Saw is ready and rarin' to be analyzed, opening as it does with the scholar-baiting tableau of a man (Leigh Whannell, also the film's screenwriter) awaking in a bathtub, baptized or reborn. (It just so happens that his name is Adam.) And I swear to God that the bad guy lives on "Stygian Street." Everything about Saw points to Whannell putting the cart before the horse: symbolism before context; set-pieces before bridges; revelations before mysteries... The movie's logic is at once unassailable and curiously inorganic--twice characters choose not to shoot a gun at an opportune moment in order to facilitate a final turn of the screw, but since that's all they're doing, Whannell should never have handed them firearms in the first place. This and the fact that the villain's motive is rendered arbitrary by us learning things at the pace of the heroes--Adam and Lawrence (Cary Elwes), a shutterbug and a doctor, respectively, who've been locked together in a fluorescent-lit dungeon with a dead body between them--is the sort of thing we'd not even stop to consider during a Dario Argento giallo, which finally places more blame on the fittingly-named James Wan's direction than on Whannell's script. Though the film does work marginally well as a satire of modern serial killer thrillers and their increasingly Byzantine games of cat-and-mouse (not to mention the same in reality-TV), I have a hunch that's the zeitgeist's doing. Programme: Midnight Madness. Running Time: 100 minutes. Screens: Saturday, September 18, 11:59 PM @ RYERSON.

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Preceded by the snarkiest, if funniest, on-screen dedication since The War Zone's "For my father" ("In loving memory of Dawn Wiener"--Dawn being the pre-teen heroine of Todd Solondz's breakthrough feature Welcome to the Dollhouse), Solondz's fifth film Palindromes is a virtual sprinkler head oscillating back and forth to spritz everything in the director's purview with venom. (It's his idea of moral ambivalence.) A "palindrome" is something that reads the same forwards and backwards, and by casting several different actresses to consecutively appear as his palindromic lead character, 12-year-old suburbanite--and victim of a botched abortion--Aviva, Solondz highlights the immutability of her hopeless mission to get pregnant. It's a canny gesture, to be sure, but it's also worth noting that the various Avivas seem to have been plugged into the film's timeline in such a way as to maximize each performer's discomfort, with a heavy-set black woman (Sharon Wilkins) materializing in the role just when it calls for a teenybopper dance number and adolescent girls (as opposed to, say, Jennifer Jason Leigh, the one celeb playing Aviva) used for the less-than-gentle sex scenes. The movie plunges irrevocably into a misanthropic abyss once Aviva takes up residence at Bible-thumping Mama Sunshine's, a halfway house for crippled children who've written their doctor his own theme song, which they perform whenever he pays a housecall. Owing a transparent debt to Tod Browning's vastly more well-intentioned Freaks (familiar campers and clotheslines surround the Sunshine home), it's the passage that goes for the biggest laughs, almost all of them aimed squarely at the disabled--this is the first time in Solondz's career that his signature political incorrectness feels like compassion envy. Solondz is apparently playing a game of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" with the critics now that Storytelling, his riposte to the accusation that he condescends to his subjects, failed to dramatically impact the conversation, and for all its temerity, Palindromes fatally lets Solondz's reputation precede it. Programme: Special Presentations. Running Time: 100 minutes. Screens: Monday, September 13, 6:30 PM @ VARSITY 8; Wednesday, September 15, 12:00 PM @ PARAMOUNT 2.

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It may seem as though Lodge Kerrigan is spinning his wheels by revisiting the territory of his directorial debut two pictures later, but this actually provides a means by which to judge Kerrigan's maturation into an auteur. Only slightly more prolific than Terrence Malick, Kerrigan quietly penetrated the indie scene with 1994's Clean, Shaven, which cast Peter Greene--in a role that brilliantly exploited the actor's own mercurial nature--as Peter Winter, a paranoid schizophrenic scoping out his only child and her new parents; the film furnishes us with a view of Peter's mental landscape through a crafty, Alan Splet-esque sound design but ultimately reverts to conventional cat-and-mouse tropes. Kerrigan's wondrous Keane is about a man, William Keane (a simply profound Damian Lewis), whose little girl was stolen out from under his nose at a train station the year before; Keane is recapitulating the events of that fateful day as the movie opens, wielding a newspaper clipping on the kidnapping as if it's a doctor's note rationalizing his manic behaviour. Like Clean, Shaven, Keane mines considerable suspense from the protagonist's fluctuating sanity, but John Foster's camera never leaves Lewis' side--most of the time, it's not more than ten inches from his face: where Clean, Shaven introduced a cop to bias us against the main character (leading to a memorably guilty reversal of expectations), the sheer intimacy of Keane denies the viewer a scapegoat for any of our feelings towards the unstable but manifestly human Keane when he befriends a part-time waitress (Amy Ryan) and her holy grail of a young daughter (Abigail Breslin, holding her own). For some, Kerrigan's cinema of unclosed grief is an endurance test because watching a movie without an emotional superintendent is too great a responsibility. (Keane doesn't even have underscore.) What matters is empathy, though, and that's something Kerrigan obviously has for Keane in spades, or else he wouldn't be so patient with him. Programme: Special Presentations. Running Time: 90 minutes. Screens: Wednesday, September 15, 7:30 PM @ ISABEL BADER THEATRE; Friday, September 17, 9:45 AM @ PARAMOUNT 4.

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Curious that Dylan Kidd, the mind behind the revelatory Roger Dodger, felt compelled to include a "director's statement" in the pressbook for his sophomore feature, p.s., but it's nonetheless an essential read in that it gives the lie to artist intentionality. "From Aristotle to Joseph Campbell to Robert McKee," Kidd writes, "everyone's in agreement: you can't have drama without obstacles...The idea behind p.s. was to tell a story where nothing stands between the heroine and her love object. Even more: in this story, the universe works with the heroine, dumping the love object on her doorstep time after time! Is it possible that the only obstacle this heroine needs to overcome is herself?" It's Murphy's Law, perhaps, that p.s. not only doesn't reinvent the wheel, but also orchestrates a veritable gauntlet for the heroine in question to run through. Louise Harrington (Laura Linney, appropriately described in the film as blindingly beautiful) is an admissions officer with the graduate fine arts program at Columbia University who one day happens upon an unprocessed application from someone with the same name--Scott Feinstadt--as her late high school sweetheart. When Scott (Topher Grace, he of the Swiss watch comic timing), actually "F. Scott," shows up for his interview, he's so much the reincarnation of her dead lover that she takes him back to her place for the most cathartic screw of her life. ("That was fucking awesome!" Scott exclaims--and indeed it is.) But although their attraction is mutual and enduring, Louise is a couple of decades Scott's senior. She's behaving unprofessionally; he shouldn't be doing anything to jeopardize his chances of getting into Columbia. She's got a horny friend (Marcia Gay Harden) coveting F. Scott because she, too, dated the prototype; he's a young man sowing his wild oats. And so on and so forth. The romantic conflicts are, in other words, unfailingly extrinsic, as well as insidiously prosaic--they'd foil better filmmakers than Kidd. I wish there were more scenes like the one in which F. Scott tells Louise that she needs to move on from teen angst and she asks him if he "moves on" when he's stuck on a piece, because Kidd excels at (or maybe, just maybe, he burns himself out on) these Nabokovian heart-to-hearts between a master and pupil of the same emotional age--whenever Linney and Grace are apart, the movie is like a detuned radio. (Additional points shaved off for casting the stars of Miller's Crossing (Harden and Gabriel Byrne) and not reuniting them on-screen.) Unless I'm mistaken, that's Kidd posing for a couple of the paintings in F. Scott's portfolio--which for once are as good as the characters pretend. Programme: Special Presentations. Running Time: 105 minutes. Screens: Monday, September 13, 9:30 PM @ VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Wednesday, September 15, 3:00 PM @ PARAMOUNT 2.

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Alexander Payne has a gift for wry humour, of course, and in Sideways, there's a nice, sardonic hold on a bathroom door's sign--"MEN"--after Jack (Thomas Haden Church), having learned nothing from a sour indiscretion that netted him a broken nose, starts hitting on a waitress. By the same token, the curlicue noted above is typical of the level of organization, for lack of a better word, in Payne's work, which always seems a tad elementary in retrospect. Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and now Sideways are each so auto-critical that they leave next to no room for either interpretation or improvement and leave almost nothing like a lasting impression. Still, they sure are firecrackers in the moment, with Sideways, Payne's most emotionally intelligent film to date, being no exception. Lamenting a generation of overgrown children, this companion piece of sorts to the identically-structured About Schmidt follows depressed wine connoisseur Miles (Paul Giamatti) as he takes impulsive Jack on a tour of California's vineyards just before Jack is due to be married. Giamatti, though typecast as a self-loathing bachelor who's reached a career impasse (see: Storytelling and American Splendor), at last has a role that doesn't hermetically seal him off from his co-stars, but it's Church and especially Virginia Madsen, playing a waitress finally ready to embrace adulthood, who are the true discoveries of the piece--as well as pretty much all that you see in the rear-view when giving Sideways a backward glance. Programme: Special Presentations. Running Time: 123 minutes. Screens: Monday, September 13, 6:30 PM @ VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Wednesday, September 15, 3:00 PM @ RYERSON.

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David O. Russell's debut feature Spanking the Monkey now bears the mark of Kane. (Citizen, that is.) A funny, caustic mood-piece that heralded the Second Coming of Hal Ashby, it was also an impossible thing to live up to--or down, for that matter, Spanking the Monkey's mother-son incest plot in some ways a modern correlative to Citizen Kane's taboo-shattering demystification of William Randolph Hearst. Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has been off-beat but circumspect, and at first, I ♥ Huckabees seems like a return to rebellious form, what with its wilfully uncommercial throughline: to find out why he's crossed paths with the same African stranger on three separate occasions, environmental activist Albert (Jason Schwartzman) hires a pair of "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) who in turn encumber his mission to stop corporate foe Brad (Jude Law, essentially resurrecting Dickie Greenleaf) from building a Huckabees department store on a sacred patch of marshland. But it's smug anachronisms that make the film as alienating as it sounds: the dialogue has a Hawksian tempo hardly honoured by the sitcom-level punchlines, while the retro iconography for huckabees is, however evocative (prepare to be floored by Naomi Watts' banal poses as the spokesmodel for the chain (I ♥ Naomi Watts)), ultimately unmoored--you never get to see inside a Huckabees outlet, which places the brunt of satiric emphasis on the marshland rather than on the ersatz Wal-Mart. (With suburban sprawl all but ignored, huckabees needn't ever have its business characterized.) Clever in fits and starts (film buffs should get a charge out of Isabelle Huppert's comic take on her sick character from The Piano Teacher), I ♥ Huckabees only really catches fire during a schizophrenic Dinner From Hell presided over by Richard Jenkins--not surprisingly, a saving grace of the similarly overarch Flirting with Disaster--and Jean Smart, two of the best-kept secrets in Hollywood. Programme: Viacom Galas. Running Time: 106 minutes. Screens: Friday, September 10, 6:30 PM @ ROY THOMSON HALL; Saturday, September 11, 9:30 AM @ RYERSON.

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I had a pretty good idea of where White Skin (La Peau blanche) was headed, and although I was more tickled that it had the French-word-for-chutzpah to go to those ludicrous extremes than disappointed that the outcome was vaguely predictable (if movies never failed to surprise me, it would only mean that I watch as many as I do in vain (besides which, no film uses a clip from Rabid indiscriminately)), there's something annoyingly retrograde about the whole megillah. The melancholic film starts off promisingly with a conversation between two men on the streets of Montreal: white Thierry (flavourless Marc Paquet), an aspiring author and undergrad, laments his incapacity for being exploited by the suddenly multiculti publishing world to Haitian roomie Henri (Frédéric Pierre, who should be the star); later, Henri plays the race card after getting stabbed in the neck by a (Caucasian) hooker, telling family and friends that a gang of skinheads did it. This sets the stage for a provocative Boy Who Cried Wolf satire that never materializes; instead, Thierry becomes infatuated with a redheaded busker (Karyn Dwyer doppelgänger Marianne Farley), his attraction inexplicable (because he can't stand redheads--it's their translucent skin, you see) but insatiable. She, alas, has cancer, so there will be sacrifices on both their parts (to say the least), and aye, there's the rub: she has "cancer"--embellishment has by such time taken the place of articulateness, effectively putting a stop to the picture's ethnological undercurrents. (A rather unfortunate juxtaposition of speeches about how blacks are more human than human and about how human beings are worthless suggests an editorial blind spot above all else.) Once again, Quebec demonstrates more aptitude for commercial filmmaking than the rest of Canada (even if the trashy, likeminded Decoys ultimately feels less indie), but I still say the national cinema could use a reboot. Programme: Canada First. Running Time: 89 minutes. Screens: Friday, September 17, 9:30 PM @ CUMBERLAND 2; Saturday, September 18, 9:30 AM @ CUMBERLAND 2.

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Stylistically falling somewhere between avant-garde and dog's-breakfast, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation invents an ethos to go along with the name of the editing software, "iMovie," used to assemble it, giving us what feels like the world's first "I" movie. The film doesn't so much defy description as resist it (Frank Zappa's "dancing about architecture" maxim applies here), but clearly a summary shouldn't be discouraged, as the more subjective the work, the greater the chance it stands of becoming the salvation of some disenfranchised individual. (Caouette himself says he was relieved to find an empathetic view of queer street life in Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.) Though it begins with an obviously staged scene of Caouette learning of his mother's lithium overdose followed by a credits sequence that bills its documentary subjects as actors (these formal concessions likely helping Caouette to keep a modicum of intellectual distance), Tarnation, perhaps the next logical step in the evolution of the personal memoir (which has hit something of a cul-de-sac in literary circles), is a video collage of home movies and found footage that linearly but tangentially retraces Caouette's tormented family history. Worldly where someone like Harmony Korine is paternalistic, Caouette effortlessly conveys the self-fulfilling lucklessness of the underprivileged, and thanks to incredible industropop soundtrack cues, with Tarnation he turns his life into the rock opera he always wanted it to be. (Hedwig himself, John Cameron Mitchell, came on board as a co-producer, as did Van Sant.) But the Job-like Caouette's deck is so politically stacked--he's a gay, experimental filmmaker who's secured distribution for a $219 production--that I do wonder if it's possible to review Tarnation without fearing that you're complimenting the emperor on his new wardrobe. Programme: Visions. Running Time: 88 minutes. Screens: Friday, September 10, 10:00 PM @ PARAMOUNT 4; Sunday, September 12, 4:15 PM @ CUMBERLAND 2.

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Just the other day I watched Dial M for Murder, a single-set movie faithfully adapted from a stage play that never becomes theatre-on-film because, let's face it, we're talking about Alfred Hitchcock here. Jerry Ciccoritti is no Alfred Hitchcock--not that Ciccoritti's Blood wants or tries to be Dial M for Murder, but its Mike Figgis, let's-see-what-this-button-does aesthetic so reeks of overcompensation as to end up not only preserving the material's stage roots in amber, but also boring us into a stupor. No doubt there's some method to Ciccoritti's onaninistic use of his editing console, an endeavouring to mirror, echo, or otherwise amplify his characters' addled state of mind, but Blood's subject matter is alien enough that a more straightforward shooting style might have proved less disengaging. Credit where credit is due that Ciccoritti--a pillar, as the co-founder of the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Company, of Toronto's queer and goth communities--is not an apprehensive or antiseptic director like most of his Canuck brethren (the eight-time Gemini Award winner surely benefited from working at the pace of television in that regard), but Blood, a stream-of-consciousness chamber piece about a part-time hooker (Neve Campbell-ish Emily Hampshire) deciding whether or not to make her own brother (filmmaker Jacob Tierney) the third party in an impending ménage à trois when he shows up at her door after a years-long absence, is nothing if not uniquely Canadian in its use of sex as a threat rather than as a promise. Programme: Visions. Running Time: 90 minutes. Screens: Friday, September 10, 9:30 PM @ CUMBERLAND 3; Sunday, September 12, 9:30 AM @ CUMBERLAND 3.

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Racking up an unorthodox number of short films before tackling his first feature, 1998's lead balloon Sitcom, the prolific François Ozon returns to his roots in a way with 5x2 - Five Times Two (5x2 - Cinq fois deux), a portmanteau in five parts that charts an ill-fated marriage--backwards. As the picture opens, Marion (archetypal Ozon blonde Valérie Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) are being read the terms of their divorce agreement; as the picture closes, the two are prospective lovers sizing each other up on an empty but sun-kissed beach, she portentously warning he of the choppy waters in which they're about to go swimming--a moment I preferred to think of as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ozon's Under the Sand, so starved is 5x2 for levity. Irréversible Lite, the film is less emotionally draining than stultifying, in part because the anthology format does all the heavy-lifting, skipping anything interstitial that might let us form an impression of these characters organically or, moreover, fluidly: sympathies sway back-and-forth between the wife and the husband (though not to the extent that we ever forgive Gilles for raping Marion in the first segment), but never within the same episode, making Ozon just another god from the machine. Bruni-Tadeschi and Freiss, both of whom are in fine form, do seem to miraculously de-age throughout, however, lending the picture some credibility and surface interest. Programme: Special Presentations. Running Time: 87 minutes. Screens: Wednesday, September 15, 6:30 PM @ VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN); Friday, September 17, 4:00 PM @ RYERSON.

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