TIFF ’15: The Family Fang

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, TIFF

Tiff15familyfang

**½/****
directed by Jason Bateman

by Bill Chambers David Lindsay-Abaire is the poor man's Tom Stoppard and Jason Bateman smothered whatever vulgar charms his directorial debut Bad Words may have possessed in an incongruous autumnal burnish, but they have a neutralizing effect on each other: Together, the strained seriousness of the former and the preposterous seriousness of the latter (Bateman shoots this one like The Godfather) create a curiously palatable harmony. The Family Fang is every inch The Skeleton Twins or some other brother-sister Sundance yarn but with a wonderfully specific source for the siblings' dysfunction: raised by performance artists, they were from a young age incorporated into their parents' notorious act, which tended to prey upon the sympathies of innocent bystanders. (In a very funny early flashback, for example, they stage a mock bank robbery that ends in the alleged shooting death of matriarch Camille Fang (Kathryn Hahn here, Maryann Plunkett in present day).) As adults, Buster (Bateman) and Annie (Nicole Kidman, looking supernaturally restored to her Peacemaker days) have distanced themselves from their past and channelled any lingering impulses towards exhibitionism into the more legitimate avenues of writing and acting, respectively. When Buster is shot in the head with a potato (don't ask), he is summoned home and drags Annie with him to serve as a buffer. Back in the family nest, father Caleb (Christopher Walken) immediately tries to rope them into a "piece," but not only have they moved on–so has society at large, now too insular to be a viable canvas for the Fangs' art. Walken's fury as he quits a prank involving counterfeit coupons is poignant; one senses a touch of the actor's own frustration with the world no longer appreciating his unique genius.

TIFF ’15: Downriver

Posted in2015, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF
**½/****written and directed by Grant Scicluna by Walter Chaw Joining Snowtown as Aussie films about sublimated desire, murder, perversion, and cults of personality, Grant Scicluna's feature debut Downriver is beautifully-lensed, patient, bleak. It reminds of another debut, Jacob Aaron Estes's 2004 Mean Creek, where, as in Downriver, the mute disinterest of Nature is used to highlight the struggle of individuals--especially children--to impose meaning on it. The title and central image of a river evoke Heraclitus's aphorism that it's impossible to ever enter the same river twice. Tied to the film's central conceit of James (Reef Ireland), a young man released…

TIFF ’15: Freeheld

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
**½/****directed by Peter Sollett by Bill Chambers Based on the Oscar-winning documentary short of the same name, Freeheld is the true story of policewoman Laurel Hester and mechanic Stacie Andree, who in the recent past, before the legalization of gay marriage, waged a public battle against Ocean County, NJ legislature when it denied the dying Hester the right to leave her pension to domestic partner Andree. Julianne Moore, enduring a protracted screen death for the second year in a row, plays Laurel beneath a cloche of Farrah Fawcett hair and Ellen Page, who produced, plays Stacie, and, um...when Back to…

TIFF ’15: Mr. Right

Posted in2015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF
½*/****directed by Paco Cabezas by Bill Chambers Max Landis follows up his American Ultra script with another action comedy about slick killing machines but abandons the Manchurian Candidate backstory in a grotesquely cynical fashion: When Sam Rockwell throws knives at new girlfriend Anna Kendrick to prove she can catch them, his conviction is based on nothing more substantial than her being the star of this particular show. Over and over, Mr. Right acknowledges that it's a cartoon, and not in an enjoyably meta, Duck Amuck sort of way--more in a "you don't care, so why should we?" sort of way.…
TIFF ’15: The Girl in the Photographs

TIFF ’15: The Girl in the Photographs

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Crime, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, TIFF

*/****
directed by Nick Simon

by Bill Chambers Written by the son of Norman Bates and directed by a protégé of the late Wes Craven, The Girl in the Photographs is an illusorily pedigreed resurrection of the slasher genre featuring scattered compositional glories courtesy of legendary DP Dean Cundey, returning to horror for the first time since, what, Psycho II? The picture opens with its Janet Leigh (horror muse Katharine Isabelle)–literally named Janet–being abducted from her home by a pair of masked fiends (one’s a harlequin, the other a Trash Humper) who eventually leave a photo of her corpse on the bulletin board of a Piggly Wiggly-type store in the real but barely-capitalized-on town of Spearfish, South Dakota, which according to this film has a police force so lame that aspiring murderers might consider moving there.

TIFF ’15: The Ones Below

Posted in2015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF, UK
*½/****written and directed by David Farr by Walter Chaw Another entry in the baby-in-peril subgenre of white-collar paranoia thrillers (see most recently Hungry Hearts), hyphenate David Farr's closed-room Polanski shrine The Ones Below is well-intentioned fluff that meanders around exhausted until it finally finds a place to sit. It's a literal upstairs/downstairs affair as upstairs couple Kate (Clémence Poésy) and Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore), expecting their firstborn, meet-cute their downstairs neighbours: bombshell Teresa (Laura Birn), also pregnant, and her older husband Jon (David Morrissey). A dinner party, an Inside accident, and suddenly Kate is either insane or insane like a fox…

TIFF ’15: Where to Invade Next + Ninth Floor

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

Tiff15wheretoinvadenext

Where to Invade Next. (pictured)
**½/****
written and directed by Michael Moore

NINTH FLOOR
**/****
written and directed by Mina Shum

by Bill Chambers The narrative pretext for Michael Moore’s globetrotting that lends Where to Invade Next its title is so low-concept, jokey, and finally immaterial as to be the documentary equivalent of the cable repairman arriving at the beginning of a porno. After a solid five minutes of trolling the Right with an inventory of recent conflicts that makes the United States look at once war-happy and, despite its exorbitant military spending, not very good at the whole war thing, Moore satirically sets off on a mission–shabby haircut, gummy smile, and Tigers cap (sometimes in camo green) intact–to find a good place for America’s next big skirmish. What he’s really doing is touring the world in search of proven ideologies his own tailspinning country would do well to adopt. In Italy and Germany, he discovers a happy, fruitful middle class in factories, of all places. In France, he encounters a gradeschool cafeteria where the chef opts for fruit-and-cheese platters over burgers and fries and the children regard Moore’s can of Coke dubiously. In Slovenia, he can’t find a single university student in debt until he happens on an American transplant who owes money back home. In Iceland, he becomes enamoured of an emergent matriarchy, which might be why he recedes as an on-camera presence: to curb the irony of his film mansplaining women in leadership to us.

TIFF ’15: Dheepan

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff15dheepan

***/****
starring Antonythasan Jesuthasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Vincent Rottiers, Claudine Vinasithamby
screenplay by Noé Debré, Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard
directed Jacques Audiard

by Bill Chambers “Well, not exactly,” a critic acquaintance gently scoffed after I shrugged that Dheepan was “y’know, Taxi Driver.” (“So Dheepan is basically the second time Taxi Driver‘s won the Palme d’Or,” I snarked on the Twitter.) He’s a grinder, and I respect the hell out of grinders–the ones who see everything and interview everybody and indefatigably churn out coverage: They are the heavyweight champions of the film-festival circuit. But they are a literalminded bunch (they have to be, for efficiency’s sake), and the Taxi Driver parallels are admittedly by no means 1:1. In Dheepan, three refugees of a Sri Lankan military conflict form a makeshift family out of stolen identities in order to start a new life abroad. They land in France, where “Dheepan” (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) scores a job as the caretaker of an apartment complex, finds “wife” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) work as a housekeeper for one of the building’s tenants, and enrols 9-year-old “daughter” Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby) in public school. Yalini, still in the prime of her youth, bristles at having to maintain the charade, particularly the fact that she’s become an insta-mom, with Dheepan direly overestimating her maternal instincts and capacity for sentiment. Of all the women he could’ve been paired with, he got Kelly Kapoor.

TIFF ’15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

Posted in2015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Romance, Switzerland, Teen, Thriller, TIFF

Tiff15keeper

BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15’s Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most ‘problematic’ of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He’s Moroccan, she hangs with “the Black Bronx,” whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he’d feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there’s a double standard, then reassuringly points out they’re both African. Within days they’re a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan’s posse to their clubhouse to be gang-raped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela’s does not, and though I don’t condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn’t make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.

TIFF ’14 Wrap-Up: The Gift of MAGI and some quick takes

Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, TIFF

by Bill Chambers I try my best to stay away from the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto’s state-of-the-art cinematheque, during the Festival, because for a goodly portion of those ten days it becomes Pandaemonium with a red carpet. But I made what I hope is a self-explanatory exception for the Industry conference “Ad Infinitum: Bigger, Faster, Brighter Movies – The Changing Creative Landscape of Digital Entertainment,” where Douglas Trumbull–who designed the lightshows for, among others, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner; directed the cultish SF movies Silent Running and Brainstorm; and engineered Back to the Future: The Ride–debuted/previewed his new MAGI process, a digital replacement for his late, lamented Showscan. Trumbull took the podium to introduce a featurette on his work that set the context for UFOTOG, a short subject shot in 4K resolution and 3-D at 120 frames per second (fps). Although the piece dovetails with Trumbull’s geeky interest in space invaders (the title is a portmanteau of “UFO” and “photography,” just as MAGI is a weird anagram-cum-abbreviation for “moving image”), its raison d’être is to serve as MAGI’s proof of concept. Good thing, too: as a narrative, it’s pretty incoherent.

TIFF ’14: 99 Homes

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

99homes

**/****
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

Posted in2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

Music3fertiff

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

Posted in2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Menwomenchildren

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

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF

Phoenix

***/****
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

Posted in2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

Topfive

**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

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Myoldlady

*/****
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

Posted in2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

Cub

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

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

Cloudsofsilsmaria

***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

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

Lookofsilence

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 desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

TIFF ’14: Nightcrawler

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Nightcrawler

**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?