TIFF ’13: August: Osage County

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

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…

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

Wewantedmore

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

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.

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…

TIFF ’13: Don Jon

September 6, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF
**½/**** written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt by Bill Chambers Formerly Don Jon's Addiction, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's feature writing and directing debut is a cheerier, lower-stakes Saturday Night Fever. Simultaneously lampooning and humanizing The Situation in the title role, Gordon-Levitt plays a Jersey boy who has no trouble getting laid but never finds the real thing as satisfying as jerking off to Internet porn. (In a very funny opening voiceover, he admits to getting insta-wood, Pavlov-style, at the startup sound of his laptop.) When he begins dating Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson, having a good year), he hears the swoony music of…

TIFF ’13: MANAKAMANA

September 5, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

Manakamana_01-1

***½/****
directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez

by Angelo Muredda The most spectacular sequence in Leviathan, the last major film to come out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, captured a horrifying seagull raid from the perspective of the birds’ prey, the camera appended to a boat and darting through the water alongside a school of anxious fish. MANAKAMANA, co-directed by the lab’s recent graduates Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, doesn’t quite have the money shot of its predecessor, but its very existence as a finished product feels like the fulfillment of a delicate magic trick. Forgoing the dozens of lightweight cameras that made Leviathan such a visceral experience, Spray and Velez fix their single camera on a cable car as it travels over the valleys of Trisuli in Nepal, carrying all manner of local pilgrims and tourists to the titular temple. We follow the car as it goes up and down over the valley eleven times, alternately watching the restless, contended, and excited passengers register every bump and dip of the trip and feeling swept along ourselves, thanks to a transparent glass window that overlooks the hills. (As Dennis Lim pointed out in the LA TIMES, each ride’s duration of about twelve minutes neatly lines up with the length of a roll of 16mm film.)

TIFF ’13: The Past

September 4, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, TIFF
**/**** directed by Asghar Farhadi by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi's A Separation but arrives at the finish line with little to show for itself. Like Farhadi's previous film, we start with a divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion Cotillard's more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim). That Samir has his own troubled…

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 2

September 4, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

Noah

A Grand Canal ***/****
19 mins., d. Johnny Ma
Beasts in the Real World *½/****
8 mins., d. Sol Friedman
Daybreak (Éclat du jour) ***/****
11 mins., d. Ian Lagarde
Noah ***½/****
17 mins., ds. Walter Woodman & Patrick Cederberg
Out *½/****
8 mins., d. Jeremy Lalonde
Seasick **½/****
4 mins., d. Eva Cvijanovic
Young Wonder *½/****
6 mins., d. James Wilkes

by Bill Chambers It opens with a bride and groom saying their vows, but as subtitled voiceover from writer-director Johnny Ma informs us, this is not a romance. A Grand Canal dramatizes the last days of Ma’s father, a Chinese boat captain who angers a mob boss by turning away a shipment, then makes things worse in trying to collect on the boss’s debt. Mei Song Shun–astonishingly, a newcomer–is powerful as a proud man reduced to grovelling in a scene exceptionally well-calibrated for tension and pathos, considering this is both a short film and a student film. Shun is so good, in fact, that it feels like a betrayal of his performance when Ma decides to up and break the fourth wall with B-roll of himself directing and narration elaborating upon the therapeutic value of this endeavour.

TIFF ’13: Devil’s Knot

September 3, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

Devilsknot_01

**/****
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Something is off in Devil’s Knot, the third film about the West Memphis Three in as many years, and it isn’t just the Satanic panic that turned a bereaved community against three wrongfully accused teenagers. Although its Tennessee setting takes him far from his usual haunt of Toronto, this material seemed like a slam dunk for Atom Egoyan, who’s done his best work in films about parents dwelling in the endless hangover of their children’s premature deaths. It’s a shame, then, that his new film feels like a wheel-spinning exercise rather than a deepening of old themes. Egoyan’s approach to this tapped-out story hits the dramatic and formal beats you’d expect from his filmography: here we get a child’s cryptic, disembodied voiceover about what he’s seen; there, a videotaped testimony that conceals more than it discloses. Ambiguity is the name of the game, just like in The Sweet Hereafter, where everything turns on young Sarah Polley’s poker face as she ushers the adults around her into the topsy-turvy world of the title.

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 1

September 3, 2013Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

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Cochemere **/****
12 mins., ds. Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski
Gloria Victoria **/****
7 mins., d. Theodore Ushev
Pilgrims ½*/****
8 mins., d. Marie Clements
Remember Me **½/****
15 mins., d. Jean-François Asselin
Subconscious Password ***/****
11 mins., d. Chris Landreth
The Sparkling River **½/****
18 mins., ds. Félix Lajeunesse & Paul Raphaël

by Bill Chambers TIFF 13’s Short Cuts Canada programme starts viewers off in the deep end with Cochemere, a bifurcated, CG-embellished mix of puppets and live-action in which a nude, polarized Mother Nature, presumably (Google tells me the title means “mother checkmark” in English), intrudes on a stormy utopia to nourish with milky saliva the uncanny fauna, who then appear to return the favour in outer space, their rapey, goblinlike presence prompting a shapely, flame-haired astronaut to start masturbating in her sleep. Sometimes enchanting–the opening images seem found, like the hidden universes of Microcosmos (and, hey, a little Barbarella kinkiness goes a long way)–but ultimately impenetrable. Perhaps all you need to know is that St. Thomas Aquinas is thanked in the credits.

TIFF ’12: Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story

September 21, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

Farout**/****
directed by Brad Bernstein

by Angelo Muredda "If you want to give them an identity, children should be traumatized," illustrator Tomi Ungerer says in Far Out Isn't Far Enough, speaking about his life as much as his career obsession with drawing the macabre. Brad Bernstein's feature debut has the benefit of an articulate subject with a captivating life story, from his confused wartime upbringing in Strasbourg–"the sphincter of France," as he calls it–to his early American days as a freelancer, to his later erotic drawings (of "bondage and so on," he explains) and role as a sort of artist-in-residence for the civil rights movement. What it lacks is assurance, frequently getting in the way of its powerful material with hammy stylistic flourishes and a treacly score better suited to a Disney-channel docudrama.

TIFF ’12: Imogene

September 21, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

Imogenea.k.a. Girl Most Likely
**/****
directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

by Bill Chambers The Wizard of Oz is the paradigm for Kristen Wiig's first starring vehicle since Bridesmaids–though for the sake of managing expectations, it's probably better to think of Imogene as Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's follow-up to their dire HBO flick Cinema Vérité. The movie opens with the title character as a child playing the lead in an unlikely school production of The Wizard of Oz and lodging the precocious complaint that Dorothy's desire to return to drab Kansas is irrational. Many years later, Imogene is an aspiring/failed playwright in the Laura Linney-in-The Savages mold reduced to staging a suicide tableau in a last-ditch effort to win back her ex-boyfriend (Brian Petsos). The frenemy (June Diane Raphael, who's in every goddamn movie like this) who finds her instead calls 9-1-1, and Imogene, thanks to the intervention of the Sitcom Fairy, is forced to serve out her mandatory psych stay at home–specifically, her childhood home in Atlantic City, where her man-child brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) still lives with their gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening), mom's weird boyfriend (Matt Dillon), and Lee (Darren Criss), the young boarder who moved into Imogene's old room.

TIFF ’12: The Paperboy + At Any Price

September 18, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sports, Thriller, TIFF

PaperboyTHE PAPERBOY
*/****
directed by Lee Daniels

AT ANY PRICE
*/****
directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of Daniels's shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter's writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter's 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or character dynamics.

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

September 18, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

Silverliningsplaybook***/****
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.

TIFF ’12: Something in the Air

September 16, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, France, TIFF


SomethingintheairAprès mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas’s new film
stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card,
which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, “APRES
MAI” (“After May”), with the mousy English translation,
“Something in the Air.” The French is the more precise, referring to
the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while
Thunderclap Newman’s yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a
roughly simpatico version of late-’60s American idealism falling into ’70s
cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out
to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas’s personal
attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn’t significantly more illuminating
about the period than something like Almost
Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing
the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving
together on one big bus, so to speak.

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

September 15, 2012Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF, UK

Leviathan****/****
directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view of the Apocalypse.

TIFF ’12: Blackbird

September 15, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Blackbird***½/****
written and directed by Jason Buxton

by Bill Chambers Jason Buxton's Blackbird is an important film but a primally engaging one that doesn't feel at all like medicine or, God forbid, an Afterschool Special. The destined-for-greatness Connor Jessup is Sean Randall, a broody but essentially sweet teen who lives with his divorced dad (Michael Buie) and loves from afar the popular Deanna (Alexia Fast). Sean's a modern-day Boo Radley, an artistically-inclined goth kid stranded in a passive-aggressive sports culture: His father operates the Zamboni at the local rink where Deanna's boyfriend–Cory (Craig Arnold), natch–practices hockey. Cory torments Sean at school, and a guidance counsellor suggests that rather than retaliate Sean vent his spleen on paper–which he does, via a hypothetical revenge scenario ("It's a story") he stupidly cross-posts to the Internet. The torch-wielding villagers show up at his subsequent court hearing like it's a town-hall meeting; in this post-Columbine world, he's never going to get a fair shake.