TIFF ’13 Wrap-Up

September 22, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

Moebius

by Bill Chambers The cause célèbre at this year’s TIFF was critic Alex Billington’s 9-1-1 call. For those living under a rock, what happened was that Billington entreated Festival volunteers to do…something…about the guy using his light-emitting cell phone at a P&I (press and industry) screening of Ti West’s The Sacrament. When they declined, Billington dialled emergency services, live-tweeting the whole sorry affair as a gift to the gods of schadenfreude. This is indeed absolutely childish and cowardly behaviour, yet a similarly insufferable sanctimony deluged the incident in think pieces and @ replies, some of them from yours truly. Yes, crying wolf to 9-1-1 is irresponsible, though I imagine Billington’s wasn’t the first or even second false alarm Toronto EMS received that morning. Yes, P&I screenings are free, throwing Billington’s sense of entitlement into relief, although they do come with the Faustian obligation to write about them at some point. (Something that isn’t made easier by a viewing filled with peripheral distractions.) And, sure, industry folk need to be able to conduct business in a darkened theatre if it comes to that, because TIFF is a buyer’s market ultimately supported by the wheeling-and-dealing that happens over a ten-day period.

TIFF ’13: Almost Human

September 19, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, TIFF, ZERO STARS

Almosthuman

ZERO STARS/****
written and directed by Joe Begos

by Bill Chambers The picture's opening titles are in John Carpenter's familiar white-on-black Albertus font, and intercut with fragments of exposition like the intro to Prince of Darkness while some neo-Alan Howarth works the minor keys on a synthesizer. But as the makers of Almost Human have already given the game away in an endless, stilted prologue, what may sound like loving homage feels in context like a desperate play for credibility, a dog whistle meant to reassure the horror geeks they're in good hands. They're not. Set in the late-'80s, because nothing good's happened since then, the film is about an archetypal fat-guy/hot-girl couple (Josh Ethier and Vanessa Leigh) and third wheel Seth (Graham Skipper) getting torn asunder when the husband, Mark, is rudely abducted by aliens. Two years later, Seth remains shattered but Jen has settled down again with the poster boy for modern douchiness, one of those guys who shaves his beard into a thin strip along the jawline. So much for period detail; so much for Jen's taste in men improving. Anyway, Mark is returned to Earth, but not in the same placid condition–maybe the aliens broke him and this is nothing more than their version of tossing a toy out the window on a highway. As Mark begins a psychotic rampage that inches him ever closer to Jen, Seth's spidey sense starts tingling and he goes to warn her in one of many scenes that peg this for next-gen Ed Wood, because writer-director Joe Begos couldn't conceive of a more efficient, less torturous way to put Jen and Seth in a room together than to have him show up at her diner, politely ask the lady at the counter to retrieve her, then twiddle his thumbs (and ours) waiting for her to materialize. Some decent splatter–Mark uses a greatest-hits of horror implements against his victims–makes up the shortfall before going a bridge too far into tentacle rape and a recreation of the Irreversible head-bash but with a woman. I don't think the filmmakers are world-class misogynists or anything, I just think they're kind of stupid. Be sure to stay through the closing credits for a tag–not that it's worth it, but I was the only one at my screening who did, and misery loves company.

TIFF ’13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

September 18, 2013Posted in2013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF

Whydontyouplayinhell_03

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things, elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge double-bill of Bastards and Prisoners, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line, commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards Alex Ross Perry’s self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono’s by turns delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming for one of the mobster’s jailed wives.

TIFF ’13: Mission Congo

September 17, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

Missioncongo
**½/****
directed by Lara Zizic and David Turner

by Bill Chambers Too satisfied with being–and too short to be anything but–a hatchet job, Mission Congo is nevertheless a worthwhile reminder that televangelists are crooks, something that's all too easy to forget in this age of video-on-demand. (Out of sight, out of mind.) The film is a documentary account of the opportunism that sprang up around the Rwandan genocide, specifically "The 700 Club" host Pat Robertson's "Operation Blessing," which was ostensibly established to fly medical supplies, water, and, of course, missionaries to a bordertown refugee camp in crisis from a cholera outbreak. Initially, it seems like Robertson has merely sent people to proselytize, with no tangible aid forthcoming (except tons of discount Tylenol nobody needs), but an even more sinister truth emerges: Robertson has used Operation Blessing to gain entrance into Africa so he can start mining diamonds–which he's subsidizing with the viewer contributions flowing into "The 700 Club" in support of Operation Blessing. Worse still, Robertson's allies are the very architects of the genocide, with whom he hobnobs–either cluelessly or hubristically–in vainglorious footage taped for his program. The bug up the ass of co-directors Lara Zizic and David Turner, who freely admit to getting sidetracked from a larger portrait of disaster relief, is not just that Robertson got away with it, thanks to his considerable political clout as the leader of the religious right, but also that he erected another façade in the form of a little community for which the Operation Blessing website continues to request donations. Its residents never see a dime, and have lived in abject poverty ever since Robertson unceremoniously abandoned them. Though Mission Congo solidly demonstrates the Kuleshov effect in a droll cut from Robertson soliciting money for a good cause to a gaggle of diamonds, it's less a movie than a public service announcement. The most memorable segments feature grizzled fraud investigator Ole Anthony, who admits to a dwindling sense of schadenfreude towards people taken in by faith healers; more of this shading, please.

TIFF ’13: Enemy

September 16, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

Enemy_01

***/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Javier Gullón, based on the novel The Double by José Saramago
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda If the interviews floating around online in the wake of his appearance at TIFF are any indication, Denis Villeneuve spent much of his time with press managing expectations about Enemy. Though it's technically his English-language debut, as well as the first of two collaborations with Jake Gyllenhaal in a year's time, Enemy isn't slated to come out until sometime next spring, long after its bigger-budgeted, higher-pedigreed younger sibling, Prisoners. Judging from its deferred release and Villeneuve's own comments that the film is an experimental project, a one-off to help him transition from the high-toned tragedy of Incendies to more classical Hollywood filmmaking, you'd think it was a dog, but in truth it's probably the best thing he's ever made–a modest little psycho-thriller based on José Saramago's novel The Double, set in a jaundiced Toronto no one would want to hold a festival in.

TIFF ’13: Bad Words

September 16, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF
½*/****directed by Jason Bateman by Bill Chambers While the concept of an "open source" film franchise, one to which any Joe Schmo can contribute, is not a new one, it's more common in Europe and Asia, where intellectual property laws are considerably more relaxed. The homegrown "bad" series--much to Harvey Weinstein's chagrin, no doubt--has somehow transcended that, spinning off from Bad Santa's core desire to milk the shock value of giving an absolute cretin some measure of responsibility for the welfare of a beatific child. A mild disappointment at the time, Bad Santa looks more sophisticated through the prism of…

Swamp Thing (1982) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

September 15, 2013Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory, Superhero, Wes Craven

Swampthing2

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise, Dick Durock
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Bryant Frazer Do you find monster movies that revolve around damsels, décolletage, and men in phony rubber suits pathetic or endearing? If the latter, you may well find room in your heart for Swamp Thing, an old-fashioned creature feature that already seemed anachronous when it hoisted itself up out of the mud of early-1980s genre cinema. As movies like Alien, Altered States, and Scanners put a grim, often grotesque spin on ideas about biological transformation, Wes Craven–surely one of the grimmest of horror directors in the 1970s–embarked on a PG-rated fairytale about a gentle scientist whose own experimental chemicals turn him into a super-powered hulk made entirely of plant matter. As Craven’s contemporaries busied themselves with tales of human bodies rent asunder by sex, drugs, and the military-industrial complex, the director of Last House on the Left was making a story of tender love in the wilds of South Carolina, where a wound to the breast can be healed by a clump of swamp moss and a beast’s severed limb can regenerate through the judicious application of sunlight.

TIFF ’13: The Strange Little Cat

September 14, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Esoterica, Family, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

The_Strange_Little_Cat_Das_merkwrdige_Ktzchen

Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
****/****
directed by Ramon Zürcher

by Angelo Muredda In his essay on the origins of the uncanny, Freud looks into German etymology to find that heimlich is one of those words that means a given thing as well as its opposite–that which is, on the one hand, familiar, and also that which is kept out of sight. The unheimlich, or uncanny, is by that token always latent within the ordinary–it’s the thing that should have stayed hidden away but has instead come to light. People in Ramon Zürcher’s marvellous debut are always calling the familiar things around them uncanny, and no wonder, given the alien eye with which Zürcher observes them. Set in a bustling Berlin apartment that houses a reserved matriarch, her visiting twentysomething children, her adolescent daughter, her ailing mother, and a pair of pets (including the ever-roving orange tabby that supplies the title), The Strange Little Cat has the ingredients of a multi-generational melodrama about a family coming together and splitting apart in an uneasily-shared space–an August: Osage County for the arthouse set. But Zürcher happily forgoes such narrative dead ends in pursuit of something more playful and unsettled, working with the weird formal properties of the objects that fill this domestic space, from a child’s misspelled grocery list to a glass bottle that spins around a bowl in the sink as if propelled by its own volition.

TIFF ’13: August: Osage County

September 14, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Augustosagecounty

*/****
directed by John Wells

by Bill Chambers "Don't go all Carson McCullers on me!" a character admonishes in August: Osage County, John Wells's film version of Tracy Letts's Pulitzer-winning play. I think the line is meant to be ironic, because Letts, author of demented southern gothics like Bug and Killer Joe, is an obvious heir apparent to McCullers. In the context of this timid adaptation, however, it sounds like a studio note. August recently made headlines because the ending may change from what audiences saw at TIFF, and that would be for the better–I somehow doubt that reassuring viewers of Julia Roberts's indomitable spirit ever crossed Letts's mind as one of his goals for the piece–but it wouldn't be enough to take the Garry Marshall tang out of the film. Chewing scenery with her mouth open, Meryl Streep is Violet, the gargoyle matriarch of an Oklahoma dynasty, hooked on pills because of mouth cancer and, let's face it, in obeisance to a certain theatrical tradition. Violet's sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and daughters Barbara (Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), and Karen (Juliette Lewis) have gathered together along with their own families to mourn the passing of Violet's husband and confront some awful truths laid bare by Violet's condition and drug-fuelled compulsion to spill secrets and push buttons. Casting like a kid in a candy store (what in God's name is Benedict Cumberbatch doing here–as the holy fool, no less) and shooting in a functional non-style that 'opens up' the play by going in for the kinds of close-ups you couldn't get without opera glasses, Wells is a producer-turned-director through and through. About his ability to marshal big egos there can be little doubt, but his camera bobs all over the axis of action like a first-year film student, and he shows almost no command of tone, reducing the material's vaguely satirical detours into perversion (incest! statutory rape!) to schematic twists both eye-rolling and curiously palatable. But it's finally the casting of 500-pound gorilla Roberts that kills this thing, throwing its centre of gravity so off-balance that August: Osage County feels not much different from a tailor-made ego trip like Something to Talk About, even before that contentious epilogue.

Telluride ’13: FFC Interviews “Under the Skin” Director Jonathan Glazer

September 13, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Jglazertitle

On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride’s free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola’s gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that–she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I’d last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can’t imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.

Telluride ’13: “On Death Row” – Conversation with James Barnes + Portrait of Robert Fratta

September 12, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Television, Telluride, Telluride 2013
"On Death Row" Conversation with James Barnes ***/**** directed by Werner Herzog "On Death Row" Portrait of Robert Fratta **/**** directed by Werner Herzog by Walter Chaw Two shot-for-television documentaries, running about 50 minutes apiece, serve as Werner Herzog's epilogue to 2011's Into the Abyss, each profiling a single inmate in the inimitable Herzog style that has evolved over the years into something that doesn't punish its subjects (as it once did) so much as it punishes the audience. Looking back to the way he shot coroner Franc G. Fallico in Grizzly Man, allowing him to twist a few beats…

TIFF ’13: The Sacrament

September 11, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, TIFF
*/**** written and directed by Ti West by Bill Chambers Surrendering once again to V/H/S found-footage mode, writer-director Ti West brazenly co-opts the particulars of the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, abandoning only the names and most expensive details (two planes become one helicopter, for instance, while the late-'70s become the present). The result is a counterfeit film without the element of surprise that also denies the viewer the lurid satisfaction of a true-crime thriller. AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, and Kentucker Audley--Austin's answer to the Brat Pack (or the Three Stooges)--play VICE journalists doing a story on Eden Parrish, a…

Telluride ’13: The Invisible Woman

September 10, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013, UK
***/**** directed by Ralph Fiennes by Walter Chaw It opens with an almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity…

TIFF ’13: Prisoners

September 9, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

Prisoners_011

**½/****
starring starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda Denis Villeneuve comes to America with Prisoners, an alternately strange and gripping but finally self-immolating crime picture that earns the right to its austere silver Warner Bros. logo before it devolves into a Scooby-Doo mystery for sadists. Last seen beckoned to the heavens by a pre-Oscar-anointed Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman plunges right back into the shit here as Keller Dover, a suburban dad and mild-mannered carpenter who goes berserk when his daughter and her friend (the child of perennially underused Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) vanish after Thanksgiving dinner. The first suspect is Alex (Paul Dano), a creepy, developmentally delayed young man who roams through the neighbourhood in his RV. Though he’s arrested by crack detective Loki (nicely played by Jake Gyllenhaal, despite his character’s name and distressingly shoddy police work) and released when the investigators find nothing to pin him on, Alex is promptly recaptured by a raging Dover, who turns out to have his own torture venue for this very occasion, complete with room enough for a black box whose construction will put Dover’s woodworking skills to good use.

TIFF ’13: When Jews Were Funny

September 8, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF
**½/**** directed by Alan Zweig by Bill Chambers Canadian documentarian Alan Zweig's best movies begin with a specific question--why do people collect records? Why are there good people who can't find love?--he needs to answer for the sake of his personal development, like a player desperate to advance to the next level in a videogame. Zweig's latest, a kind of companion piece/spiritual sequel to his 2004 I, Curmudgeon, finds the filmmaker struggling to articulate a thesis statement, so much so that a number of his interview subjects call him out on it. Consequently, it lacks urgency, though truth be told…

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 3

September 8, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

Candy **/****
9 mins., d. Cassandra Cronenberg
Der Untermensch **/****
9 mins., d. Kays Mejri
In Guns We Trust **½/****
12 mins., d. Nicolas Lévesque
Jimbo **½/****
23 mins., d. Ryan Flowers
Method ***/****
8 mins., d. Gregory Smith
Portrait as a Random Act of Violence ***/****
4 mins., d. Randall Lloyd Okita
We Wanted More ***½/****
16 mins., d. Stephen Dunn

Wewantedmore

by Bill Chambers Unfortunately for Candy, a non-judgmental, veritable time-lapse look at one night in the life of a prostitute that occasionally branches out to linger with her spent, oddball clientele, "Breaking Bad" got there first with an indelible montage set to The Association's "Windy" that opened season three's "Half Measures." Kudos to director Cassandra Cronenberg, however, for not making a straight-up horror and risking the same comparisons to her father that plagued brother Brandon's Antiviral.

Telluride ’13: Under the Skin

September 7, 2013Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Undertheskin

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

TIFF ’13: All Cheerleaders Die

September 7, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF
*½/**** written and directed by Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson by Bill Chambers I suppose they've both been campy at times, but I think Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson might be too grim for something like All Cheerleaders Die (or as the closing title card ominously puts it, "All Cheerleaders Die, Part One")--a title that at the least augurs fun schlock tinged with the alarmism of '50s hygiene cinema. After capturing the dubious--but funny--death of the head cheerleader on tape, standoffish Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) remodels herself as a Heather and earns a spot on the squad, much to the dismay…

Telluride ’13: Nebraska

September 6, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Road Movie, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Nebraska

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It’s easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.