As I type this update I've got the Live Aid DVD box set playing, found it used at Refried Beats yesterday. Loving the Wembley stuff (my hero Paul Weller rocking an entire stadium...wowwowwow) but since all I've seen so far of Philadelphia is Bryan Adams the U.S half is less than stellar so far. Seriously, did every male rock star in 1985 have ginormous hockey hair? Oh, here's Nicholson introducing U2. This could be good...
Right, the fest. Two more programs were (partially?) unveiled today but before I get to those I have to confess I've sort of come around on the issue of Jennifer's Body opening MM. Despite the presence of Megan Fox, whom I'm still not convinced is an actual living, breathing human being and not a s1m0ne-like computer simulacrum created Weird Science-style by wrapping a bra around Michael Bay's head and shoving Maxim photo spreads into a CPU for replication, which hangs an unassailable mainstream cred millstone around the neck of the whole affair despite the inherent coolness of Diablo Cody and thus not exactly in keeping the the renegade nutball spirit of Midnight Madness, I realize that this opener represents an elevation of the MM program in the estimation of the programmers. Jennifer's Body could have been a Special Presentation; shit, Zack & Miri was last year, and as I said before Cody has earned her status as a star of TIFF. But an actual high-profile star vehicle brings press and critical attention the the Midnight Madness program in a way that even, for instance, Borat and his peasant-hauled oxcart arrival in 2006 wouldn't. I guess to some degree this means that MM isn't just for the fringe-dwellers in the festival crowd any more, which is sad, the way a favorite band suddenly going from the clubs to the arenas always hurts, but as long as this isn't a harbringer of future programming trends (I shudder at the thought of MM gaining, say, Bob Weinstein as a primary sponsor), it's actually a good thing.
(Live Aid interjection...okay, July 13 1985 was officially the moment that Bono's self-satisfied messianic impulses leapt into the driver's seat permanently. And may I say again, dude, THAT FUCKING HAIR!!!!!)
Discovery and Vanguard titles hit the website today, there are a few more that range from tempting to gotta-see for me. There's a lot of misery on parade as well, which is always a big turnoff for me. I'm hoping to see some more cool Scandinavian work this year (I've had generally good luck with Icelandic picks over the past three TIFFs) but, and call me narrow-minded if you must, I'm steering clear of dead kids, abusive parents and addiction tales that are promised to be even an iota less cheery than Trainspotting (which is one of my favorite movies, dead baby and all, but I hadn't reached my saturation point on that particular subgenre yet when the movie came out). Which is hard because a quick scan at the summaries for Discovery alone reads like a depressive's diary, half the titles involving one or all three of my no-gos listed above. Samantha Morton, one of my favorite actresses and one of the most luminous screen presences of my generation, is bringing her directorial debut The Unloved to Discovery, but..."the stark portait of a young British girl plucked from her abusive family and thrown into the hands of government care"? Le sigh. I dunno, maybe I'll have to for Morton, but...
So the cool stuff that jumps out at me so far is...Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's My Dog Tulip, because I'm definitely looking to see some cool animation this year; Leon Prudovsky's Five Hours From Paris; J. Blakeson's The Disappearance of Alice Creed, as it stars the amazing Eddie Marsan from Happy Go Lucky and Gemma Arterton from Quantum of Solace, one of the most underrated Bond girls in the entire franchise; The Misfortunates, because drunk rambunctious Belgians sounds like a fun evening; Accident because...ah! I told you Johnny To would be here! Okay, he produced it, but it still counts.
36 days until FanExpo
49 days until TIFF
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
The opening salvo of Midnight Madness
Last year fully a third of my TIFF screenings were part of the Midnight Madness program. Bear in mind I have never actually been to a midnight premiere at the festival, as my sleep cycles are whacked out enough and during the fest I'm coasting on caffeine and Szechuan fumes as it is--despite my best efforts I just know I'd fall asleep at the Ryerson and I suspect that's not a crowd you want to find yourself unconscious in the middle of, love 'em though I do. Still, I'm pretty sure that every year I've attended the Toronto Film Festival I've seen at least one MM flick during a day/evening screening, and last year I hit a certain saturation point. I wrote at length last year about how Not Quite Hollywood reaffirmed my faith in the joys of Cinematic Trash so I won't rehash it here, nor will I relate how the penultimate film of my TIFF '08 was Martyrs and how it made me question my own latent censorious nature. But while MM is the first program at the fest to be fully listed on the website and thus I couldn't help but wait with bated breath for the update, I was approaching it with trepidation this year for some very French, skinned-alive reasons.
Damn that freakin' Colin. Because the bastard with the best job in the TIFF organization seems to have done it again. Of the ten, there are at least eight that I know I'm going to see eventually, a few that I'll definitely try to see if I can come September and three that immediately made the "absolutely must see" list that I'm sketching before Program Book Release Day. It's not your typical MM lineup, either: there are no documentaries, there's nothing from Hong Kong (though if this year is like any of the last few, I'm sure Johnny To has two or three films scattered throughout the other programs), there's no Gallic torture porn. On the other hand, it appears the opening night flick is Jennifer's Body, the trailers for which are already playing in the Cinemultiplexes. Every year there's at least one MM premiere that ends up being an unexpected hit in mainstream theatres later that fall, but it's typically a surprise that's to some degree discovered at the festival. I've been going to TIFF since 2003, and looking back through my well-thumbed program books I see Ju-On (2003), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), Borat and The Host (2006), Diary of the Dead (2007...okay, not a huge hit but I did eventually see it at the Scotia) and JCVD (2008). For a studio-backed flick written and produced by an Oscar-winning success story from just two years ago to be opening MM this year...subject matter be damned, considering how TIFF introduced the world to the brilliance that is Juno ( I say that without irony, I fucking love that movie) in 2007 one would think Diablo Cody would be walking the red carpet at the Visa Screening Room at least instead of waiting for her introduction next to a bank of gym lockers at the Ryerson.
ANYWAY...so my gotta sees this year so far are The Loved Ones, A Town Called Panic and Daybreakers, the last of which I may actually try and stay up late for the premiere on the off chance that Sam Neill will show up. Solomon Kane and Bitch Slap are possibilities for impulse ticket buys later in the festival to plug holes in my schedule as they occur.
Hey, they announced the documentary list, or at least seventeen of them. What's cool there...Cleanflix, about that weird Mormon company that hacks up movies for the sake of people whose heads explode at the mere whiff of an f-bomb, that just made my list. The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. I am so all over that one. And The Topp Twins has one of the most enticing one-line descriptions I've yet come across, that's a strong possible there.
Alright, I'm officially excited.
38 days until FanExpo
51 days until TIFF '09
Damn that freakin' Colin. Because the bastard with the best job in the TIFF organization seems to have done it again. Of the ten, there are at least eight that I know I'm going to see eventually, a few that I'll definitely try to see if I can come September and three that immediately made the "absolutely must see" list that I'm sketching before Program Book Release Day. It's not your typical MM lineup, either: there are no documentaries, there's nothing from Hong Kong (though if this year is like any of the last few, I'm sure Johnny To has two or three films scattered throughout the other programs), there's no Gallic torture porn. On the other hand, it appears the opening night flick is Jennifer's Body, the trailers for which are already playing in the Cinemultiplexes. Every year there's at least one MM premiere that ends up being an unexpected hit in mainstream theatres later that fall, but it's typically a surprise that's to some degree discovered at the festival. I've been going to TIFF since 2003, and looking back through my well-thumbed program books I see Ju-On (2003), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), Borat and The Host (2006), Diary of the Dead (2007...okay, not a huge hit but I did eventually see it at the Scotia) and JCVD (2008). For a studio-backed flick written and produced by an Oscar-winning success story from just two years ago to be opening MM this year...subject matter be damned, considering how TIFF introduced the world to the brilliance that is Juno ( I say that without irony, I fucking love that movie) in 2007 one would think Diablo Cody would be walking the red carpet at the Visa Screening Room at least instead of waiting for her introduction next to a bank of gym lockers at the Ryerson.
ANYWAY...so my gotta sees this year so far are The Loved Ones, A Town Called Panic and Daybreakers, the last of which I may actually try and stay up late for the premiere on the off chance that Sam Neill will show up. Solomon Kane and Bitch Slap are possibilities for impulse ticket buys later in the festival to plug holes in my schedule as they occur.
Hey, they announced the documentary list, or at least seventeen of them. What's cool there...Cleanflix, about that weird Mormon company that hacks up movies for the sake of people whose heads explode at the mere whiff of an f-bomb, that just made my list. The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. I am so all over that one. And The Topp Twins has one of the most enticing one-line descriptions I've yet come across, that's a strong possible there.
Alright, I'm officially excited.
38 days until FanExpo
51 days until TIFF '09
Sunday, July 19, 2009
The countdown begins...
I can’t believe I let this go for so long. Or maybe I can…getting linked to through the TIFF site drives my traffic well above its usual two readers, and who wants to spew into a vacuum, so naturally I’ve slacked off. But we’re now less than eight weeks out, the summer days and weeks racing by at a frightening pace, draft after draft of movie-themed bile and bilge getting tossed and/or forgotten without ever seeing pixel to screen, and as I battle a humid bout of SAD under the overcast Toronto sky, I figured it’s time to get back to it, no?
So to get caught up: ticket packages have been on sale for a couple of weeks now, and I did get mine, after a few false starts. Went up to 55 Bloor on my lunch break and, oh yeah, not there any more. My bad, I forgot. Sign on the door sez go to 2 Carlton so I hop back on the subway and get off two stops south. Only to be told, “Um, we’re just a phone bank, you’ll have to go to” and here’s where I buggered it up again because I could have sworn the guy said Yonge/Dundas Square, where the ticket pickup and box office was last year. Next day, attempt two, I’m wandering the food court like an idiot, wondering if the fates once again have it in for me. Fortunately I’ve got the latest mailing in my bag, which I should have checked in the first place, and whaddya know: Nathan Phillips Square. In other words, six or seven blocks away from any festival screening room, yards from striking city workers, and basically not in any particularly sensible spot. Couple of days later at lunch I finally hike over there and buy the 10-pack.
I think I burned myself out last year. My end total was something like eighteen screenings (I got two 10-packs and brought friends to two films). I’m a film nerd, or at least used to be, but at that pace they start to blend together and one’s stomach becomes a solid tumor of food court Thai that doesn’t clear out until Halloween. I’ve often been envious of the 30-screenings folk and the critics who achieve the same saturation level, but I suspect that I’d be throwing in the towel around Wednesday if I seriously attempted it. So this year, the plan is one 10-pack and four, maybe five additional individual tickets once they go on sale on September 9th, and hopefully no three-flick days.
Of course, the closer the day actually gets, I’m sure I’ll change my mind again. As both my devoted readers know, the three week stretch surrounding FanExpo (weekend before Labour Day) and the end of TIFF is the absolute highlight of my Toronto year. There’s the day the Program Book comes out (August 25th this year), which to me is like Christmas, New Year’s and every birthday from ages four through twelve all rolled into one, an evening of spreadsheets and schedules and cross-referencing and picking my top ten and backups sometime around two AM, then three days of nerding out at the convention centre, the annual family visit over the holiday and then six days off work and lugging notebooks, scripts and my camera all over hell and gone for those magical screenings.
My impressions so far? Can one have any, two months before the fest? Of course….of note so far:
- Yes, I know I just finished bitching about it, but the box office situation is a major bugger. I really hope there will be more than one spot to buy same-day tickets during the festival, and that it’ll actually, you know, maybe be at one of the screening locations.
- Last year was stage two or three of the TIFF’s gradual elimination of the Visa Screening Room Special Presentations from accessibility to the hoi polloi. A couple of years back, you could still get SP tickets as part of your packages, but if bought individually they were hiked up to gala price. Then last year all the SPs were priced out of range, unless they were premiering in the Winter Garden screening room, which seemed to be decided rather arbitrarily by the programmers and what movie was screening where was only evident when one looked to choose their package picks. Rumour has it this year the general rabble will be able to view movies in the best screening room left in the city (since the Uptown fell), though we will be relegated to the balcony lest the donors get student-stink on their Armani. Which isn’t terrible, the Elgin theatre is still a dynamite place to see a movie from any altitude, though if you have vertigo you may want to wait for the second or third festival screening.
- The initial titles released on the TIFF website (largely SP, but a few other programs as well) are by and large droolingly enticing. And this Tuesday the Midnight Madness program is unveiled. Last year I saw six of the ten MM flicks, though after my experience at Martyrs I’ll definitely choose a bit more sparingly. Colin Geddes still has, I’m convinced, the best job in the festival, and if he finds anything this year half as glorious as The Burrowers or Not Quite Hollywood it’ll make up for any duds in the rest of the fest for me.
- In the past two years, Time magazine did two features each year a week apart on the fest, in fact in 2007 it made the cover of the Canadian edition (and just that edition, I’m fairly certain). Now that Time no longer publishes a Canadian version, I wonder how in-depth the coverage is going to be.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
The Academy Award nominations - reactions and predictions
So the Academy Award nominees were announced this week and it’s easily one of the more predictable years in memory. There’s actually not too much to actually complain about, mind you, it’s just that there were no real stunners. I’m a bit surpised at the complete shutout of Gran Torino; since Eastwood hinted that it would be his last time in front of the camera I was sure the Academy would have thrown him the acting Oscar he’s never won. He wasn’t even nominated for Best Song, which was just as big a head-scratcher. Best Song is one of the odd categories where there isn’t a mandatory number of nominees, and this year there’s a grand total of three, two from Slumdog Millionaire and the Peter Gabriel number from Wall-E, any of which would be worthy winners, but “Gran Torino” definitely should have made the cut. The Eastwood flick was one of the better surprises of the year, especially coming from a director who’s spent more than a decade cranking out ponderous solemnities based on the kinds of novels that businessmen buy at airports (I mean, really, Bridges of Madison County was the last masterpiece he directed) and one could say that it was just a year of oddly dense quality that shuffled some worthy entries off the edge of the bench, but that doesn’t explain the Best Picture nod for The Reader. Nor does it explain the passing over of Rosemary DeWitt, Bill Irwin and Debra Winger for Rachel Getting Married; of Colin Farrell for In Bruges; or in the most egregious oversight of all, of Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky, mere weeks after she won the Golden Globe.
Anyway, I could rant, but instead of descending into my annual pissing and moaning I’ll instead refer you to the best online discussion I’ve come across so far, between Troy Patterson and Dana Stevens on Slate. Stevens is rapidly becoming my favorite film critic since David Edelstein decamped for New York Magazine and his postings became oddly sporadic and truncated, and this year’s Movie Club was terrific as well under her leadership.
So my predictions for the main categories:
Best Actor
Should win: Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Will win: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Best Actress
Should win: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Will win: Kate Winslet, The Reader
Best Supporting Actor
Should win: Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
Will win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Supporting Actress
Should win: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Will win: Viola Davis, Doubt
Best Director
Should win: Danny Boyle
Will win: Danny Boyle
Best Picture
Should win: Slumdog Millionaire
Will win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
We’ll find out in four weeks.
Anyway, I could rant, but instead of descending into my annual pissing and moaning I’ll instead refer you to the best online discussion I’ve come across so far, between Troy Patterson and Dana Stevens on Slate. Stevens is rapidly becoming my favorite film critic since David Edelstein decamped for New York Magazine and his postings became oddly sporadic and truncated, and this year’s Movie Club was terrific as well under her leadership.
So my predictions for the main categories:
Best Actor
Should win: Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Will win: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Best Actress
Should win: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Will win: Kate Winslet, The Reader
Best Supporting Actor
Should win: Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder
Will win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Supporting Actress
Should win: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Will win: Viola Davis, Doubt
Best Director
Should win: Danny Boyle
Will win: Danny Boyle
Best Picture
Should win: Slumdog Millionaire
Will win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
We’ll find out in four weeks.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
2008 - The year in review
Alright, I’ll get it out of the way first, then will come the overanalysis and dissection. Beloved readers (yes, both of you), my Top Ten movies of 2008 (A caveat: I include movies on my list that I saw that were either released in Toronto theatres or played at this calendar year's film festival, whichever came first. This is why Son Of Rambow was on last year's list--topped it, in fact--even though it only opened here in 2008):
1. In Bruges
2. Rachel Getting Married
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Happy-Go-Lucky
5. Wall-E
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
7. American Teen
8. Not Quite Hollywood
9. Religulous
10. It Might Get Loud
And the runners-up (in alphabetical order)
· The Burrowers
· Forgetting Sarah Marshall
· Frost/Nixon
· Gran Torino
· Hancock
· Iron Man
· Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
· Let The Right One In
· Pineapple Express
· Redbelt
· Synecdoche, New York
· War Inc.
· The Wrestler
There’s no way to describe the past year in movies without the adjective “weird” popping up somewhere in the text. Well, maybe not “weird” per se, but there was a lot that seemed just a little off. Which was not always a bad thing. I may lose my Cinema Nerd Guild union card for admitting this, but to my utter surprise, everything in the upper half of my top ten this year is also showing up on plenty of critics’ lists. How’d that happen? I’d mourn the passing of my tetchy obscurity-love, but there’s actually something refreshing about being able to engage in serious debate about the titles that moved me this year, instead of trailing off so often into “Well, I saw it at a festival, it’ll be on DVD eventually, I guess…” (my next blog entry will revisit the past decade of my top ten lists to see what’s held up and what I’d throw overboard in retrospect so you’ll see what I mean).
Here’s something else bizarre: until I caught Benjamin Button on January first and had to regretfully nudge the Joe Strummer flick off the back end, my top ten this year was evenly split between fiction features and documentaries. One through five and six through ten, respectively, and that was a complete accident I only noticed once I’d juggled titles around for a while. Who knows, if I’d gotten around to seeing Man On Wire or Encounters At The End Of The World, which are showing up on a lot of critics’ lists, my own decalogue would have been even more doc-heavy. Speaking of which, can someone explain to me how, in this nearly-unprecedented age of documentaries actually making some bank at the box office, American Teen tanked so badly? Staged insert shots aside, little else this year could touch it for sheer drama, and there were few people who were such a luminous presence onscreen as Hannah Bailey. I'm baffled, frankly.
Then of course, there’s this year’s TIFF, which I dissected enough during its run (scroll down if you care) but which was enough of a near miss this year to cast a curious shadow over my autumn’s mood. At least, what I actually saw left that aftertaste. Looking over my top ten, I see six titles that premiered at the Toronto fest, even if only two of them were festival screenings that I actually saw. Who would have ever figured that a Danny Boyle flick, set in India and structured around a game show, shot and cut in his typical Trainspotting-esque hyperkinetic style would be a leading Oscar contender at this point? Or that Jonathan Demme would beat a retreat from his recent lefty documentaries and ill-advised remakes to re-embrace his uptown vibe, Dogme-style, and return to his humanist roots, and lead Anne Hathaway by the hand towards critical reevaluation?
How about the other big genre story of the year, namely the domination of the superhero saga? 2008 truly was the summer when Marvel fans could rejoice at their beloved comic heroes getting proper big-screen treatment. The Marvel Studios five-year plan to unveil a series of interconnected blockbusters has finally borne fruit in not just bringing respectful comic adaptations but also comic books’ hypertextual nature to the screen. Even Punisher: War Zone, not part of the Avengers continuity with its Marvel Knights banner and hard-R rating, was done right. Third time’s the charm, apparently: the filmmakers--a big shoutout to my former kickboxing instructor Lexi, who graduated to the directing big-leagues by lensing this one--were positively reverential towards Garth Ennis’ groundbreaking run on the title and made an adult action flick that’s much more than a guilty pleasure.
As for other comic movies, I loved Hancock, even if the ending battle was a bit of a muddle and the DVD release gives away the huge plot twist in its cover art. Then there was the elephant in the room, the second-biggest (worldwide) grossing movie of all time at this writing, The Dark Knight. Which didn’t even come close to making my list. While I will gladly concede that Nolan’s sequel contained a half-dozen movies’ worth of images that are seared into my memory, I wound up ultimately underwhelmed. Perhaps if it were shorn of half an hour, the botched Scarecrow cameo, the life-is-a-pile-of-shit ending and the too-often leaden pacing, the narrative could have matched the visuals for sheer impact. While I wouldn’t begrudge Ledger his posthumous Oscar, The Dark Knight is this year’s most overrated movie.
Or maybe that’s The Wrestler, which I still think is pretty terrific, mind you, but isn’t quite the masterpiece that many are claiming. Yes, Rourke is staggering, even once you strip away the meta-meanings of his portrayal. But the character of his daughter, ably played though she is by Evan Rachel Wood, is a paper-thin one-and-a-half notes, and the final reel gets almost unbearably mawkish. The final shot is one of the year’s biggest miscalculations, I think.
What The Wrestler gets absolutely right, on the other hand, was part of a bigger trend this year in utterly glorious cinematography. I suspect it has a lot to do with increasingly widespread use of high-quality video cameras, but this year’s images were as brain-ticklingly evocative as I can remember. I walked out of Gran Torino, Benjamin Button, Choke and countless other movies this year feeling like I was waking up from a dream, that I could still smell the settings and reach out and touch the peeling paint on the walls of the sets. Not that these were flashy films by any means, on the contrary their utter lack of visual affect was what lingered. Even a big-budget event film like Twilight was visually stunning; the rolling hills and forests of the Pacific Northwest were more expressive characters than the background Cullen brothers.
Okay…a couple more tidbits:
Worst miscasting: William Hurt in The Incredible Hulk. Overall, I had a blast at the flick, and I know they made a point of recasting absolutely everyone from the Ang Lee misfire, but replacing Sam Elliott with an actor you don’t believe, for a second, could ever even enlist in the military let alone become a cigar-chomping, hard-as-nails general was a rare misstep.
Barf-bag please! I actually didn’t make it halfway through Cloverfield. The trend towards feature-length handheld was bad enough, but incorporating whip-pan POV video into the narrative form is an aesthetic phase that needs to end as soon as possible.
Not as bad as all that: Speed Racer. Okay, yeah, it was junk, and probably killed what remaining goodwill the Wachowski brothers still had in Hollywood with its colossal kah-beuhm of an opening weekend. But it was genuinely daring filmmaking, an experiment that failed but failed with verve and ambition.
Okay, that’s nice, can we get back to business, please? Daniel Craig himself has said that he hopes the Bond films bring back such mainstays of years past as Q and Moneypenny, and after the skillful but dour Quantum of Solace, I couldn’t agree more. Let’s just agree that the franchise reboot was successful and lighten the fuck up a little, please?
Surprise of the year: Ghost Town looked like something you’d have to drag me to with hooks through my eyelids, a horribly clichéd rom-com with a hackneyed, “what, again?” premise. Man, was I wrong on that count. It turned out to be hilarious and affecting in equal doses, with stellar performances from all the leads and a burnished glow on its images of New York that lingered in the memory.
As for 2009…only eight more weeks ‘til Watchmen! Woo-hoo! And seven months (grumble grumble) until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. There’s also Michael Mann’s Dillinger biopic, Tom Twyker’s The International, James Cameron’s Avatar…and I have no idea what’s on deck for the 2009 TIFF. So while 2008 had its high points and hidden rewards, this year could very well handily blow it out of the water. Can’t wait.
1. In Bruges
2. Rachel Getting Married
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Happy-Go-Lucky
5. Wall-E
6. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
7. American Teen
8. Not Quite Hollywood
9. Religulous
10. It Might Get Loud
And the runners-up (in alphabetical order)
· The Burrowers
· Forgetting Sarah Marshall
· Frost/Nixon
· Gran Torino
· Hancock
· Iron Man
· Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
· Let The Right One In
· Pineapple Express
· Redbelt
· Synecdoche, New York
· War Inc.
· The Wrestler
There’s no way to describe the past year in movies without the adjective “weird” popping up somewhere in the text. Well, maybe not “weird” per se, but there was a lot that seemed just a little off. Which was not always a bad thing. I may lose my Cinema Nerd Guild union card for admitting this, but to my utter surprise, everything in the upper half of my top ten this year is also showing up on plenty of critics’ lists. How’d that happen? I’d mourn the passing of my tetchy obscurity-love, but there’s actually something refreshing about being able to engage in serious debate about the titles that moved me this year, instead of trailing off so often into “Well, I saw it at a festival, it’ll be on DVD eventually, I guess…” (my next blog entry will revisit the past decade of my top ten lists to see what’s held up and what I’d throw overboard in retrospect so you’ll see what I mean).
Here’s something else bizarre: until I caught Benjamin Button on January first and had to regretfully nudge the Joe Strummer flick off the back end, my top ten this year was evenly split between fiction features and documentaries. One through five and six through ten, respectively, and that was a complete accident I only noticed once I’d juggled titles around for a while. Who knows, if I’d gotten around to seeing Man On Wire or Encounters At The End Of The World, which are showing up on a lot of critics’ lists, my own decalogue would have been even more doc-heavy. Speaking of which, can someone explain to me how, in this nearly-unprecedented age of documentaries actually making some bank at the box office, American Teen tanked so badly? Staged insert shots aside, little else this year could touch it for sheer drama, and there were few people who were such a luminous presence onscreen as Hannah Bailey. I'm baffled, frankly.
Then of course, there’s this year’s TIFF, which I dissected enough during its run (scroll down if you care) but which was enough of a near miss this year to cast a curious shadow over my autumn’s mood. At least, what I actually saw left that aftertaste. Looking over my top ten, I see six titles that premiered at the Toronto fest, even if only two of them were festival screenings that I actually saw. Who would have ever figured that a Danny Boyle flick, set in India and structured around a game show, shot and cut in his typical Trainspotting-esque hyperkinetic style would be a leading Oscar contender at this point? Or that Jonathan Demme would beat a retreat from his recent lefty documentaries and ill-advised remakes to re-embrace his uptown vibe, Dogme-style, and return to his humanist roots, and lead Anne Hathaway by the hand towards critical reevaluation?
How about the other big genre story of the year, namely the domination of the superhero saga? 2008 truly was the summer when Marvel fans could rejoice at their beloved comic heroes getting proper big-screen treatment. The Marvel Studios five-year plan to unveil a series of interconnected blockbusters has finally borne fruit in not just bringing respectful comic adaptations but also comic books’ hypertextual nature to the screen. Even Punisher: War Zone, not part of the Avengers continuity with its Marvel Knights banner and hard-R rating, was done right. Third time’s the charm, apparently: the filmmakers--a big shoutout to my former kickboxing instructor Lexi, who graduated to the directing big-leagues by lensing this one--were positively reverential towards Garth Ennis’ groundbreaking run on the title and made an adult action flick that’s much more than a guilty pleasure.
As for other comic movies, I loved Hancock, even if the ending battle was a bit of a muddle and the DVD release gives away the huge plot twist in its cover art. Then there was the elephant in the room, the second-biggest (worldwide) grossing movie of all time at this writing, The Dark Knight. Which didn’t even come close to making my list. While I will gladly concede that Nolan’s sequel contained a half-dozen movies’ worth of images that are seared into my memory, I wound up ultimately underwhelmed. Perhaps if it were shorn of half an hour, the botched Scarecrow cameo, the life-is-a-pile-of-shit ending and the too-often leaden pacing, the narrative could have matched the visuals for sheer impact. While I wouldn’t begrudge Ledger his posthumous Oscar, The Dark Knight is this year’s most overrated movie.
Or maybe that’s The Wrestler, which I still think is pretty terrific, mind you, but isn’t quite the masterpiece that many are claiming. Yes, Rourke is staggering, even once you strip away the meta-meanings of his portrayal. But the character of his daughter, ably played though she is by Evan Rachel Wood, is a paper-thin one-and-a-half notes, and the final reel gets almost unbearably mawkish. The final shot is one of the year’s biggest miscalculations, I think.
What The Wrestler gets absolutely right, on the other hand, was part of a bigger trend this year in utterly glorious cinematography. I suspect it has a lot to do with increasingly widespread use of high-quality video cameras, but this year’s images were as brain-ticklingly evocative as I can remember. I walked out of Gran Torino, Benjamin Button, Choke and countless other movies this year feeling like I was waking up from a dream, that I could still smell the settings and reach out and touch the peeling paint on the walls of the sets. Not that these were flashy films by any means, on the contrary their utter lack of visual affect was what lingered. Even a big-budget event film like Twilight was visually stunning; the rolling hills and forests of the Pacific Northwest were more expressive characters than the background Cullen brothers.
Okay…a couple more tidbits:
Worst miscasting: William Hurt in The Incredible Hulk. Overall, I had a blast at the flick, and I know they made a point of recasting absolutely everyone from the Ang Lee misfire, but replacing Sam Elliott with an actor you don’t believe, for a second, could ever even enlist in the military let alone become a cigar-chomping, hard-as-nails general was a rare misstep.
Barf-bag please! I actually didn’t make it halfway through Cloverfield. The trend towards feature-length handheld was bad enough, but incorporating whip-pan POV video into the narrative form is an aesthetic phase that needs to end as soon as possible.
Not as bad as all that: Speed Racer. Okay, yeah, it was junk, and probably killed what remaining goodwill the Wachowski brothers still had in Hollywood with its colossal kah-beuhm of an opening weekend. But it was genuinely daring filmmaking, an experiment that failed but failed with verve and ambition.
Okay, that’s nice, can we get back to business, please? Daniel Craig himself has said that he hopes the Bond films bring back such mainstays of years past as Q and Moneypenny, and after the skillful but dour Quantum of Solace, I couldn’t agree more. Let’s just agree that the franchise reboot was successful and lighten the fuck up a little, please?
Surprise of the year: Ghost Town looked like something you’d have to drag me to with hooks through my eyelids, a horribly clichéd rom-com with a hackneyed, “what, again?” premise. Man, was I wrong on that count. It turned out to be hilarious and affecting in equal doses, with stellar performances from all the leads and a burnished glow on its images of New York that lingered in the memory.
As for 2009…only eight more weeks ‘til Watchmen! Woo-hoo! And seven months (grumble grumble) until Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. There’s also Michael Mann’s Dillinger biopic, Tom Twyker’s The International, James Cameron’s Avatar…and I have no idea what’s on deck for the 2009 TIFF. So while 2008 had its high points and hidden rewards, this year could very well handily blow it out of the water. Can’t wait.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
TIFF 2008 wrapup (and revisiting the film that won't die)
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
