Film Festivals Archives - Page 3 of 46

TIFF ’23: I Don’t Know Who You Are

September 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Mark Clennon, Anthony Diaz, Nat Manuel, Michael Hogan
written and directed by M.H. Murray

by Bill Chambers Toronto scenester Benjamin (Mark Clennon) is a young, Black artist and musician getting his groove back after breaking up with his boyfriend and performing partner, Oscar (Kevin A. Courtney). He’s a sweetheart, the sort of guy who sends what little spending money he has back home to his mother and makes ends meet giving music lessons to kids and empty-nesters around the neighbourhood. He’s also a bit of a raw nerve: When his friend Ariel (Nat Manuel) teases him for not having slept with current beau Malcolm (Anthony Diaz) yet, she unwittingly sets off his insecurities about Malcolm’s desire to take things slow. So begins a Friday night of heavy drinking that finds Benjamin running into Oscar, who’s settled into a new relationship with ease. At first, then, it’s a cheap boost to Benjamin’s ego when a stranger (Michael Hogan) starts hitting on him on the way home, but soon the stranger’s predatory intentions come into stark relief and Benjamin, too rubbery from wine to fight him off, is raped. The next day, instead of calling the police, going to the ER, or confiding in friends, Benjamin does something that feels psychologically acute in its irrationality and starts cleaning the fridge. I Don’t Know Who You Are is at its best in these moments that defy exposition, and in fact there’s an entire other movie happening, unspoken, about what, exactly, Benjamin’s race means within his obviously inclusive but conspicuously white inner circle. One friend describes him as “our jukebox,” which maybe isn’t the compliment they think it is. (Benjamin points out that, unlike him, jukeboxes get paid.) His rapist is white, too, incidentally–and billed as “The Man.”

Telluride ’23: The Zone of Interest

September 11, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Poland, Telluride, UK, War

****/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, Ralph Herforth
screenplay by Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw A real sense of evil permeates every nook and cranny of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which is an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel in the same way Glazer’s Under the Skin is an adaptation of Michel Farber’s novel. That is to say, one of tone and mood that discards all but the broadest strokes of the original premise. If Glazer applied the same process to this film as his previous one, he let the mysterious currents of his intuition guide his hand across the text. He is the philosopher as artist, an anthropologist locating himself in a human blind and documenting the mysterious movement of the dark as it oozes from one crooked and low place to another. I don’t know how he finds the threads he pulls, but his fingers must be more sensitive than mine. I also don’t entirely understand how he sneaks toxins past my defenses, desensitization, and tolerances: the draft you can never locate after the first freeze of a long winter locks you in place. Glazer isn’t interested in moralizing, in trying to understand, even contextualize, how an ordinary, upper-middle-class military family in The Zone of Interest can owe their existence to mechanized genocide and feel no call to conscience. He doesn’t see his characters as so complex they defy binary judgment; he sees them as so mechanical and simple they defy binary judgment. The universe tends to comfort. It’s a fool’s mission to impose systems of understanding on the ant Isserly beholds at the beginning of Under the Skin. Trying to do so could drive one to madness. Trying to do so says more about you than it does the ant.

TIFF ’23: Anatomy of a Fall

September 10, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller, TIFF

Anatomie d'une chute
***/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Samuel Theis, Swann Arlaud, Milo Machado Graner
written by Justine Triet & Arthur Harari
directed by Justine Triet

by Angelo Muredda The list of thematic provocations is long in Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet's twisty Palme d'Or winner–the kind of winding, enigmatic character study that people who miss reading literary fiction wistfully describe as "novelistic." Even before the credits sequence, a montage of old family photos and videos taken in better times, we've been introduced to any number of hooks that one could build a hot-button arthouse legal thriller around. From the dead husband found at the bottom of a chalet by, of course, his blind son and support dog–below the window from which he either fell or was pushed–to the mysterious upstairs presence of his aloof, probably bisexual wife, a foreigner who isn't fluent in the language of the court she's about to be tried in, Anatomy of a Fall plants itself in the land of ambiguity and intrigue. That's to say nothing of the icy, wordless air we feel pass between the strained partners in the opening moments, where the now deceased man was blasting a steel-drum cover of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." on repeat during his author wife's flirtatious interview with a female student, still more circumstantial evidence for us to file away for later. From the start, then, Triet commits to a tricky balancing act, pitching her work somewhere between a formalist drama concerned with observation and perspective, attuned to what we can or can't know of a person or a marriage from the outside, and a more prurient genre exercise about killer wives, cuckolded husbands, and unseeing witnesses.

TIFF ’23: The Teachers’ Lounge

September 9, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

Das Lehrerzimmer
***/****
starring Leonie Benesch, Leonard Stettnisch, Eva Löbau, Michael Klammer
screenplay by Ilker Çatak, Johannes Duncker
directed by Ilker Çatak

by Bill Chambers At first, I thought the form of The Teachers’ Lounge might be too classically sedate for a quasi-thriller with the dyspeptic energy of an Uncut Gems, but as elementary-school teacher Carla Nowak, a young idealist who’s hyperconscious of power imbalances (a Polish immigrant at a German school, she’s the kind of person who doesn’t like speaking her native tongue with another Polish teacher because it alienates their colleagues), Leonie Benesch is so keyed-up she’s practically an aesthetic unto herself. After a teacher is pickpocketed at school, presumably by a student, Ms. Nowak’s first priority isn’t to the faculty: She doesn’t like that the kids are being encouraged to rat on their own and bristles at the racial profiling of one of her sixth-graders when he’s singled out for having a large sum of money in his wallet. Later, she thinks she’s caught the real thief on camera, long-time receptionist Ms. Kuhn (Eva Löbau), whose son Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch) is in her class. She confronts the woman in private with every intention of letting her off the hook, but she underestimates the gulf between them in terms of age vs. experience, perhaps, or teachers vs. clerical staff, or spinsterhood vs. working single-motherhood, and Ms. Kuhn’s indignant reaction scorches the earth, forcing Ms. Nowak’s hand. When Ms. Kuhn is put on leave, Oskar tries to pay his mother’s tab with his meagre savings, but the debt, of course, has ballooned past any dollar amount. He demands she make some sort of retraction to clear his mother’s name. Again, not that simple, and it probably wouldn’t do any good, though he’s adamant: “You will apologize in public or you’ll suffer the consequences.”

Telluride ’23: Fallen Leaves

September 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Telluride

Kuolleet lehdet
***½/****
starring Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

by Walter Chaw I adore Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan, live-action Bill Plympton of Finland, who tells his small stories, little romances and tiny tragedies, with a style one might call rigid but that for me plays like the legacy of Fassbinder carried through into our dotage. (Mine and his, had he lived.) Kaurismäki’s latest film, Fallen Leaves, reminds me a lot, in fact, of Fassbinder’s winsome Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), about a young Tunisian immigrant who falls for an older cleaning lady in West Germany. Its story of star-crossed lovers, separated by culture and generation, race and creed, is presented with the kind of simplicity that’s all the more emotionally lacerating for its reserve. Fassbinder’s slow, mannered pace allows his actors to find their breath, to expand into the skins of their characters so that we register every minute change in expression, every tightening of the skin by the eye, every roll of the muscle in the jaw when a small slight lands like a blow. Kaurismäki’s pictures engage in the same slowing-down, the same understated dialogue, the same complexity of emotion.

Telluride ’23: The Royal Hotel

September 6, 20232023, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, James Frecheville, Hugo Weaving
written by Kitty Green & Oscar Redding
directed by Kitty Green

by Walter Chaw Aussie hyphenate Kitty Green’s follow-up to her superlative office horror The Assistant is The Royal Hotel, a lighter, distaff version of Wake in Fright in which two college girls looking for a little adventure but out of money find themselves in the Outback tending bar to a bunch of despicable degenerates. Hanna (Julia Garner) is the cautious one and Liv (Jessica Henwick) is the broken one, leading to a few uncomfortable scenes where Liv gets fall-down drunk while surrounded by a bunch of men who would most assuredly like to rape and murder her. Maybe not in the bright light of day, but a few dozen pints later all’s fair in love and the poor decisions most of us somehow survive. For the record, I liked Hanna very much and loathed Liv, which is evidence of not only a profound empathy gap in me that stops me from caring about people who, by their damage, end up damaging those who’ve made themselves responsible for them, but also a script (by Green and Oscar Redding) that leans perhaps too heavily on the horror-movie dichotomy of good girl/party girl. What works so well about Wake in Fright is how its hero is both a respectable doctor and a drunken gambling addict with a sadistic streak. You hate him, but you hate everyone else a tiny bit more. Still, when he puts a gun to his temple, you hope he doesn’t miss. Imagine the film now with a friend for the hero who is fully equipped with a working human warning system that no one will heed. It’s distracting; it becomes a different movie when there’s someone in it making sense.

Telluride ’23: Poor Things

September 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Romance, Sci-Fi, Telluride, UK

****/****
starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
screenplay by Tony McNamara, based upon the novel by Alasdair Gray
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw Ex Machina by way of Anaïs Nin, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a libertine exercise-cum-fable about the hypocrisies of politesse and the occasional eruptions of collective sexual hysteria designed exclusively for shackling women to proverbial bits and millstones. It is the final of three films in 2023 that use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a launchpad for progressive genre explorations, locating in the novel’s stitched-together creature a fulsome metaphor for the indignities afforded the spirit encased in prisons of rotting flesh. Rather than quibble about the merits of one over the other, watch all three (Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth being the other two) in any sequence to witness the unfolding of an extended treatise on gender and racial politics delivered with brio, invention, wicked intelligence, and bracing creative courage. It’s possible to make a movie of a lecture, but it’s more effective to make dangerous, even experimental, art from which all manner of lecture and examination will eventually be constructed. The former is the province of creators limited by their fear and ignorance, the latter of mad scientists inordinately confident in the ability of their cinematic children to find a way through the rubble of a drowned and ruined world. I don’t know that these three films are the best three films of the year, but they’re among them, and certainly, they comprise an uncanny trilogy for a period in which the United States has stripped women of their bodily autonomy at the moment of a suspiciously-timed rise in fascist white nationalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism. They’re doing it in the open: raising a flag of moral panic waved by Evangelical fucknuts pushing hard for an Apocalypse they hope will consign everyone else on this burning Earth to a damnation born of their perverse, onanistic fetishism.

Telluride ’23: Fingernails

September 4, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, Telluride, UK

½*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, Riz Ahmed, Luke Wilson
written by Christos Nikou, Stavros Raptis, Sam Steiner
directed by Christos Nikou

by Walter Chaw If you ever wondered what a tuneless Yorgos Lanthimos rip-off would look like, Christos Nikou’s Fingernails has your answer. It’s lifeless, pointless, idiosyncratic in the basic, formula-bound way non-idiosyncratic people imagine idiosyncrasy to be like, and it staggers around trying to make sense of its internal logic before it’s too late–but it’s too late. There’s no plan here that makes sense, only a high concept that sounded smart one night and a trillion-dollar corporation desperate for something to fill the voracious maw of its content extruder. Fingernails is the stupid-person’s version of Dogtooth, substituting an explicitly violent and sexual fable for the dangers of oppressive belief systems with a conspicuous nothing-burger that, not knowing what it’s about or how to be about it, is predictably a dumpster fire that thinks it’s about the indomitability of love yet in execution is about nothing. The movie has going for it three of the very finest actors working right now in Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White–and it has going against it a script that feels like a first draft, desperate direction, and a technical presentation that, at least in its festival incarnation, was marred with flaws that exacerbated the impression the film’s brand is “undercooked.” Everyone deserved better.

Telluride ’23: Cassandro

September 3, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sports, Telluride

*/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla de la Rosa, Raúl Castillo
written by David Teague & Roger Ross Williams
directed by Roger Ross Williams

by Walter Chaw Playing out as an exhausted vanity piece on the one side and an exhausted sports biopic on the other, Roger Ross Williams’s Cassandro essays the life and early career of flamboyant, El Paso-based luchador Saúl Armendaríz, who, under his nom de guerre “Cassandro,” became the first openly gay exóticos character in Mexican wrestling allowed to actually win matches. Armed with the “Mexico tint” coined by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, a lot of Dutch angles, and an inexplicable 1.44:1 aspect ratio that makes everything seem like it was shot on an iPhone, Williams nudges the film along from one stale trope to the next like an old frog disinterestedly leaping across lilypads. There are flashbacks to Saúl’s childhood in which his “really into Jesus” dad, Eduardo (Robert Salas), feeds him doughnuts, not knowing his son will one day be an emblem of the love that dare not speak its name; interludes with Saúl’s figure-hugging-animal-print-dress-wearing mama Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) that show her son to be a good boy; and then montages where Saúl trains with badass Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) and starts climbing the Lucha Libre ranks. Cassandro, in other words, has nothing to say and doesn’t say it with any particular innovation, either. What a shame.

Telluride ’23: Pyrrhic Victories (An Introduction)

September 2, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

I imagine I can feel entropy sometimes, like the way you can imagine the sensation of being drained while you’re donating blood. I feel myself piecemeal falling away to nothing, just the shape of what I used to be.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Birth/Rebirth

August 15, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

****/****
starring Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland, AJ Lister, Breeda Wool
written by Laura Moss & Brendan O’Brien
directed by Laura Moss

by Walter Chaw In this year of the distaff Frankenstein riff, sandwiched between Bomani Story’s exceptional The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming Poor Things, find Laura Moss’s fucking awesome Birth/Rebirth, which, like Story’s film, manages to smuggle in a sharp, eloquently deployed payload of social and philosophical issues alongside just enough satisfying gore and a gratifying amount of real terror. I wonder if the key to the success of these films, Story’s and Moss’s, has to do with filmmakers who aren’t white men taking their shot at interpreting what is and always has been an essentially, perhaps the essentially, progressive genre text–one authored by a woman, no less, the daughter of one of the most important figures in the early women’s-rights movement, Mary Wollstonecraft (who published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and political philosopher/anarchist William Godwin. First-time readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might be surprised by its political sensitivities–its critique of a carceral state in which there is no forgiveness, only the presumption of guilt based mainly on appearance and social status. By how the Monster’s fate is predetermined as he’s cast off to educate himself with pilfered books and shelter amongst others whom polite society has labelled “misfit” and “outcast.” Frankenstein is a story of class war. Mary and her husband didn’t even eat sugar because of its role in the Caribbean slave trade. The Monster says, “I heard of the division of property of immense wealth and squalid poverty of ranked dissent and noble blood.” He was woke as fuck, and this was 1818.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Pandemonium

August 10, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror

***/****
starring Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide, Ophelia Kolb
written and directed by Quarxx

by Walter Chaw French multidisciplinary artist Quarxx’s sophomore feature Pandemonium is relentless miserablism presented handsomely and with neither of the usual pressure valves of archness or irony. It’s punishing. Although it doesn’t share much in terms of approach or narrative with Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, they have a similarly slick surface, and it did make me feel uncomfortable in the same way. And, ultimately, almost as unhappy. Films like this–such as most of Lars von Trier’s and Michael Haneke’s respective filmographies–are generally provocations without much more on their mind than to upset expectation and a perceived general apathy, but Pandemonium did get me thinking about how I’m raising my kids, so there’s that at least. I wonder if the function of the film-as-endurance-test isn’t ultimately as a lens with which to focus one’s empathy. That is, to say that for as lousy as your life feels at any given moment, it can and almost certainly will get worse. How consistently I enjoy movies that make me feel awful (and now I’m thinking of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, which made me feel bad for months–and topped my best-of list of that year) says something about our desire for confirmation bias, I suppose. I want to be reassured that my Hobbesian outlook is rational. I’m addicted to that reassurance.

Fantasia Festival ’23: New Life

August 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

**½/****
starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George
written and directed by John Rosman

by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman’s New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer’s The Train measures the value of a man’s life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner’s remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they’ve gone to survive. New Life‘s stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller–the “Trolley Problem” where one of the hero’s choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she’s not even doing it for herself.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Sympathy for the Devil

August 1, 20232023, Action, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joel Kinnaman, Kaiwi Lyman
screenplay by Luke Paradise
directed by Yuval Adler

by Walter Chaw A History of Violence for Dummies, Yuval Adler’s slow-moving, never-ending Sympathy for the Devil is a Nicolas Cage vanity project in which America’s slavering hambone tries on some kind of accent, a scarlet dye-job, and a half-assed high-concept that’s familiar to everyone, it appears, except those responsible for carrying it off. Cage is The Passenger, a mysterious lunatic with a gun who carjacks father-to-be The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) in a hospital parking garage and forces him to drive down the Las Vegas strip to a neon-lit Edward Hopper bar where screaming fits can be engaged in for the bemusement of the easily bemused. “There he goes again,” one might say of Cage as he bares his teeth, bangs on the table, flashes his eyes, and raises his voice. Lest one think he’s merely punching the clock here, he’s also listed as one of the producers, so I have to believe that phoning it in, all dials turned to “11,” is the creative choice he’s making at this point in his career. Cage can be an exceptional actor when he wants to be, don’t get me wrong. I just wish he wanted to be more than once every ten years.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Raging Grace

July 29, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Leanne Best, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Hayman
written and directed by Paris Zarcilla

by Walter Chaw What sets something like Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace apart from similar servant/master, immigrant/colonizer stuff like Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo is how it offers glimpses of joy amid the suffering. We see a community at play and worship, united in song, celebrating one another, exultant and safe–at odds with how their oppression is generally centred in otherwise sympathetic texts. Jubilation, it turns out, is a useful tool to ratchet up the tension in a film about isolation and domestic enslavement. When you grasp what can be lost, the stakes become unbearably high. Raging Grace isn’t a happy film, but there’s happiness in it, starting with the hopefulness of its hero’s name, Joy (Maxene Eigenmann). Joy’s a homeless Filipino house cleaner on an expired visa to the UK struggling to care for her impetuous daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), on very little money and under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. The two survive by squatting in clients’ homes while they’re away, and Zarcilla has a lovely touch with the stolen days where mother and daughter pretend to have a place of their own. The rest of Joy’s life is a hustle: to get more work, to hold onto existing work, to keep her kid entertained and hidden, and to try to leave the panic out of her voice when she talks to family she’s left behind in the Philippines. Before Raging Grace becomes a horror film, it’s already a horror film.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Aporia

July 28, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi, Payman Maadi, Faithe Herman
written and directed by Jared Moshé

by Walter Chaw Titled after a word meaning “irresolvable internal contradiction,” Aporia is a tragicomedy of errors à la The Butterfly Effect in which three well-meaning suburbanites figure out a way to change the past but can’t quite figure out how to avoid causing unexpected temporal fuckups in addition to the ones they’re trying to cause. For what it’s worth, their always remembering their former timelines isn’t addressed in any meaningful way–nor, I guess, does it need to be, given that this is soft sci-fi and not Primer, but I did think about it. I also thought about how the title is probably fair warning against trying to Neil deGrasse Tyson the thing, and so: fair enough. What happens is that grieving widow Sophie (Judy Greer), seven months out from losing husband Malcolm (Edi Gathegi) to a drunk driver, does her best to manage the trauma she and her daughter Riley (Gaithe Herman) are going through, but it’s a losing battle. She confides in her friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) that things are spiralling, and Jabir tells Sophie that he and Malcolm had been working on a time-travel device that could fire a burst of energy to a specific time and place in the past. If they were to kill the drunk driver, they figure, maybe all would be well again in their world. So they do it, and at first it seems like this Monkey’s Paw is one of the rare benevolent Monkey’s Paws. But then Sophie starts feeling guilty over the financial plight the drunk driver’s wife, Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), suffers in the absence of her lout of a husband.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Vincent Must Die + Blackout

July 25, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Werewolf

Vincent doit mourir
***½/****
starring Karim Leklou, Vimala Pons, François Chattot, Karoline Rose Sun
written by Mathieu Naert
directed by Stéphan Castang

BLACKOUT
***½/****
starring Alex Hurt, Addison Timlin, Motell Gyn Foster, Barbara Crampton
written and directed by Larry Fessenden

by Walter Chaw I’ve been angrier lately, angrier than I ever remember feeling in my life–and I was a teenage boy once. I am either more keenly aware of how broken the world always was, or the world is more broken than it’s ever been. Likely a little of both is true. I am frustration unrelieved. I am catharsis in eternal, trembling abeyance. The bad win and escape consequences; the good lose and lack the commitment to fight. The Earth is on fire, and only a handful of Scandinavian teens gluing themselves to paintings seem to have the will to do anything about it. I feel like I’m going to crack at every provocation, however minor or unintended. I wonder if I’ve lost my mind. It’s the old man’s fate to lament the growing incivility of every generation, but I didn’t expect to have so much rage going into my sixth decade. I didn’t expect to be the source of the incivility. I think the fallout from the cascading traumas of the last several years will continue to expose fault lines in our society for decades to come. Fallout is inevitable after an apocalypse, after all, and fault lines cause earthquakes. There’s nothing special about us.

Fantasia Festival ’23: Introduction

July 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals

by Walter Chaw I love Fantasia Festival. More than love it, I think it's an important showcase that has provided at least a couple of titles that end up on my Best of the Year list every time I've covered it. Its programming is consistently on point, its courage to wade into deep and hostile waters laudable. This year, I'm most excited to catch Oh Dae-hwan and Jang Dong-yoon in Kim Jae-hoon's Face/Off-inspired debut, Devils, and Jimmy Laporal-Trésor's rise-of-fascism period piece, Rascals. Quarxx has a new flick inspired by Milton and Dante called Pandemonium, and there's a new '80s Satanic Panic documentary called Satan Wants You that dates me, I'll admit. A small part of me still believes I'll start speaking in Aramaic and crawling up the wall every time I spin an Iron Maiden vinyl. I feel a similar mix of nostalgia and dread about A Disturbance in the Force, which dives deep into what exactly was going through everyone's heads while making the "Star Wars Holiday Special".

Story Time: FFC Interviews Bomani J. Story

June 4, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

Walter Chaw interviews Bomani J. Story, writer-director of
THE ANGRY BLACK GIRL AND HER MONSTER

I love writer-director Bomani J. Story’s feature debut, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. I love it for its verve, its intimidating intelligence, its righteousness. It’s one of the few Frankenstein adaptations that actually takes Mary Shelley’s presence in the novel into consideration, serving as a very fine horror film on the one side and a sharp social commentary on the other. Story is the rare young filmmaker unafraid of subtext, and he has a genuine humility about him that, to me, is a predictor of future life success. He’s said that going back to Frankenstein the book was, essentially, a bolt of lightning for him, and indeed, I think it takes a minority read of it to fully grasp its revolutionary quality. I was similarly galvanized my first time reading it, too. It probably, by itself, led to my interest in studying British Romanticism once upon a time.

Hot Docs ’23: All You See

May 13, 20232023, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Netherlands

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar’s All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited “all Charlie Kaufman films” and Lars von Trier’s Dogville as key influences on the picture’s design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies’ offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.