TIFF ’13: Devil’s Knot

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

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**/****
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

Posted 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

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
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

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

a.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

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

THE 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

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

***/****
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

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


Après 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

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

****/****
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

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

***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.

TIFF ’12: Everyday

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**½/****
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Angelo Muredda Michael Winterbottom makes projects more than he makes films, and happy are the rare few that bridge the gap. Everyday comes close at times, with no thanks to the unnecessarily tricked-out structure, which picks up with a young British family at holiday satellite points spread out over a five-year period and watches them cope with separation anxiety in between. In theory, this narrative-by-checkpoint strategy most resembles 2004’s dismal 9 Songs, where Winterbottom watched a dull relationship bloom and die in the span of nine dull concerts and miserable sex scenes, but the film can’t help but be improved by the material this time.

TIFF ’12: Frances Ha

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There’s a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her “galumphing radiance.”) You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender’s miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song’s abrupt stop, from Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant’s Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film’s ambling structure: a lovely headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.trans-2476182

TIFF ’12: The Iceman

Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Gangster, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

*½/****
directed by Ariel Vroman

by Bill Chambers Although The Iceman proves that a movie cannot get by on Michael Shannon’s dark charisma alone, Shannon has reached that point in his career where his casting supplies the lion’s share of subtext. Hence, a line like “I dub cartoons for Disney”–uttered not two minutes into the film, before there’s enough context for it to be a joke or a lie–induces titters of recognition. Of course, most will know going in that Shannon’s playing real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski, who’s thought to have dispatched over 100 people, professionally-speaking. In The Iceman, the film version of his life, smut-bootlegger Kuklinski starts a family with winsome Barbara (a baby-talky Winona Ryder) at the same time mobster Roy DeMeo (Ray Liotta) makes him an enforcer. He keeps Barbara in the dark about his new profession (his old one, too), telling her he’s a stockbroker to explain the conspicuous infusions of cash; by the time their angelic daughters are in middle-school, he’s settled comfortably into the schizoid role of suburban-dad-slash-serial-killer. Eventually, he sub-contracts himself out to Pronge (Chris Evans, so skeevy I mistook him for Bradley Cooper), a free agent who operates out of a Mr. Softee truck and gives Kuklinski the idea to freeze his victims, and thus his eponymous nickname.

TIFF ’12: To the Wonder

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he’s now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist’s career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick’s oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line‘s trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas’s carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl’s joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It’s all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, “There’s something missing.”

TIFF ’12: Tabu

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Portugal, Silent, Spain, TIFF

****/****
directed by Miguel Gomes

by Angelo Muredda Tabu opens, fittingly enough, at the movies, with an old melodrama about an explorer who’s just been turned into a brooding crocodile. That’s the first of many transformations in a protean film that shifts gracefully from ironic postcolonial critique, to essay on the cinema as a means of appropriation and reincarnation, to thwarted love story. While those layers may seem impossible to navigate, take heart: Director Miguel Gomes’s great coup is to let this complex material flow instinctually from its emotional core. Fluidity is key to Gomes’s aesthetic, which pairs the breathless momentum of a page-turner with the non-sequitur progression of a dream. Case in point, a moment when Pilar (Teresa Madruga), the first half’s protagonist, sees a movie with the stuffy man who loves her. Pilar is visibly moved by what’s on screen, but we never see it, hearing only a Portuguese cover of “Be My Baby” on the soundtrack–a thread left dangling only to be gingerly picked up in the second half. “You know what dreams are like,” as one character tells us: “We can’t command them.”

TIFF ’12: Antiviral

Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mystery, Satire, Sci-Fi, Thriller, TIFF

*½/****
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers Featuring more close-ups of needles piercing flesh than a booster-shot training video, Antiviral, the debut feature by Cronenberg offspring Brandon, takes place in a world evolutions ahead of TMZ, where fans pay to have themselves infected with viruses extracted from their celebrity crushes. (“Biological communion,” the film calls this process–a phrase that links father and son filmmakers as efficiently as a paternity test.) The slightly repulsive Caleb Landry Jones is Syd March, a rogue technician for The Lucas Clinic who breaks protocol by contaminating himself with the disease that is rapidly, unexpectedly killing superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), making him a target of Hannah’s family–who figure he’ll be useful in their search for a cure–and fans, who want to watch him expire as a proxy for their beloved Hannah. Yes, it’s pretty silly.

TIFF ’12: Ship of Theseus

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, India, Netherlands, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Anand Gandhi

by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical origins up front. Gandhi’s film begins with a philosophical conceit from Plutarch–the question of whether a ship that’s been repaired using parts from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all–and workshops it through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied with the biological analogy of Theseus’s broken-down ship, a leaky body that needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance between humanism and intellectual rigor.

TIFF ’12: Argo

Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF, UK

***½/****
directed by Ben Affleck

by Bill Chambers Ben Affleck’s films as a director are no longer surprisingly good–they’re expectedly good. The surprise of his latest, Argo, is twofold: first, put a beard on Affleck and suddenly he’s an actor of gravitas; second, that this directing detour his career took may have been born of not just self-preservation, but real movie love. You can see it in his hoarding of genre staples for one-scene (Adrienne Barbeau) and in some cases one-line (Michael Parks) roles, but more importantly, you can see it in the gentle Hollywood satire Argo briefly–perhaps too briefly–becomes. Set in 1979, the picture is suffused with a passion for filmmaking, if also a tinge of wistfulness for that bygone era in filmmaking. Though it may be period-authentic when Affleck shows the Hollywood sign in a state of disrepair, I think it’s meant as commentary on the present. Argo is the second Warner release this year to revert to the golden-age Saul Bass logo–it fits better here.

TIFF ’12: A Royal Affair

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Czech Republic, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Sweden, TIFF

En Kongelig Affære
***/****
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Angelo Muredda A Royal Affair isn’t exactly Barry Lyndon, but as period pieces go, it’s surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and politicians determine a nation’s political outcomes as much as the ideologies they represent. It doesn’t seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. “It is the Age of Enlightenment,” we’re told in the tasteful font of “Masterpiece Theatre”, and while the rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator, Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect–her book collection doesn’t pass the Danish board of censors–who flounders in the country she now rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense back to the erratic King.

TIFF ’12: Reality

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Satire, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Angelo Muredda Reality, Matteo Garrone’s follow-up to the urban planner’s nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan crook who dreams of being a contestant on “Big Brother”. Luciano is played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide–unlike his modest fictional counterpart, who’s involved in a baffling scheme to resell pastry-making robots on the black market. It’s a terrific performance, somehow sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it’s the reason Reality works as well as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.