Hot Docs 2012: Finding North (ds. Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson)

May 1, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012
**½/**** by Angelo Muredda An incendiary political missive in search of a good movie, Finding North is as frustrating as it is revelatory. Directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson come at the problem of hunger in the United States with the statistical acumen of seasoned journalists. Their conceptual scope is expansive, covering everything from the daily struggles of Rosie, a seriously malnourished fifth grader, and Barbie, a single mother of two, to more abstract problems like the federal government’s complicated dance around subsidies for enormous agribusinesses at the expense of local farmers. With the help of some unexpectedly poignant commentary from…

Hot Docs 2012: Tchoupitoulas (ds. Bill and Turner Ross)

April 30, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***½/****

by Angelo Muredda Tchoupitoulas is a rare thing, an aesthetic antidote to the info-dump documentary tradition of talking head interviews and old snapshots. Described in the press notes as a night-time “piggyback ride” through the French Quarter, it’s more like a sweet re-imagining of James Joyce’s “Araby.” That short story culminates in a child’s dispiriting revelation that all that glitters in a bazaar is not gold, but Tchoupitoulas strikes at something more ambivalent and certainly more beguiling, the bleary-eyed altered state of a 3AM comedown after a night of revels.

Hot Docs 2012: Legend of a Warrior (d. Corey Lee)

April 29, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Martial Arts, Sports

***/****

by Angelo Muredda Director Corey Lee stages a moving reunion with his infamous but distant father in Legend of a Warrior. As a martial arts grandmaster and lauded trainer famed for ushering former pupil Billy Chau to a kickboxing world championship, Frank Lee spent his son’s formative years in gyms, training surrogate children while Corey went largely unattended. Now his son is trying to reconnect, relocating to the elder Lee’s Edmonton gym for a rigorous five-month training program that will submerge him in his charismatic father’s world while taking him away from his young children. What follows is both an observational record of that process and a subtle father-son melodrama, punctuated by animated interludes that turn Frank’s early days in Canada and youth in Hong Kong into a comic-strip biography.

Hot Docs 2012: The Boxing Girls of Kabul (d. Ariel Nasr)

April 28, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

***½/****

by Angelo Muredda Ariel Nasr’s The Boxing Girls of Kabul opens with clandestine footage of an execution in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, where members of the Taliban force a woman to crawl before shooting her at close-range. That image haunts the alternately uplifting and sobering narrative that follows, which shadows the faltering Olympic hopes of a trio of young female boxers in a country where patriarchal attitudes toward women, particularly athletes, range from mild acceptance to violent hostility. This is a vibrant film, coloured by the verve of its protagonists, Shahla and siblings Sadaf and Shabnam, who speak candidly about their progressive values and their anxieties about the precariousness of their position amidst threats of assault and kidnapping. They’re presented as jocks, so it’s especially jarring when their future turns out to depend less on their athleticism than on the volatile political conditions of their country and its stance on the rights of women.

Hot Docs 2012: She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column (d. Kevin Hegge)

April 28, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012
**½/**** by Angelo Muredda A few minutes into Kevin Hegge’s long-gestating She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, a critic calls the titular feminist post-punk act an art band that wasn’t necessarily arty. That sounds like an interesting distinction, but it’s also as far as the idea goes in a doc that almost makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in depth. Hegge sets a fast pace, and the early history of intellectual centre and drummer GB Jones and lead singer Caroline Azar’s collaboration nicely establishes their dynamic of cryptic rock deity and big-sweatered frontwoman, with plenty of footage…

Hot Docs 2012: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (d. Alison Klayman)

April 27, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***½/****

by Angelo Muredda Like Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s vital This is Not a Film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry delights in capturing its dissident subject lounging in the company of animals. Panahi has his iguana, which roams the Tehran high-rise to which he’s been confined by Iranian authorities, and Ai, a target of systematic harassment by the Chinese government, has his cats, one of whose ability to open doors mystifies him. By framing Ai in this domestic scene, director Alison Klayman finds warmth in an artist recognized for his compulsive refusal to comply with draconian authority – see, for instance, the series of photos where he smashes ancient pots and strategically places his middle finger in front of cultural landmarks. Situating Ai as a cat man might seem precious, but Klayman is also doing sly political work here. She’s demystifying an avowed radical, and showing (without telling) how his oppositional stance to the government in projects like a multi-year effort to catalogue the students who died in 2008’s Sichuan earthquake due to shoddily constructed buildings are born not of snark but out of a real respect for individuals, be they undocumented students or pets.

Shame (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 26, 2012Posted in****/****, 2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, UK

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale, Nicole Baharie
screenplay by Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw Brandon is a cipher from beginning to end, and while that’s usually a detriment, in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary, gruelling Shame, it’s key to why the whole thing works. Even better is that Brandon, a widely-presumed sex addict (to my mind, the film works better without a pop diagnosis), is played by Michael Fassbender, he of the matinee-idol looks and piercing green eyes. It’s interesting that what he plays best is ambiguity (next up: a robot in Prometheus), an unknowable quality that inspired McQueen’s previous installation piece, Hunger, making the lonesome protest of hunger-striker Bobby Sands into a holy mystery, a relic unknowable and his English bull tormentors Romans with spears knowing not what they do. No less ecclesiastical, Shame is a feature-length indulgence and scourging, making it fair to wonder if McQueen’s aim isn’t to assail each of the Deadly Sins in due course–his own septet on glowing, adjoined celluloid panels. It’s a great explanation of the title, and makes me wonder if the next one won’t be “Avarice.” Anyway, the film only works because Fassbender is beautiful. Ugly guys don’t get to be ashamed of sex.

Hot Docs 2012: The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche (d. Maya Gallus)

April 26, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***/****

by Angelo Muredda Newmarket-born author Mazo de la Roche hit the big leagues in 1927 when her third novel Jalna, the first entry in a lucrative sixteen-part series, won a $10 000 award from the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. In terms of prestige – particularly Canadians’ favourite sort, the kind that’s granted from elsewhere – you could think of her boon alongside Yann Martel’s Booker win in 2002, which similarly propelled a relatively unappreciated home-grown talent to international literary celebrity. But few people make the connection these days, or read de la Roche at all. Maya Gallus’s playful docudrama The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche does a good job of redressing this lacuna. Through a mixture of dramatic re-enactments with actress Severn Thompson, bitterly funny interviews with de la Roche’s adopted daughter, and talking-head testimony from Canadian authors Susan Swan and Marie-Claire Blais, the film situates de la Roche both within her early celebrity in Canada and within the larger cosmopolitan movements of first wave feminism and modernism, with which she was loosely allied.

Hot Docs 2012: Wildness (d. Wu Tsang)

April 26, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

**/****

by Angelo Muredda “They call me Silver Platter.” That’s the opening salvo of Wu Tsang’s Wildness, which hands its narrating duties off to the so-named bar in the East end of Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, a safe space for undocumented Latina trans women that turns into a largely cissexual queer hipster party called Wildness on Tuesday nights. It’s a bumpy ride from there. Tsang, the performance artist who started Wildness, smartly establishes MacArthur Park as a palimpsest, constantly transformed by waves of gentrification, economic collapse, and immigration. (That none of these terms are spelled out is also nice.) He brings the same consideration to the complex history of the Silver Platter, attending even-handedly at first to the owners and to the bar’s shifting clientele.

Hot Docs 2012: Ballroom Dancer (ds. Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed)

April 25, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

**½/****

by Angelo Muredda Early in Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s Ballroom Dancer, we see 33-year-old Russian ballroom dancing champion Slavik tell his students that a dance between two people is an everyday story, not a big drama. The goal, he tells them, is to get on the other person’s wavelength. Slavik’s lesson is taken by Bonke and Koefoed’s film, which strives to get on the physical and emotional wavelengths of an aging artist who can’t get back to his salad days with former partner and reigning champion Joanna. His training sequences with new (younger) partner and lover Anna are rendered in dynamic camera movements that position the spectator as a surrogate partner in their tense mating dance, which yields disappointing results in competition. The filmmakers find a way to capture less obviously visually charged moments as well, framing Slavik and Anna in two-shots that emphasize their distance from one another even as they share the same space: Anna seems always to be hovering in the background on her Blackberry, eager for a window out. Slavik’s journey is a tricky one, then – a quest for self-mastery negotiated with another person who has her own set of goals.

Hot Docs 2012: Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (d. Stacy Peralta)

April 25, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

**½/****

by Angelo Muredda Stacy Peralta returns to skateboarding culture with mixed results in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. A sort of sequel to Dogtown and Z-Boys, which focused on his mates in early 1970s crew Zephyr, Peralta’s new film turns to the titular group of talented young misfits that he and business partner George Powell recruited in 1978, who went on to dominate the sport for the next decade. Like Dogtown, this is a likeable memory box of a movie, which briskly mixes up talking head interviews with scratchy archival footage and snapshots visibly manipulated by the director’s own hand. Peralta has a knack for converting alternative social history into this strangely effective hybrid of MTV and family album aesthetics. His firsthand experience and easy conversance with his subjects – who sometimes boyishly narrate his past actions to him with the kind of reverence guys usually reserve for dads and deities – makes for a good hook, and certainly there are worse tour guides through skater culture than a scrappy Jeff Daniels doppelgänger. Still, for an autobiography, this enthusiastic campfire reunion can feel cursory, especially at a bloated two-hour running time.

The Ghost Writer: FFC Interviews “The Innkeepers” Writer-Director Ti West

April 24, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

THE INNKEEPERS writer-director Ti West on the right way to use a train set

April 23, 2012|The irony of identifying Ti West as a member of the new guard in the horror genre is twofold in that first, there doesn’t appear to be a new guard in the horror genre, and secondly, if he does represent a revolution, it’s a revolution in retrograde. What seems refreshing about West’s films, particularly his lauded The House of the Devil and now The Innkeepers, is his dedication to character-driven pictures, shot on real film, with long takes and small moments–a babysitter listening to The Fixx on her Walkman, an asthmatic girl struggling to take out the garbage–that build, gradually, to “the goods” in the finale.

In conversation, West is direct to the verge of impatient, quick with unguarded opinions and apparently weary of the usual junket questions. I didn’t, therefore, ask him to rehash the story about meeting Kelly McGillis over Skype, or how cast and crew stayed at the Yankee Pedlar in Connecticut while filming The House of the Devil and how fortunate it was that they didn’t stay at a chain (specifically The Marriott) during that time, because it would have killed The Innkeepers in its cradle. I didn’t want to rehash the 17-day shoot, the strict limits on stock and the fear that they wouldn’t be able to complete the film should any reshoots be necessary…

But I did want to ask Mr. West about his relationship to FFC fave Larry Fessenden, producer for all of West’s films (except Cabin Fever 2, which was taken away from West–for reasons I also didn’t wish to rehash) to date. We spoke briefly via telephone last Wednesday in conjunction with the Blu-ray release of The Innkeepers.–Walter Chaw

The Woman in Black (2012) + The Innkeepers (2011)|The Innkeepers – Blu-ray Disc

April 23, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Horror, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE WOMAN IN BLACK
*/****
starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ciarán Hinds, Janet McTeer, Liz White
screenplay by Jane Goldman
directed by James Watkins

THE INNKEEPERS
***½/**** | Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw A beautifully outfitted, brilliantly designed Victorian jack-in-the-box, James Watkins’s The Woman in Black will likely be remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter commencement (given that no one saw December Boys). Alas, it squanders a pretty nice, ‘Tim Burton Sleepy Hollow‘ set-up in bumfuck England for a solid hour of crap jumping out of shadows. Popping up from behind bushes is startling, but it isn’t art (it’s not even clever), and at the end of the day, it’s only really entertaining if you or your date is a sixteen-year-old girl. Carrying the Hammer imprint and boasting production design so good that long stretches of the film are devoted to looking at it, the piece only ever honours its legacy and appearance with the brutality with which it handles its dead children and a delirious dinner scene in which a grief-besotted lady (Janet McTeer) treats her little dogs like babies and carves something on her dinner table whilst possessed of a hilarious fit. The rest of it is garbage.

Bad Teacher (2011) – Unrated Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

April 23, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

*/**** Image A Sound B- Extras C-
starring Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Lucy Punch, Jason Segel
screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Jefferson Robbins It’s time for a teacher-centric dark comedy, I think. American public education, always beset, is under threat today by moralists, union-busters, profiteers, economic malaise, and taxpayers who simply refuse to vote for better school funding. We say that children are our future, yet we bus them off every day to institutions we no longer find trustworthy. Federal regulation collides with common sense, and all that matters in the end is filling in the bubbles on a Scantron sheet. Education needs its own The Hospital or Network–something like an update of Arthur Hiller’s 1984 Teachers, but with more focus, and better bite. What it doesn’t need, or at least doesn’t benefit from, is Bad Teacher.

Uncle Buck (1989) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2012Posted in1980s, 2012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, John Hughes

***½/**** | Image B Sound B-
starring John Candy, Amy Madigan, Jean Louisa Kelly, Macaulay Culkin
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers It’s not John Hughes’s best film, but Uncle Buck could be his funniest, as well as his saddest. Saddest for many reasons, some of which are beyond the movie’s control. John Hughes is gone, John Candy’s gone, Macaulay Culkin’s innocence is gone; because of its place on the precipice of Hughes’s ’90s decline, revisiting Uncle Buck has long been a bittersweet prospect, but now that it’s definitively the last good John Hughes film, it’s taken on the funereal feeling of old home movies starring dead relatives. Still, the sadness isn’t entirely from without. There is in this movie a raging pathos that begins with the pariahdom of the title character and continues through a motif that finds some lost soul standing in long-shot beneath an archway (forming a makeshift picture frame), gazing uncomprehendingly at someone else, the very portrait of quiet suffering. Buck’s on the receiving end of one of these pitiful stares at least once, when the movie’s putative love interest, Chanice (Amy Madigan), walks in on him dancing with a neighbour lady (Laurie Metcalf). The song on the soundtrack is “Laugh Laugh,” The Beau Brummels‘ spiteful “I told you so” to a woman who chose the wrong man, and as Chanice’s heartbreak wafts through the air, lead singer Sal Valentino, sounding suddenly compassionate, croons, “Lonely… Oh, so lonely…”1

Rebecca (1940) – Blu-ray Disc

April 21, 2012Posted in****/****, 1940s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama

Rebeccacap3

****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Robert E. Sherwood and Joan Harrison;
adaptation by Philip MacDonald and Michael Hogan, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
–“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Wallace Stevens

Let’s take a moment to talk about water.

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) + Lockout (2012)

April 20, 2012Posted in2012, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
*/****
starring Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz
screenplay by Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard
directed by Drew Goddard

LOCKOUT
**/****
starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Peter Stormare
screenplay by Stephen Saint Leger, James Mather & Luc Besson
directed by Saint & Mather

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Drew Goddard’s (and Joss Whedon’s, you won’t be able to forget) unfortunate giant middle finger The Cabin in the Woods takes a shit-eating high-concept only to do nothing interesting with it for about 80 of its 100 minutes. Because the high concept is the crux of the film and the elbow of the argument, as they say, stop right here if you want to stay a spoiler virgin. For me, I went in not knowing anything about the movie–didn’t even see the trailer–on the back of assurances from many respected friends and colleagues that this was, in fact, a must-see for the genre fan. What I should have asked was, “What genre?” The Cabin in the Woods is Scream for what Joe Bob Briggs used to call “Spam in a cabin” flicks, in which a group of nubile youngsters piles into an unreliable junker to spend a fateful weekend in some backwoods hick oasis where they’re picked off, one by one, by some combination of demons and Ted Nugent. The difference being that Scream was cold, nihilistic, scary as hell, and a lovely example of the thing it was simultaneously deconstructing. The reason The Cabin in the Woods is neither revolutionary nor “ground-breaking” is that everything it does has already been done, repeatedly and better, and that rather than serving as a sterling example of that which it is trying to pinion (thus establishing its credibility as satire, see?), it’s really just another instalment in the live-action Scooby-Doo franchise.

Unforgiven (1992) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook)

Unforgiven (1992) – Blu-ray Disc (Digibook)

April 19, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Western

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Webb Peoples
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Even if time and HBO’s “Deadwood” have made Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven into something less revisionist and more just a furthering of the Siegel/Leone mythology, the fact remains that the picture’s earned its place in the company of other flawed masterpieces like The Searchers and The Man from Laramie. At the time of its release in 1992, as my editor Bill once ably laid out, its pending release was actually seen as a joke, earned at the expense of a trio of legendary, completely indefensible flops. Its serious-mindedness–what appeared to be an unsentimental accounting for the remorseless bastards Eastwood had parlayed into immortality–therefore took audiences expecting another Heartbreak Ridge, “western edition,” by surprise.

Damsels in Distress (2012)

April 19, 2012Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Analeigh Tipton, Megan Echikunwoke
written and directed by Whit Stillman

by Angelo Muredda Damsels in Distress is a hard movie to sink your teeth into–a stick of gum soaked in brine. Whit Stillman’s first effort since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, it’s a light-headed fantasia that’s committed to its gonzo vision, best expressed by a character who calls her favourite soap scent “very precise.” Very precise, indeed: Less wealthy than Metropolitan‘s socialites, Damsels‘ cadre of female sophomores breathe even more rarefied air. Though each actress works her peculiar cadence into these pronouncements to uncanny effect, they seem possessed by their creator even more than is typical for Stillman’s characters, genteelly handling accusations of hypocrisy with defenses like, “We are all flawed. Must that render us mute to the flaws of others?” Stillman’s rigorously formal dialogue is always a trial-by-fire for actors–easily passed in Last Days by Kate Beckinsale, for example, but stumbled over by Matt Keesler, who looks embarrassed to identify as a “loyal adherent to the disco movement”–but something’s different this time. Always accused of being hermetic but usually too enamoured with other people’s ephemera (e.g., collections of Scrooge McDuck memorabilia) for that to be true, this time he’s properly set up shop in the projection booth at the back of his mind.

The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

April 17, 2012Posted in2011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale
screenplay by Terence Davies, based on the play by Terence Rattigan
directed by Terence Davies

by Angelo Muredda In Of Time and the City, Terence Davies’s self-described love song and eulogy for his native Liverpool, the director halts his psycho-geographic walking tour of old haunts at one point to pay backhanded tribute to the Merseybeat movement. With the meteoric rise of The Beatles, he pronounces in sulky baritone, the well-crafted love songs on which he was weaned became, overnight, as antiquated as curling tongs. Yet just as abruptly as pop turned beat, the young Davies went another way: “I discovered Mahler,” he drawls, “and responded completely to his every overwrought note.” Davies’s studiously unfashionable gravitation to the Romantic, largely for its affinities with the torch songs he so recently mourned, finds apt expression in his sixth feature, a beautifully overripe adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea. Like its source, the film chronicles the misfortunes of Hester (Rachel Weisz), a judge’s wife in postwar London who leaves her cerebral older spouse, William (Simon Russell Beale), for sexual fulfilment with wastrel Royal Air Force pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), and subsequently finds herself unloved and in limbo. Only a recent convert to such reckless emotional indulgence, Hester, when we meet her, is very much the Mahler sort. Despite its apparent distance from more clearly autobiographical films like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, then, Davies is an ideal steward for this material–every bit as attentive to matters of exquisite sadness as his protagonist.