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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mr. Neill?"

"Yes?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a good day.

TIFF 2009 reviews: The Disappearance of Alice Creed

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

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

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

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

TIFF 2009 reviews: Fish Tank

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

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

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

TIFF 2009 reviews: The Most Dangerous Man In America

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

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

TIFF 2009 Reviews: Cleanflix

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

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

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

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

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

TIFF 2009 reviews: An Education

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

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

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

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

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

The night before...

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

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

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