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)
Friday, September 18, 2009
TIFF 2009 Reviews: L'Affaire Farewell
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)
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)
Thursday, September 17, 2009
TIFF 2009 Reviews: La Donation
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!
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!
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
TIFF 2009 Reviews: The Loved Ones
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)
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)
Monday, September 14, 2009
TIFF 2009 Reviews: George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead
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. (**)
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
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. (***)
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. (***)
Sunday, September 13, 2009
TIFF 2009 Reviews: Kirot
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)
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)
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