TIFF ’12: The Hunt

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sweden, TIFF

Jagten
**½/****
directed by Thomas Vinterberg

by Angelo Muredda The Hunt hinges on a misunderstanding, a nasty story born of a child’s bruised ego and happily seized by a pack of overeager concern trolls calling themselves adults. But there’s a whole other story about misunderstanding to be spun from how the film will surely be received in different quarters as either a devastating portrait of small-town life or a grim black comedy. That one is all on director and Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg. While it’s always dicey to ascribe authorial intent, Vinterberg seems to waffle between middlebrow tragedy and scattershot satire not out of some postmodern commitment to walking the edge of irony, but because the script can’t really sustain a further push in either direction. That makes The Hunt a provocative film, sure, but also a bit of a lazy one–a conversation starter without much follow-through.

TIFF ’12: Rebelle

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, War

a.k.a. War Witch
***/****
written and directed by Kim Nguyen

by Angelo Muredda A firm refusal of the charge that Canadian filmmaking is unable to see much farther than its own backyard, Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle tackles a complex sociopolitical situation without reducing it to easy lessons learned. The most recent reference point for what Nguyen is doing with this first-person chronicle of Komona (Rachel Mwanza), a 12-year-old abducted from her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and turned into a child soldier for rebel forces, is probably Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies. But though that film also reaches for global significance in tracing the grim trajectory of a politically disenfranchised child, its vagueness stands in sharp contrast to Nguyen’s accomplishment here, which is to ground Komona’s story in a particular milieu.

TIFF ’12: Picture Day

Posted in2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Teen, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Kate Melville

by Bill Chambers 27 according to the IMDb but convincingly aged down, Tatiana Maslany gives a star-making performance in Picture Day as 18-year-old Claire, who’s forced to repeat the twelfth grade after failing math and phys-ed. It seems obvious that she in fact chose not to be jettisoned from the womb of high school just yet, though she shows little interest in actually attending classes, to the consternation of the vice principal (Catherine Fitch). (“You can’t stay in high school forever, Claire,” the VP tells her. “You did,” Claire snaps.) One day, she joins a kid who’s deviated from his gym class to smoke up–are teenage potheads really this brazen now?–and discovers that he’s Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), the timid boy she used to babysit, all grown up. A science wiz who turned down a private-school education (he sort of resents his intellect–plus, it was an all-boys academy), he even grows his own marijuana, in a closet that contains, among other things, a shrine to Claire filled with enough traces of her DNA–chewed gum, soiled tissues, hair bands–that one wonders if he intends to clone her.

TIFF ’12: Amour

Posted in2012, Austria, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Angelo Muredda From the moment it screened at Cannes, Amour became the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d’Or, and no wonder: Terrence Malick worked more or less the same formalist-auteur-goes-humanist formula to great success just last year. But while The Tree of Life‘s cosmic drama was hardly a stretch for Malick, you have to think Amour, which ultimately did cop the big prize, was a harder nut to crack for Michael Haneke. He was, of course, first awarded the Palme for a thuddingly obvious Village of the Damned knockoff designed for people who don’t do horror. Would he prove himself human after all?

TIFF ’12: Rust and Bone

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Romance, Singapore, TIFF

De rouille et d’os
**/****
directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda On paper, the most troubling thing about Rust & Bone is the suggestion, right from the title, that we’re in for a yarn about maimed bodies that go bump in the night, grinding their way into oblivion. You have to give some credit to Jacques Audiard–who’s otherwise taking a decisive step back from A Prophet–for going surprisingly easy on the figurative potential of a love story between Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer turned double-amputee after a rough day on the job, and Ali (Bullhead‘s Matthias Schoenaerts), a brutish security guard and distant father who moonlights as a back-alley boxer. Based on two short stories (it shows) from Toronto-born author Craig Davidson, the film puts itself squarely in the specious Paul Haggis tradition of the crisscrossing tragedy but keeps the stakes pretty low much of the time, mostly sparing us the usual tortured hymns about how we’re all connected at some primal level. As a disability film, a problem genre that finds little middle ground between triumph-of-adversity celebrations and euthanasia apologies, it’s also fairly attuned to mechanical matters that usually lie outside the bounds of melodrama. Consider Stephanie’s insurance-paid apartment, a smartly-organized space for a wheelchair user, down to the widened doorframes and easily-accessible washer and dryer. Ephemera counts for something.

“Odds” and Ends

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Canada, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Directors: William Friedkin, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 11
  • The first TIFF movie I saw this year, a Canadian teen-gambling thriller called The Odds (**/****, Canada First!), is unfortunately a tiny dot in the rearview now. What I remember of it is that writer-director Simon Davidson, shooting in ‘scope presumably to announce his transition to a bigger canvas (he’s a veteran of short films, all of which previously played at the TIFF), seemed to have a good eye but trouble maintaining momentum for the length of a feature. With its Psycho-esque shocker a half-hour into the film, in fact, The Odds comes to feel like a short with two more acts tacked on. And its distinctly “Degrassi”-esque vibe of kids playing dress-up affirms the wisdom of Rian Johnson’s Brick in stylizing its high-school setting to abstraction.

TIFF ’11: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (ds. Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky) + Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life (d. Werner Herzog)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Directors: Werner Herzog, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, TIFF, TIFF 11, UK

On August 19 of this year, the West Memphis Three–the no-longer-young men railroaded in a triple homicide that left a humble Arkansas town mobbishly seeking justice–were finally released from prison, making Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which premiered at the TIFF on September 11, instantly obsolete. (The film reveals their parole in a postscript that feels laughably abrupt after 100 minutes of handwringing.) Where 1996’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills dealt with the role of religious paranoia in the scapegoating of the West Memphis Three (who were accused of killing a trio of boys as part of a Satanic ritual) and its 1999 sequel, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, was profoundly if not explicitly about the ineffectuality of the original as an agent of change, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is mostly a lot of housekeeping, a refresher course for viewers of the first two films and a lint trap for details about the case that have emerged in the media over the past decade. More a glorified DVD supplement than a documentary, the picture’s at its best when it shows how easy it is to work up a head of righteous anger for dead kids by framing one of the fathers of the victims, Mark Byers, as the killer with “evidence” no less flimsily circumstantial than that which was used to condemn the West Memphis Three. (He had priors, his son’s death didn’t curb his criminal lifestyle–he must have done it!) In fact, Byers is compelled by his moment on the other side of the torch-wielding villagers to write a letter of apology to Damien Echols, the only one of the West Memphis Three on Death Row, whose head he called for back in ’93. But by the end of the piece, another of the fathers, Terry Hobbs, has implicated himself in the killings by virtue of suing the Dixie Chicks‘ Natalie Maines for slander, and Byers hastily commits to this new version of events, drafting a giant pros-and-cons list that seals Hobbs’s guilt in his eyes. Hobbs may well be the culprit (the DNA does not work in his favour), but the point is, eighteen years later, nobody has learned to let nature take its course–except the Zen-patient West Memphis Three.

TIFF ’11: Paul Williams: Still Alive (d. Stephen Kessler)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF, TIFF 11

Stephen Kessler’s fun, funny Paul Williams: Still Alive proves that you can revere and challenge a documentary subject at the same time, and in that sense, the film was a tonic after watching two-plus hours of Pearl Jam blow their loads into Cameron Crowe’s waiting mouth. Paul Williams is of course the diminutive singer-songwriter who was a veritable Zelig in the ’70s, his facile wit making him a favourite guest of Johnny Carson, his unique look making him a viable character actor, his whorish need for attention making him powerless to turn down any offer to appear on television. (The day after he won an Oscar for the Barbra Streisand song “Evergreen,” he agreed to do “Circus of the Stars”.) Williams didn’t adapt well to ’80s pop culture, in part because he could no longer juggle his career with drugs and alcohol, in part because, I would argue, movies, TV, and music all started becoming so image-conscious as to marginalize guys like Williams, nobody’s definition of a pretty boy. According to his self-deprecating narration, Kessler, an Oscar nominee himself (for the short film Birch Street Gym), idolized Williams in his youth for precisely that reason. I know that girls feel the phantom pressure of the media but believe me–boys do, too; Williams was a homuncular beacon among the studly John Travoltas and Burt Reynoldses, and though many of his career choices look tacky in retrospect, most misfits only saw that he was everywhere and felt validated, nay, vindicated, by his mainstream ubiquity.

TIFF ’11: Jeff, Who Lives at Home (ds. Mark & Jay Duplass)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, TIFF 11

I’m no mumblecore slut and found the two previous Duplass Brothers films I’d seen–The Puffy Chair and Cyrus–to be an off-putting cross between Judd Apatow and Henry Jaglom, but Jeff, Who Lives at Home is lovely. Jeff (Jason Segel) is an unemployed, 30-year-old pothead living in the basement of his widowed mom, Sharon (a surprisingly tolerable Susan Sarandon). He’s obsessed with the movie Signs, but the filmmakers seem to accept, rather than ridicule, that it is simply the thing that helped him crystallize his fatalistic belief system, and that if his worldview were less limited by circumstances–namely, depression–he would perhaps have latched onto something more highbrow. When his mother calls him from work demanding that he go buy wood glue to fix a broken shutter, it’s the beginning of an adventure-filled day that brings him into orbit with older brother Pat (Ed Helms), a paint salesman whose fears that his marriage is disintegrating are confirmed when he spots wife Linda (Judy Greer, gorgeously lit) having lunch with another man. In a nice reversal of the reversal of expectations to which sitcoms have conditioned us, she really is contemplating an affair.

TIFF ’11: Countdown (d. Huh Jong-ho)

Posted in2011, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, South Korea, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 11

Speaking to my new friend George after a screening of the stylish but gratuitously long South Korean export Countdown, I said, “It was a good yarn, at least. It reminded me of the kind of thing Hollywood used to do and do well.” “Yes, you can just see Bogie in it,” he replied. Then, almost in unison, we both added: “Only the Bogart version would’ve been over in 90 minutes.” Tae (Jung Jae-young) is a debt collector who receives a terminal diagnosis of liver cancer after passing out in traffic. Since his best hope is a transplant, he puts his skills to use tracking down the recipients of his dead son’s organs: knowing their blood type will match his own, he hopes to guilt one of them into a reciprocal donation. Finally, he locates Cha (Secret Sunshine‘s luminous Jeon Do-youn, surely bound to be poached by the American studios any day now), the con woman who got his son’s heart, and she agrees to give up a piece of her liver if he’ll provide in exchange the whereabouts of a criminal kingpin on whom she seeks revenge. Underestimating her slipperiness, the increasingly weary Tae spends a frantic couple of days pursuing and protecting Cha in equal measure.

TIFF ’11: The Oranges (d. Julian Farino)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF, TIFF 11

Except perhaps for Hugh Laurie, who tries valiantly but hopelessly to extricate the mannerisms of Dr. House from his American persona, The Oranges feels like it was cast by a computer–why are Alison Janney and Oliver Platt even still willing to read scripts that call for a sardonic homemaker and a schlubby hubby, respectively? Catherine Keener is Laurie’s ball-breaking wife, Adam Brody and Alia Shawkat are their ironic offspring, and Leighton Meester is Shawkat’s hotter frenemy; what happens is that rather than elevate the material, this archetypal, overqualified cast only exacerbates its familiarity.

TIFF ’11: Dark Horse (d. Todd Solondz)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF, TIFF 11

For a while, at least, Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse does suggest something of a response/antidote to the oeuvres of Judd Apatow and Happy Madison in general and Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin specifically. Jason Alexander-esque Jordan Gelber is Abe, a thirty-ish man who lives with his parents (an embalmed Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow) in his childhood bedroom and works for his father in a small office that does real estate business for strip malls. He drives a Hummer, listens to ’80s music, and bids on “Thundercats” memorabilia when he’s supposed to be filing reports. He abuses his status as the boss’s son to cut out early and go to the movies–in an astonishingly meta moment, Solondz lets a few of those pre-show trivia slides play out in close-up, which had the TIFF audience roaring–or Toys”R”Us, the logo of which is always cryptically blurred out. He pursues Miranda (Selma Blair), a pretty woman he met at a Jewish wedding, seemingly ill-prepared for his kamikaze bravado having any sort of positive effect on her.

TIFF ’11: Pearl Jam Twenty (d. Cameron Crowe) + Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (ds. Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF, TIFF 11, UK

When Cameron Crowe’s Pearl Jam Twenty was over, I lined up to use the bathroom between two other people, a woman and a man, who were at the same screening. The woman, who looked perhaps like she might’ve been in kindergarten when Pearl Jam‘s “Ten” came out, asked me, “That Chris Connell [sic], the guy with the–” she crooked her finger over her lip to indicate a pencil moustache, “–was he in the band?” “No,” I said, “he’s the lead singer of Soundgarden.” “Oh,” she replied, and I could tell this answer didn’t satisfy her in the least, but the bathroom became vacant and she excused herself. Then the man behind me, who was closer to my age (36) and patchouli-scented, wanted to know what I thought of the film. I told him that as someone who lost track of the band–lost interest in it is the truth, but something told me not to say that, for he’d take it personally–after “Ten,” I had trouble keeping up with it. He nodded sagely and said, “The thing about the drummers?”

TIFF ’11: A Dangerous Method (d. David Cronenberg)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, TIFF, TIFF 11, UK

by Bill Chambers I wish David Cronenberg would direct a script of his own again. A Dangerous Method is recognizably Cronenbergian in its careful anthropology (DePalma-esque, too, in its frequent use of the split dioptre), but it’s also a hit-or-miss period talkfest, identifying it as a Christopher Hampton adaptation of a Christopher Hampton play through and through. Distilling all the expected body-horror in grotesque and painful-looking contortions of her jaw, first-billed Keira Knightley does fine if exhaustingly histrionic work as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Carl Jung’s (the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender) who becomes his apprentice while in therapy. Jung corresponds with the more popular Sigmund Freud (Cronenberg muse Viggo Mortensen, ingeniously cast against type) over Sabina’s case as well as his own neuroses, and Freud eventually tosses another patient Jung’s way, protégé Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), whose maverick disregard for the ethics of transference and countertransference ultimately influences Jung’s decision to embark on an affair with the sexually repressed Sabina.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (d. Lynne Ramsay)

Posted in2011, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 11, UK

Elliptical, sprawling, transfixed by the natural or at least the pseudo-natural (chiefly, food), We Need to Talk About Kevin confirms that Lynne Ramsay is the heir apparent to Terrence Malick in more ways than just her lack of prolificacy. But she shows that his method can be used to more sobering, less transcendental effect. Where billowing curtains are a hopeful, ethereal symbol in The Tree of Life, here they signify death; where Malick has locusts wreak biblical havoc on the farm in Days of Heaven, Ramsay has ants devour a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich left angrily smeared on a glass coffee table. Her images, though no less pretty, are all about bringing you back down to earth. She’s also more willing to be ironic (Tilda Swinton’s Eva Khatchadourian, reluctantly enduring her 15 minutes, hides from onlookers amidst a Warholian row of soup cans) and blackly comic–I suspect I haven’t been with an audience this ashamed of itself for laughing since I saw Happiness, also at the TIFF.

TIFF 2010: Wrap It Up

Posted in2010, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Music, Mystery, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Superhero, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 10, Time Travel

by Bill Chambers

  • The films are fading fast in the rearview for me (no reflection on them, necessarily), but before they become too vestigial I want to at least highlight the rest of what I saw at this year’s TIFF, starting with a movie called White Irish Drinkers (*/****). How I wound up catching this flick is fairly embarrassing: the director is “John Gray,” which I misread in my bleary, end-of-festival state as “James Gray.” I was severely late for the flick, so I don’t want to pummel it (or even officially rate it), but keen auteurist that I am, I figured out my mistake pretty quickly: James Gray just wouldn’t have a naked girl (the maddeningly familiar Leslie Murphy) run around a cemetery with “free spirit” music cued up on the soundtrack–he’s not a de facto film student anymore. Though it turns out that John Gray has an extensive TV-movie resume, having done everything from The Marla Hanson Story to the remake of Brian’s Song, this feels very much the work of a novice, not a little for its pretensions to be the next Mean Streets. Because Stephen Lang salvaged Public Enemies virtually single-handedly, I was hopeful when he turned up here, but his character may be even more one-note than the one he played in Avatar. As his put-upon wife, Karen Allen has seemingly recovered from the stupefying euphoria of getting to resurrect her iconic Marion in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Strangely, I missed said goofy grin, yet she makes the most of a thankless role that indirectly references her previous brush with this genre, Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers. The rest of the cast is made up of baby-faced thugs who have to be given black eyes at regular intervals in order to pass for tough. On a related note, I never could shake the feeling that this is exactly the sort of project Vinnie Chase would be hot for on “Entourage”.

TIFF 2010: On “Womb”

Posted in2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Hungary, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10

by Bill Chambers I found the imposed misery of Never Let Me Go a lot less provocative and haunting than the self-inflicted kind one encounters in Benedek Fliegauf’s Womb, whose one-word title seems to not-unduly affiliate the picture with Jonathan Glazer’s great Birth. I love this movie, but it took me a few days to digest it, and I’m not sure I’d have the patience to sit through it again. It’s challenging from the get-go, what with the quasi-kiddie porn of its opening sequences, in which a beautiful young boy and girl start sleeping together, and the girl caresses her skin, then the boy’s, as if trying to decipher some message between them written in Braille. (For pure eroticism, though, nothing trumps the pair watching a snail writhe across a kitchen table–and it’s here that I wish I possessed Walter Chaw’s vocabulary for discussing suggestively Romantic images such as these.) The girl, Rebecca, moves to Tokyo, and grows up to be played by Eva Green. She returns to the little beach community where she met the boy, Thomas (Matt “Doctor Who” Smith as an adult), and looks him up, having transparently spent the intervening years pining for him. When they meet again, he’s so thunderstruck that he dumps his current girlfriend on the spot, and the two impulsively begin a life together as eco-activist–an amateur entomologist, he breeds cockroaches, speaking to indelibility and infestation–and muse. Just as suddenly, Thomas is killed on the way to a protest, and Rebecca, feeling cosmically robbed, has and implements the lunatic idea to be artificially inseminated with Thomas’s clone and cultivate in the child an Oedipal complex, so that at some point in the future she will get to be with a facsimile of her lover, even if he is, technically, her son. What ensues is a distaff Lolita that makes up for in controversy (the incest angle) what it may lack in guts (all things considered, this is a fairly chaste film), though the Zen patience with which Rebecca courts Thomas II only affirmed the intelligence of the piece for me: you’re just not going to see a woman exhibit the immoral lust of Humbert Humbert with the same urgency.

TIFF 2010: On “Let Me In”

Posted in2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 10, UK, Vampire
by Bill Chambers The logo for the refurbished Hammer Films that opens Let Me In is a little like the one for Marvel Films, only images of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing flutter past instead of Spider-Man and other "-men." I think it may have caused me to squee, as the girls say. The movie itself doesn't labour to honour the Hammer legacy per se--I had secretly hoped it'd find room for at least one slutty Victorian barmaid--but it does reverentially emulate its key source, the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In, which Walter Chaw and I had on our Top 10 lists for that…

TIFF 2010: On “John Carpenter’s The Ward”

Posted in2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Directors: John Carpenter, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF, TIFF 10
by Bill Chambers Before we resume our regularly scheduled programming, a few words on a film evidently especially anticipated by readers of this site/blog. Like most movie fiends around my age (i.e., old), I'm a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool John Carpenter fan, and I didn't hesitate for a moment to clear a space in my TIFF sked for his first feature film since 2001's Ghosts of Mars. He's been off his game for years--decades, even--and this is the sort of festival fare that makes me feel like I'm opting for peanuts over the vegetable platter, but still: a no-brainer. Alas and alack,…

TIFF 2010 Day 2: Jack Goes Boating; Curling; Never Let Me Go

Posted in2010, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, TIFF, TIFF 10, UK

by Bill Chambers Friday began with Jack Goes Boating, the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also stars as the title character. Jack is an airport limo driver who’s been the third wheel in the lives of his married friends Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Ruben-Vega) for so long that they’ve decided to intervene by setting him up with the mousy but receptive Connie (Amy Ryan). The movie, adapted–and, one suspects, significantly “opened up”–by Bob Glaudini from his own Off-Broadway play, casually parallels their burgeoning romance with the evaporation of Clyde and Lucy’s relationship. In a fall preview on his delightful blog, Nick Davis summed up his level of anticipation for Jack Goes Boating thusly: “Loved Synecdoche but can’t take much more schlub.” Truer words, etc. Jack isn’t just a schlub, he’s the ur-schlub, a maddeningly static individual who has to be nudged into action like a soccer ball, and Hoffman lights and poses himself to look as appetizing as Grimace from the Happy Meals. I much prefer another passion project of Hoffman’s, Love Liza: although it operates on the same demented frequency as Jack Goes Boating, there’s a whole slew of theatrical affectations to contend with this time around. (You can eventually set your watch to Jack’s nervous throat-clearing.) Ortiz is tremendously winning, though, in a bromantic role that reveals a lot more range, not to mention teeth, than Hollywood’s ever given him a chance to show. Jack Goes Boating reminded one woman I spoke to of Rocky; I can see it if I squint.