing draws were due to the donors jumping the line, I suspect a lot of it is really just “you pays your money, you takes your chances.” Availability obviously has something to do with the individual viewing halls’ capacities. I saw some movies in massive, half-empty auditoriums, and some smaller halls were packed to the rafters. There’s just no way of knowing in advance where the viewers are going to gravitate each year, the best example of which is the blockbuster status at the fest of Country Wedding. I mean, who knew? My own rules are pretty firm: as little as possible that’s going to be in the theatres in October anyway, and no galas. Getting a photo of one of the Coen brothers from across King St. just isn’t a priority for me, and I don’t need to hear Kevin Smith doing a Q&A after the second screening of Zack and Miri. So people filled their ticket selection books with the star-studded Hollywood awards bait and wondered why they didn’t get in? Hmmm?

Having come down on the side of the TIFF on those fronts, though, there was still plenty to aggravate this year. There was the clusterfuck of the ticket pickup day, with (reportedly) the broken printer and a three-hour wait for voucher cash-ins. There was the muddle regarding the split within the Special Presentation program, with no distinction between gala-priced and regular-priced SP’s in the main reference bible of the festival. I suspect, sadly, that next year all Special Presentations will be gala-priced, though fortunately there’s no way they can spread that to other programs without seeming completely arbitrary and giving the game away (“Okay from now on…um…Canada First! is forty-five bucks a pop! Yeah, that’s the ticket!”) The demise of the Cumberland as a viewing venue hits hard; though the theatres aren’t the biggest, it’s always been a cozy spot for an end-of-week screening.

And then…there was Martyrs. It was three days ago and I’m still playing it over and over in my mind—not the movie itself, though certain images are sticking with me much to my chagrin. Rather, I keep going over my reaction to it, and my bafflement over the reasons for its existence. In some regards, I suppose it is a masterpiece; Martyrs takes the horror genre to a very specific new groundbreaking place. Whether it needed to go there is another question entirely. The sort of pleasure it brings to its admirers and defenders is yet another issue. I may never be comfortable with the film; I certainly don’t plan on ever seeing it again to see if I feel as strongly about it in the future. But the fact that it’s still gnawing at me and I still keep bashing the arguments around in my head, and I can’t help but acknowledge that for all the moral offence it caused me it was an exceptionally made piece of work and far from the product of a hack…I guess that all means it did what it set out to do.

But is that justification enough? I still can’t get anywhere near conceding that Martyrs says anything that needs to be said in the genre or even film in general, and the director’s studied offhand remark that he views the piece as a melodrama that happens to have a lot of violence in it still strikes me as cynical and disingenuous. That bit of propaganda aside, I’m left with just my own reaction to the film to go by. And what possibly disturbs me the most is the feelings it brought out in me about the validity of a work’s very existence, an argument that before now I never would have had about anything in the entire cultural spectrum. My reaction to Martyrs made me think, this is what all of western popular culture must seem like to the Brent Bozells, the James Dobsons, the Mary Whitehouses of the world. What can it be like living in a world in which every Janet Jackson nipplegate or every f-bomb that slips past the tape delay is as shattering an offence as a young French girl being skinned alive for the edification of a bunch of religious cultists onscreen or an a theatre of gorehounds offscreen? Feeling that murmur of censoriousness was almost as disturbing as anything I witnessed at the AMC that rainy afternoon.

So anyway…that’s about all I can say on the subject. Martyrs didn’t cast a fatal pall over the festival for me, but it did make it memorable in a way I really could have done without in the absence of a life-changing cinematic experience. I did make a number of new great memories this year: meeting my screenwriting idol Paul Schrader, even if only for long enough to get a poster autographed, is a moment I’ll cherish forever. The Q&A for It Might Get Loud was the most rocking and rolling evening I’ve ever spent without any live music actually being played. Asking Wong Kar Wai a question and having him tell me about his latest conversation with Lin Ching Hsia in response…be still my heart. Not to mention the cinephile debates, the blog trades, winning the Ozpolitation handbook at the Not Quite Hollywood screening, and the tradition continuing of uncovering those special gems entirely by accident, the great along with the good and the bad.

Best year ever? Well, no. But still pretty damn good.

TIFF 2008 reviews: My Mother, My Bride & I

2008-09-13T23:15:00.002-04:00

My Mother, My Bride & I is a charming German romantic comedy that maybe relies upon a bit too much hand-held camera and stretches credulity when it asks us to believe that even a repressed forty-year-old mutter’s boy is going to bail in fear if Maria Popistasu doffs her kit in front of him and says please. But I still liked it a lot. It manages to make all three leads believable and interesting, and makes some sweet soundtrack choices, but mainly I’m glad I saw it because otherwise the last movie of this year’s TIFF for me would have been Martyrs and it was such a relief to have two hours of recognizable human behavior onscreen again. (***)

Yeah, it's short and doesn't say much but I'm still incensed over that travesti from this afternoon. I'll be back with a festival wrapup tomorrow.

TIFF 2008 reviews: Martyrs

2008-09-13T23:12:00.002-04:00

Martyrs was a post-ticket-draw voucher cash-in. What the hell, I sez, a French horror film, I regret missing Frontière(s) last year, and why not plug that hole in my schedule on the last day of the festival between the Thai kickboxing flick and the German romantic comedy with something fun and wild? What could go wrong?

I’ve been writing and rewriting this blog entry in my mind ever since the lights came up, and I’m still sort of at a loss for words as I sit down in front of the computer for the dispatch. Martyrs is, without a doubt, the most vile, disgusting piece of trash I’ve ever seen. I will concede that there’s skill behind the camera, but if anything that makes it worse, since that skill is being put to no conceivable good use. Look, I’ll defend Hostel and its sequel, the work of Jorg Buttgerheit, Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust (one more than the other but I always get them confused) and any number of other extreme horror flicks. And those aren’t even really my type of horrors: give me a creepy J-horror ghost story or some classic Hammer or a werewolf, vampire or Frankenstein variant any day. I was telling someone the other day that if I never saw another serial killer movie again that would be fine with me (and then I wandered into Acolytes).

But this film goes beyond the pale. It’s not just torture porn, that recent genre mutation that actually seemed to find its mainstream footing at TIFF Midnight Madness with Hostel and Saw (which I have never seen a single franchise installment of), it’s torture porn to the hundredth degree, unleavened by irony, subtext, politics or any sense of morality. The pseudo-religious garbage spewed by the ultimately-revealed villains doesn’t justify the senseless abuse the audience has been subject to for the previous hour. This is a new low: never before has physical abuse, damage and pain inflicted on frightened innocents been portrayed as stoically, methodically graphic.

For a while, I was lulled into thinking that this would be like the Reservoir Dogs of TP: Dogs was a heist movie all about the aftermath, and this would be all about the recovery and vengeance from a freed victim. But oh no, at about the hour mark any forward plot momentum simply stops and the audience’s nose is rubbed into the BTK depravity for a wordless twenty minute stretch as one of our two heroines (?) is chained up in a basement and beaten mercilessly. Rumour has it that someone actually vomited at the midnight screening. Gee, when was that? Was it when the girl was flayed alive, or when the ten year old took a shotgun blast to the chest, or was it when the other girl chained up in the basement had her facemask removed, the inch-long pins holding it to her skull slowly pulled out and the skin of her face and scalp sloughing off with the mask? Take your pick.

I should have listened to one quiet nagging doubt. The controversy of Martyrs’ French rating—the ratings board dusted off a rating that’s actually no different than Ontario’s “R” or the American “NC-17” but which is virtually never applied in France, basically serving as a ban over there—was mentioned in the TIFF program book and I sort of thought that was leading the witness, as it were. I mean, shouldn’t we decide if a movie is “controversial” or not, isn’t it the audience reaction over here that will give the movie its reputation? Look, I’m no great lover of the French, but they do have North American culture beat in so many ways. France is an open-minded society that knows how to balance work and play, doesn’t get hung up over sexual matters, takes care of the health of its citizens, and isn’t run by religious moralizers. I have a visceral reaction to any form of censorship, but Martyrs has brought me to the point where I’m willing to say: “you know, if even the French want to ban this movie…maybe we oughta listen.” (zero stars)

TIFF 2008 reviews: Chocolate

2008-09-13T23:10:00.001-04:00

When it comes to most genre films, I can get lenient on my criteria for entertainment. Basically it all ultimately boils down to one question: did the movie deliver what it promised? In the case of Chocolate, Prachya Prinkaew’s follow-up to festival hit Ong Bak, the answer is a stone cold yes, maybe not a home run but still a solid hit. The promise, in this case, was that for my admission price I’d get an hour and a half of a cute autistic Thai girl with photographic reflexes muay thai-ing her way through the Bangkok underworld. Done.

I actually kind of prefer Chocolate to Ong Bak (it’s about neck and neck with Tom Yum Goong, though, as far as lack of downtime goes), mainly because I’m still not convinced Tony Jaa will develop the onscreen gravitas and charisma he’ll need for the long run, whereas JeeJa Yanin emerges in her starmaking vehicle fully formed: she’s got the comedy, drama and moves down pat. Plus this time there isn’t a cynical passing-the-torch scene like the one in Ong Bak where Jaa bumps into the world’s worst Jackie Chan impersonator at the airport and stares him down.

If I’d seen this movie when I was twenty and in full chop socky fanatic mode, it would have been my favorite movie ever. As it is, there’s nothing new but, as I said: the movie delivers. It’s not a classic, but anything that gets an entire audience screaming, cheering and clapping simultaneously at acrobatics and body blows has done its job. (***1/2)

TIFF 2008 reviews: Achilles and the Tortoise

2008-09-13T09:27:00.000-04:00

This’ll be a short one. I actually would have traded in my ticket for Achilles and the Tortoise if I’d remembered that same-day exchanges weren’t permitted, and I nearly walked out after nodding off a couple of times during the screening. Which isn’t to say that A&T is a bad movie, far from it. There’s a reason Takeshi Kitano’s in the Masters program, and I’m a big admirer. But only four hours sleep Thursday night and the oppressive sweltering heat of Friday afternoon were not making me the most receptive audience member, especially for a stoic Japanese parable about the compulsive need to create “art” in a world that just doesn’t understand genius. I will say that it’s an oddly lopsided movie for Takeshi, who usually maintains a much more consistent tone in his films (I can’t recommend Hana-Bi enough for anyone who wants to see him at the peak of his directing abilities). The first half is a grim tale of a child’s obsessive need to paint as outside forces strip away all creature comforts. The second half is a wacky comedy about the child (grown up and played in the last act by the director) and his repeated bungled attempts to break into the art world, first with a college gang of zany abstractionists and then as a solo act abetted by his long-suffering wife. The only real aesthetic link between the two halves is a recurring theme of various people in his periphery committing suicide in front of him, usually ending with a pool of blood spreading around their head. So, really, just your typical Japanese comedy. (***)

TIFF 2008 reviews: Acolytes

2008-09-13T09:08:00.004-04:00

I wouldn’t call Acolytes a dud, as far as Midnight Madness shows go, though of the four MM flicks I’ve seen so far (two more to go) it’s the only one I’m not exactly raving about. The afternoon screening went rush shortly after I picked up my ticket at the Manulife box office. I’m not sure why the sudden surge in interest, the reviews in the weeklies hadn’t exactly been effusive, and it certainly wasn’t garnering the press attention of JCVD or the public curiosity (judging from how many people I talked to this week who were dying to see it) of Detroit Metal City. I suspect that many festival-goers just wanted to see SOMETHING—Friday was a rainy, muggy, miserable day outside, and there were less than 36 hours remaining in the festival and oh god this can’t end so soon, is it nine days already? Is there something, anything starting right now? I’ll take it! Just keep the non-mainstream flickering images going in front of my eyeballs! In all honesty, that’s kind of why I went. Well, it was Acolytes or Christopher Walken as a wacky con man, so…

Director John Hewitt showed up to introduce the movie though he couldn’t stick around for a Q&A. Interestingly enough, Geddes mentioned that Hewitt had actually been seeing plenty of other movies at the fest while in town, including all the midnight shows, which is refreshing news, as I’ve been wondering for years why more guests of the festival don’t kick back for a week and take in the TIFF like regular movie-lovin’ folk instead of bolting for Pearson after a gala or two and a couple of parties. Personally, if I was in their boots I’d be making a ten ticket pack and a program(me) book a condition of playing nice on the red carpet. This year, like I mentioned, I spotted a couple of directors in the audience for Kathryn Bigelow, and reports were going around of Geoffrey Rush making like a local, but except for Ivan Reitman at the Ryerson showing of DePalma’s Redacted last year, that’s the extent of my celeb spotting among the hoi polloi.

So anyway, Hewitt commented on his enthusiasm for Not Quite Hollywood, and how those same schlocky seventies grindhouse flicks influenced his own work (“You can see the occasional Brian Trenchard-Smith shot in here,” he promised, and went on to dis the classy examples of Aussie national cinema such as Breaker Morant and Picnic at Hanging Rock which, after the week I’ve had, somehow seems like a de rigeur complaint), which places him solidly in the tradition of the horror film directors working today who revere the seventies as a golden age for the genre. Which is a stance I only partially understand. I think Eli Roth is a terribly underrated director solely because he traffics in the most extreme end of the mainstream horror genre (and by “mainstream” I simply mean that he pushes the envelope in terms of what a major studio will release), but actually has a tremendous eye and a solid sense of pacing and storytelling. Still, to listen to the commentary track on Cabin Fever, he’s yet another young filmmaker who can’t stop raving about the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie I’m still convinced is the biggest cinematic case of the Emperor’s New Clothes in history, a dull, dreary, murky bore. This era of “hardcore” horror never does anything for me; except for Dawn of the Dead and early Cronenberg, the seventies were a big dry stretch in horror in my opinion.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to my main issue with Acolytes. Don’t get me wrong, I still recommend the movie: the performances are uniformly genuine and effective, and Hewitt’s a creative guy when it comes to camerawork, so the movie works well cinematically. It does suffer from a certain depressed grimness, a shadowy visual palette that makes me think that just maybe it wasn’t the best choice moodwise for an ugly, muggy Toronto afternoon. But for all the skill behind the camera, Acolytes rarely cuts loose with the kind of celebrated weirdness and gonzo spirit that Hewitt loved at the Ozploitaion drive-ins of his youth. It’s a pretty unrelenting story about three high schoolers seemingly from the Queensland touring group of Larry Clark’s Kids, three familiar types: the sensitive wounded teen romantic, the hypersexualized hottie (played by a terrific actress named Hanna Mangan Lawrence who bears an uncanny resemblance to Anna Paquin) and the sneering bully alpha dog, the type of fifteen year old asshat we all remember from high school, the guy who was a mess of wretched aggressiveness who still somehow managed to bag the girls who bore an uncanny resemblance to Anna Paquin. What starts off as a down-under version of Stand By Me, as the trio discovers a dead body in the woods, soon enough starts twisting off course into a cat and mouse game with a suburban serial killer and the local white trash child molester. There may be a twist or two too many, actually; though all the pieces come together at the end, I personally thought one of the reversals was a deus ex machina of the highest order. I left the Varsity feeling very bummed out rather than exhilarated, recognizing the skill with which the movie was made but still wishing that today’s horrormeisters would let loose with the wonky craziness more than the seemy-underbelly aesthetic. (***)

TIFF 2008 reviews: The Burrowers

2008-09-11T21:20:00.006-04:00

I turned thirty-five today, which I hesitate to mention here except that it always does fall in the middle of the festival, and I have to wonder if that annual body blow of mortality awareness determined why I liked the one movie I saw today so much and why I couldn’t quite bring myself to actually go to the other one for which I had a ticket. Anyway, it’s certainly not like I had a big blowout—indeed, with a b-day on 9/11, I stopped telling very many people a few years ago for some reason—it was a typical holiday for me: gym, grocery store, poking around on the internet, downtown for a screening of a monster-filled western, treated myself to dinner at Red Lobster. Who says oldsters don’t know how to get down?

Once again, at any rate, the fates work in mysterious ways. The second movie I saw at TIFF this year, It Might Get Loud, was one of my backup picks; I forget what I missed getting to make room for it, but it really doesn’t matter as I had a wild rockin’ time to kick off my first night of screenings. Today was another second choice: for some reason The Dungeon Masters, the doc about role playing gamers, was booked solid early on, so I wound up with a ticket to the Midnight Madness presentation The Burrowers, which I may have wound up trying to wedge in anyway, what with my elevated MM immersion program this year. I’d been wary of the movie for reasons I’ll get to, but when I bumped into Colin Geddes manning the MM booth at FanExpo, he gave me the hard sell on it and, yes, I’m learning to trust his judgment (see: Not Quite Hollywood. No, literally, see it. It’s playing again tomorrow evening. End plug.)

What did I know going in? Just the pitch of “it’s like The Searchers, but with monsters,” which tickled that part of my brain that celebrates the wacky genre mashup. So I kicked back in the Scotia 4, engaged in the most spirited “what have you seen?” conversation with my seatmates that I’ve had yet (any TIFF regular knows that such exchanges can be almost as entertaining as the movies themselves and can result in anything from desperate searches for 2nd showing tickets to love affairs to fistfights) and as the movie unspooled, was utterly transported. Yes, The Searchers with monsters. But also a genuinely expertly-made western, a solid suspense flick and an actors’ showcase. How great is it to see Clancy Brown onscreen again? Though he’ll always be the Kurgan to me, in The Burrowers he’s a wonder: buried under a grey beard and a tattered cowboy hat, he disappears into the role of a Dakota lawman, and establishes himself as a western actor in the tradition of Ben Johnson or Warren Oates. William Mapother is also a shock. Tom Crooze’s cousin scuffs down enough to be another credible oater star. If the western ever actually makes another comeback, these guys should be regular players.

And as for the monsters? Well, not to give too much away, they freakin’ rock. Director JT Petty keeps them offscreen or fleetingly-glimpsed for the first hour or so, and when they’re revealed as being…well, I won’t spoil that.

Here’s the thing that baffles me about The Burrowers: I saw Petty’s last movie S&MAN at TIFF two years ago and really disliked it. S&MAN was purportedly a documentary about the ultra low-budget, made in someone’s backyard horror movie scene, the kind of filmmaking that makes the dudes from American Movie seem like Corman-esque entrepreneurs—I say “purportedly” because it is that but is also something else, I won’t spoil that either, but I left the theatre feeling pranked, and not in a pleasurable way. Beyond the manipulative rug-pulling that pissed me off, the movie’s focus was on a group of people that I would have gladly crossed the street to avoid, a certain metalhead white trash alcoholic substrata of trailer park culture, and Petty’s documentary aesthetic seemed to stoop to that level. His film, despite the switcheroo, barely seemed a notch above the homemade exercises in masturbatory violence his subjects trafficked in. I felt dirty watching it.

So two years later, here’s Petty again with one of a) the best films of the festival, b) the best horror movies I’ve seen in ages and c) the most gorgeously-shot and brilliantly-acted westerns to come down the pike since Unforgiven. Was this talent coiled inside him as he hung around biker bars with a digicam shooting losers pretending to knife strippers laid out in wax pentagrams? This is a monumental leap forward, and I’m all of a sudden a huge fan, I can’t wait to see what he does next and my head hurts from switching gears that fast. The Burrowers is Petty’s fourth feature film. I’ve seen films that were the director’s tenth that weren’t as assured or well-mounted. And oh yeah, he wrote it, too, this terrific script that not only fuses genres so smoothly it’s like they were thrown together unexpectedly in a telepod, he also manages to comment on extraordinary rendition and class warfare without the slightest hint of beating the audience over the head with metaphor. I could rave for a few more paragraphs, but I expect I’ve overstayed my welcome here already. Great goddamn movie. (****)

I had a ticket to Firaaq this evening, but I wound up pawning it in the rush line. I know I really wanted to see something from India this year, but a week of disc-punishing lines, food court dinners and insomnia finally caught up with me, and I also realized I just wasn’t in any mood to see what was bound to be a really intense drama about south Asian religious strife (on this day of all days). So I retreated back to the east end, and I swear I’ll check out Firaaq if it plays the Varsity this fall.

TIFF 2008 reviews: Adam Resurrected

2008-09-10T23:47:00.005-04:00

From the ridiculous to the sublime…Plastic City finally (FINALLY!) ended and I raced up the aisle in the dark to line up outside the Isabel Bader theatre again for one of my absolute cannot-miss screenings of the festival, Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected. Okay, truth be told, I had no real idea what the movie was about going in; I knew there was a holocaust theme, and both Jeff Goldblum and Willem Defoe were in it, but beyond that I was in the dark. I was there for the man himself: Paul Schrader, the main reason I went to the AFI; the man from whose frontal lobe sprung Travis Bickle and Julian Kay and John Letour; the man who got career-best performances out of Richard Pryor, Michael J. Fox, Dana Delaney; one of the icons of the seventies golden age of American cinema. So he really could have brought Bio-Dome 2: Still Domin’ to town and I would have shown up with bells on. Indulge me, I have so few heroes left.

So anyway, the movie’s an adaptation of a novel which I haven’t read but which I learned in the Q&A is a major part of the cultural lexicon in Israel, and while it seems strange at first for Schrader to be taking on such a subject, considering his religious background both biographical and filmographical (raised strict Dutch Calvinist and made his name writing for the most Catholic of all American directors) but then again he did write the definitive movie on the most famous Jew in history, so maybe it’s not a stretch. Adam Resurrected, as a film, is at times even more powerful that Schindler’s List as it tackles some of the same horrors, though the events in this film are entirely fictional. In his B&W flashbacks to the camps, Schrader focuses not so much on the visceral evil of the Nazis but on the violations of the soul and dignity that they perpetrated. It’s a subtle distinction, but essential for Goldblum’s arc. Since we’re on the subject of career-best performances…yeah. This is his. It’s still Goldblum, he does that rapid-talking thing and that move where he’s unloading sly witticisms while his eyes are already moving on across the room and he’s no longer paying attention to his listener, and throws in a Yiddish accent on top. During the Q&A, he was asked about preparation for the role and he brought the house down; apparently that babble that’s become his onscreen trademark is basically how he talks in real life.

In fact, the Q&A seemed oddly jovial for such a serious film, though truth be told the film itself has more moments of levity than one might expect. Partly it’s a “laugh that we not cry” thing, but Schrader explained right off the bat that one thing that attracted him to the script was that it violated two key rules about holocaust movies, namely the story is entirely fictional, and it’s irreverent. I’ve seen the man come off as incredibly dour in interviews (in the Taxi Driver documentary he’s positively mopey) but he was a cheery delight tonight. And (swoon) I raced out behind the theatre and caught the delegation as they were piling into the limo, and he signed my Light Sleeper poster (“Oh, I like this one!” he commented cheerfully as he scrawled his name and I promptly dropped the poster on the ground twice). Sweet. (***1/2)

TIFF 2008 reviews: Plastic City

2008-09-10T23:20:00.003-04:00

Ouch. Another stinker. Plastic City started off okay, it’s a Hong Kong film starring Anthony Wong set among criminal-minded Chinese expats in Sao Paolo, and for a while it seemed like a topical contemporary gangster thriller in the making, ie: it’s no golden age classic but at least Noodle Cheng isn’t in it, and it deals somewhat with the scourge of piracy as a criminal enterprise. Then about halfway into the movie, the wheels come off the wagon in a big way. The supersaturated colour scheme starts taking on a bit of an “anime bordering on Beatty’s Dick Tracy” primary palette. The plot, already a bit shaky, topples over into the realm of the nonsensical—no two consecutive scenes appear to be following any similar plot strands. The limitations of digital projection make themselves clear: not only is the image visibly grainy, the subtitles don’t switch off during the few bits of English dialogue which, it should be pointed out, is invariably completely different from the words along the bottom of the screen, and I started to wonder if we were actually watching a DVD being projected. Finally, from out of absolutely nowhere, there’s a huge gang fight that seems to be set in an apocalyptic wasteland for no readily discernable reason and the Urotskudôji colour scheme really goes into overdrive. One character starts calling out for “Tetsuo” (by the way, I didn’t even know there was a Tetsuo in the flick so far) and I fought the urge to start an Akira chant (“Tet-suuuu-ooooo!!!!”). By the time the dead Amazonian native shaman popped up, I realized I was trapped in a reasonable facsimile of Oliver Stone’s id, and all I could really do was wait it out.

Director Yu Lik-Wai is apparently mainly a cinematographer, though looking over his filmography I’ve seen none of the films he’s shot. This movie is exhibit A in why not a lot of DPs make the move to the director’s chair. (*1/2)

TIFF 2008 report: In conversation with...Kathryn Bigelow

2008-09-10T10:18:00.006-04:00

Do you ever get the feeling, when discussing a movie, that everyone else saw a different one than you did? Same stars, same director, same story, but somehow your eyeballs took in a completely different film? I sometimes feel that way about Kathryn Bigelow’s work. Near Dark is one of my touchstone films; it’s among my top three vampire movies ever, the other two being The Addiction and The Hunger, and was a big influence on my own vampire script. From the incredible composition, to the brilliant casting (three key players from Aliens plus the luminous Jenny "why hasn't she acted in a decade?" Wright and stellar B-movie presences Adrian Pasdar and Tim Thomerson) to the eerie Tangerine Dream score to the assured storytelling, Near Dark is, in my opinion, a masterpiece.

And Bigelow has never been able to follow it up. Next up were Blue Steel, a gorgeously shot actioner with plot holes you can drive a winebago through and slack pacing; Point Break is a painful-to-watch early-90’s period piece full of hokey philosophizing that expects us to buy a 26-year-old Keanu Reeves as an undercover FBI agent; and then came Strange Days, to my mind one of the worst big-budget science fiction movies of the 90’s. I could expound for page after page on what I thought was wrong with Strange Days, but I guess my biggest problem was on the screenplay level. James Cameron (Bigelow’s ex) co-wrote the script, and while Cameron’s been able to get his key message—namely the dangers of mankind putting all his trust in machines that can turn on him—across in his own movies without whacking the audience about the head with it, in Strange Days one could almost see him at the corner of the screen pleading in a whiny voice: “You have to pay attention to this! This is soooo important!” Not to mention the scene where a racially-charged riot is stopped by the white Los Angeles mayor simply walking into the middle of the street and extending a saviour’s hand to a beaten black woman. I haven’t seen any of Bigelow’s films since, except for her latest, The Hurt Locker, on Monday night.

But apparently, I’m the one out of step. To judge from Noah Cowan’s introduction and the audience’s questions at the “In conversation with…Kathryn Bigelow” presentation at the Isabel Bader theatre, Blue Steel is a prescient feminist manifesto, Point Break broke new ground in chase technique and was ahead of its time in both casting and pseudo-homosexual interplay, and Strange Days is a millennial masterpiece. Maybe it is me, and I have to go back to give those movies another chance. This feeling of being critically out of step is one reason I wanted to hear Bigelow speak, and I emerged after an hour and a half even more confused than before, because the director we all saw onstage was nothing if not a smart, talented craftsperson with a clear directorial vision and a natural born filmmaker’s aggression and drive. Near Dark was a gorgeous movie: you could tell there was a brilliant visual stylist behind the camera. And her next two films, despite my problems with the storytelling, were a cut above most action films of the era; Bigelow struck me during this period as a female Tony Scott, only without so much reliance on smoke machines (which, despite the razzing Tony Scott gets these days which I feel is largely deserved, I do mean as a compliment, as his technique defined the North American action movie palette for more than a decade).

So am I just nitpicking the scripts? Does she just not spot what doesn’t work in a screenplay when she’s occupied with setting up her painterly compositions? Could she not tell that the “If only I had a knife! Oh, wait a sec…” climax of Strange Days was one of the funniest moments onscreen in 1995? When she devoted weeks to developing a portable 35mm camera fluid and light enough to shoot the POV virtual reality sequences in the same movie, did she not know about the digital video cameras that NHK-Nihon had invented for Until The End of the World four years earlier that would have done the same job?

I don’t know. I guess I’m still an admirer of Kathryn Bigelow. There’s something to be said for a solid action movie craftsperson and The Hurt Locker, despite my problems with it on a structural level, is probably the best film so far about the Iraq conflict. I guess I will have to go back and view her older films again to see what I missed, to see if the problem was with me. It was an illuminating evening, even if it didn’t exactly resolve my conflicted feelings about Bigelow, but then I guess that wasn’t the point.

As a side note, this is the second year in a row that I spotted a stellar rainbow to the east while waiting in line outside this particular theatre. As well, there were several directors in attendance with the seminar: Richie Mehta and Mark Hartley were both sitting a couple of rows behind me.

TIFF 2008 reviews: Not Quite Hollywood

2008-09-10T09:35:00.005-04:00

This year nearly a third of my TIFF screenings are from the Midnight Madness program. There’s actually a ticket package available that gets you into all ten MM movies at their 11:59 PM showings where, if coverage is to believed and I don’t know why it wouldn’t, the Ryerson theatre is packed to the rafters with scruffy Red Bull-wired vampires who can expound on the finer points of Takashi Miike and Hershell Gordon Lewis with equal fervor at the drop of a hat, glazed-eyed 30-ticket-package holders who’ve already seen five movies that day and are shooting for the hat trick, and Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth hiding behind Groucho glasses. Bear in mind I say this with all respect for this crowd. Colin Geddes probably has more fun putting together his program than any other programmer at TIFF. While most of the other higher-ups at the TIFF group are making the film festival rounds slogging through three-hour Bulgarian abortion weepies and achingly sincere Venezuelan transvestite coming-of-age sagas, Colin’s trolling the grindhouses of Japan and the sleaziest booths on the Croissette for the kinds of movies that’ll give you nightmares, laughter-induced laryngitis, erections or preferably all three at the same time so he can foist them on a public absolutely starved for the kind of stimulation that the demise of VHS back catalogs and the real-world midnight showings community has robbed us of. Simply put, I think he may have the best job in Toronto.

Personally, I’d go nuts after a week. Not to restate the bloody obvious, everyone’s film fanaticism goes through phases. When I got my first VCR in my first apartment and could devote night after night to the film education that I wasn’t getting in my Film & Communications program, I’d go through my Scorsese week, my Wenders era, my westerns survey…as well as my front-to-back horror franchise overview and my straight-to-video martial arts cheapie exploration. A few outside influences drew me over to the realm of trash connoisseurship and then the Hong Kong invasion hit and that was it for me, weekend after weekend of laserdisc rentals, immersing myself in wonky gun-fu and Boxer Rebellion-set wire-fu lunacies, searing the memory banks with indelible images of carnage and craziness that may as well have been from another planet.

That lasted for a few years until…I’m not sure what exactly began to dull my taste for trash (and I’m using the term “trash” in its honorific form; Leonard Maltin don’t know, but the MM crowd understands). Maybe it was the rise of DVD and the disappearance of vast catalogs of the low-budget dreck-with-the-occasional-gem on video from the shelves of Suspect. Maybe it was the grim realization that it didn’t really matter if I ever saw another Cynthia Rothrock or Don “The Dragon” Wilson movie again cause they were all pretty much going to be the same lousy flick over and over again. Maybe it was, as Roger Ebert has pointed out, that B-movies were now being produced by major Hollywood studios as summer tentpole features and those rare moments of wacky genius started to have a CGI’d focus group sheen on them. Maybe it was the 1997 handover of Hong Kong back to the PRC, after which the batting average of what had been the most vibrant film community in the world took a cordless bungee jump and Jackie Chan began making shitty movies with anorexic Party of Five stars, and my trips up to the Pacific Mall would result in piles of unwatched bootleg DVDs gathering dust, with me unable to work up the interest to sit through even one of them on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

No matter the reason, I was burned out on trash.

Which brings me, (FINALLY, the readers yell) to Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley’s utterly brilliant “rockumentary” about Australian exploitation cinema, or “Ozploitation” as he calls it in a term I plan on inserting into conversations at any given opportunity whether it’s called for or not. The doc explores an industry that found its economic footing through randy sex comedies, horror films that seem to filter the excesses of the goriest giallo through an alcoholic redneck rage and car chase movies that would make that hack Hal Needham soil himself (in other words, it pretty much parallels the last thirty-five years of Canadian film history including the tax rebate program and the expat American stars slumming it for a paycheque but without the snow, the rural Quebec location shooting and the ponderous self-importance…speaking of which, why hasn’t anyone made the Canadian version of Not Quite Hollywood yet?). In the hundred or so minutes of the film, clips from seemingly hundreds of “oh my god I can’t believe I just saw that” unspoiled, each one crazier than the previous, each behind-the-scenes story more surreal, each Tarantino interview segment lending more confusion as to how he could have gotten Death Proof so wrong if he understands so well what makes grindhouse movies work. This film celebrates trash and pulled off what I thought was near-impossible: it made me want to immerse myself in utterly crap movies again to find those gems that renew one’s faith in the fun side of movie-making.

If I had one complaint about NQH, it was resolved quite adequately in the Q&A. The first half hour or so whizzes by at such a prodigious pace that even if I had been taking notes during the screening I never would have been able to write down the titles I’m now dying to see. So I asked if there was, perhaps on the movie website, a comprehensive list of the movies excerpted, and for my question I was honoured with a prize of the Not Quite Hollywood companion book, the first time I’ve won anything at one of these screenings so I left the AMC walking on air, my faith in the healing cinematic power of all things totally gratuitous renewed. Anyway. See it. (****)

TIFF 2008 reviews: The Hurt Locker

2008-09-09T11:10:00.004-04:00

I won’t say much about The Hurt Locker because later today I’m attending “in conversation with Kathryn Bigelow” and I’ll have more context for a proper review, but I was left somewhat cold. To be sure, it’s a terrifically well-directed piece, and its total lack of politics surrounding the Iraq war is probably the right angle to take on the subject at this point. But it’s about twenty minutes too long, the shakycam hand-held style is rapidly becoming the most overused technique of 2008 (though to its credit this movie didn’t make me want to go peristaltic with my popcorn the way Cloverfield did), and the big-name cameos become distracting much the way they did in JFK. The short screen time afforded to Guy Pearce, David Morse and Ralph Fiennes (who actually gives the film a jolt of elegance and sex appeal when it really needs some) explains why none of them bothered flying in for the screening. Worst of all, and maybe this is just a peril of filming in a blazing-bright pale white sand-covered country, Bigelow’s traditional visual style which used to have a great Tony Scott sheen to it is almost nonexistent. Anyway, I might have more later. (**1/2)

TIFF 2008 reviews: Ashes of Time Redux

2008-09-09T11:04:00.002-04:00

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about Wong Kar Wai and the glory that was his mid-nineties output, so I won’t rehash here. This special presentation is the recut (pared down by ten minutes or so) and rescored version of his bizarre wu xia pan Ashes of Time and I can say that I did pretty much understand what was going on this time. I had seen the original version three or four times before, though the last time was well over a decade ago so maybe I just wasn’t as swift back then (if anything, I think the opposite may be true) or maybe Wong actually did tighten up the narration into coherence. For me, part of the attraction was to see Brigitte Lin on the big screen one more time. Lin Ching Hsia was, IMHO, one of the greatest screen sirens of all time, with a screen presence in the tradition of the Asumpta Sernas, Anouk Aimées and Arsinée Khanjians of the film world, an utterly hypnotic scene-stealer who consumed the lens. She retired and vanished from public life after making a pair of movies with Wong Kar Wai, each of which summed up her career and her iconic status in the Hong Kong new wave and movie history in the long term in diametrically opposite ways. In Chungking Express she was every film noire femme fatale brought to Taiwanese life for a final farewell (her stage-right freeze frame after finally dropping the blonde wig has got to be one of the greatest cinematic sendoffs in history), and in Ashes her role’s a comment on and deconstruction of all the androgynous sorceress swordswomen she had brought to life in the previous five or ten years.

In fact, as Wong alluded in his Q&A, Ashes of Time Redux is a veritable time capsule of a certain era in HK cinema, starring as it does so many of the best and biggest dramatic stars of back in the day: Jacky Cheung, the late Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Big Tony, Little Tony, Charlie Yeung. Although I guess by that logic Eagle Shooting Heroes, the parody of Ashes that made it to the screens before the source material did because of the long post-production period and which starred all the above actors plus Joey Wong whose part had been cut from Ashes, is also a time capsule, though the scene where Brigitte is chased through flat-floored Star Trek caves by a guy in a gorilla suit would tend to give the lie to that notion. Hmmm? Oh, right, back to the movie. Anyway, therein lies my only problem with the screening (besides an oddly grainy print), namely that I remember Ashes being much more affecting than it was. Maybe it’s a simple case of “you can’t go home again” or maybe it’s that Yo-Yo Ma’s cello doesn’t quite fit Maggie’s monolog the way Frankie Chan’s synths did but Ashes of Time seems much more the odd man out in Wong’s filmography, a noble experiment that has moments of transcendence but is more a curiosity piece that freed up his muse to make such masterpieces as Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.

Seeing as how my next movie was also at Ryerson and I didn’t need to race across downtown, I stuck around for the brief Q&A, which was quite rewarding. Wong Kar Wai’s English is better than most HK directors, and I asked a question for the first time at the festival, namely if the actors had seen the new version and what were their reactions. Apparently Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Carina Lau saw it at Cannes, and less than two weeks ago he’d arranged a private screening for the now-reclusive Brigitte Lin, and they all loved it and were glad they’d made the film in the first place. Overall a good afternoon, and I’m even more curious to know how Wong’s going to follow up My Blueberry Nights if he’s got swordsmen on his mind again. (***1/2)

TIFF 2008 reviews: White Night Wedding

2008-09-09T11:01:00.002-04:00

There’s not a lot I can really say about White Night Wedding. I’ve been lucky the last two years at TIFF with Icelandic films, and Baltasar Kormákur directed Jar City, one of the best movies I saw at last year’s festival, so picking this one was a no-brainer, though I’d also put in for a ticket to Country Wedding but, like everyone else I spoke to in the pickup line, didn’t get it, as apparently Icelandic nuptials are the hot ticket item among donors this year. Maybe there was some advance hype on that one; my Icelandic friend Disa says that her grandmother recommended she see Country, but White Night is, according to the program(me) book, one of the biggest box office hits in Iceland in recent years, so six of one, you know, maybe it doesn't matter which one I wound up seeing.

As it is, the impression left with me by WNW is similar to how I felt after Jar City, namely that Kormákur’s good at taking a familiar genre and putting a uniquely Icelandic twist on it while leaving most of the familiar beats in place, not that I’m even sure this is his plan. This movie’s apparently based on a Chekhov play that I haven’t read, but I’m pretty sure even most American marriage comedies have a little Chekhov in their DNA even if the Disney execs greenlighting them think “The Cherry Orchard” was a Warrant song. So there’s plenty of recognizable tropes here, with the characters just slightly larger than life which may be, I guess, the only way one can make it through life if you’re living on a tiny island of maybe fifty people shoved up against the arctic circle, as are the townsfolk in the movie. Personally, I found a bit of a Corner Gas vibe going on, including one character who’s basically a cross between Hank Yarbo and Vincent Gallo. And once again I have to wonder just how big the Icelandic film community is to be able to showcase such uniformly good performers. I can only guess that it’s largely government-subsidized and there’s gotta be a pretty sizeable theatre community from which to draw actors who are able to pull off Nordic zaniness without falling into the cloying saccharine trap that mars so much similarly-themed fare from, say, Ireland. Anyway, as for the movie: hilarious, well-acted, loads of fun, there’s no chance in hell it’ll play anyplace bigger than the Carlton but worth hunting down on DVD later. (***1/2)

TIFF 2008 reviews: Genova

2008-09-08T00:26:00.003-04:00

Genova is the movie I’d kind of worked myself into a lather over in the runup to the TIFF program book release, what with its “special presentation but not Visa Screening Room” status confusion. And all in all it really wasn’t worth my sweat. I was just psyched to have the opportunity, ultimately, to see Michael Winterbottom’s new film, no matter what the subject. Winterbottom’s a guy I’ve really gotten into in the past couple of years. The double Coogan whammy of 24 Hour Party People and Tristram Shandy really woke me up to the guy’s versatility: both movies play with narrative and storytelling in intriguing ways, and the latter was actually my favorite movie of 2006. I also recently saw 9 Songs, and it brought it home that this is a filmmaker with a unique and intriguing artistic sensibility. I did stay away from A Mighty Heart, but that’s more just an aversion to Angelina Jolie going all method. So anyway, I was down for whatever trip Winterbottom wanted to take us on this month (yes, month…he’s practically as prolific as Miike, it seems).

And “trip” is actually a better description of Genova than “story” when you get right down to it. I mean, there is a plot, the story of a family coping with the death of a mother by relocating to scenic Italy for a year (as we are wont to do, I’m sure…no, it’s not Hollywood-style contrived, there’s actually a reason for them to go), but you can sit back and watch the movie as a travelogue and probably walk out not disappointed. And the beauty of the city and ocean is only helped along by the always-luminous Catherine Keener. This was, to hear Colin Firth describe it in the Q&A after the screening, a real guerilla-style shoot, not so much in the absence of permits but in the lack of a crew, so the end result is a loose, 100% believably naturalistic family drama that happens to play out in gorgeous locales. You can immerse yourself in the mood; if anything I was reminded of the effect Alan Rudolph used to be able to pull off in his movies, that dream-like quality that lingers after the lights come up. So I’m glad I saw it, doubly glad the cast and director were all so engaging at the show. It’s no Tristram Shandy, but I dug it. (***)

TIFF 2008 reviews: La Mémoire des Anges

2008-09-08T00:07:00.005-04:00

Instead of College Park, this year’s southernmost TIFF box office is located at the brand spankin’ new AMC 24 at Yonge and Dundas. Which, mercifully, they’ve finally finishd construction on, since although it’s disconcerting enough emerging from a festival screening into a food court, I think it would somehow be worse to have to slog up three levels of escalators past nothing but drywall, scaffolding and surly staring contractors with Burton Cummings hair. I’m still not sold on the whole megaplex-as-festival-venue idea. The Scotia, at least, limits TIFF to the front four screens and manages to maintain the festival atmosphere while adding the more traditional moviegoing perks, like a snack bar, that you can’t enjoy at, say, Isabel Bader. Fortunately, I’m only at the AMC for three more screenings this week, although two of those are Midnight Madness flicks, which seem more incongruous at that location than anywhere else, although no more so, I guess, than The Memory of Angels.

Before I get going on that, was there a senior’s discount day that I wasn’t aware of? Because the 5:30 screening was a sea of grey hair (okay, considering the size of the AMC 1, “pond of grey hair” may be more appropriate), walkers, canes and at least one portable oxygen tank. And I had the great fortune of sitting next to this guy:

“So tell me again how you buy tickets? Wow, eighteen movies. I guess you must really love film, eh? You know, yesterday they told us this was sold out but then they also said to try again this morning and that’s how we got our tickets. Who are these seats reserved for? Really? The director is going to be here, too? Oh, that would be terrific, we can ask questions about the film then! You know, I’m from Montreal, that’s why I wanted to see this…” and then he went on to identify for his wife all the city landmarks as they appeared onscreen until I finally nudged him and made the finger-to-lips universal signal to shush although I’m hoping the look in my eyes also conveyed the addendum “Are you that bloody ignorant that you yammer all the way through every movie you go and see or is this the first time you’ve been in a movie theatre since The Sting? STFU!”

ANYHOW…La Mémoire des Anges (so identified in the program book and on my ticket yet not in the credits which were entirely in English) is an eighty-minute montage of clips from the National Film Board archives, exclusively from films set in or about Montreal between the depression and, say, Expo 67, the effect of which is not unlike flipping through your grandmother’s photo album and envisioning a time when all men looked sixty and were born wearing hats and women were prohibited by law from leaving the house without wearing white gloves and a pair of batwing-shaped glasses.

So it’s a sort of interesting compilation, especially as I’m a former resident of Montreal and it’s fascinating just how much of the architecture from sixty-odd years ago is still intact today. And it’s an at-times stunning portrayal of the pre-Quiet Revolution era, in which the Catholic church held sway over every aspect of private and public life in the province. But I’m stumped as to what the actual purpose of the movie is. It’s obviously not destined for theatrical release so…what? Promotional DVD sampler for the NFB library? A permanent exhibit for Tourism Montreal? As a sampler, it’s way too long. So I’m not even sure how I’m supposed to take it beyond “this is your grandfather’s Montreal.” Um, okay? (**1/2)

TIFF 2008 reviews: The Ghost

2008-09-06T23:32:00.002-04:00

Okay, so you have a good day, then you have a bad day. I mean, come on, with eighteen screenings on my docket at TIFF this year, they can’t ALL be gems. And thus, my first stinker of the fest, The Ghost. I don’t have much to say about it, really, partly because I fell asleep a couple of times and can’t claim to have followed every minute of the setup. I couldn’t leave, though, because the director was sitting right behind me. On the plus side, the program book got the running time wrong, and it was about forty minutes shorter than I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, here’s the thing about foreign fest fare, as far as my programming picks are concerned. My theory is that we learn much more about foreign cultures through their genre pop culture than through any sort of official national cinema or adaptations of the country’s “classics.” By the very nature of inherent populist requirements, horror, thriller, comedy, sci-fi or what have you tap more deeply into a national culture’s touchstones than straight drama, which in my experience tends towards the “look at my potato” school of storytelling. This has been borne out through years at the festival: Iceland’s Jar City, Hong Kong’s PTU and Throw Down, Japan’s Sukiyaki Western Django…these films say more to me about the countries that produced them than all the Zhang, Bergman and Ray you can throw at me.

That said, the movie still has to stand on its own merits, thus my apathy or outright dislike of Macedonia’s Shadows, Austria’s Silent Resident and as of tonight, Russia’s The Ghost. Part of the problem I had with the flick, I suppose, was that it seemed to be structured around where one would think the major plot twist would happen, like the director was trying to ape American movies stylistically but couldn’t quite get the bat off his shoulder. Not helping things is the fact that the protagonist is a major douchebag throughout the first seventy minutes or thereabouts, so when his life turns criminally Kafkaesque, it’s hard to be 100% sympathetic to his plight. Anyway, like I said: they can’t all be gems. Hopefully I’ll have better luck tomorrow. (**)

TIFF 2008 reviews: It Might Get Loud

2008-09-06T09:07:00.003-04:00

Next up was another of my fallback screening picks, and I’m still baffled as to how I managed to snag a ticket for what had to be one of the packed houses at the festival, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary It Might Get Loud. The concept is simple: three major rock guitarists, each from a different musical generation, having a creative summit on camera, crosscut with location shooting of their workspaces and vintage footage of The Early Years. Basic stuff, except that the three stars are Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White. In all my years of the festival, I’ve never seen an audience so primed and jazzed by the presence of stars…you can have your Clooneys and Pitts, I have a hard time believing either of them have received such a split-the-sky thundering standing O the way the former Led Zeppelin axeman got by taking one step into the Ryerson auditorium.

As for the movie itself, It Might Get Loud is one of the great rock documentaries and a guitar nerd’s wet dream. The vintage footage of a teenage Page’s early TV appearances in pre-Yardbirds combos is reason enough to see the movie. However, these numbers also prompted some of the more annoying audience call-outs; the crowd had more than its share of paunchy longhaired ex-hippies, already primed to cheer every time Page’s name was even mentioned onscreen for the first half hour, and the hoot of “You’ve come a long way, Jimmy!” when the scratchy BBC footage played was just embarrassing.

The whole evening turned into kind of a blur for me. It’s easy to get lost in the riffage as your brain tries to process concepts like the three stars all jamming on the “I Will Follow” intro riff and turning a two chord repeating figure into a heavenly paean. So I’m left with random thoughts:
· The Edge deserves a lot better than to be saddled with that obnoxious goof as a lead singer. The U2 footage reaffirms my impression of Bono as a dingbat who’s probably always composing articles about himself in his head (“’Politicians are a funny breed,’ he mused, settling back in the limo on the way to the airport…yeah, that’s what he’ll write.”) In fact, one of the Edge’s big laugh lines happens when I’m pretty sure he’s doing an impression of Bono’s portentiousness.
· Jack White is a bundle of contradictions for me. On one hand he seems to let himself be defined by his shtick, be that the colour coordinated wardrobe or his ongoing claim that Meg is his sister (is that one of those ironic things, that by repeating the trope five years after it’s been revealed as false, it becomes funny again?), an impression backed up by the Raconteurs footage in which, stripped of such irrelevancies, he seems to put on a better show. On the other hand, he’s a fucking great guitarist and his love of the blues seems utterly genuine and not at all like white boy slumming.
· Jimmy Page is the epitome of cool. I’m not the biggest Zep fan—in fact, if I never hear “Stairway” again it’ll be far too soon—but Page just eats up the lens with charisma.

Anyway, it was a pretty magical night. I was in the third row, so my proximity to rock royalty was as good as it’s ever been, even including Lou Reed at last year’s fest. I think I’ve got to go practice now. (****)

TIFF 2008 reviews: JCVD

2008-09-06T08:34:00.004-04:00

(now that I’m actually getting to the reviews part of my festival dispatches, I’m going to my annual 4-star ratings system, in honour of Roger Ebert, and if anyone knows if he made it to the fest this year, please give him my best. I’m also assuming that anyone logging into this blog has access to the tiff08.ca website and the film summaries contained therein so I’ll be skipping plot overviews for the most part.)

Reading over my past few entries, it’s embarrassingly obvious that I’ve been really negative this year. Yeah, there have been some hitches, but I’m willing to posit that one reason I’m so out of sorts is that my regular TIFF body rhythms are off. I’m pretty sure that every other year I’ve attended the festival I’ve attended a screening on opening night. This year with my backup tickets my first film wasn’t until Friday afternoon. So I was living in an emotional temporal stutter until I finally settled in for…a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie? Well, yes and no.

If there exists a more self-excoriating film project by a major movie star, I have yet to see it. JCVD isn’t a joke. It’s not a take-the-piss approach to an actor’s image, a self-referential inside-Hollywood elbow in the ribs ode to a star’s image that comes off as manufactured and contrived as said star’s mainstream efforts. Nor can JCVD even be described as a comeback vehicle, as its goal is something different and almost unsettling: therapy.

The centerpiece of the film is a five-minute unbroken shot in which the drama freezes, the eponymous star floats up through the ceiling and, among unattended grip equipment, breaks the fourth wall to lay himself bare for the audience. No, not in a “Very nice, Mr. Keitel, now please put that away.” sort of way, but in an unsettlingly emotional purge, a paean to a career that tumbled from some relatively impressive heights to straight-to-DVD purgatory. Addressing the camera/audience directly, Van Damme unloads blame for his decline on himself, the business, himself, the pressures of stardom, himself, his own lack of willpower and himself again. He actually cries in this scene, and it doesn’t get a laugh, nor is he going for one. One wonders how many takes were required to get the shot in the can; if it was a first take I wouldn’t be surprised.

The fact that the monolog is delivered in French helps immeasurably. Actually, that could be said about the film as a whole—sample any of Van Damme’s “classic” actioners and one realizes that even a master thespian couldn’t put lipstick on the pig that tried to pass as expository dialogue (No Retreat No Surrender's "So. It is you. The son. Is it not?" still cracks me up). But here, freed from the constraints of The Prisoner ripoffs, illogically paradoxical science fiction and the toxicity of Rob Schneider, as well as using his native tongue. JCVD gives his first genuinely terrific performance, top to bottom. It’s all in the subtleties: asides that are anything but sly, resignation, fatigue…even in one of the few scenes in English, a custody battle flashback, his body language is priceless. If nothing else, only the most churlish critic could fault the star’s acting abilities here. Comparisons to Stallone’s work in Copland (for much the same reasons) are appropriate.

JCVD isn’t a perfect film. The sepia-toned photography is beautiful and evocative, but a little goes a long way to negligible effect. That to-the-camera shot goes on for about a minute longer than it really needs to (or maybe that’s the point). And the production might have shelled out a bit more for a proofreader to snag those typos in the subtitles which, I should point out, were white against white about 20% of the time. But overall, JCVD is a daring move by a star with nothing much left to lose and is all that much more powerful an experience as a result. (***1/2)

The press needs an attitude adjustment

2008-09-05T09:05:00.002-04:00

Okay, this insomnia, this waking up at 4:30 every morning no matter what time I turned out my lights the night before, this has really got to stop if I’m going to make it through this marathon.

First day of my vacation, and I’ve got two movies today: JCVD at 3:15 and It Might Get Loud at 9:15. Easing into things, I guess…tomorrow I’ve just got an evening show of The Ghost, and Monday is my first three-flick marathon.

More exhaustive fest coverage in the free weeklies yesterday. Glad to see that one of my gambles, My Mother, My Bride & I, is getting raves. Now included a Stella Artois pullout which features an easy-to-read schedule, a couple of glossy interviews and still more snarky promo. Seriously? In promotional material, should the first person singular pronoun appear quite so often? Who’s Barrett Hooper and why should we care that he’s got nothing to add to the tired “TIFF is the launching pad for Oscar season” meme? Does Glenn Sumi work for TIFF or Stella Artois? And if it’s the former, do the programmers mind that he calls some of their picks “stinkers”?

I’m not sure why the press coverage is bugging me so much this year. Part of it seems to be a tone of “cut ‘em down a peg” from outsiders but there’s plenty of pissing from inside the tent as well. Does TIFF have a few problems this year? Judging from what I saw and heard on ticket pickup day, sure, but can’t we put that crap on hold for ten days? Not to sound all Tracy Flick here, but can we have a little pep and spirit for the home team for at least a week?

My schedule and some strange/lame coverage

2008-09-03T21:24:00.003-04:00

Okay, it’s all nailed down. Barring any impulse buys—which during the festival basically means I’ve got a four hour gap between movies and I’m debating whether to spend an hour and a half plus in transit back out to my place in the east end then back downtown or is it worth $20 to skip the trip and fill the gap with an Uzbek musical or Ghanaian murder mystery—I’ve got my schedule locked down. Made a couple of trades and picked up some extras for friends so here’s how I’m spending Friday through next Saturday:
JCVD
It Might Get Loud
The Ghost
La memoire des anges
Genova
White Night Wedding
Ashes of Time Redux
The Hurt Locker
Not Quite Hollywood
In conversation with Kathryn Bigelow
Plastic City
Adam Resurrected
The Burrowers
Firaaq
Achilles and the Tortoise
Chocolate
Martyrs
My Mother, My Bride & I

Realized I’m seeing fully half the Midnight Madness program, none of it at midnight. With my sleep cycle as wonky as it is, I daren’t risk the caffeine binges that would be required to make the witching hour shows. Though I may at least show up at 11 on Thursday to see if I can spot the eponymous Belgian meatloaf heading into the premiere of JCVD.

On another note, last year Time magazine had two huge features on the festival on consecutive weeks, one of which was a cover story (Canadian edition only, I imagine). Last week’s issue, the one with McCain on the cover, has this year’s coverage, and if you happen to have read the article, chime in on this would you, is it unnecessarily snarky and pissy this year? Comments about how the reduced number of features “allow[s] the bosses of the festival…to congratulate themselves for streamlining the event.” The whole article seems to be about how TIFF is the launching pad for Oscar season, which is hardly news to anyone, but the writer obviously had a hard time finding an angle. The main body of the article barely qualifies as news; it’s a glorified promo piece, down to the more in depth coverage of Brad Pitt’s latest career move and fleeting interest in the foreign fare that makes up the bulk of the screenings. There’s also a few pages on where to shop and dine if you’ve got money to set on fire, and a map of downtown that suggests to me that this article IS in the U.S. edition of the magazine, if only because the Gardner Expressway is referred to on the map as “Frederick G. Gardner.”

One more day of work then my vacation starts. Kickass, dude.

Five hours in line and the rare stroke of luck

2008-09-02T20:29:00.004-04:00

This may be the week for me to buy a lottery ticket.

You can probably tell from the tone of my last dispatch that I felt thoroughly screwed by fate, being in the very last ticket form bin to be processed. All Sunday night I was in a pretty foul mood, figuring I’d get none of my first picks and I’d be slogging through the festival seeing a bunch of also-rans. Any gems I came across by accident would be tainted…tainted, I tells ya.

So I’m up at 4:30 on Monday because I collapsed from exhaustion at quarter to ten the night before and apparently my body’s only got a certain number of hours REM in it each night, and I checked my email. And I got thirteen out of my top eighteen. Not only that, but I got some shows that I was 100% sure would be sold out, like the Genova SP and the premiere of Ashes of Time Redux. Adding curiosity, I got It Might Get Loud as a backup. Huh? That was a shot in the dark, if only because who knows if Jimmy Page, Jack White and the Edge will show up for opening night? So thirteen first picks, four second picks and one voucher. I did miss a few that I really wanted, but oh well, I’ll only see one Icelandic movie with “wedding” in the title this year.

Anyway, I head downtown a bit later than I’d planned and I get to Canada Life Square around nine…then all the way up the block to Gould and around the corner. And then the weird stories start. I’m right in front of a woman who not only got none of her first picks but none of her second picks either. She got an email saying, basically, “here’re ten vouchers.” What are the statistical possibilities of that happening without a computer foulup or some serious human error? The woman in front of me, on the other hand, got duplicate tix for the same show, with her first and second picks overlapping, so she had some exchanges to make as well.

Knowledge of the holy bin number turned out to be a strange shibboleth among the crowd. All morning, you could hear the furtive queries: “what bin were you?” My downbeat “eight” was always met with a mixture of horror and sympathy, followed by disbelief that I batted as well as I ultimately did. Two hours after arriving I finally picked up my tix. The volunteer cheerily noted “you did pretty well!” so I imagine he was seeing some of the horror stories first-hand. At this point, the exchange line was almost as long as the pickup line. I joined the second crowd and…stood almost perfectly still for another hour. THAT line wasn’t moving an iota. Word filtered back that they were letting up fifteen people every twenty minutes…or ten people every fifteen minutes…or thirty people every…whatever…and that a printer had broken down, and a volunteer was running someone’s tickets down from Manulife.

Finally I said screw it, I’ve gotta go. So I scooted up to Yonge and Eg to catch a noon showing of Babylon A.D. which aside from a botched ending (the leitmotif of high-concept action flicks this summer) was actually a pretty solid dystopic actioner with a European sensibility. Kassovitz is disowning the movie, saying the producers ruined a much smarter movie. I’ll be curious to see a director’s cut.

Anyhoo…back down to Canada Life Square and jaysis fookin’ ‘ell, the exchange line is just as long. Well, ye gotta do…so two hours later…I traded in my voucher and my passes to that long-titled Quebec film about the ’68 Expos as it’s been getting pans and Cold Lunch because I just can’t deal with dead kids that early in the festival (yes, I know the blurb says nothing about a dead kid but it’s implied) for a couple more Midnight Madness matinees and an early screening of The Ghost. Heard more tales of woe while in line…the guy who got two out of his top picks, the goof who didn’t know about the 1 PM cutoff for dropping off his form (actually, not much sympathy there, but then I’m anal about deadlines, especially when it comes to the TIFF), and NOBODY I talked to got Country Wedding though many people had it as a pick. Who knew that an Icelandic comedy would be the hot ticket item for opening night?

Heading up to the Box Office after work tomorrow to try and fill in some gaps, to try and trade one of my Achilles and the Tortoise tix for a second My Mother My Bride & I pass. Two more days of work, then Friday afternoon I plunge right in. Woo-hoo!

Screwed by punctuality: sagas of the bin

2008-08-31T17:47:00.003-04:00

Number fucking nine.

Saw on the TIFF site that the number selected (was it not randomly computer-generated? did they ask someone's kid what his favorite number was?) to begin the ticket draw was number nine. And I, of course, dropped my ticket form off on Wedneday mid-afternoon and it went into bin number (wait for it) eight. And they filled seventy-eight boxes with forms. How many forms in a box? Fifty? So are there 3900 people who will be processed before I am? Am I going to get a single one of my top picks? Looking over my list I see at least seven I can pretty much guarantee will be filled before my form is drawn.

Seriously, at this point it's probably for the best if I think negative thoughts; the surprise waiting for me in my inbox later tonight or early tomorrow morning can only be an improvement.

Program book day and the torture of choosing a top twenty

2008-08-26T21:40:00.003-04:00

You know that classic scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where the teacher passes out a mimeographed quiz and all the stoner students take a huge whiff of the papers? Yeah, that’s me soon’s I crack open the TIFF program(me) book every summer. Sad, ain’t it? I actually said “Amazing! Smell this!” to my manager and she did indulge me, though I suspect it’s because I so rarely get enthused about very much at the office and she didn’t quite know what nuttiness might ensue otherwise. I passed out the promo goodies (a bag of coffee, some Lindor chocolates, a Pizza Nova contest card, and I kept the Stella Artois glass) and settled back to get to highlighting the index.

So the book is out! Kind of muddy earth tones on the cover, not exactly the eye-catcher that the blazing blue of ’06 or the green of ’04 was, but never mind, I don’t get it for the cover. And I’ve actually worked out a top twenty schedule in record time. I think. Sort of. I’m missing a couple that I was hoping to squeeze in, and if I get them at all as backups, it’ll be at the cost of something I want even more, but I did the best I could with the overall festival schedule. My top twenty is actually a top eighteen, as I’m taking friends to a couple of shows. So the eighteen I’m hoping to see this year are, in chronological order: Country Wedding, A Film With Me In It, Un été sans point ni coup sûr, Middle of Nowhere, La Mémoire des Anges, Genova, White Night Wedding, Ashes of Time Redux, The Hurt Locker, Not Quite Hollywood, the evening with Kathryn Bigelow, Plastic City, Adam Ressurected, The Dungeon Masters, Firaaq, Krabat, Chocolate and My Mother, My Bride and I. I’ll spare you my backup list until it becomes a going concern.

What’s the breakdown? Ten are in a language other than English, two are documentaries, two are Canadian (specifically Quebecois), two are Icelandic, two are matinees of Midnight Madness flicks and only one is something I suspect might get a theatrical release in Toronto.

And Genova made my list, despite the muddling efforts of the fest organizers. When I open the book, I tend to skip over the gala section for the obvious reason. This year, what with the Special Presentation change (which the woman behind me in line, for whom this will be her twentieth year at the fest, was also commiserating about. Power to the people), I was going to skip the SP section as well. Skimming through the book, frustration mounted as that particular program seemed to be the thickest of them all. I verified that a handful of SPs were playing in non-gala theatres after their premieres, so I called up once more to see if a verdict had been reached on 2nd screening prices. At which point it was explained that the pricing pertains, ultimately, to the venue more than the program. Galas you know, but SPs are only premium priced if they play at the Visa Screening Room. The Winter Garden Theatre, on the other hand, located in the same building, though I have no idea where, is also playing host to Special Presentations at the old price. So it sort of makes sense, though such a distinction is spelled out only monumentally obliquely if you care to hunt for the facts. Genova makes the list. I hope I get in.

Looking forward to Ashes of Time Redux. I must admit my interest in Wong Kar Wai waxes and wanes; I nearly fell asleep at 2046 but thought My Blueberry Nights was quite wonderful and unfairly maligned by the critics. ‘twas a time, back when a good 40% of what I was watching was in Cantonese with English subtitles, that Wong was a major concern in my cinematic life. To this day I think Chungking Express is the most romantic movie I’ve ever seen; the final line of dialogue between Tony Leung and Faye Wong makes me want to hug myself with joy every time I hear it. The original version of Ashes is more problematic. It was a wu xia pan whose production spiraled out of control and was banged into a well-nigh incomprehensible form in the editing room, yet was still a wonky masterpiece. I remember lending a bootleg to a German friend while at film school and she called me up just as Brigitte Lin was slicing the lake in two, saying “Thees is my new favorite moo-vee! Thank you, thank you!” The way the camera lingers on Maggie Cheung’s face during her closing monolog cemented her status as one of the greatest iconic screen beauties of all time. If this re-edit maintains all the power of the original but also renders the story understandable, Wong will definitely have his mojo back.

A few other observations…

Control Alt Delete, a Canadian film about a guy obsessed with internet porn who actually begins to have intercourse with his hard drive, was produced by Lynne Stopkewich, who directed the classic necro drama Kissed, and thus seems to be building a career around movies featuring characters humpinandpumpin things they really shouldn’t. Only in Canada.

Looking through the Galas I can’t spot this year’s massive misstep, that high profile red carpet event that either tanks completely upon release or is critically reviled or both. All The Kings Men, anyone? How about 2005’s closing night gala Edison, starring Kevin Spacey, Morgan Freeman and Justin Timberlake, which went straight to DVD as Edison Force? I’m leaving Elizabethtown out of this grouping because I thought the release version was a lopsided masterpiece and I don’t hold its “work in progress” gala catastrophe against it.

I ran into Colin Geddes at FanExpo and we talked about the Midnight Madness lineup. It’s a really solid program this year, though oddly enough there’s no musical documentary like there usually is. Geddes was raving about The Burrowers, though I really disliked JP Petty’s S&MAN two years ago. If I can somehow squeeze into a screening of Martyrs, I just might hit that one on top of my ticketed program.

Is every Israeli director named “Amos?” Just wondering.

I think John Malkovich is in about eight movies at the festival this year. Maybe not that many, but his photo seems to be all over the book for some reason.

I’ve already seen the trailers for seven of the Special Presentations in theatres, two of which star Greg Kinnear, who’s actually done really well at the TIFF with Auto Focus and The Matador, among others. Ghost Town seems to be the oddest festival entry of the year, a comedy that seems so unbearably mainstream and generic and is really only going to pack ‘em it so folks can see and hear Ricky Gervais in person.

So anyway, I’m dropping off my form after my lunchtime comics run tomorrow and my fingers will be crossed until the weekend. What did everyone else pick?

Various random thoughts on the film list

2008-08-21T18:00:00.001-04:00

The closing night gala is Stone of Destiny, about the theft of the Stone of Scone which is kinda funny because I just last weekend watched the episode of Highlander in which Mac, Fitz and Amanda are revealed to be the ones who lifted the rock. Okay, so that’s just funny to me.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a Special Presentation, and I noticed that Traci Lords is in the cast list. Which got me wondering if this is the first time Lords is onscreen at the TIFF, but then I realized that as a John Waters veteran, it’s probably not even the first time she’s been thirty feet high on the Visa screen.

In between my recent 24 marathons, I’ve rented a couple of former festival flicks lately. Saw Shortbus (2006) last night and liked it quite a bit, though the ending was way too inconclusive for my liking. There were some truly spectacular moments of pathos, though, particularly the former mayor’s lament and the closing song. And I rented The Boys and Girl from County Clare pretty much on whim (an hour and a half of Irish reels and Andrea Corr’s cheekbones? Sold!) only to discover later that it had played at a Gala in 2003. It was…fine, I guess, entertaining enough despite a script loaded with more clichés than a Bon Jovi lyric; I’m still sort of puzzled as to how it made the gala cut.

Only two of the galas worry me about subsequent general release possibilities: Who Do You Love and The Good, The Bad and the Weird. I really hope there’s a Mongol-style surprise and Lionsgate or Alliance picks them up for theatrical.

Two weeks to go!

Initial thoughts on the film list and one final rant

2008-08-21T17:55:00.004-04:00

So, Christmas (ie: Program Book Day) is just around the corner and things are in kind of a holding pattern. The full film list went live on Tuesday, but with no blurbs or schedule accompanying it, such a posting tends to leave one more frustrated than anything else. Each year I spend that Tuesday evening cross-referencing titles with the imdb, but since most of the films haven’t had any kind of release even in their home countries, and many others have secured little if no distribution, information can be scarce. Many titles don’t show up at all on an imdb search, and others have little more than a title and main cast credits in the listing: no external reviews or official website which makes advance querying futile until the book comes out to give a few more hints.

All I can really do until the 26th, then, is to research what I can and make lists based on directors, actors, and countries of origin that I’m hoping to visit cinematically this year. Two Icelandic movies have made my list--both about weddings, oddly enough; I guess nuptials was this year’s theme du jour in the Reykjavik film community. French-Canadian films seem a little thin on the ground, but the weird way in which Canuck flicks are programmed (a concentration in Canada First! and then scattershot through every other program) makes it hard to be sure until I see the catalog en toto.

Paul Schrader’s latest, a holocaust drama starring Wilem Dafoe, is playing, thankfully in the Masters program and not as a Special Presentation, and that’s my Can’t Miss for this year. Schrader’s one of my few remaining cinematic heroes; Taxi Driver was such a seminal film for me, and so many others, like Hardcore, Mishima, Auto Focus and Last Temptation of Christ, have made a huge impact on my life. I went to the AFI largely because Schrader was one of the first Fellows there…though he dropped out due to political reasons, which I should have seen as an omen for how well I’d succeed in film after actually graduating. So I’ll be lining up early for that one if I can score a ticket, and in my required one fanboy move of the festival I’ll be bringing along my Light Sleeper poster and a Sharpie, just in case director and star walk the gauntlet slowly outside the Ryerson.

This week’s Now magazine also has a pullout section with some interesting info. There’s a purported full rundown of the Galas and Special Presentations and Genova isn’t on the list. Very curious. Cancelled from the fest? Downgraded to an accessible screening? (interjection: I sketched out this posting at work and checked the site at home, and Genova is indeed listed on the TIFF site as being an SP, so who knows?) In its own TIFF article, Eye also makes the first comment I’ve seen so far in the press about the elevation of status and ticket prices for SP screenings. I’m really hoping a few more people will kick up a bit of a stink. It also seems, judging from this pullout, that the second or third screenings of Gala and SP movies are also being held at the Visa Screening Room which ixnays ticket package purchases.

I know I seem to be harping on this issue, but it’s not a minor one to me. I don’t have an issue with the exclusionary galas; part of the international cachet of the film fest is the Hollywood North rollout of Oscar season prestige product and the attendant celebrity buzz. My own preferred beat at the TIFF is the smaller indie film or the obscure foreign entry or quirky doc, so the galas are off my radar. I mean, I’m going to go see Burn After Reading when it gets released anyway, and I don’t feel like I’m being shut out of a valuable viewing experience by not ponying up a couple of sawbucks for the nosebleeds. But in my festival experience, the Special Presentations have a certain magic to them; the Visa Screening Room is one of the most beautiful theatres I’ve ever set foot in—I’d rank it up there with the (late) Rialto in Montreal or the main room at Mann’s Chinese. The films that make that SP cut, they’ve been leaning towards “why isn’t this a gala?” lately but something like, say, Snow Cake or a Johnny To flick late in the evening feel more like regular festival programming, not something that needs to shut out the hoi polloi. True, it’s one program out of the dozen or so, but it still seems like a major step away from the notion of the “people’s festival.”

Okay, I’m officially dropping the subject now.

Tropic Thunder, Mirrors and more festival picks

2008-08-17T08:09:00.003-04:00

Saw Tropic Thunder Friday night and it was....good, I guess. No, it was actually pretty hilarious, and I'll repeat my comment from Pineapple Express regarding bloody viscera and its growing importance in improv-heavy ironic comedies of the day. I suppose what resistance I have to giving the movie an all-out rave is my basic issue with Ben Stiller, namely that his inside-Hollywood self-reference always seems to lend his projects an uncomfortable air of nudge-nudge chumminess that I find really offputting. On the other hand, Stiller seems to only play two kinds of characters these days: on one hand there's the schlemiel whose relationships devolve into Kafka-esque hells (Along Came Polly, Meet The Parents), on the other there's the over-the-top caricature who seems to exist in a separate plane of reality but seems vaguely plausible within the context of the narrative (Dodgeball, Zoolander, Mystery Men). Personally, when he's doing the latter I tend to find him a lot more interesting; Tugg Speedman falls firmly into the this camp, but the returns are shrinking. As for the other much talked-about performances, Downey Jr. is as brilliant as always, and I think would be a shoo-in for a best supporting actor nod if the role wasn't freighted with such political overtones. Tom Cruise...is onscreen for about three times as long as he should be for his role to be at all effective; as it plays, he's boring and irritatingly profane for no discernable reason.

Also saw Mirrors in a virtually empty AMC 24 theatre and I was mostly impressed. Though I've kind of cooled on Asian horror of late, I'm always game for a solid remake, and Alexadre Aja delivered in ways that the makers of One Missed Call and Shutter utterly failed to do. I was stunned at just how extreme the violence was, and how it pushed so many of my nightmare buttons.

Anyway, back to the TIFF. More announcements this week, including Genova which is a Special Presentation after all so I won't be going to the premiere screening. I called the festival office to inquire about pricing for the subsequent screenings and was told they hadn't gotten all the details yet. Assuming that the second and maybe third screenings of Genova will be in theatres other than the Elgin I'll still add it to my choices. Discovery, Vanguard and Visions programs were also announced, with several maybes: Gigantic, Lymelife and Afterwards are high on the possibles list.

Two days til the whole film list goes live

Looking back: thumbnail sketches of my past TIFF experiences

2008-08-12T20:54:00.002-04:00

Killing time…killing time…one week until the full film list is up and a week more after that until Program Book Day so I figured some self-indulgent autobiography is in order. Not my own life history, which is boring enough, but my history of the TIFF. I moved to Toronto permanently in late summer of 2000 after four+ years off and on in L.A. My only previous film festival experience was mostly the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival and occasional one-off screenings at other local L.A. fests, of which there are dozens if not hundreds. So now, a year-by-year rundown of how I became such a TIFF junkie.

2000: Didn’t go. I’d just moved to Toronto a couple of weeks before and was barely eking out a living at the nameless video store. This was, however, my first experience with movie actors setting up accounts for a couple of days so they could rent movies then run off to California with them.

2001: The year everyone would like to forget, in which the 9/11 attacks happened at the midpoint of the festival. I actually wasn’t in town; I was taking a week off work around by birthday (which is on 9/11) and was in Ottawa visiting my folks for most of the fest. That day I went to a sparsely-attended matinee of Peter Hyams’ The Musketeer and the next day took a road trip to Montreal in a daze.

2002: Didn’t go. I was working on the set of The In-Laws at the time, though, and many of the cast went to galas and parties. For several days in a row the press person for the shoot would drop off stacks of party invites to my boss and would tell me very pointedly: “And remember, these are non-transferable.” Yeah, yeah, I get it. Didn't want to go to Jewison's barbecue anyway (pout).

2003: Finally took my first tentative steps. Went up to the box office after work the day individual tickets went on sale and stood in line for two hours as more and more screenings got crossed off the big board. I didn’t have a program book, so I borrowed the one of the guy standing in front of me. Picked three more or less at random based on the photos. Opening night I saw the brilliant documentary Mayor of the Sunset Strip and was made painfully nostalgic for L.A.; the film even opened with footage of an X concert that I had attended. Met Rodney Bingenheimer and director George Hickenlooper after the show; got to tell the latter that I’d been at the Dogtown premiere at the LAIFF back in 1997. Saw four more movies at the fest: PTU, Prey For Rock ‘n Roll, Elephant and Cremaster 3, which nearly put me to sleep. One was a particularly good score; I was walking past the Uptown when somebody in the crowd said “Does anybody need a ticket for Elephant?” I said yes and was reaching for my wallet when he pressed the ticket into my hand and walked off. Van Sant was there for a Q&A after the screening with his cast; little did I know at the time what a rare occurrence that would be for a third-fest-screening of a movie.

2004: Planned ahead, but still wasn’t plunking yet down for a ticket package. I lined up on FanExpo Saturday for a gala ticket to Clean, then arrived at College Park at 4 in the morning for a handful of individual tickets. Some memorable moments: the gala was a “never again” experience. Forty-odd dollars for nosebleed-section seats at Roy Thompson Hall, Maggie Cheung could have been Jacky Cheung onstage for all I could see. It was pretty funny when a staggering Nick Nolte slurred into the mic that his favorite city is Montreal. Also, in memory of the time Wim Wenders had let me buy him a glass of wine at a Harry Dean Stanton concert, I gave him a bottle of Ontario cabernet after the Land of Plenty screening. Saw about six movies, the best was Johnny To’s Throw Down.

2005: Another crack-of-dawn lineup experience, this time up at Manulife. First time going to a Dialogues presentation (Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream) and my first Midnight Madness screening, albeit in the afternoon (The Great Yokai War on the final Saturday). Some pretty terrific films (Wah Wah stands out, partly for the fantastic Q&A) and I got to chat with Robin Tunney for the first time since The In-Laws wrapped after her screening of Runaway. This year’s Nick Nolte moment was David Boreanaz using the phrase “we were all in agreeance” during the These Girls Q&A. But the year felt like a bit of a letdown; unlike the previous two years, there was no one movie I saw that was a transformative experience. I went home after TGYW and thence to the Beach Cinema to see Lord of War, which was more powerful than anything I’d caught at the fest that year.

2006: The year I finally got it right. Booked a week off of work and bought a ten-pack of tickets. Had a fun moment with Saffron Burrows after the Fay Grim screening; I’d driven her around on her first American movie as she didn’t have a driver’s license (in clear violation of favored-nations clauses in the actors’ contracts) and when I said hi to her from the crowd on the way to the limo she recognized me and came over to chat, leaving a confused Jeff Goldblum stewing in the car wondering what the holdup was. Fave movies of the fest: Severance and Snow Cake. Least favorite: Dans Les Villes.

2007: I knew I should have booked an extra day off; The Mother of Tears opens Midnight Madness and I can’t go ‘cause I’ve got work the next morning. Fricking frick. Lou Reed concert movie on my birthday, Peter Greenaway in the Elgin theatre, Bill Maher at Ryerson and a Roger Ebert book signing. A pretty perfect week if you ask me. Except, I suppose for that lousy Austrian science fiction movie that I walked out of halfway through. Son of Rambow was my last screening of the fest and became my favorite movie of the year. I saw fifteen movies in total and can’t remember a better time.

2008…gonna be a great one, I can feel it…

Pineapple Express and the worst remake idea EVER

2008-08-09T22:04:00.000-04:00

Just saw Pineapple Express and I gotta admit it was a lot of fun. Normally not a fan of the stoner movie, largely due to a bad previous job at which it seemed half my co-workers rocked the ganj far too much, but the "Have you ever really LOOKED at your hand?"-type humour was kept to a minimum and it's always great to see the ever-gorgeous Nora Dunn onscreen, especially when she's cursing up a storm. Quite the lovely contempo ultraviolence as well; I remember the disparaging tone commentators used to take about action movies from the early eighties, especially the ones from the Joel Silver factory, but seriously? Commando is practically a children's movie compared to the flying viscera that seems to get flung around in the name of ironic yucks these days.

Okay, so I'm settling back with my kiddie combo (what? if I get a full bag of popcorn I'm going to eat the whole thing and nobody wants that) and the pre-show promo reel is unspooling and in "Casting Notes" it's mentioned that Eva Mendes and Nicolas Cage are going to be headlining a remake of Bad Lieutenant.

Go ahead, read that back to yourself, I'll pause for a moment to let it sink in.

Can you think, scouring your memories, for a film LESS needing a remake? The mind positively boggles. So I look it up on imdb as soon as I get home, and, get this, Werner Herzog is directing, it also stars Val Kilmer and Fairuza Balk (pause for a second while I swoon over knockout nutty goth girls....okay, I'm back) and the full title is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. The discussion boards seem to express some well-deserved confusion...is it a remake? re-imagining? sequel? Is it some in-name only franchise cash-in in the vein of Carlito's Way: Rise To Power or U.S. Marshals: Like The Fugitive Only It Blows? While I enjoy the synchronicity that Abel Ferrara did pursue Nicolas Cage to star in The Funeral (for the role Christopher Walken ultimately played), and the fact that Herzog is getting some Hollywood cred only forty-odd years into his directing career, I'm up-and-down, back-to-front flabberbaffled at this whole state of affairs. Seriously, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.

Say it ain't so...the dwindling state of the theatre-going experience in Toronto

2008-08-07T19:33:00.000-04:00

It's one of several paragraph-long newsblips in the "Up Front" section of this week's Now magazine, rumblings that the Cumberland cinema may be the next movie theatre in this film-lovin' town to face the wrecking ball. Heartbreaking, but I suppose inevitable. I'd been meaning to write something on the first-run movie houses of Tee-Oh, and there's one more reminder that everything in this entry may well be rendered obsolete in a year or two. If you're a Toronto filmgoer reading this, there's probably nothing new here save my own personal reminiscences; if you're reading this from elsewhere, I suspect some nods of recognition are a'comin'.

Hogtown's suffered the fate of most other big North American cities, by which I mean the consolidation into plexes and the slow decimation of the standalone and independent arthouse theatres. Still, there are a handful of decent venues, many of which are taken over by the Festival Group in early September. The best, in my opinion, first-run theatre in the city closed almost four years ago. Any other Uptown fans here? Right, I thought so. The Uptown had the biggest, most cavernous main theatre in my Toronto experience, as well as two decent-sized basement rooms. Barely a bad seat in the house and the perfect spot to see genre work that calls for a big screen like the first two Matrix flicks, both of which I caught there opening day. The fate of the Uptown is well-known, and no doubt nationally common save for the fatal twist: the owners were unwilling or unable to pony up and cave to activist group pressure and retrofit the front entrance (an admittedly steep escalator) to make it wheelchair-accessible, and it was shuttered for good shortly after the cutain closed on TIFF 2003. The following summer, as the building was being demolished, a wall collapsed onto a nearby language school, killing (if memory serves) a South American exchange student.

As well, not long after I moved back to TO, the threeplex at the Hudson's Bay Centre was sealed up, and the Eaton Centre theatres closed; the latter wasn't exactly a palace, with its lousy projection and a labyrinthine hallway to get to the theatres, but it was the only remaining half-price second-run place downtown.

So what does this leave? The Paramount, which to me and everyone I've talked to about it, will always be the Paramount and not the freaking Scotiabank Theatre (sigh...) with its four huge front rooms, IMAX screen and nine back rooms, not a single one of which is a shoebox. It's right downtown and for a multiplex makes a surprisingly good location for fest screenings. There's also the Varsity for your slightly upscale flicks (Persepolis, inevitably the latest Coen brothers, In Bruges) as well as a decent cross section of the H'wood product of the day. Plus about half the Varsity rooms are turned over to the festival, and I'll always love the place for the proximity it allowed me to Lou Reed last year. I don't think the Beaches quite counts as downtown (no idea what the census calls the dividing line but I figure the Don River is the cutoff point) but I can't let this go without mentioning the Beach Cinemas because, as they're four blocks from my apartment, I'm there most weekends, especially during the summer. It's a multi, but it's part of the Alliance chain so the programming is a decent mix of slightly-left-of-centre and mainstream, the ticket prices are the cheapest in town with a membership, all the theatres are sizeable and have great sound and projection and the snack bar is above average.

The less said about the new AMC (Yonge & Dundas) the better; I think I need to see a movie with more than eight people in the auditorium to really form an opinion on the place. But that's my fault, I guess, for going there to see War Inc. and American Teen instead of the stellar studio product that clogs 90% of the AMC screens on a given weekend.

Which leaves us with the first-run arthouses. There's the possibly soon-to-be-gone Cumberland, which is sensibly totally taken over come festival time. Why not, since you can hit the Four Seasons with a rock from the snack bar, so the stars don't have far to walk for their premieres. And then (shudder) there's the Carlton. Whenever I see that a movie I've been looking forward to is opening there I can't help but wince and weigh just how much I really want to see it. Partly it's the atmosphere: I don't think I've ever seen a movie at the Carlton with more than twenty people in the auditorium (you can almost see the tumbleweeds rolling across the lobby), whether the movie was great (Tristram Shandy, Bee Season, Don't Come Knocking), middling (Angel A) or crap on toast (She Hate Me). Not that you can realistically squeeze all that many more people into screening halls that are about the size of my living room with tiny screens way up high that leave you with a crick in your neck the rest of the day.

However, the Carlton can at times seem like the Varsity compared to the most unpleasant theatre experience in town, the Canada Square. Up at Yonge & Eglinton, a block south of the Scotia's sister multi, is a bizarre little indoor mall with a ten-or-so-rooms theatre at the south end. Finding a gotta-see listed at the Square is worth two winces and a couple of out-loud curses. I mainly go to matinees on weekends and the mall, the kind of retail hallway built as an afterthought on the ground floor (or lower) of an office block, is 90% closed for business as I trek from the subway to the box office, so I can't help feeling like a trespasser, like I've missed the KEEP OUT sign on an abandoned building slated for renovation. Often there'll be one little boutique open for shits and giggles and the clerk at said salon or newsstand will sit there looking forlorn and depressed in the near-dark as what little foot traffic there is on a Sunday passes by. I've seen a few decent movies at the Canada Square, but for some reason virtually everything I catch there is a disappointment in some way, not to mention a downer as a movie, and I walk out pummeled by dreariness. I've got to be imagining this, but somehow almost every movie I see there had a myopic DP and a set dresser on Prozac; that's the only way to explain such mopey, murky offerings as the Strangers With Candy movie, the execrable Art School Confidential, and Walk All Over Me, the Canadian domme-com that begs the question "How can a movie featuring Tricia Helfer and Leelee Sobieski in fetish gear for most of the running time be so deathly dull to watch?" I'm convinced that the venue has tons to do with it.

Okay, this went on a lot longer than I'd planned it to. I did mean this to be a generally informative survey, but the imminent demise of the Cumberland drives home once again the sad fact...we're losing the great non-rep screens in town one at a time. If we're not careful, Toronto will turn into (ick) Ottawa, with its one arthouse, its one second-run house, its zero single-screen houses and its half dozen multiplexes being the only option for seeing any kind of flick that the distributors deign to drop on the capital.

Attica! Attica!

29 days and counting; going live

2008-08-06T20:24:00.001-04:00

The festival announced thirteen Asian titles today...that's a very odd sentence for some reason, reading it back. Hmmm. Plenty more good stuff, though. With twenty tickets I'm hoping to hit a few more countries cinematically this year; 2007 had me dipping my toes into Macedonia and Mongolia for the first time, albeit, reading back last year's blog entries, without thrilling success. I had really hoped to see The Voyeurs last year but couldn't work it into my schedule and in 2006 Never Say Goodbye was sold out by the time I tried to score tix, and that was probably my biggest missed-flick regret of the festival along with Grbavica. So this year, I have the goal of definitely seeing something from India, and Firaaq looks like the one. There's a new Takeshi Kitano as well, but the writeup on the TIFF site says it's the third part of a trilogy and I haven't seen the first two, nor am I even quite sure what they are. As well, I have to admit I may have passed through my Takeshi phase; Fireworks (Hana-Bi) blew me away when I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen in Ottawa, and I think Brother is a grossly underrated part of his oeuvre, but I find myself struggling with his other recent work. Maybe. I don't know. The Sky Crawlers sounds pretty sweet, and who knows, maybe I'll finally crack that anime mental block I've got with something by a master.

So the list is filling up. Thirteen days 'til the film list goes online and twenty days until that glorious day, what for me is like Christmas and...um...okay I guess that's the only holiday that comes with presents, so Christmas and mumblemumble rolled into one, the day the program book is released and I can freak out over a spreadsheet for three hours trying to figure out a program of first and second picks. Good times. And I really mean that without irony, that's one of my favorite nights of the year.

Also sent the link to this new journal into the TIFF site for hopeful inclusion in the "Your Blogs" section. The past couple of years I was working off my MySpace page but that's generally sort of falling into disrepair anyway, so a clean start seemed in order. Hopefully my Paul Gross snark of a couple of weeks back hasn't disqualified me from inclusion this year, but anyhow if you're reading this linked from the TIFF site, hi there, good to see you, and I'll be updating more and more frequently. It'll be mainly about the fest, but also the summer's-nearly-over blockbuster roundup is on deck, as are planned posts (in rough form currently) about the Toronto moviegoing experience in general, not to mention the other current countdown of the late summer, FanExpo, which is a mere sixteen days off.

Rain tomorrow, they say. I really hope so.

Wishing and hoping

2008-07-27T21:29:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned last time, bits and pieces are doled out teasingly by the TIFF exec as the summer plods along. The Midnight Madness program has been made public and while I was looking forward to Chocolate, I may be getting my hands on a boot later this week and thus I'll pass at the fest, tempting tho' it would be to see a flick about a female autistic savant Thai boxer while surrounded by genre junkies hopped up on Jolt Cola in the Ryerson auditorium at one AM even for a second time.

As I wait for more announcements, I can't help but make my mental wish lists. I already mentioned Palermo Shooting, but now let me add Genova to the list. I just watched 9 Songs, and was reminded just how much I dig Michael Winterbottom's work and I'm hoping his latest gets programmed, hopefully in the Masters program. With the change this year bumping Special Presentations up to the more or less status of Galas, there's cause for worry that my anticipated picks are going to be priced out of my range, or if I decide to splurge on one or two I'll be stuck with nosebleed seats like I was for Clean in 2004. Winterbottom's a TIFF regular, so the odds are good IMHO that he'll be bringing Genova here in September.

And I swear, if one more person asks me what I thought of The Dark Knight I'm going to freak. Once and for all: half an hour too long and a botched ending. Beautiful cinematography though, especially of the cityscapes. Now taking bets on who the villain will be in part three. I'm stumped, seeing as how the remaining name-brand Bat-villains all have a fantastical element that would brush up hard against the gritty realism established in the onscreen Chicago (let's call it what it is). The Romero and Nicholson portrayals of the Joker may have tipped into the surreal but Ledger showed the character could be embodied as a human loony with a few smears of greasepaint. Unless Wayne Industries has been tinkering with genetic engineering as far back as the sixties, the Penguin seems unlikely, and the Riddler, oy, don't get me started. My vote's for Rose McGowan as Catwoman, though.

Midnight madness and counting down

2008-07-23T20:01:00.000-04:00

Okay, so it took me more than a week to get around to the second entry of the new journal. Moot point, to be sure, as I'm sure nobody's reading this yet. Maybe if the TIFF does that link from their site this year some folks will scroll back but anyhoo.

With forty-three days to go 'til opening night, the steady stream of announcements and leaks have begun. Last week the Sun published its annual "we can all look forward to seeing Pitt, Clooney and Witherspoon on the red carpet this year" blurb, yadda yadda. I don't go to galas, so that niche of celebrity spotting is well out of my orbit of interest. That said, the Gala and Special presentations that have been announced so far are a pretty impressive lot this year. Oscar bait, sure, but still no complaints, and plenty I'll pay to see in regular release ultimately, especially the new Jonathan Demme flick and Fifty Dead Men Walking.

The fest is opening with Passchendaele, the trailer for which has been playing in Canadian theatres since late Spring (I saw it in front of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, of all places). And I know I may get my passport yanked for this, but I simply have no desire to see the movie whatsoever. The battle of Passchendaele is one I learned about several times throughout grade/high school (retention is another matter altogether) and yes, I know this movie is meant to be Canada's Saving Private Ryan, ie: a visceral representation of a wartime crucible that formed our national character. Maybe some Americans found the brilliant Ryan to be an insufferable history lesson, and perhaps those Americans will appreciate Paul Gross' tribute to our sacrificing forefathers much more than I can. Maybe it's just my general dislike of Paul Gross. You know, I suspect he's an absolutely awesome guy, a blast to hang with, real salt-of-the-earth. But I have a hard time seeing him onscreen without his precise Grierson-esque diction grating on my nerves. And fine, be a patriot. But his endless elevation of Canuck ephemera drives me batshit. Men With Brooms comes off as smug and insular as the "Darkest One" video, the one where the Hip hang with the Trailer Park Boys, Don Cherry delivers them fried chicken and they pay with red two-dollar bills and Canadian Tire money. Seeing Gross interviewed about Passchendaele, and I don't doubt his sincerity, he always seems to have that heavy-lidded, down-the-nose look that evokes the smug cliquishness you can see in photos of Woody Harrelson yammering about mediatation and biofuels, Tom Skerritt in Contact, and Soundgarden in any photo circa 1989.

But anyway, onto brighter topics. I've seen Midnight Madness movies at the TIFF before (Sukiyaki Western Django made my Top Ten of 2007 list) but never actually at the midnight screenings. Licking my wounds from missing last year's opener of The Mother Of Tears I booked Friday the fifth off as well so I'd be free to catch any MM screenings. Opening night is JCVD, in which Jean Claude Van Damme goes all meta on his celebrity, which is tempting, but...Sexykiller, Not Quite Hollywood and Chocolate are all must-sees for me, especially that last one, which I've been dying to see for a while now. C'mon, the folks who brought us Tony Jaa now spring an autistic Thai hitwoman on us? Dude!

More tidbits as they come up. My fingers are still crossed for a Palermo Shooting premiere, hopefully not as a Special Presentation so I can still squeeze it in on my ticket book. It's getting scathing reviews, but it's Wenders, so I'm there with bells on no matter the venue.

Hellboy II: The Semi-unflattering Comparison

2008-07-12T08:13:00.001-04:00

Saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army last night, which I suppose I was looking forward to as a summer popcorn muncher, and it certainly had its moments but ultimately left me kind of cold. I wonder if I'm just getting burned out on the whole "visual innovation for spectacle's sake" aesthetic, as I also thought Wanted was boring as crap a couple of weeks back. Don't get me wrong, Hellboy II is miles and away better than most generic summer movie junk. The performances are uniformly excellent and the makeup/effects work is well-nigh staggering. Plus I could watch two hours of Selma Blair and her cheekbones reading the phone book. Still, Guillermo del Toro is someone I'd categorize/lump in with Tim Burton in that he's a visual stylist who's a much more interesting director than, you know, a good director. If the Hellboy movies are del Toro's Batmans, then I guess Pan's Labyrinth is his Big Fish (and by the same token Devil's Backbone is his Corpse Bride? Blade II is his Mars Attacks? Probably best to leave this thread unpulled..).

Anyway, this is sort of a stopgap ramble to get my new blog up and running. More to come later today.