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.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Saturday, September 13, 2008
TIFF 2008 reviews: My Mother, My Bride & I
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.
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
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)
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
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)
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
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
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. (***)
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. (***)
Thursday, September 11, 2008
TIFF 2008 reviews: The Burrowers
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.
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.
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