TIFF 2011

TIFF 2011 coverage here.

TIFF 2010: Wrap It Up

• The films are fading fast in the rearview for me (no reflection on them, necessarily), but before they become too vestigial I want to at least highlight the rest of what I saw at this year's TIFF, starting with a movie called White Irish Drinkers. How I wound up catching this flick is fairly embarrassing: the director is "John Gray," which I misread in my bleary, end-of-festival state as "James Gray." I was severely late for the flick, so I don't want to pummel it (or even officially rate it), but keen auteurist that I am, I figured out my mistake pretty quickly: James Gray just wouldn't have a naked girl (the maddeningly familiar Leslie Murphy) run around a cemetery with "free spirit" music cued up on the soundtrack--he's not a de facto film student anymore. Though it turns out that John Gray has an extensive TV-movie resume, having done everything from The Marla Hanson Story to the remake of Brian's Song, this feels very much the work of a novice, not a little for its pretensions to be the next Mean Streets. Because Stephen Lang salvaged Public Enemies virtually single-handedly, I was hopeful when he turned up here, but his character may be even more one-note than the one he played in Avatar. As his put-upon wife, Karen Allen has seemingly recovered from the stupefying euphoria of getting to resurrect her iconic Marion in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Strangely, I missed said goofy grin, yet she makes the most of a thankless role that indirectly references her previous brush with this genre, Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers. The rest of the cast is made up of baby-faced thugs who have to be given black eyes at regular intervals in order to pass for tough. On a related note, I never could shake the feeling that this is exactly the sort of project Vinnie Chase would be hot for on "Entourage".
• If the effusive headlines at AICN are any indication, the geeks were born to love James Gunn's fast, cheap, and out-of-control Super (**/****). I wasn't exactly indifferent, but I'm definitely burned out on these pomo comic-book movies. Aggravating the picture's been there/done that feeling is its pronounced debt to Taxi Driver, which Super rehashes with selective realism and a much greater emphasis on shock value. It also has a Troma patina--which is probably a hard thing for Gunn, who cut his teeth on stuff like Tromeo and Juliet, to shake--that makes the all-star cast look like they're participating in a telethon, although Ellen Page overcomes this obstacle to deliver another performance for the ages. As the ferocious sidekick to Rainn Wilson's homemade superhero the Crimson Bolt, she resists every impulse towards good taste and forces audiences to start recognizing her as a) an adult woman and b) a sexual being by modeling her skin-tight spandex costume as indecently as possible. Still, the film is so glib and so arch that I kind of resented its presumptuous detours into sentiment and tragedy.
• I don't show my appreciation for Bruce Springsteen--an evergreen artist if ever there was one--often enough, thus in a way going to see The Promise: The Making of "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (**½/****) was a form of penance. But I confess I had an ulterior motive, which was to set foot inside Toronto's new state-of-the-art cinema complex the Bell Lightbox. It's beautiful. Huge, too. My visit was basically a hit-and-run, but I did of course get to audit one of the five spacious screening rooms, with its impressive corridors and seventies-brown, perhaps quintessentially Canadian interior. (The lobby is a mix of cool blues and modernist whites.) As for the Bruce doc, a quasi-sequel to Wings for Wheels: The Making of "Born to Run", it's a pleasant mix of fly-on-the-wall footage of the original recording sessions for the titular album and retrospective interviews with the E Street Band as well as various industry types. You've got to admire Springsteen's chutzpah in documenting and cataloguing his creative process with a borderline-Kubrickian obsessiveness long before his reputation warranted it, but as much as his collaborators bitch about his anal-retentiveness from their current vantage, he's such a benign genius that the studio material frankly doesn't generate a lot of electricity--at least between jams. Moreover, so much of it is presumed to need contextualization by the latter-day interviews that I grew restless with the constant cutting back and forth.
• I don't know what to say, really, about Canadian Carl Bessai's Repeaters (*/****) or Ji-woon Kim's I Saw the Devil (**/****). Bessai has flirted with sci-fi tropes before but he's wading pretty deep into the genre pool with this indie riff on Groundhog Day, in which three rehab residents take the place of one weatherman. While these 12-steppers are more obviously inclined to seek redemption in do-overs than Bill Murray was, they might as well still be TV meteorologists: given that they cheerfully relapse upon realizing tomorrow now comes with a clean slate, it's a cheat that they're able to control and even forget their addictions once some semblance of a plot kicks in. The '80s-horror-movie coda doesn't help matters. The premise of I Saw the Devil, another film instantly enshrined by the geek cult, is that a serial killer locks horns with a Korean secret service agent, who uses every tool at his disposal to track his wife's murderer and thwart the bastard's attempts to claim another victim, thereby giving him a terminal case of blue balls. It's a potentially exasperating conceit rendered all the more so by the execution: the picture's too long, too repetitive, and neither stylish nor meta enough to get away with lazily-plotted scenes like the one where the presumed-unconscious killer overhears a crucial bit of information. I write this as a fan of Kim's A Tale of Two Sisters and his Leone pastiche The Good the Bad and the Weird.
• Let's go out on a high note, with Eric Lartigau's The Big Picture (L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie) (***½/****). (The literal translation of the French title is considerably more loaded: "The Man Who Wanted to Live His Life.") I actually don't want to spoil this one with a plot synopsis, because I can't discount the sheer pleasure I got from its constant gear-shifting. (This year's TIFF taught me that I'm learning to appreciate a good yarn well told.) Suffice it to say, the first act filled me with dread that this was going to be another film that sets out to punish the workaholic patriarch, only in French (it's in fact based on an American novel by Douglas Kennedy), but the picture soon flies off in a different direction, and then it soars--a draggy section of pipe-laying in the middle notwithstanding. What I love is its moral ambivalence, its neutrality: Romain Duris's Paul Exben isn't a bad guy, he just does bad things; and somehow, his acts of atonement are even worse, yet there is a certain consolation in that he's following his muse. We observe him with interest if not attachment. A literate epic,The Big Picture waxes poetic on everything from the nature of identity to the virtues of digital vs. analog (both reveal their boundaries in Paul's transition from one world to the other), to photography, to fame, to globalism... And let it not go unsaid that A Prophet's Niels Arestrup and Public Enemies' Branka Katic are absolutely lovely in pivotal roles that leave a little hole in the air when the movie's over.

TIFF 2010: On "Womb"

I found the jury-rigged misery of Never Let Me Go a lot less provocative and haunting than the self-inflicted kind one encounters in Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, whose one-word title seems to not-unduly affiliate the picture with Jonathan Glazer's great Birth. I love this movie, but it took me a few days to digest it, and I'm not sure I'd have the patience to sit through it again. It's challenging from the get-go, what with the quasi-kiddie porn of its opening sequences, in which a beautiful young boy and girl start sleeping together, and the girl caresses her skin, then the boy's, as if trying to decipher some message between them written in Braille. (For pure eroticism, though, nothing trumps the pair watching a snail writhe across a kitchen table--and it's here that I wish I possessed Walter Chaw's vocabulary for discussing suggestively Romantic images such as these.) The girl, Rebecca, moves to Tokyo, and grows up to be played by Eva Green. She returns to the little beach community where she met the boy, Thomas (Matt "Doctor Who" Smith as an adult), and looks him up, having transparently spent the intervening years pining for him. When they meet again, he's so thunderstruck that he dumps his current girlfriend on the spot, and the two impulsively begin a life together as eco-activist--an amateur entomologist, he breeds cockroaches, speaking to indelibility and infestation--and muse. Just as suddenly, Thomas is killed on the way to a protest, and Rebecca, feeling cosmically robbed, has and implements the lunatic idea to be artificially inseminated with Thomas's clone and cultivate in the child an Oedipal complex, so that at some point in the future she will get to be with a facsimile of her lover, even if he is, technically, her son. What ensues is a distaff Lolita that makes up for in controversy (the incest angle) what it may lack in guts (all things considered, this is a fairly chaste film), though the Zen patience with which Rebecca courts Thomas II only affirmed the intelligence of the piece for me: you're just not going to see a woman exhibit the immoral lust of Humbert Humbert with the same urgency.

Beneath its sensationalistic hook, Womb is also solid pop anthropology, with Rebecca recreating original Thomas's environment as much as possible in the hopes of raising a true clone but finally bringing up someone who is, unlike his "father," unmotivated and kind of an idiot. (Though she appears to enjoy fucking him too much to care, new Thomas's girlfriend (Hannah Murray, who has the sexiest overbite I've ever seen--writer/director/composer/sound-mixer Fliegauf has an eye for carnal mouths) hits the nail on the head when she calls him "juvenile.") There are simply too many variables involved in how a child turns out, not the least of which the human soul. That none of this is actually put into words by the filmmakers shames Never Let Me Go, which wheels Charlotte Rampling out like Blofeld to speculate about souls in genetically-engineered individuals. Green is fabulous, by the way, a woman for the first time on screen and walking a tightrope with aplomb. There's ambivalence in her maternalism that's exactly right; accepting her predicament requires a huge suspension of disbelief, but she believes it first. ***1/2/****

TIFF 2010: On "Let Me In"

The logo for the refurbished Hammer Films that opens Let Me In is a little like the one for Marvel Films, only images of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing flutter past instead of Spider-Man and other "-men." I think it may have caused me to squee, as the girls say. The movie itself doesn't labour to honour the Hammer legacy per se--I had secretly hoped it'd find room for at least one slutty Victorian barmaid--but it does reverentially emulate its key source, the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In, which Walter Chaw and I had on our Top 10 lists for that year. That Let Me In doesn't feel synthetic like Gus Van Sant's Psycho redux is something of a miracle; xenophobic viewers will get to have an experience roughly analogous to the original in tone as well as content--but do they deserve it? Me, I found it a pleasant sort of déjà vu, with Richard Jenkins and Elias Koteas--ringers, both, in the final analysis--brilliantly cast as twin avatars of middle-aged pathos. Jenkins barely utters a line yet steals the show as the reluctant star of his own slasher movie (which has a curious resonance, given that the film is set in the genre's heyday of 1983), and writer-director Matt Reeves gifts him with the film's best (and most innovative) sequence, a white-knuckle car chase shot entirely from the back seat of an automobile. In the lead role of Oskar, née Owen, Kodi Smit-McPhee appears to be genuinely, heartbreakingly smitten with co-star Chloe Moretz, who initially struck me as too polished, too actressy, dare I say too pretty (between this and Hit Girl, I see a few too many Hinckleys in her future), though as Let Me In wears on, these qualities start to seem designed--she's a shrewder, if not preferable, take on a character who is, after all, grooming a replacement for her lackey. The bullying sequences are highly visceral, Greig Fraser's anamorphic cinematography captures the bleak Los Alamos winter without falling into colour-coded cliché (even as it's hamstrung by Reeves's prosaic shot-reverse-shot strategies), and...it's a little thing, but...the picture gets 1983 right, down to wholly ineffable details like body language. Reeves cut "the shot" (you know the one I'm talking about), but I actually don't blame him. If the mass exodus at my press screening during Moretz's first attack on an innocent is any indication, he's already fighting an uphill battle against the prigs. ***/****

TIFF 2010: On "John Carpenter's The Ward"

Before we resume our regularly scheduled programming, a few words on a film evidently especially anticipated by readers of this site/blog. Like most movie fiends around my age of my gender, I'm a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool John Carpenter fan, and I didn't hesitate for a moment to clear a space in my TIFF sked for his first feature film since 2001's Ghosts of Mars. He's been off his game for years--decades, even--and this is the sort of festival fare that makes me feel like I'm opting for peanuts over the vegetable platter, but still: a no-brainer. Alas and alack, that's doubly true of The Ward. Usually when Carpenter fails, it's because he overthinks--not this time. Amber Heard plays a new patient at a psychiatric institute for criminally hot chicks (fellow inmates include Danielle Panabaker and Lyndsy Fonseca), though Carpenter's so asexual you can forget about Sapphic overtones or witty leering. (This movie must have the most un-titillating all-girl shower scene in cinematic history.) The picture courts the MAXIM demo, verisimilitude be damned, because that's how you cast something you expect to go straight to video, and Carpenter's similarly nuance-free direction all but confirms he had no higher aspirations for The Ward. Which is why I'm baffled that the film is officially called John Carpenter's The Ward: he made it abundantly clear in Gilles Boulenger's interview book that he leaves his name off the title if his heart wasn't in it. A return to form it definitely isn't, in other words--but, worse, aside from its cannibalizing of a few Cundeyian Steadicam moves and the ending to Prince of Darkness (and, again, that lack of sensuality), it doesn't feel like a Carpenter flick. There's no mood, no tension, no originality (and all that that implies in a year which saw the release of Shutter Island). It's deeply stupid, without the balm of his inimitable style, or any style. It relies on jump-scares. It broke my fucking heart. 0.5/****

TIFF 2010 Day 2

Friday began with Jack Goes Boating, the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars as the title character. Jack is an airport limo driver who's been the third wheel in the lives of his married friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Ruben-Vega) for so long that they've decided to intervene by setting him up with the mousy but receptive Connie (Amy Ryan). The movie, adapted--and, one suspects, significantly "opened up"--by Bob Glaudini from his own Off-Broadway play, casually parallels their burgeoning romance with the evaporation of Clyde and Lucy's relationship. In a fall preview on his delightful blog, Nick Davis summed up his level of anticipation for Jack Goes Boating thusly: "Loved Synecdoche but can't take much more schlub." Truer words, etc. Jack isn't just a schlub, he's the ur-schlub, a maddeningly static individual who has to be nudged into action like a soccer ball, and Hoffman lights and poses himself to look as appetizing as Grimace from the Happy Meals. I much prefer another passion project of Hoffman's, Love Liza: although it operates on the same demented frequency as Jack Goes Boating, there's a whole slew of theatrical affectations to contend with this time around. (You can eventually set your watch to Jack's nervous throat-clearing.) Ortiz is tremendously winning, though, in a bromantic role that reveals a lot more range, not to mention teeth, than Hollywood's ever given him a chance to show. Jack Goes Boating reminded one woman I spoke to of Rocky; I can see it if I squint.

The more aggressively deadpan Curling is the first film I've seen from the well-regarded Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté, and I'm getting a strong Kaurismäkian vibe from him--though VARIETY's review of Curling claims that Côté traffics in "arthouse misery." Maybe it's that a Canadian can see the humour in the sort of wintry desolation this movie depicts and an American can't. Real-life father and daughter Emmanuel and Philomène Bilodeau play, or perhaps role-play, Jean-François and Julyvonne Sauvageau, rural Quebecers trapped in a prison of the former's making. Lots of parents don't want their children to grow up, but Jean-François seems uniquely determined to freeze Julyvonne on the precipice of womanhood, sheltering her from the outside world to the extent that she doesn't go to school--he buys textbooks for her that probably collect dust--and doesn't get to go to work with him at the bowling alley (where the picture's most overt comedy springs from), because it's not "safe" for a twelve-year-old. She's left to her own devices at home, however, which ironically hastens her loss of innocence once she stumbles on some dead bodies (and, inexplicably, a tiger) during a stroll through the nearby woods. A slow burn that respects the audience's literacy when it comes to subtext, Curling is a gratifyingly dense piece that pings off zeitgeisty anxieties about powerlessness I wouldn't describe as exclusively parental. Further reading: Jason Anderson's cover story on the film and Côté's career in the latest issue of CINEMA SCOPE.

I succumbed to buzz by ending the day with Mark Romanek's Danny Boyle-esque Never Let Me Go, which proved not-uncomplementary to Curling in that they're both about dead-end indoctrinations of the young. Based on the beloved (and unread-by-yours-truly) Kazuo Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go represents an alternative history in which genetic cloning became possible in the fifties, inspiring the government to begin breeding people to give up their organs in adulthood; the story follows a love triangle from its inception at a Hogwarts-like school for future donors to its pitiful "completion" in sterile operating rooms. Never Let Me Go represents, too, my least favourite kind of exploitation: the polite, pretentious kind that, somewhat hypocritically, plays coy with the specifics while getting off on the emotional sadism of its high concept. (The movie is three innocents placidly riding a conveyor belt to a meat-grinder.) The blue-collar filmgoer in me would not stop asking literalminded but no less valid questions Never Let Me Go is above addressing, such as why don't these motherfuckers run? At the risk of accusing the book of same, the whole thing reeks of fear of genre, and while Romanek's direction is certainly moody, it lacks the tone-poem quality that might've transformed evasion into evocation. Credit where credit is due, the kid they cast as young Carey Mulligan (one Isobel Meikle-Small) looks so much like a shrunken version of her that it's actually topical, but my final recommendation is to watch Seconds or Blade Runner again instead.

JACK GOES BOATING: **/****
CURLING: ***1/2/****
NEVER LET ME GO: */****

TIFF 2010 Day 1

I started the morning off on a bum note by boarding the wrong subway train (which caused me to miss The Town), but other than that, the day went off without a hitch. I found the new homebase of the Festival okay, spotted Karina Longworth (who like most critics of note looks part cartoon character), got mistaken for a stand-up comic (am I the only one who feels bizarrely contrite when this happens?), and managed to park my ass in a cinema just as Stone was beginning to unspool. As an aside, I now see a real upside to holding the press screenings at the Scotiabank instead of the Varsity, as the larger auditoriums are cutting down on the last-minute scrambles to find a seat; at both of my movies today, the first few neck-straining rows were almost entirely empty. It's a throwback, really, to the good old days of the Uptown.

Stone opens...if not promisingly, then intriguingly, with stand-ins for young Robert De Niro and Frances Conroy experiencing what is presumably only an uglier-than-usual day in a loveless marriage as she announces she's leaving him and he threatens to throw their baby daughter out the window if she does. Though this incident is never actually revisited directly, it informs every aspect of the De Niro character, a parole officer who uses his cases as a moral yardstick against his own transgressions and, as we've seen, treats his wife like a prisoner. Into his life enter convicted arsonist Stone (Edward Norton, doing voices now) and Stone's wife (Milla Jovovich), who's intent on expediting her husband's release through her considerable sexual charisma. Director John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Painted Veil) frustrates: he has a nice eye for widescreen tableaux and good editing instincts, but despite their dramatic promise his films are crock-pots instead of pressure cookers, and Stone, like his previous work, never peaks in any way that could be conventionally described as satisfying. All kidding about his Travoltan croak aside, Norton is quite good, but the real stars of the show are Jovovich and the woman photographing her, Maryse Alberti, who shows her documentary roots in a close-up of the actress's blotchy legs, only to reveal a deepening interest in all the individual parts--the gumdrop toes, the antenna nipples, the dewy lips--that make up this authentically beautiful creature. De Niro is, alas, uninspired, and it doesn't help that his younger self is played by Enver Gjokaj, an actor with some of the hunger and tabula rasa range De Niro used to have; "Dollhouse" fans will wish for more flashbacks that fail to materialize. Worthy of further exploration: how Angus McLachlan's screenplay echoes the one he wrote for Junebug.

Post-Stone, I leapfrogged across the lobby to the much-anticipated I'm Still Here, which I have to FORCE myself not to type as I'm Not There. Here's my take on the whole Joaquin Phoenix-quits-acting-for-hip-hop thing: yes, it's a hoax--and what's pissing him off in this film is that everybody sees through it. (It suggests he's not a very convincing actor after all.) There are scenes in this movie, like when Puff Daddy tells Phoenix he doesn't like his music enough to take it on as a producer, that are just too well-timed in the vein of embarrassment comedy. Apropos of which, I liked Puff in this a lot more than I expected to: he has this great lecture about the democratization of the entertainment industry disrespecting the hardworking, talented people who deserve to be in it. Ben Stiller's cameo is heroic, too, and we infer real vitriol in his mocking impersonation of Phoenix at the 2009 Academy Awards. I also believe that Phoenix genuinely desired a break from (traditional) acting, that I'm Still Here is going to be as difficult for him to live down as a season of "The Surreal Life" would be, and that he needs a hug. And a Bowflex. Ian's got a full review of this one in the pipeline.

BOTH FILMS: **/****

2009 TIFF Bytes #3.5

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

A SHINE OF RAINBOWS (dir. Vic Sarin)
Gawd, this movie is so nauseatingly nice. And generic. And hackneyed--any seasoned moviegoer will be able to predict every single story beat in advance. Connie Nielsen and Aidan Quinn--neither of whom is from Ireland (the director, meanwhile? From India)--play an Irish couple who adopt an adorable stuttering moppet (John Bell) from the local Dickensian orphanage. Because the kid is timid, kind of effeminate, and more than happy to learn the ropes from Nielsen, stoic, grunty Quinn can't relate to him. But then tragedy strikes (as you know it will from the first moment Nielsen tentatively clutches at her chest), and Quinn goes on a bender, and the kid steals a boat, and Quinn's grinch heart grows three sizes when the kid inevitably capsizes. Did I mention the baby seal yet? Who is this movie for? ½*/4

There may still be another capsule at the mothersite, but otherwise this it for my TIFF coverage. Apologies that I wound up reviewing such underwhelming fare; I confess I didn't pursue the buzz very aggressively--a muscle injury, coupled with the unexpected death of a friend, left me at the start of the Festival with little physical or psychic stamina. I'm kinda bummed that in the case of both Werner Herzog movies I showed up at the wrong theatre, but on that I blame a seemingly genetic aversion to doublechecking. Thanks for reading, even if you haven't felt much like commenting!

2009 TIFF Bytes #3

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:
A Gun to the Head (d. Blaine Thurier)
Those who, like me, missed Male Fantasy, the sophomore feature of Blaine Thurier, may find themselves at a loss to distinguish between Thurier's growth as a filmmaker and advancements in digital video since his directorial debut, the better-in-retrospect Low Self Esteem Girl. Thurier's latest, the Vancouver-lensed A Gun to the Head, is comparatively polished, yet the film, with its focus again on suburban drug culture, feels dismayingly unevolved coming from someone who leads a prolific life that includes a steady gig as the keyboardist for the indie-rock supergroup The New Pornographers--even as it cops to a certain anxiety about abandoning comfortable milieux via Trevor (Tygh Runyan), a newlywed struggling with the demands of marriage in the face of his old freedoms. Basically a bush-league Mikey and Nicky, the picture has Trevor ferrying paranoid cousin Darren (Paul Anthony) all over town on a drug run just to avoid the dinner party his wife (Marnie Robinson, the spitting image of Jordana Spiro) is throwing back home; eventually the two run afoul of Darren's suppliers, who have already shown themselves capable of murder. I will say that Thurier is good with actors--this cast really brings it, with the suddenly-vivacious Sarah Lind a particular standout. (Revealing hidden comic chops, she plays a nasal-voiced bimbo who only picked up the word for "um" on her trip to Japan.) Lead baddie Hrothgar Mathews unfortunately bears a sometimes-striking resemblance to Glenn Gould the same year a documentary about the famous pianist plays alongside A Gun to the Head at the TIFF. Which leads me to... (**/4, by the way.)

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (ds. Peter Raymont & Michèle Hozer)
Going in, I knew nothing of Gould beyond what I gleaned from Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and coming out, I mostly lingered on how miscast that film's Colm Feore seems in retrospect. This is a conventional womb-to-tomb doc, chock-a-block with interviews and archival materials and predictably more fun in the earlygoing when its subject is eccentric than near the end when its subject is damaged goods. Over and over, it piques--then sates--curiosity with a reassuring rhythm, but that clunky, arrogant title has a reach exceeding the filmmakers' grasp on the sphinxlike title figure; mileage will of course vary depending on one's degree of Gould-love. **½/4

2009 TIFF Bytes #2.5

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

Vincere (Win) (d. Marco Bellocchio)
Structurally and even editorially, the oddly-titled Vincere (Win) is kind of a mess, but the badass opening scene hooked me. Therein, a slender, dark-eyed journalist with a good head of hair--you guessed it: Benito Mussolini--sets a pocket watch and gives God five minutes to strike him down; if he's still alive when time runs out, Mussolini (Filippo Timi) tells the pious crowd gathered before him, it means there is no God. I really wanted to like this guy, but the movie's about his mistress and alleged other wife, Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who has the sort of face you can lose yourself in), whose story pretty much precludes any chance of that. Ida bears Mussolini a son and sells all her worldly possessions to subsidize his fascist newspaper, but as soon as his political career starts to gain a little traction, he has her exiled and eventually institutionalized. (Benito Jr. (Timi again) is committed as well once he reaches adulthood.) I'm not sure what the movie's out to prove, other than that Mussolini was a fucking fuckhead, but it's hard not to feel a subversive tickle during the fairly-graphic sex scenes between he and Ida, which reduce Il Duce in the act of giving him human urges. As much as veteran director Marco Bellocchio wants to honour Ida's Snake Pit ordeal, he does seem a little wistful about the aesthetics attendant to her ruin. Indeed, Inglourious Basterds might be the second-most cinema-fetishistic war movie I've seen this year, and it's hard to deny the strange enchantment of a war hospital tableau in which religious silents are projected onto the ceiling to placate the wounded. ***/4

2009 TIFF Bytes #2

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

A Single Man (d. Tom Ford)
I can't speak for Christopher Isherwood's novel, which seems like it must be a pre-emptive eulogy for the relationship documented in Chris & Don. A Love Story, but the movie made from it is pretty embarrassing. For better or worse (worse, if you ask me), A Single Man is precisely what you'd expect from fashion designer Tom Ford, even if you can't quite picture that sensibility as applied to a movie set in the world of academia circa the early-'60s. (Cue much "Mad Men" envy.) I don't think I've ever seen digital colour-timing so serially abused, or so hammily: Colin Firth is an English professor trying to go about his routine after the recent death of his long-time companion (Matthew Goode, better than he was in Watchmen), whom he can't publicly mourn; every time he sees something 'sublime,' like a pretty little girl in a dress who asks him why he looks sad, the image goes from washed-out pastel shades to near-blinding Technicolor. Lee Pace, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Elisabeth Harnois are squandered inasmuch as one can squander those actors and Julianne Moore is cringe-inducing as a go-go lush hoping against hope that Firth will start to swing both ways, but the pièce-de-resistance is Nicholas Hoult, all grown up but still disconcertingly sporting the same head he had in About a Boy. Hoult's character, a student of Firth's who stalks him like a lost puppy, is ascribed an emotional clairvoyance Hoult himself is utterly incapable of conveying authentically. Indeed, he's matured into such a terrible actor that it's actually disturbing to watch him in scenes with Firth (solid here), as though he's some theatre geek who's cut himself into the film with iMovie. */4

Trash Humpers (d. Harmony Korine)
Harmony Korine dares you to hate this movie...and I accept. Shot (and edited) on VHS in Korine's hometown of Nashville, it's "about" people in old-people masks--including Korine and his asshole wife, Rachel, who spends the last five or ten minutes of the film traumatizing an actual infant--who dry-fuck garbage cans--you didn't think that title was a metaphor, did you?--and find various horrible ways, in vignette after endless vignette, to amuse themselves. An elderly man degraded by a French-maid's outfit recites poetry while one of the titular humpers--who look more like burn victims than like anything else--sets off firecrackers (a Putney Swope/Boogie Nights reference? How cutting-edge). In the next "scene," the poet is dead on a kitchen floor, his throat slit. My problem with Trash Humpers is not that it's stupid, ugly, masturbatory, and tedious, it's that, unlike Gummo, it doesn't transcend all those things to become simultaneously sublime, beautiful, titillating, and rewarding. Whatever you think of Mister Lonely, this is a regression, a tragedy akin to watching an alcoholic relapse. I agree with critic Dennis Lim's theory in the latest CINEMASCOPE that Korine effectively invented YouTube with the man-vs.-chair sequence from Gummo, but YouTube exploitation is a dilettante's game, and so is courting pure shock; Korine is just too old for this shit.* With any luck, he just needed to get this out of his system--like diarrhea. ZERO/4

*Then again, so am I, I guess.

2009 TIFF Bytes #1.5

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

White Material (d. Claire Denis)
This is Claire Denis' very own Gone with the Wind, and she seems to denote it as epic by shooting it in 2.35:1 widescreen. Headstrong Maria (Isabelle Huppert) struggles to keep the Vial coffee plantation operating in the midst of an African civil war despite accumulating exit cues. Her entire workforce heeds the evacuation call she chooses to ignore. She finds a severed animal's head among the beans. Her son (Nicolas Duvauchelle) goes mad after a brush with the rebels. Highly sought-after resistance fighter The Boxer (Isaach de Bankole) takes up residence in the Vials' shed far too conspicuously. And still she remains undeterred. One of Denis' most fascinating protagonists, Maria is an interloper everywhere she turns: a white woman in Cameroon, a divorcée living on the estate of her ex-husband (Christopher Lambert), the boss of a plantation she has no formal stake in; Denis subverts the paternalism of shit like I Dreamed of Africa, as you'd expect from the director of Beau Travail and Chocolat. But I have to admit, for all its indisputable richness of theme and craft, I found it a little tedious and just didn't connect with it; Walter's final words for Public Enemies ("It doesn't mean a thing to me") rang unfairly in my ears. No matter: Denis already made one for me this year (the lovely 35 Shots of Rum), and I am content to have discovered that Lambert is aging into a far more interesting actor than he ever was in his youth. **½/4

2009 TIFF Bytes #1

Too long for Twitter, too brief for the capsule page, some quick takes on films screened at this year's TIFF:

Jennifer's Body (d. Karen Kusama)
I missed a good chunk of Jennifer's Body's first reel, so I think it would be dubious of me to assign it a star rating; nevertheless, it would have to be a hell of a redeeming opening for me to consider going higher than *. Why is Karen Kusama directing a movie this high-profile after the hard flop of Aeon Flux when Joe Dante's reduced to "Goosebumps"-style kiddie fare after the comparatively-revered Looney Tunes: Back in Action? Kusama again shows a special talent for blurring that fine line between camp and ineptitude (see: step-printed flashbacks to little girls playing with Barbies), and Megan Fox, the sex object from the Uncanny Valley, delivers some lines so sluggishly I felt bad for keeping her up. (Attention tit fiends: the paparazzi captured more skin with their zoom lenses on the set of this film than actually made it onto the screen.) I hope Walter or Ian tackles it in general release--it could really use the new asshole--but in the meantime I recommend Glenn Kenny's take for his articulation of the Diablo Cody Problem. ????/4

My Toxic Baby (d. Min Sook Lee)
This one's a documentary, only 45 minutes long, and scheduled to air on Canadian TV in the coming weeks. It's nightmarish, but not for the same reason it intends. Director and narrator Min Sook Lee is a new mother growing increasingly paranoid about the invisible threats to her daughter; in the film's best sequence, she invites a toy tester into her home to check for lead and soon has him scanning her whole kitchen for traces of the stuff. (Cut to: hubby tearing out the cupboards.) The punchline is that a tox screen reveals her daughter is practically antiseptic, though Lee's closing voiceover suggests she won't be satisfied until the kid's fitted for a Hazmat suit. Setting out to enlighten and inform her fellow parents, Lee instead captured the onset of OCD from the eye of the storm. Also: Pox Parties? Ick. ***/4

Mute Witness

As threatened, a few stream-of-consciousness thoughts on Charlie Kaufman's latest...

When Synecdoche, New York premiered at Cannes, I remember being annoyed by how feeble the critical coverage on it was. But I get it now. This is a film I'm hard-pressed to describe, let alone review in depth, after just a single viewing. I can say that I see why Kaufman kept this one for himself rather than entrusting it to Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry—it's so dense and cryptic that it would be nigh uninterpretable by anyone but the source. Kaufman is a pretty meat-and-potatoes director, all things considered, but there are so many idiosyncrasies built into the material that it's stylish by default.

The film itself suggests an X-ray of a self-loathing artist's soul (he wrote without any intention of qualifying it). A miserable theatre director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) receives the MacArthur Genius Grant and what he does with it transcends mere navel-gazing: he erects an exact replica of his life in a cavernous warehouse, eventually hiring actors to shadow him and his inner circle. (Synecdoche, New York reaches some mad crescendo when the boundaries between representative and actual realities have blurred such that doubles for the actors themselves start cropping up.) Once Kaufman started taking his games off court, so to speak, for instance by casting Emily Watson as Samantha Morton—the two are often mistaken for each other offscreen, and are certainly doppelgangers here—I found myself wondering if even Kaufman/Hoffman was a planned coincidence. That’s the kind of insanity this movie breeds.

The term “Lynchian” is bound to come up a lot in reviews of the film and for once it's not inappropriate (and moreover not an insult to Lynch). Yet I suspect it will still be misapplied to Synecdoche, New York's surreal humour when it more accurately describes its existentialism; the picture is nothing less than a distaff Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire, climaxing in a quiet apocalypse worthy of Week-End's closing title declaration: "END OF CINEMA / END OF WORLD." This is not to accuse Kaufman of making a pastiche—indeed, he might be the only other American filmmaker to whom these nested narratives come naturally.

Bottom line: Synecdoche, New York is hilarious, heady, intoxicating, heartbreaking, and more than a little maddening.

I saw another film at this year's TIFF that I feel woefully unprepared to write about without a second look, Astra Taylor's Examined Life. A rebuttal of sorts to What the Bleep Do We Know!?, it may be too broad for its own good (Taylor literally asks a handful of noted philosophers (Cornel West and Judith Butler among them) to spout ten minutes of arbitrary rhetoric apiece and calls it a documentary), but it's as compulsively watchable as its animated counterpart, Richard Linklater's Waking Life. It's also so linear and compartmentalized that it feels like the first filmed blog, with viewers destined to take its scene transitions as unconcious prompts to complete the cycle of interactivity in public forums afterwards.

(This post dedicated to the memory of David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008.)

TIFF File (Up Up and Away'd)

The stars don't tell the whole story, of course, but for quick reference purposes, here's a rundown of everything I've screened so far @ this year's TIFF, followed by brief commentary:

• Gigantic (d. Matt Aselton) - **
• Synecdoche, New York (d. Charlie Kaufman) - ****(?)
• Adoration (d. Atom Egoyan) - *
• The Wrestler (d. Darren Aronofsky) - ***1/2
• Not Quite Hollywood (d. Mark Hartley) - ***
• Examined Life (d. Astra Taylor) - **1/2
• Two Legged Horse (d. Samira Makhmalbaf) - **1/2
• Rachel Getting Married (d. Jonathan Demme) - **
• 35 Shots (d. Claire Denis) - ***1/2
• Gomorrah (d. Matteo Garrone) - ***
• Lorna's Silence (ds. Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne) - ***1/2
• The Girl from Monaco (d. Anne Fontaine) - **
• Derrière moi (d. Rafaël Ouellet) - **1/2
• A Christmas Tale (d. Arnaud Desplechin) - ***

So far I appear to be in the minority on Rachel Getting Married (the praise-by-way-of-Altman comparisons must have Altman turning in his grave) and Lorna's Silence (pretty much said it all in my capsule). On the other hand, I'm slowly coming around to the positive consensus on Cannes Grand Prix winner Gomorrah: its title a play on the Camorra, better known as the Mafia, the picture is about the trickle-down effect that organized crime has had on an industrial Italian city not unlike "The Wire"'s Baltimore. But if "The Wire" too often betrayed its gritty authenticity with platitudes and contrivances (in the show's defense, I think viewers ascribed a documentary realism to it that the creators themselves, telling a modern Greek tragedy, never actively pursued), Gomorrah is told at such a clinical remove that it actually made me feel a little sociopathic for how frequently disengaged I was by it all. And yet, I'm finding it has a half-life greater than almost anything else listed above. Go fig; just wish I could find a way to articulate that paradox.

Feel free to discuss "True Blood" in this thread, by the by; seems to be the non-TIFF highlight of the week. Viva Anna.

Why I'm Not Formally Reviewing 'Control'

Control is an authentic-feeling biopic about the late Ian Curtis, the epileptic front man for Joy Division who committed suicide--though a revisionist theory absurdly contends that he "accidentally" hung himself from the clothesline in his Manchester flat--in 1979 at the age of 23. Spoiler. Directed by music-video auteur Anton Corbijn and objectively lensed in black-and-white and 'scope by Martin Ruhe, the film overcomes the central miscasting of Samantha Morton as Ian's wife Deborah (though she would've nailed this role in her Morvern Callar days, she's far too long in the tooth for it now) with the near-perfect casting of Sam Riley as Curtis, Craig Parkinson as Tony Wilson, and Alexandra Maria Lara as Annik Honoré, a.k.a. The Other Woman. (Morton's incongruous star-power is easily explained by the basis for Control's screenplay: Deborah Curtis' own memoir Touching from a Distance.) The film is admirably not a hagiography while engendering empathy for a gifted asshole more successfully than, say, Man on the Moon, and the song recreations are surprisingly persuasive, although I was a bit disappointed with how literalmindedly the music is applied at times.

Anyway, I liked it and thought it mostly deserving of its Cannes honours, but towards the end of the film, I found myself growing increasingly restless: instead of dreading Ian's fate, I became impatient with any scene I knew wouldn't end with the money shot. Rather than give the Brothers Weinstein ammunition to butcher another film, though, I'm more apt to blame the anti-piracy measures that have been put into effect for this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Throughout the film, some skinny, anime-looking dork attired in a security uniform that was sliding off his shoulders paced the aisle next to me, stopping occasionally to put a pair of infrared specs to his eyes and pivot his head back and forth, Terminator-style. Call me a prima donna, but when a movie is quiet and intense, as Control most certainly is, there's just something distracting about a guy incessantly goose-stepping in your periphery. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was when he leaned against the screen, spilling some of the projected image onto his smug expression. I kept hoping someone with a little influence would speak up (Dave Poland was seated in my vicinity) until finally I tried staring down the twerp myself. Alas, he wielded those night-vision goggles like a talisman, using them to shield himself from direct eye contact. Eventually I hotfooted it to the other side of the theatre--the Nazi stationed there was much less obtrusive, seemingly conscientious of Control's fragile tone.

Now, I'm not gonna get all self-righteous about being monitored during these press & industry screenings, even though I think they're very obviously going after the wrong people. Everybody knows that the Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka's factory comes with some caveats. But at least properly train this Gestapo to blend into the furniture and conceal their contempt for the whole charade, because it's the films--not the spectators--that ultimately pay the price.

My TIFF So Far:
Just Buried *1/2
Angel **
Emotional Arithmetic **
King of the Hill ***1/2
Love Songs *
A Promise to the Dead **1/2
Amal **1/2
Lust, Caution ***
Control ***
Mother of Tears: The Third Mother ***1/2

The TIFFing Point

Two more days until I turn back into a pumpkin (or something like that), probably for the good of not only my health, but also that of FILM FREAK CENTRAL. Anyway, some more stopgap coverage for you...

FAY GRIM (d. Hal Hartley)
As far as this unlikely sequel to the brilliant Henry Fool is concerned, those hoping for a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. The movie feels like it came out of Hartley sideways (or, conversely, all too painlessly), and it never really catches fire until Thomas Jay Ryan makes his long-delayed cameo as Henry Fool. By then, it's too little too late. **/****

BLACK SHEEP (d. Jonathan King)
A thoroughly superfluous mutant-sheep splatter flick that nevertheless hums along nicely. Due homage is paid to old-school Peter Jackson, Aliens, and the werewolf and zombie canons, but it's a lot better paced than the similarly-derivative Undead. **/****

BLACKBOOK (Zwartboek) (d. Paul Verhoeven)
Returning to Holland for the first time in over twenty years, Paul Verhoeven proves that while you can take him out of Hollywood, you can't take Hollywood out of him. It was kind of a relief to see a movie-movie after a string of homely indieprods, but I wonder how many more variations on the Anne Frank and Mata Hari stories I can sit through before I stop flinching in Pavlovian disgust at Gestapo iconography. (There's an unfortunately fine line between ensuring we "Never Forget" and desensitizing us.) If there's at least a flimsy rationale behind the homage to Basic Instinct, a "Three's Company"-style contrivance late in the game is merely indefensible. **/****

Keep an eye on the mothersite for more capsules as well as Walter's review of The Black Dahlia.

My TIFF So Far

Seems we're all a little constipated right now but rest assured reviews are on the way; here's a quick rundown of TIFFpix screened thus far by yours truly.

BABEL (d. Alejandro González Iñárritu)
It coheres better than 21 Grams, but Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga are really spinning their wheels at this point. A few funny extratextual lessons are imparted: never take a Fanning to Mexico (Elle has almost as harrowing an adventure there as sister Dakota does in Man on Fire); and never trust a director who includes a post-script dedication to his children. As with 21 Grams, though, Babel doesn't make room for any intentional levity, eventually desensitizing you to all the calculated anguish. *½/****

HALF MOON (Niwemung) (d. Bahman Ghobadi)
Ghobadi has really honed his craft since the dire A Time for Drunken Horses; his use of 'scope here--thinking of the opening cockfight, or a tableau of exiled Iraqi women serenading a band of Kurdish musicians as they leave town--is particularly cinematic. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't find its "Waiting for Godot"-isms a little draining. **½/****

THE HOST (Gue-mool) (d. Bong Joon-ho)
I'm no scholar of the Man in Suit genre, but I feel pretty confident in saying that this is the pinnacle of giant-monster cinema. A Spielberg movie that doesn't wuss out (and that traffics in the kind of black humour that used to be his métier), The Host has a shot at becoming South Korea's first real crossover hit--so long as its American distributor doesn't do something stupid like remake it instead. ***½/****

EVERYTHING'S GONE GREEN (d. Paul Fox)
Rather than grow with the demographic that helped make "Generation X" part of the vernacular, Douglas Coupland is like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, still courting the slackers because even though he gets older, they, with their disposable income and impressionable minds, stay the same age. A disingenuous sermon to the choir on the cul-de-sac of working a cubicle job that has the gall to hate money and Vancouver's film industry. */****

Click here for capsule reviews of Torn Apart (La Coupure), The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages), and After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet).

More Two-Second TIFF Reviews

Wassup Rockers (d. Larry Clark)
Somehow the most humanistic film of Clark's career is also his most nihilistic. Nice to see him acknowledge the "other," but they're still skater punks. *** (out of four)

Romance & Cigarettes (d. John Turturro)
A fugue. In the words of David Lynch, "Fugues make me crazy!" Actually eager to rant about this one. *1/2 (out of four)

All the Invisible Children (ds. Various)
As with any omnibus film, hit-or-miss. I think I liked Kátia Lund's segment best, but John Woo does his best work since heading West. Your mileage will vary. **1/2 (out of four)

Two-Second TIFF Reviews

Mary (d. Abel Ferrara)
Third-tier Ferrara, as evidenced by his choice of star (Matthew Modine). ** (out of four)

Heading South (Vers le sud) (d. Laurent Cantet)
Cantet works in dread the way some work in oils. A much-needed antidote to the twee likes of Ladies in Lavender. *** (out of four)

Takeshis' (d. Takeshi Kitano)
A kind of career summary for Beat by way of Buñuel; heard outside the screening: "Was that a comedy?" Short answer: yes. ***1/2 (out of four)