TIFF Archives - Page 6 of 14 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’14: 99 Homes

September 20, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Angelo Muredda Where was there to go for Ramin Bahrani after the ghastly critical Americana of At Any Price–complete with race cars, ominous cornfields, and home movies–but a wildly over-cranked story about the housing crisis? Another silly, histrionic look at America Today, 99 Homes continues Bahrani’s curious late run as the unaccomplished middlebrow answer to Nicholas Ray. It stays afloat where his last sank, though, largely thanks to some inspired scenery-gorging by the perpetually-vaping Michael Shannon, playing slick Rick Carver, a side-armed real estate broker who makes his bones seizing other Floridians’ foreclosed houses and flipping them to the banks that probably shouldn’t have given them a loan in the first place. Enter Andrew Garfield as working-class angel and struggling single-dad Dennis, who cedes his keys to the devil in the tan jacket only to go to work for him for a shot at getting his family home back. What are the odds he’ll keep his house and, more importantly, his soul?

TIFF ’14: Seymour: An Introduction; Love & Mercy; Whiplash

September 18, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
***½/****
directed by Ethan Hawke

LOVE & MERCY
**½/****
directed by Bill Pohlad

WHIPLASH
**/****
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Bill Chambers Ethan Hawke’s first documentary isn’t the affected thing its Googler-confusing, appropriated-from-Salinger title would suggest. (And perhaps we should be grateful he didn’t go with Suddenly Seymour, Seymour Butts, or I Know What You Did Last Seymour.) Intimate but not prying, Seymour: An Introduction profiles the homuncular Seymour Bernstein, a former pianist of some renown who withdrew from the concert circuit in his prime to focus on teaching piano, hoping to stave off the neuroses of fame. Hawke decided to make the film after receiving some life-altering advice from Bernstein at a gathering, as if compelled to share his good fortune with the world, and that generosity of spirit courses through a piece that looks for wisdom, not pathology, in its subject’s hermetic existence (57 years alone in the same New York apartment) and monk-like devotion to music. A forgotten genius, Bernstein also proves an unsung raconteur in enthralling stories that place him at the centre of a real-life Sunset Boulevard or on the front lines of Korea; he commands the screen in lingering close-ups and holds court with equally-captive audiences of confrères and disciples, despite his professed stage fright. The picture builds to Bernstein’s first live performance in decades, a recital Hawke has arranged in a gesture that seems like a betrayal yet has the not-undesirable effect of making Bernstein look oddly heroic. If possible, he’s an even more expressive individual when filtered through the keys of a Steinway.

TIFF ’14: Men, Women & Children

September 14, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

½*/****
directed by Jason Reitman

by Bill Chambers We’ve entered a golden age of movies that use state-of-the-art technology to rail against the use of state-of-the-art technology. An ensemble piece sardonically narrated in the third-person by Emma Thompson (think Little Children by way of Thompson’s own Stranger Than Fiction), Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children paints a glum picture of the Internet’s hold over the American middle-class. In no particular order, husband and wife Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt seek out extramarital affairs online while their insipid son Travis Tope streams BDSM porn and sexts with cheerleader, classmate, and aspiring famous person Olivia Crocicchia. Crocicchia’s mother Judy Greer is a former model living vicariously through her daughter’s burgeoning career, posting predator-baiting snapshots of her to the tut-tutting of overprotective mom Jennifer Garner, who thinks nothing of printing out daughter Kaitlyn Dever’s private messages to read like the evening paper. (She is, in all sincerity, more infuriating than Piper Laurie in Carrie.) Bookish Dever, meanwhile, finds herself the Jane Burnham to a Ricky Fitts played by dreamy Ansel Engort–a former football hero who, to the chagrin of sports-nut father Dean Norris, retreated into the world of online gaming after his mother left home. Also, there’s a thread involving anorexia and rapey boys that never doesn’t feel grafted onto the narrative out of some insecure impulse to physicalize the abstract threat of cyberspace.

TIFF ’14: Phoenix

September 13, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

***/****
directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda A smart, tidy film about dumb people with messy histories, Christian Petzold's Phoenix walks the line between psychological thriller and earnest postwar allegory with grace when a little gangliness might have been nice. Petzold MVP Nina Hoss knocks it dead as Nelly, a Jewish Holocaust survivor betrayed by her wormy husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), left for dead, and now come back to life à la Franju, under a heavily-bandaged face. Instead of wanting revenge, Nelly yearns to recapture herself so that Johnny will recognize her as Nelly, opting to have her features restored to their original appearance as closely as possible. Never one to pay the most attention to detail (which is seemingly a satire of beefy husbands as much as it is of postwar German denial), Johnny welcomes back the reconstructed Nelly not as herself but as a woman who looks a lot like her, and who may just be the key to capturing his dead wife's inheritance, if she can play the part well enough.

TIFF ’14: Top Five

September 11, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**½/****
written and directed by Chris Rock

by Bill Chambers Chris Rock’s Top Five seems to begin in medias res and then backtrack, but in retrospect, the opening sequence–a nicely-sustained tracking shot of Rosario Dawson and Rock taking an afternoon stroll in New York, bickering about whether Obama has actually paved the way for other minorities to become president–could be a flash-forward to the post-film future of these characters. That’s kind of a comforting notion; the problem is I’d rather be watching that light relationship comedy, where they’re already together and routinely engaging in these Woody Allen dialectics, than this one, in which Dawson’s Chelsea and Rock’s Andre do the Forces of Nature/A Guy Thing boogie on the eve of Andre’s marriage to one of Bravo’s many profligate reality-TV subjects (Gabrielle Union). A comic-turned-megastar who made bank starring in a cop-movie franchise as a machine-gun-toting bear (Rock may have an even lower opinion of the filmgoing public than Mike Judge), Andre is asking to be taken seriously with his newest project, Uprize, about the slave revolt in Haiti. To that end, he relents to a NEW YORK TIMES profile, even though the paper of record has never given him a good review; Chelsea is the writer they send, and she comes with something of a hidden agenda. At the risk of spoiling what that is, by the end of Top Five, one thing is abundantly clear: Chris Rock hates critics.

TIFF ’14: My Old Lady

September 11, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*/****
directed by Israel Horovitz

by Walter Chaw Israel Horovitz’s My Old Lady, written by Israel Horovitz based on a play by Israel Horovitz, is adorable. Just adorable. Really. It’s like a great, fat, French cat, or that sneezing baby panda movie, except that it stars Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith, and–I’ve never much liked her, I’m realizing now–Kristin Scott Thomas. Kline is destitute yankee Mathias Gold, who, upon inheriting an apartment in Paris, learns that it comes with a nonagenarian accoutrement, Mathilde Girard (Smith), who seems to have the girl-French version of Mathias’s name. Isn’t that precious? Because he’s spent every last dime to get to Paris to sell this apartment he’s not able to sell because there’s this just-darling old lady squatting there, My Old Lady begins to take on a minor whiff of Arsenic and Old Lace, which is also awful–er, cuddly. Lest there be any doubt as to how sweet the whole thing is, Mark Orton’s saccharine score–the only thing not by Israel Horovitz, it seems–makes sure there’s absolutely no room for even a tiny, niggling one.

TIFF ’14: Cub

September 9, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

Welp
½*/****
directed by Jonas Govaerts

by Bill Chambers Cub–or Welp, as it is humorously called in the original Dutch–has a killer hook, or at least a viable-enough premise that some considerable buzz has built up around this Midnight Madness entry. A troop of cub scouts goes camping in Belgian woods allegedly occupied by Kai, a boy who becomes a werewolf by night; the two young scout masters, Peter (Stef Aerts) and Chris (Titus De Voogdt), build their own buzz about the cryptozoic creature to have something for the campfires (also because they seem to like antagonizing children), unaware of course that Kai does exist in the form of a lightning-quick feral kid wearing a mask fashioned from tree-bark. Sam (Maurice Luijten) actually stumbles on Kai’s treehouse, where the child stows trinkets purloined from campers, The Final Terror-style, but being an apparent charity case gives Sam zero credibility with those he tells–particularly Peter, who takes sadistic glee in isolating Sam from his peers and targeting him for military punishments that Chris, the more empathetic and merciful of the two, is never around to avert. Seriously: even with a wild child who can’t figure out how to work a can opener living large in a treehouse worthy of I.M. Pei, Chris’s constant absence is the movie’s most confounding mystery.

TIFF ’14: Clouds of Sils Maria

September 8, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

***½/****
starring starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Lars Eidinger
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda A master class on acting played simultaneously to the orchestra and the cheap seats, Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria is an odd, beguiling thing. Juliette Binoche is Maria, an international star of film and theatre (naturally) on her way to accept an honorary award on behalf of the director and dramaturge who made her career when she was only eighteen in his infamous Maloja Snake, which sounds a lot like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by way of All About Eve. When he dies, Maria finds herself commissioned to star in a remake by a hotshot talent of the German stage, who sees her now as Helena, the older woman in the same-sex romantic drama, giving her role of the young seductress and abandoner Sigrid to rising starlet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz). If that isn’t enough, the text–a younger man’s treatise on the loves and rivalries of women, as Maria has come to see it–has seemingly taken on a radioactive agency of its own, creeping into Maria’s hip-joined relationship with soulmate, line-runner, and personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart), who’s becoming yet another Sigrid at about the same pace Maria is settling into Helena’s skin.

TIFF ’14: The Look of Silence

September 7, 2014****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Taiwan, TIFF, UK

Senyap
****/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Bill Chambers Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is devastating because it doesn’t offer any moral opposition to the glibly boastful first-hand accounts of Indonesian death squads; and his The Look of Silence is devastating because it does. A B-side to The Act of Killing but no mere Blue in the Face afterthought, The Look of Silence follows Adi, a 44-year-old door-to-door optometrist whose senile father is 103 and whose mother improbably claims to be around the same age. The father has forgotten but the mother has not that Adi was preceded by a brother, Ramli, who was killed during the “communist” purge (the picture reiterates that anyone who didn’t immediately fall in line with the military dictatorship was tarred with the same brush, regardless of political or religious affiliation)–though “killed” somehow undersells his execution, a two-day ordeal that culminated in Ramli’s castration. Adi watches Oppenheimer’s footage of the murderers describing his brother’s death in that animated, kids-playing way familiar from The Act of Killing, though these are not the same two “actors” who appeared in that film, underscoring that a desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

TIFF ’14: Nightcrawler

September 6, 20142014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

**½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton
written and directed by Dan Gilroy

by Angelo Muredda What would we do without Jake Gyllenhaal, who's grounded every self-serious and thinly-sketched high-concept Movie About Something he's appeared in since Rendition at least? The committed star pulls off the same magic trick to even more impressive effect than usual with Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy's directorial debut after toiling away as a screenwriter on less pedigreed fare like Real Steel and Two for the Money as well as big brother Tony's most recent Bourne franchise effort. The Nightcrawler partisans–and they'll be numerous and vocal–will likely downplay such hacky origins along with the filial leg-up that producer Tony no doubt provided. (How many first-timers get to work with DP Robert Elswit?) But why should they when Gilroy's own film is about nothing so much as the corrosive effects crony capitalism wreaks on that heretofore-unsatirized American institution (certainly not covered more intelligently and presciently by a nearly forty-year-old film whose title rhymes with get work) of headline news?

TIFF ’14: Maps to the Stars

September 6, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF

*½/****
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers There's something vaguely pathetic about Bruce Wagner continuing to write these Los Angeles tapestries that send up the movie business, since his Hollywood career peaked in the early-'90s (and the vision of these satires is ossified thereabouts). And getting David Cronenberg–someone so insularly Canadian, and probably the last filmmaker to pore over the trades–to direct one of them is lunacy, albeit potentially inspired in the way that getting a German to helm Paris, Texas was. Indeed, though, Maps to the Stars is the blind leading the blind, taking place in an obsolete world where Carrie Fisher, playing herself, is some kind of industry gatekeeper and a remake of an old black-and-white melodrama is the hottest project in town. Fresh off the bus from Florida, the mysterious, lightly-disfigured Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) arrives in L.A. with an ally in Fisher, who helps get her a job as the personal assistant to high-maintenance Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an actress haunted by both her own former glory and the superstardom of her late mother (Cronenberg's paper-doll muse Sarah Gadon). Havana has regular, sexually-charged sessions with self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), father of teen sensation Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), a nightmare of Bieberian entitlement who, like Havana, has lately been receiving unwelcome visitations from the dead.

TIFF ’14: Ned Rifle

September 3, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Road Movie, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Hal Hartley

by Bill Chambers The third, shortest, and presumably final entry in an improbable film series of seesawing returns, Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle is the religious component of a triptych that has thus far loosely tackled Art (Henry Fool) and Politics (Fay Grim). Titular Ned (Liam Aiken) is the offspring of drifter Casanova Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and hapless Fay Grim (Parker Posey), the latter of whom begins this movie in prison as a result of Henry’s antics, consigning Ned to the care of a reverend (Martin Donovan) and his family. Wanting to biblically avenge his mother, Ned follows a trail of breadcrumbs back to his deadbeat dad; yes, the film has the same basic quest premise as Fay Grim, though it takes the form of an askew It Happened One Night this time instead of another globetrotting “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” journey. Ned’s interloping travelling companion is Susan (Aubrey Plaza–not a fan, but she curtails her most irritating mannerisms here, and looks dynamite), a grad student with a hidden agenda that somehow entails writing her thesis on the poetry of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) and ghost-authoring Fay’s memoirs. (“Susan’s brilliant, and she’s a good person, but she’s totally fucked-up,” Simon warns Ned. He could be describing any Hal Hartley protagonist.) A God-fearing Born-again, Ned fends off what he perceives as her advances, but he bristles with jealousy once they track down Henry at a mental hospital and she becomes drawn into his father’s orbit, like so many before her.

TIFF ’14: Waste Land

September 2, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Pieter Van Hees

by Bill Chambers Ominously chaptered after the weeks in a pregnancy, Waste Land begins with an encouraging but deceptive touch of absurdity, as Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) placidly stands in for the victim at a nauseatingly fresh crime scene while the addled perpetrator tries to reconstruct the murder for a forensics team. Leo's next case, involving the occult-related death of a young Congolese immigrant, coincides with wife Kathleen (the appropriately-named Natali Broods) announcing she's with child–her second, Leo's first–and planning on aborting it due to her husband's grim attachment to his profession. He goads her into keeping it by pledging to quit the force once he's through with this latest investigation, but it proves an unreasonable vortex that soon has him becoming infatuated with the dead man's sister (Babetida Sadjo) and going off the grid, as well as the proverbial deep end.

TIFF ’13 Wrap-Up

September 22, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

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, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, TIFF, ZERO STARS

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, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF

***/****
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, 20132013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**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, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Film Festivals, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

***/****
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, 20132013, 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…

TIFF ’13: The Strange Little Cat

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

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.