TIFF 2008: "Celebrity" Sightings

This year's been very dry as far as celebrity sightings. I don't really go out of my way to look for celebrities so here are the two that I happened upon:

• Elvis Mitchell - He's a film critic, does that count? I didn't know what Elvis looked like until I checked out an interview he did with Quentin Tarantino that showed up on my OnDemand a few weeks back. With a name like "Elvis," I wasn't expecting a brother. And I certainly wasn't expecting that fucking hair! Apparently it's really bad to be sitting behind him at screenings as his dreads are a hindrance to seeing the film.
• Marilyn Manson - I think it was him. I saw this tall, thin, pale guy get out of a limo today and a woman next to me said, "That's fuckin' Marilyn Manson, I love his shit!" I'll count that as a confirmed sighting.

TIFF 2008: Biting the Hand that Feeds

It's been four days now and I've managed to see only two of the Midnight Movie selections at Press/Industry screenings. This kind of blows. In years past the MM flicks where shown--gasp--more than once (sometimes) and usually the day of or day before their Midnight screening in order to allow reviews of these films to run in a timely manner. As it is, I'm two Midnight Madness movies behind. Worse, tomorrow there are two MM screenings on Tuesday... within a half hour of one another thanks to the cockamamie P/I programming schedule.

I really am taking umbrage with the screening schedule this year. It used to be that Sunday screenings started a little later due to all the "heavy partying" on Saturday night (not to mention public transportation running late on Sundays). Not this year. As I mentioned, there were eight films that just I wanted to see between 9AM and 10AM today. None of these films are getting a repeat screening with one exception -- Blindness screened at 9AM and 12:30PM meaning that I couldn't see either of these screenings due to my 10AM that lasted past 12:30PM. Not too smart, guys.

Repeat screenings are supposed to happen on different days at generally different times. Likewise, if you're going to have one screening that's at a highly popular time, the other screening should be at a "low traffic time." And, with this whole notion of "Priority Press" screenings, you would think that the "Priority Press" screening should happen first and not after the general P/I screening (as was the case with Burning Plain).

The festival used to be fairly "front loaded" with bigger gala pictures showing for P/I early in the week (Thursday / Friday). Now they're spread out all over, leaving Thursday a gaping wound. I struggled to find things to fill my Thursday just as I struggled to find things to fill my Saturday, just as I struggled today to find something this evening to see. As everything I really wanted to watch played between 9 and 10 this morning, there was little left after my 3:45PM show let out. This lead me down to the Scotiabank to see Babylon A.D.. I'm determined to see four films a day, even if this means I have to pay to see something first run! I'm rather be spending my time watching and writing about movies that really deserve the ink but TIFF isn't allowing me to do that.

Rather than show Flame & Citron, Inju, La Bete Dans L'Ombre, Tears for Sale, or Achilles and the Tortoise (all things on my "I'd like to see" list and all things that played against The Good, The Bad, The Weird and Dead Girl) for a second time this evening for me to review, I was at the first run theater like the rest of the Great Unwashed. C'mon, TIFF, get yer head out of yer ass.

I don't expect every screening configuration to work out but this year's just been sucks for getting that proper blend of interesting films plus available showtimes (with a dash of "convenient theaters" so you're not running around town). Adding additional venues such as the AMC 24 down at Yonge and Dundas should have helped to make more screenings available for P/I folks. It seems that quite the opposite has occurred.

</whine>

TIFF 2008: Day 4

Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom / The Good The Bad The Weird (Ji-woon Kim, 2008, Korea)
Where the action of Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly played out against a backdrop of the U.S. Civil War, the occupation of Korea/Manchuria by the Japanese integrates far more in Ji-woon Kim's The Good The Bad The Weird. Apart from the title and the film's finale, TGTBTW seems more indebted to modern filmmakers such as Takashi Miike and Robert Rodriguez than Sergio Leone.

TGTBTW stars Kang-ho Song as Yoon Tae-Goo, The Weird. This outlaw looks like he's straight out of the Korean conflict with his ubiquitous earflap hat. He's the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, and the chaotic center around which the film's narrative revolves. He's got a gang of ragamuffins, the Japanese Army, a talented bounty hunter, and a black-clad baddie all after him and a pilfered map of Manchuria. The latter players are The Good (Woo-sung Jung) and The Bad (Byung-hun Lee).

While much of the film appears to take place in “The Old East,” the presence of seemingly anachronistic Jeeps and motorcycles leave many viewers scratching their heads. Others will just kick back and enjoy the ride which includes a bevy of gunslinging set pieces. The relationship between The Good and The Weird feels more akin to that of Harmonica and Cheyenne in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, especially as they're more remote and reserved in comparison to Tuco from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Raucous, predictable and entertaining, TGTBTW is a fun ride.

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Deadgirl (Marcel Sarmiento & Gadi Harel, 2008, USA)
Sex with an attractive girl with no emotional strings attached. That sounds like a lot of guys' dream. If that hot girl was actually more room temperature and found bound in the basement of a mental hospital, this might present a problem to some dudes...but not all. The fact that she's actually a zombie might further cull her potential suitors down to a select group. Luckily, JT (Noah Segan) has no bones about getting a boner for the living dead when they've got a good body and won't talk back. He's all about porking Deadgirl (Jenny Spain) in any orifice she has, with the exception of her hungry, gnashing mouth. His good friend Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez), however, has a few problems with JT's newfound passion. Rickie's got his dick in his heart over JoAnne Skinner (Candice Accola), his childhood crush that he “lost to puberty” (and a dumb jock boyfriend).

An interesting examination of classism and cliques in high school as well as when the boundaries around necrophilia get a little blurry, Deadgirl is filled with unpleasant moments that will polarize audiences; either utterly repulsing them or making them laugh with pleasant discomfort. Once the story gets going, it's fairly predictable (some see the conclusion coming from miles away) but it's still highly enjoyable to see it play out, especially after a wonderfully creepy opening. Shiloh Fernandez can be fairly grating (no matter how much he may look like Joaquin Phoenix) but Noah Segan picks up the acting slack with his terrific turn as lovable scamp JT. Sick, twisted, and delightful.

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Plastic City / Dangkou (Nelson Yu Lik-wai, 2008, Brazil)
Wow this movie is bad. It starts out promising with Anthony Wong as Yuda, an up-and-coming import/export man who has all the right connections and an ambitious adopted son, Kirin (Joe Odagiri). It looks as if the movie might start to follow a kind of Godfather path with Yuda being sold down the river by his political affiliates in order to favor a New Wave gangster who's less respected among the Sao Paolo community but more efficient in paying graft. Yeah, that might have been a good movie... but that's not in the cards for Plastic City.

Yado gets carted off to jail and Kirin's left to run the family business for a while. This would have been a good opportunity to give the film more of a “heroic bloodshed” feel by adopting some A Better Tomorrow tropes. No, again that might have made the film interesting. Instead, it'd be better to never find out what's motivating these characters and to just make the film look interesting rather than be interesting. Had the entire movie been the few minutes of experimental digital work that director Nelson Yu Lik-wai employs scattershot, it would have been effective. As it stands, the narrative feels as if someone lost a few pages out of the script (say one page for every eight) and no one bothered to worry about it. The show must go on.

The movie takes as many twists and turns as the Amazon and makes about as much sense as the ponderous finale about “all things return to the river.” It's interesting when it's experimental but sucks when it's a narrative. If you want to be cool, pretend you understand it and talk loudly about it at your next hipster party.

Escalator to DEATH

TIFF 2008: The Truth About Canadian Films

It's a fact: Most people would rather eat their own children than see a Canadian Film.*

Miraculously, there are not one but two Canadian films at this year's festival that I not only "wouldn't mind" seeing but actually want to see. The only thing is... I can't see either of them. They're both playing against other films which I want to see more. So, here's hoping that Real Time and Pontypool find their way a few hundred miles West and cross into the Detroit area.

*Exceptions made for Guy Maddin, John Paizs, and David Cronenberg films (and a few others). I once ate a neighbor's child when just threatened to have to watch an Atom Egoyan film. If I see that chick with the thick eyebrows one more time... (shaking fist at sky).

TIFF 2008: Walkout Count - 3

Adding to the walkout count came Burning Plain (there's a plane in it that crashes... but it doesn't catch fire). Once I figured out the "trick" of the narrative, the film turned into another "Lifetime Drama."

And, number three walkout was 7915 km. I expected a documentary about a race across Africa. What I got was interviews with people who saw the race. Dude, I want to see cars tearing ass across the desert... I don't care about your camel.

Afterwards there was little else I wanted to see today (compared to the eight films tomorrow that I want to see that all start between 9AM and 10AM). I tried to get into $5 A Day with Skizz but was told that the situation for getting in via the Rush Line was pretty much hopeless. Instead, I enjoyed Hamlet 2. It's not a great film but it was a nice parody of the "feel good indie" kind of crap that usually gets the hype at Sundance.

TIFF 2008: Day 3

Witch Hunt (Dana Nachman & Don Hardy Jr, 2008, USA)
Where some documentaries attempt an unobjective approach to subject matters, these wishy washy works are far less effective than their unfair and unbalanced brethren. Rather than playing to the illusion of subjective neutrality, far more effective documentaries present all sides of an issue while clearly adopting a viewpoint, one the filmmakers feel is the “right” one.

From its inflammatory title, Witch Hunt pulls no punches in portraying a paranoia present in the Kern County, California of the 1980s where at least a dozen people were unjustly accused and convicted of child molestation. The ten subjects in Dana Nachman and Don Hardy Jr's film were charged with hundreds of counts of molestation and sentenced to over a thousand years in prison. This apparent plague of molestation began after newly elected District Attorney Ed Jagels—running on a “tough on crime” platform—took office.

Rather than spark concern over the repeating patter of railroading these middle/lower class parents, the public—fed by a complacent media—merely roiled with fear. It wasn't until these alleged molesters were behind bars and a fresh wave of accusations, far more heinous than the last, garnered attention from the California Attorney General. As with so many wild tales, the new accusations devolved into fantasies including human sacrifice and dime store Satanism. The CA AG found that Kern County investigation/interrogation techniques were less than ideal, paving the way for overturning the previous spate of convictions. This less easier said than done. While the innocent wasted in prison, their lives ripped apart, the “victims” of their “crimes” began to feel the effects of being instruments of cowboy justice.

Witch Hunt is the film that The Jaundiced Eye and Capturing the Friedmans so desperately wanted to be. Rather than asking open-ended questions, the film provides answers thus painting a vivid portrait of political maneuvering at the price of civil liberty.

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JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2008, Belgium)
A highly engaging experiment in self-reflexivity, this film continues to prove that “The Muscles from Brussels” has a keen sense of humor about his screen persona. The film opens with any Van Damme fan's wet dream—a one-take scene of total Van Dammage wherein Van Damme destroys an army, rescues a prisoner, and kicks his way through scores of enemy soldiers. This opening also underscores the problems of the action star. Credited as “the man who brought John Woo to America” via Hard Target, Van Damme's subsequent films have been multinational lower-tier efforts with nothing approaching the promise Van Damme expressed in the early '90s.

The film finds Van Damme struggling for artistic credibility, cash, and his daughter. She's embarrassed by her dad and would rather live with her mother. Returning to Brussels, he gets caught in the crossfire of a bank robbery, suddenly plunging him into some all-too-familiar action film territory.

Told via a fractured time structure that continually shatters into smaller pieces, the film works as a cohesive whole. JCVD boasts a washed-out, dirty color palette which helps reflect our hero's drab mood (though does little to keep the English subtitles from disappearing into overexposed areas of the screen). Those surprised by Van Damme's acting chops must not be familiar with Time Cop. Indeed, JCVD allows Van Damme to flex his inner thespian and kick some emotional butt.

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Burning Plain (Guillermo Arriaga, 2008, USA)
At the crux of Guillermo Arriaga's Burning Plain is a formidable performance by Charlize Theron. She plays Sylvia / Mariana, a damaged woman bent on self-destruction and filled with self-loathing. She sleeps with any man that crosses her path when she's not working as a sommelier / hostess at a posh oceanside restaurant where the roiling water reflects her inner turmoil.

Told as a series of flashbacks in three different time frames cross-cut with "present day" Portland, the narrative is a puzzle box. Once the box is assembled, however, the game is over and the film becomes just another box into which are placed the kind of performances guaranteed to garner Oscar nominations with themes sure to titillate the Oprah crowd.

Often Burning Plain felt like it was based on a book where the winding timeline would have served the narrative rather than the opposite. As it is, this melodrama could easily have been a Hallmark movie of the week. It's far more plain than burning.

TIFF 2008: Walkout Count - 1

So far I've only walked out of one film, Los Paranoicos / The Paranoids. This movie was a little too self-reflexive for me with its hapless protagonist working on a script during his kooky life. After about twenty minutes I started ignoring the subtitles to see if I could keep up with the dialogue based on my knowledge of Spanish. After ten more minutes, even that bored me. I doubt much more happened in the film.

TIFF 2008: Day 2

Sauna (Antti-Jussi Annila, 2008, Finland)
A group of Swedes and Russians journey through the wilderness, marking a new border between their countries after a long, bloody war. Brothers Erik and Knut Spore comprise the Finnish team. Erik (Ville Virtanen) has bloodied his hands with seventy three men, women and children as a soldier while his brother (Tommi Eronen) was away at University.

Visions of a helpless farm girl plague Knut. He sees her as a J-Horror apparition; all long hair and wetness. The watery spirit plays into the elemental themes of the film with frequent discussions of fire used to purge sin and water to wash it away. Knut attempts to rid himself of his visions in the hot waters of the titular sauna which stands next to the strange village the group discovers in the middle of an expansive swamp.

The featureless facade has stood in the swamp since time immemorial, predating any known prior inhabitants of the village which is now populated with seventy three souls. The locale serves as Perdition. It's a place of ancient evil where statues bleed and men claw at their own eyes to avoid terrible visions.

This film marks a surprising comeback for director Annila whose Jade Warrior was seen as a pale imitation of Chinese chop sockey (while some accuse Sauna as being too close to Tarkovsky's Stalker). Expert pacing keeps Sauna moving at a good clip, surfacing the scares frequently while never ceasing to build the central terror to which the thrills cleave.

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Religulous (Larry Charles, 2008, USA)
Winner of the “Most Mispronounced American Film” award, Religulous is a comedic documentary which pokes fun at the ever present pink elephant of taboo conversation, organized religion. Concentrating primarily on those kooky Christians, director Larry Charles takes a more direct approach to satirizing American insanity then his previous effort Borat. Charles employs outspoken comedian Bill Maher to eloquently skewer religion as the opiate and destroyer of people.

Often akin to shooting fish in a barrel, Maher finds much at which to shake his head in desperation as he discusses faith, accuracy, and morality with scary hard core Christians. Highlights include a visit to a truck driver chapel, a trip to Orlando, Florida's Holy Land Experience, and a tour of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Maher waxes about the “shamelessly inventive” Christianity to which so many ascribe; a faith sullied by superstitions and based on discordant, antiquated texts.

Briefly touching on sects such as Mormonism and Scientology (both played for tremendous laughs on episodes of South Park), other cults such as Pentecostals were sadly absent. Who doesn't like a good “proving your faith by handling snakes” scene? Other missed opportunities include a discussion of transubstantiation, more talk of the Biblical definition of “abomination,” churches being exempt from taxation (in a country built upon the separation of Church and State), and mysterious apparitions of saintly faces in oil stains and grilled cheese sandwiches.

The film falters when it leaves the confines of the United States and briefly examines Judaism and Islam in Europe and the Holy Land (an entire documentary could be made about the “Muhammad comics” alone). This lack of focus is forgivable, but an unfortunate misstep. America is a comedic treasure trove with all manner of religious nut falling from trees without the slightest shaking.

A good companion piece to Hell House, Jesus Camp, and For the Bible Tells Me So, this decrying of backwards thinking could be turned into a weekly series without much effort!

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Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008, USA)
The Western has enjoyed a resurgence over the last few years with notable entires including The Proposition and 3:10 to Yuma. Based on a book by Robert B. Parker (Spenser for Hire, Appaloosa really works well when it avoids pilfering from Western progenitors.

The story of two roving lawmen, Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), these two blue-eyed gunmen share an endearing banter with Everett always helping to expand Virgil's vocabulary. The pair take charge of Appaloosa, NM, where local cattle baron, Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), has started to go rogue. He killed the last sheriff rather than let two of his men face the Law.

The film soon comes to a screeching halt with the appearance of Allison French. Played by Renee Zellweger with all the squint and shiny face she can muster, the actress seems to be channeling Shirley MacLaine from Two Mules for Sister Sara. Allison claims to be a widow (and she probably is), but she's really a society whore, hungry for power and prestige. With a better script and better actress, her part could have been far more interesting. As it stands, she's a damper on the action.

Only when Allison serves as a damsel in distress is her character effective. Here Appaloosa charges back along as a heroic and slightly introspective film. However, the momentum abruptly ends about a half hour before the movie concludes, wrapping up with a long-winded third act.

Somewhere in Appaloosa are elements to a far better film.