December movies #2

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2007)

The Royal cinema on College West reopened in mid-December, complete with picketing projectionists and the Toronto premiere of Reginald Harkema’s Monkey Warfare, a highly appealing little movie (lasting just 75 minutes and appearing to have the budget of the average wedding video). Don McKellar and Tracy Wright play a jaded couple, one-time revolutionaries of sorts, now living rather aridly in Parkdale, making money mostly by scavenging (aided with a sweet rent deal from an inattentive landlord). When a young drug dealer (Nadia Litz) comes on the scene the balance shifts, in some ways for the better, in others not. Harkema perfectly catches the grungy lifestyle, and evokes the earlier, funnier Jean-Luc Godard through his use of jump cuts, graphics and suchlike; the movie conveys an authentic hankering for the thrill of making some kind of stand, and for how heavy life can be without it. It ends rather abruptly though, leaving you wishing he could have extended his examination further, although in the circumstances it’s easy to believe he just ran out of money.

The Good German

Steven Soderbergh seems to be in a position now where he could whip up money to make just about anything, and his new film The Good German is one of his periodic “conceptual” projects, the concept in this case being a modern-day movie made in the style of something from the 40’s (apparently to the point of using old cameras). This stars George Clooney (certainly the best available choice) as a military investigator in post-war Berlin, trying to untangle a complicated plot involving femme fatale Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire as a scheming driver. Nothing about the film strikes radically new narrative or thematic ground, so on the face of it the payoff would merely be to craft a viewing experience with a sixty-year-old feel to it, but I’m not sure what value one could ever really put on that. Not to mention that (to my thinking at least) Soderbergh confuses the premise through a very modern use of language and violence.

Still, the film does a good job of crafting an old-fashioned Big Sleep kind of complexity, along with multiple moral shadings, although it tends to make you wish for the zippiness of a Howard Hawks (The Good German is quite laborious and monotone). The final scene does bring a contemporary note of reckoning to a Casablanca-style set-up, and I will say overall it left with me a more compelling aftertaste than I might have expected at the time. Still, overall it’s a film that might have been designed just to be lost in the shuffle.

The Good Shepherd

It’s only near the end, when we see the preparations for a family wedding intercut with the build-up to the bride’s demise, that the ambition of Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd becomes completely clear. Matt Damon plays this film’s Michael Corleone, but the institution here is the CIA and its wartime precursor, which he joins with the same patriotic optimism that caused Al Pacino to enlist in The Godfather. He rises in the organization, but the original values become abstracted and distant, the difference between the good and the bad guys becomes tenuous and shifting, his connection to his family almost disintegrates, and in the end he’s responsible for terrible acts, but on he goes, dead inside, a virtual automaton.

Unfortunately, The Good Shepherd is far less dynamic than The Godfather, with none of its flair for accessible yet nuanced storytelling; De Niro is more of an assembler than a real director. The cast is impressive (Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, De Niro himself and many others, surrounding the minimalist Damon), but it feels too often that we’re merely watching a parade of cameos. Most problematic is De Niro’s failure (despite the movie’s 160 minute length) to communicate the real geopolitical implications of the CIA’s growing reach; we seldom feel the raw power that comes to lie at Damon’s fingertips, and it’s a mere guess what it does to his psyche. The film ends up unequal to its subject in almost every respect, clinging to superficial devices and images when it should have been complex and upsetting.

Two Fantasies

Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is one of last year’s most distinctive and compelling films (and if you remember my ten best list from a few weeks ago, that’s saying a lot). It’s set in Spain in 1944, in an outpost where fascist soldiers stake out a group of forest-dwelling rebels. The evil captain summons his pregnant wife to stay with him, and she brings along her 11 year old daughter from a previous marriage, a girl named Ofelia who is quickly introduced into a magical underworld of fairies and fauns and strange creatures, which may or may not be a creation of her imagination, and in which she may or may not be the reincarnation of a princess who fled centuries earlier to the world of men. The film is superbly visualized, expertly constructed, and completely mesmerizing; it's satisfying both as a muscular adult fairy tale and as a serious minded (if enjoyably lurid) depiction of the fascist psyche. It’s both highly specific and illuminating, and at the same time timeless and universal (one suspects that a greater knowledge of the time and place and surrounding culture would open up almost boundless resonances). Del Toro’s previous films (including Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone) have been a bit too conceptual and genre-bound for my own taste, but Pan’s Labyrinth has a rare assurance.
 

The following day I saw Steven Shainberg’s Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which occasionally struck me as a variation on del Toro’s film, except that the mistreated girl is now famous photographer Arbus in her formative 50’s housewife phase, and instead of the magical underworld the film conjures up a weird upstairs neighbour who leads her into a personal awakening. This is a man covered in hair, played by Robert Downey Jr., who has connections with a whole network of physically distinctive people of the kind who would come to populate much of Arbus’ work. As the film’s title and the opening credits make clear, this is all invention, and I’m not sure it’s particularly flattering to Arbus: at times she seems like no more than a flighty sensualist. At best, the concept does no more than vaguely explain her affinity for certain types, but this doesn’t take us very far toward understanding the rigours of her very distinctive aesthetic approach. On its own terms though, Fur is surprisingly beguiling, and quite sensitive and provocative on a scene-by-scene level. It’s best taken, I think, as a wacky fantasy that – despite the lack of any overt supernatural presence – might actually have less to do with the real world than Pan’s Labyrinth.

Best of 2007

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2007)

Here are my favourite ten films released in Toronto this year. It was a pretty good year, although this list didn’t come together quite as easily as last year’s – the last two choices below might easily change tomorrow, and then again the day after that. Apologies to any masterpieces released in the last few days of the year. Happy New Year!

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (Cristian Mungiu)

Mungiu’s remarkable film won the top prize at Cannes, and would likely deserve the Oscar. It’s about a young Romanian student who helps her roommate obtain an abortion, and I can’t recall a film that illustrates certain aspects of this procedure more clearly.  The film is realistic, and realistically depressing, an anthropological eye-opener, and afterwards I kept mulling over its endless subtleties: the theme of physical and existential (and in particular for women, biological) confinement; its immense technical smarts, producing one breathtaking piece of execution after another. This is probably my favourite of the films included here – I wouldn’t have wanted to change a frame.

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes)

As deliberate a head-scratcher as anyone’s come up with recently, this is a meditation on the life of Bob Dylan, represented by six different actors playing different versions (or evocations) of the man at different points in his life (or different extrapolations of his myth), poetically intertwined and juxtaposed. It’s quite stunningly achieved, executed with enormous panache – it’s immensely visually and tonally varied (from pseudo documentary to utter poetic association), a constant tumble of allusion and connection. Sometimes it’s a bit gimmicky of course, but even when you don’t understand some of Haynes’ choices they’re intriguingly executed and thematically provocative within the overall scheme.

Inland Empire (David Lynch)

I didn’t give Lynch’s reworking of Mulholland Drive that glowing a review at the time, but of all these films, it’s the one I most wanted to see again quickly. Lynch of course has an unparalleled activity to evoke menace and lurking threats, and to create a sense of some underlying coherence no matter how the films’ raw elements dispute that. Inland Empire, shot on digital video with an often-grainy image quality, is suffused in this tone. Focusing on the intertwined inner and outer realities of an actress played by Laura Dern, it sustains its project over three hours, suggesting an almost limitless capacity for further revelation, or confusion, the two being much the same in this case. Still, I’m not sure what else can possibly lie for Lynch in this direction.

Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran)

Running almost three hours, this French version of the D. H. Lawrence novel is an extremely detailed observation of the frustrated Connie’s sexual and emotional awakening, via an increasingly passionate affair with the gamekeeper on her disabled husband’s vast estate. This is very much a woman’s story, and has been criticized in some quarters for what might be seen as wishy-washy romanticism (and in others for overlooking Lawrence’s social consciousness). But if you submit to Ferran’s sometimes-quirky perspective, and to the mesmerizingly detailed performance by lead actress Marina Hands (who also won the top French award), it’s extremely satisfying.

Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood)

Eastwood’s second Iwo Jima film of last year opened here in January, focusing on the Japanese soldiers hopelessly assigned to defend that wretched island. Much more stark and pained than its predecessor Flags of our Fathers, it drives home how Flags – for all its apparent respect toward American heartland values – exposes the machinations of a puffed-up, corrupt empire. It has its weaknesses, but it’s a film of great eloquence and weight, establishing the arrogance of the very concepts of winning and losing in war.

No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson)

This highly impactful documentary sets out some of the colossal errors, largely rooted in arrogance and complacency you can’t even process, behind the current mess in Iraq. Inevitably, most of the culpable parties declined to be interviewed – the main exception, who at least deserves points for being game, confirms everything you ever suspected about the cloistered indifference of the decision-making process. Much as the war continues to be debated and analyzed, Ferguson’s film reminds us that full mass recognition of the venality of what’s been visited upon us is yet to be achieved.

Offside (Jafar Panahi)

Like Iranian director Panahi’s earlier film The Circle, Offside is about the treatment of women, focusing here on their exclusion from soccer stadiums: the official explanation is that this protects them from the cursing and excesses of the excited males, but of course that’s merely rationalization. Presented almost in real time, the film is mesmerizing, and extremely subtle. Again as in The Circle, the focus on the women doesn’t preclude awareness that such an ideology traps both sexes, and there’s much humanity in the guards’ treatment of their captives. The film isn’t didactic – there’s some (albeit bleak) comedy in many of the exchanges, and the most compelling argument for change is contained simply in the energy, eloquence and commitment of the women themselves.

Ratatouille (Brad Bird)

This animated film about Remy, a French rat with a passion for gourmet cooking, is a staggering visual achievement, sending its unconstrained camera on journeys of impossibly intricate choreography: Remy is simply one of the all-time triumphs of anthropomorphism – immensely sympathetic, but always very plainly a rat. Most of all, apart from doing a stellar job of promoting the merits of good, natural food, it’s transcendent in its insistence that artistic achievement can spring from the least likely of sources. In this regard, Ratatouille is a perfect marriage of form and content – for doubters like me, it’s not quite as miraculous as a dreamy meal cooked up by a rodent, but it’s in the ballpark.

Control (Anton Corbijn)

This is about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who killed himself in 1980 at the age of 23, on the eve of the band’s first trip to the US. Directed by Corbijn (a renowned rock photographer who knew Curtis well) in pristine black and white, this is a deliberately downbeat but highly skilled telling; you’ve probably never seen a rock biopic so immune to the thrill of performing and all that goes with it. It allows us a general sense of Curtis’ inspirations and frustrations, but it’s ineffably mysterious, with a sullied, thwarted hope at its centre.
 

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)

This won the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, and is a most worthy entry in Germany’s continuing dissection of its taxing past century. Set in 1984 East Germany, a stiff-necked Stasi (secret police) officer is given a surveillance assignment, to uncover the suspected subversive activities of a notable playwright and his girlfriend, an esteemed actress. The complications that follow make for a fascinating narrative, loaded with significant moral and political weight. The film depicts a ruling system that’s totally lost its ideological bearings, serving only to crush or warp everyone within it, although it’s also about the power of art in a totalitarian state.

Christmas movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2007)

Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal is a superbly potent, gripping entertainment, but never so potent or gripping that you forget you’re watching a blatant melodrama. Cate Blanchett is a new, pretty teacher at a rough-edged London school who crosses madly over the line, having an affair with a 15-year-old boy. She’s caught by a sour-faced, unfulfilled older teacher played by Judi Dench, who imagines herself a potential lover and soulmate. There’s no possibility of a good outcome, and the film is as concentrated as an acid drip feed, crafting extremely memorable characters and confrontations with barely an excess frame or syllable. The casting, of course, is the key. Dench is winning most of the praise, but good as she is, I never really thought she surpassed the basic simplicity of her character’s conception. Blanchett on the other hand is a complete wonder, transcendently embodying a thrilling network of neurosis and impulses and desires. The film always seems capably of shifting onto a more challenging thematic level, but never actually makes the leap – the conventional final scene is particularly disappointing. Still, for those too squeamish to sit through Hostel, this is good edge of the seat stuff.

Children of Men

The real scandal of our times, of course, is in how the news media continues to occupy us with such passing melodramas while the overarching issue, the only one really, comes into focus only in fits and starts, still failing to grab any meaningful policy traction. I’m talking about climate change, the environment, the sustainability of the whole damn thing, and it’s only the thinnest of silver linings that the issue seems somewhat more central to the political debate than it did a year ago. If you spend as much time as I do fantasizing gloomily about where this is all leading, then Children of Men may be (or looked at another way, absolutely may not be) a can’t miss film. This is a stunning imagining of where we might get to in a mere twenty years – a world recognizably our own, with some technological advancement, but catastrophic overall decline otherwise. It exists at a slight tangent to our real nightmares, for the premise here is an infertile world, where the youngest living person is 18, and life is merely a prolonged deathwatch, trying to hang onto some kind of functioning society while collapsing hopelessly upon itself, morally and financially and culturally.

The film, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, is superbly well conceived and directed – the attention to detail is stunning, and Cuaron’s control of his medium is masterly. Its limitation is that once this is all established, the focus of the narrative sometimes feels a little too narrow: Clive Owen plays a now-cynical former idealist who finds himself safeguarding the only pregnant woman in the world, and has to protect her from an insurgent group who want to use her baby for their own ends. In large part it’s a chase thriller, with some stock characters and set-ups, although all searingly well executed. The film’s lasting impact is pretty much all established in its first third, and there’s a bit of a sense of letdown as that becomes clear, but still, what a dynamite piece of work overall,

The Painted Veil

In a very different vein, John Curran’s The Painted Veil is a delicate, moving adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel, about a scientist husband who cruelly drags his unfaithful wife into a remote cholera zone in 1920’s China. The film is quite a throwback, charting the shifts in their relationship against a highly pictorial backdrop and some old-fashioned personal dangers. Edward Norton and Naomi Watts are both perfectly in tune with the material, and the film gains resonance both from the heightened current sense of China (depicted here at the point where foreign intervention is becoming less welcome) and from how the underlying arc of the wife’s personal journey remains oddly recognizable (if the stuff I read in woman’s magazines is anything to go by). The movie wins sympathy for sheer optimism: as if such a project, released in the same week as the other films in this article, could possibly carve out space for itself.

Curse of the Golden Flower is the new film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou, another immense historical spectacle in the vein of his Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Golden Flower centres on a powerful 10^th century emperor (Chow Yun-Fat), his beautiful wife (Gong Li) and three fine sons; the empire initially seems impregnable, until the strains and machinations within the family spawn an unravelling. It struck me that House of Flying Daggers, for all its scope, had only four speaking parts of any consequence, and Golden Flower has only about twice that many; these are unusually concentrated, sparse centres for such apparent epics, but with monumental ripples, embodied in the thousands of soldiers and serfs who populate the film, herded into vast configurations (often just to get killed of course) at the behest of their rulers. This makes for glorious tableaux (even if much of it must be digitally created) but it’s sometimes a little disquieting how Zhang’s recent films mirror the feudalism they portray, swooning over the travails of the rulers with all else being mere cinematic cannon fodder (although I suppose this is no more than the classic approach to tragedy). If you can get past that, the new film is always gripping, with a mild sense of perversity lying beneath its overwhelmingly scenic surface, and some of the set-pieces, particularly the climactic battle, are among Zhang’s most accomplished creations yet.

Perfume

The first notable release of the new year was Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, based on a novel by Patrick Syskind, which chronicles the fanciful tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born into extreme poverty in eighteenth century Paris, with no advantages other than an acutely developed sense of smell. Quickly surpassing the limits of the perfumer’s art (Dustin Hoffman plays his mentor), he becomes obsessed with finding better techniques to capture odours, but his interest focuses on the smell of women, and the demands of his project lead him into serial murder. The film is most engrossing early on, when Tykwer uses his facility with montage (he’s best known for Run Lola Run) to evoke the world through Grenouille’s nose, but for much of the time we’re merely watching the unfolding of a clever but somewhat hollow narrative, which becomes increasingly divorced from any compelling period flavour or psychological interest. The movie does have a striking finale, and the way it films some of the women is genuinely sensual and adoring, if you manage to look past the grim role of the female in the whole creation. It’s enjoyable enough overall, but no one who sees it will particularly remember six months from now.

Fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2007)

James Mangold’s remake of 3.10 to Yuma, with Christian Bale as a one-legged farmer trying to escort the outlaw Russell Crowe to a prison train against impossible odds, is enjoyable enough, but festooned with limitations. It’s most disappointing at the very end, when Mangold tries to pull off two kinds of twists – one psychological/existential, the other narrative. Both fail, for different reasons. A Sergio Leone, say, could have pulled off the former, and would have had the good judgment to torpedo the latter. Of course, if Leone had made it, the film would have been an hour longer too, but might still have seemed shorter than Mangold’s. Anyway, no matter what you prize about the Western genre, this movie isn’t very effective at tapping it.

I don’t remember much of anything now about Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, but if it’s a mental void, it’s a fond one. The Farrelly Brothers’ remake takes the classic premise – about a man who falls in love with another woman on his honeymoon – and plods through it in the most formulaic and soulless manner possible. It’s peppered of course with the usual Farrelly Brothers’ gross-out stuff, but even that hardly has an impact any more. My conscience is clear on this: a few years ago when everyone raved about There’s Something about Mary, and its makers were being fawned over in the serious magazines, I yawned about the movie in these very pages. Now everyone’s moved on to Judd Apatow. Well, I don’t much like his stuff either.

And I increasingly don’t like Wes Anderson’s. The Darjeeling Limited (actually, his movies generally lose me right at the title) is about three brothers on a “spiritual journey” in India, to rekindle their relationship and perhaps find their mother, who’s ensconced in a convent. Anderson’s familiar style, defined through distinctive fonts, bright colours, slow pans, action staged at right angles to the camera, and sundry affectations, has the effect of draining the flavour from everything he looks at; his India is just another source of gimmicks and bric-a-brac, presented without a shred of real engagement or integrity. Anderson’s self-regard seeps off the screen; you can virtually feel his drool on you.

In the Shadow of the Moon evokes the Apollo moon missions through the testimony of the surviving astronauts (excluding the reclusive Neil Armstrong) and the of-course stunning archival footage. It’s fascinating, naturally, and one could easily have wished it to be longer: with the focus so much on the individual bravery of those nine men, there’s little consideration of the underlying science or logistics, or the surrounding politics. But at the end, when one of them takes a shot at the current preoccupation with gas prices in lieu of sensitivity to the planet’s challenges, the basic point is lunar-clear: the “giant leap for mankind” has dwindled into a sad series of furtive sidesteps.

No End in Sight, directed by Charles Ferguson, is an even more impactful documentary, setting out some of the colossal errors, largely rooted in arrogance and complacency you can’t even process, behind the current mess in Iraq. Inevitably, most of the culpable parties declined to be interviewed – the main exception, who at least deserves points for being game, confirms everything you ever suspected about the cloistered indifference of the decision-making process. Other interviewees, describing how the Bush Administration again and again placed ideology and fantasy above all else, are often close to tears. Much as the war continues to be debated and analyzed, Ferguson’s film reminds us that full mass recognition of the venality of what’s been visited upon us is yet to be achieved.

Richard Shephard’s The Hunting Party metaphorically evokes the Iraq war: it’s a big but shady concept, ineptly executed. Set in Bosnia in 2000, and based (somewhat shakily it seems) on a true story, it depicts three journalists on a crackpot enterprise to interview, and perhaps even capture, an evasive war criminal; Richard Gere and Terrence Howard (both as dull as hell) are the lead actors. Nothing about the film really works. It seems to be aspiring to be a blackly comic, allusive romp, but is blandly made and inauthentic-feeling in all respects. It holds irritating pretentions to be educating us about shady American foreign policy (again!), and loftily teases us on what’s wholly or partly invented. Regardless, you just won’t give a damn.

Peter Berg’s The Kingdom isn’t annoying, but merely uninteresting. A group of FBI agents fly into Saudi Arabia after a huge explosion in a US compound. Dodging local customs and assassins in equal measure, they do the CSI thing for a while, and then the frenetic action thing for a while longer. Movies (and TV for that matter) are so adept now at delivering gritty, multi-layered, handheld-camera mayhem that you just find yourself yawning at spectacles that might have dazzled even fifteen years ago; there’s nothing new here, and any five minutes of Syriana (for example) was more provocative and intellectually charged than The Kingdom in its entirety. The actors, including Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, generally seem like actors.

Robert Benton, who won Oscars for Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart, is in his mid-70’s now, and Feast of Love is plainly the work of an old man (that’s a glass-half-full kind of assessment). Set in Portland, it weaves six or seven core characters into an amiable, sometimes poignant story of personal ups and downs; Morgan Freeman is at the centre as a, uh, amiable philosophy professor, and Greg Kinnear is a,  well, amiable coffee shop owner who’s desperately unlucky in love. Kinnear embodies the film’s strengths and weaknesses: it’s unusually sharp in positioning his “nice guy” quality as self-absorbed cluelessness, but ultimately backs off and allows him too lucky a break. The portrayals of lesbians, and of young people generally, are distinctly idealistic, as if Benton had never encountered the former, and last touched base with the latter in the 60’s. There’s some surprisingly fearless nudity in the movie, but no erotic charge (the subplot about a porn movie might as well have turned on a candy floss smuggling ring). But easy as it is to take shots at all this, it’s warm and decent and I liked it. 

Another old man’s film, Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball, made a blink-and-you-missed-it visit to the Royal. It’s a semi-coherent melodrama about a young female architect renovating a remote Irish cottage, and falling into her crazy neighbours’ hormone- and voodoo-fueled orbit. It’s possible to see how this might have carried a pretty strong feminist charge in Fay Weldon’s novel, but nothing really coalesces here. Roeg works in some of his old techniques and themes, but it’s a little bit like watching Bjorn Borg reduced to fiddling around on the ping-pong table. Donald Sutherland, from the director’s classic Don’t Look Now, contributes a mystifying two-scene cameo. Still, if you’re well disposed toward Roeg (and readers may recall I devoted a whole article to him a few months ago), the movie can’t help being enjoyable.

2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Four

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2007)

This is the fourth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog)

Herzog has been making documentaries for nearly forty years now, and in some ways this one involves fairly conventional subject matter by his often extreme standards: a visit to the McMurdo Station base in Antarctica, where he checks out the daily life and undergoes some expeditionary side trips. Herzog doesn’t take the screen this time round, but he’s highly present as narrator and off-screen interviewer, throwing in plenty of his quirky self - he refers to McMurdo’s accommodating “abominations such as…yoga classes” and fills his interviews with off-kilter queries such as whether insanity exists among penguins. Herzog seems to be pessimistic about mankind’s long-term chances, and yet is dismissive about “tree huggers”: always a wacky theorist at best, he remains a celebrant of pioneers and iconoclasts, whether it be scientists who spend their days on the lip of an active volcano (which harks back to Herzog’s classic La Soufriere) or a lone penguin determinedly heading away from its family, toward the mountains and certain death – maybe insane, but certainly admirable in Herzog’s eyes. The title refers not only to the geographic location but also to the sense that mankind’s first outpost on an alien world might look something like this; the beautiful underwater photography also resembles science fiction at times.

Useless (Jia Zhang-Ke)

The young director Jia has already hit a major high point with The World, a piercing examination of alienation within modern China. In the few years since then, he’s worked in a more minimalist vein, including a couple of documentaries. The latest of these, Useless, conveys the sense of a stream of consciousness, almost as if Jia started filming in one fairly randomly chosen place and then followed wherever the connections took him. Fashion is the primary linkage, from a rural factory to a high-concept Paris fashion show, to poor tailors squeezing out a living on mending threadbare garments. The title “Useless” is the translation of the latest line by the designer Ma Ke, who while seeming sincere and pleasant, nevertheless lives in astonishing splendour compared to virtually everyone else in the film, spouting various airy aphorisms that suggest she’s lost touch. The title also carries easy resonance beyond that of course. It’s almost impossible to make a documentary about contemporary China that’s anything other than fascinating, and Jia provides some fascinating parallels and contrasts while withholding any overt interpretation (there’s no voice over and only a few explanatory captions). It’s very worthwhile viewing but I don’t think this is his most valuable vein: hopefully the next film will again evidence greater ambition and personal investment.

Chronicle d’un ete (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin)

A festival sidebar devoted to Quebec director Michel Brault provided my first chance to see this famous 1961 cinema verite milestone (on which Brault acted as one of the cinematographers). It attracted a very sparse audience, suggesting again that the festival’s great success in galvanizing the mainstream for ten days doesn’t necessarily serve as the rising tide to lift the cinematic appetite as a whole. The film is a great time capsule, at times seeming more naïve than profound now, but yielding numerous fascinating moments. Starting off by interviewing random passers-by on their degree of happiness, it evolves into a more probing examination of working class lives and then into broader vignettes of the 1960 summer. The Algerian war looms large, and it’s an age when even a relatively young woman could have a concentration camp ID tattooed on her arm, but we also take in St. Tropez vacations and amateur rock-climbing attempts. The film comments throughout on its own making, including an epilogue in which the main participants debate what we’ve just seen, differing markedly on the degree to which some of them were “acting” rather than simply being. For all the talk of truth, manipulation (in the sense of directorial choice, influence, juxtaposition, etc.) is inevitably prominent throughout, but the earnestness is still engaging. It’s a shame that something like the Documentary Channel, in between seemingly endless close-up examinations of the porn industry, can’t make historic material like this more readily available.

And here are two more I caught up with in their current commercial release.

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis)

Haggis’ somber drama, an amalgam of detective story and sorrowful war requiem, is a way better picture than his Oscar-winning Crash, which I found almost unwatchable. It also relies too much on coincidence and contrivance: for instance, Tommy Lee Jones, playing amateur detective, is almost always a step ahead of the cops on the case. But that helps here to illuminate the overall theme of eroding American values, particularly in its most cherished institutions. Jones plays a retired military man who’s probably never questioned the code in his whole life; one of his two sons died in uniform, and the other has now disappeared, just days after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq: military and civilian police fight over jurisdiction, with neither side seemingly caring. It’s carefully worked out, and although the film has struck some as being rather plodding, I found the desolate tone – perfectly refracted through Jones – quite moving. It’s good on the heartland culture too, precisely deploying drinks and cigarettes and strip joints (and Bibles and Support our Troops signs), and it dares to suggest that the strategic blunder of Iraq might have engendered a near-pathology in the troops. A truly great film would have explored that idea at least a little more directly. The denouement comes in a bit of a rush, and the final scene (messing with the Stars and Stripes, no less) is a return to heavy-handed symbolism, but it’s an interesting piece overall. 
 

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford  (Andrew Dominik)

That train-length title tells you the project here: to take a well-established, often-mythologized historical event, and scrutinize it with an objectivity that eschews normal suspense; as such the film runs over two and a half hours, and is often deliberately dour. Brad Pitt is interestingly ambiguous, if as usual a bit too recessive, as Jesse, with Casey Affleck doing pretty well with Robert Ford’s arc from naïve hero-worship to spooked self-preservation. But Dominik doesn’t fill this ambitious framework with anything like enough substance – there’s not a strand, not a ghost of an idea here, that hasn’t been done better before. Of course that’s true of most modern movies – it’s a mature art form, what can you expect? – but Dominik’s apparent pretensions to stand astride the genre invite these comparisons to come flooding in, causing the film to virtually implode.

2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Three

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)

This is the third of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

La fille coupee en deux (Claude Chabrol)

Chabrol is probably the least intellectually esteemed of the three French New Wave veterans who brought films to this year’s festival, having spent much of his efforts (and he’s been amazingly prolific) on melodramatic material of somewhat uncertain thematic value. Inevitably, the precision that marked classics like Le Boucher has eased off now, to be replaced by a sense of relative effortlessness that might yield either grace or fuzziness (based, it sometimes seems, on little more than how the wind blows). The new film is another unwieldy concoction, with Ludivine Sagnier as a TV weather girl who has an affair with an esteemed, much older author, while being pursued by the more age-appropriate but unstable heir to a chemical fortune (played, bizarrely ripely, by Benoit Magimel). The film mostly bumps along, with a confusing sense of time and psychology; some of its more interesting avenues are barely explored, whereas much of the plot turns on some “depraved” actions presented here with a rather doddery-seeming discretion. None of it is dull, but it again carries a sense of near-randomness, with the different tones and structures never coalescing. It just doesn’t feel as if Chabrol tried very hard to think his way into these people and situations, which leads here to overall hollowness, rather than masterly transcendence.

Les amours d’Astree et de Celadon (Eric Rohmer)

87-year old Rohmer has said this may be his last film, and if so he may have chosen an almost perfect parting note. Adapted from a 17^th century novel and set who knows when, this is a simple tale of love lost and regained between two shepherds, apparently shot in extremely modest circumstances, and for a little while it seems perhaps too flighty for this great director. But we soon see how this might all along have been the blueprint for almost all his wonderful comedies and proverbs, turning on another moral dilemma which gives rise to delicious plot complications. The film involves some suspension of disbelief, or at least the ability to think oneself into a different frame of reference. But since the opening titles gently caution us that this has been shot in an alternate location because the true setting is now inadequately preserved, we’re clearly compelled to bring our contemporary sensibility to the table. The closing sequences are some of Rohmer’s most unrestrained celebrations of love, not to mention being unusually erotic for him. Overall, if it’s not as complex or completely fulfilling as his very best work, there’s no doubt that Rohmer’s vision for the film, and for its place in his wonderful career, has been completely achieved.

Ne touchez pas la hache (Jacques Rivette)

A mere 80 years old, Rivette’s film by contrast doesn’t feel at all like a wrapping up work (unless one counts the presence of several key past collaborators in supporting roles), but rather like a quite surprising new direction. As concentrated as anything he’s ever done, this is an adaptation of Balzac’s novel The Duchess of Langeais, about what we would nowadays call a distinctly passive-aggressive relationship between the duchess and her military suitor. He obsessively devotes himself to her, winning only minor concessions; when he turns the table and starts to ignore her, she becomes obsessed with regaining his devotion. The film is superbly controlled and well acted by Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu, but I must confess it strikes me as second-tier Rivette. In his best films, which are just about as good as anyone’s, he’s constructed a unique cinematic universe: elegant, literate, mystical, playful. It’s only at the very end, when the officer and his friends set out on a seafaring quest, that Ne touchez pas la hache really works in that classic vein. But as with just about every Rivette movie I’ve ever seen, I suspect it will take multiple viewings to open up all the rewards here.

Before the Devil Knows you’re Dead (Sidney Lumet)

83-year-old Sidney Lumet is perhaps the oldest working American director (you can see there’s a theme to how I make many of my selections – I call it “always buy brand names”). Never recognized as an auteur, Lumet’s best work nevertheless exhibits a terrific fusion of form and content, a great feel for the contemporary pulse, and of course often-brilliant acting. The glory days of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon et al are a while ago now, although his last film Find Me Guilty (which I haven’t yet managed to see) reportedly recaptured some of the old flair for atmospheric logistics. The new film certainly does so in spades. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are brothers (which as imaginative casting goes, works way better than Lumet’s casting of Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman as father and son in Family Business), both suffering major money problems, which they aim to solve by knocking off their parents’ jewelry store. Needless to say, things go wrong, but if some of the plot mechanics are broadly predictable, Lumet’s masterly handling of the steadily darkening tone certainly isn’t. The film does some jumping around in time, which seems obligatory of all thrillers now, but never becomes a prisoner of its structure: the director has a great feeling for the lives and the settings and coaxes several of the actors (Hoffman, and the magnificent Albert Finney as their slowly tuning-in father) to an Oscar-worthy level. Amazing to say, but this might ultimately rank as one of the best of Lumet’s fifty or so pictures.
 

And here’s one I caught up with in its current commercial release

Across the Universe (Julie Taymor)

This is certainly a film of very high imagination and quality of execution, weaving thirty or forty Beatles songs into a narrative about young people in the 60’s, against the backdrop of Vietnam, the draft, and the evolving counterculture; glamorously turbulent America is contrasted with drab industrial Liverpool. Certain sequences are breathtaking in their surreal vision, and Taymor – who ascended to major fame with the stage production of The Lion King – unleashes the entire range of her gifts here. But you may detect a certain stiffness to this praise, and unfortunately the film is hardly as galvanizing as you’d want. Structurally ingenious as the narrative may be, it brings as much fresh insight to its period and characters as The Lion King did to the serious study of African ecosystems. The acting and musicianship are mostly bland, the premise soon gets tired (the lead character is called Jude…the women around him are called Lucy and Sadie and Prudence…eventually you can’t help rolling your eyes), and even Taymor’s virtuosity sometimes seems merely like undisciplined fiddling at the digital keyboard. All you Need is Love, of course, provides the finale. As they say, if a thing’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well.

2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Two

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)

This is the second of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin)

Akin’s fiery Head-On, about the marriage and love affair (in that order) between two Turkish immigrants in Germany, was one of my favourite films of a few years ago. The new film is not as striking, with an intricate but conventional criss-crossing plot structure and a less hectic pace. A Turkish immigrant in Germany (to date Akin’s filmic universe has remained very close to his personal one) courts a whore and then accidentally kills her; his son, a professor of German, goes to Istanbul to find the woman’s daughter, who’s a political activist, and impulsively decides to relocate there. Meanwhile, the young activist is in Germany, searching for her mother, until she gets deported back home, and the strands pull together (while never quite getting tied up). Akin is great at evoking the flavour of Turkish culture, and this is a fairly rich creation overall, apparently skeptical about the overall prospects for Turkey’s integration into Europe (mordantly summed up by echoing images of coffins being transported between the two countries – the film was completed though before the religious controversies around the recent elections) while nevertheless seeming almost sentimental about the possibility for reconciliation on the personal level. But the overall artistic direction isn’t as striking as the incidental devices. The cast includes the indelible Hanna Schygulla, from so many Fassbinder movies of the 70’s and 80’s, although I have to confess I failed to recognize her for at least twenty minutes.

L’Age des tenebres (Denys Arcand)

Notwithstanding patriotic pride at a Canadian Oscar winner, I can’t say that Arcand’s movies have ever impressed me much. I found The Barbarian Invasions something of a self-important mess, and the famous “adult” dialogue mostly grated on me; he never provides much in the way of interesting style either. An unsurprising follow-up, the new film is about a middle-aged civil servant who’s suffocating beneath a dull job, loveless marriage, indifferent kids, mammoth mortgage, and all the rest of it. He fantasizes constantly about sex and celebrity and power, with Diane Kruger playing the main recurring lust object. The movie is less sprawling than Barbares, more invested in the misery of a single sad sack Everyman, and the script is largely a scrap book of op-ed headlines, along with some unremarkable satire (mainly of the foolish Government of Quebec bureaucracy) and those mostly leaden fantasy scenes, and it doesn’t really end so much as just run out of ideas. And this does definitely not rank high in the pantheon of great films about women. Even so, I actually liked it a bit more than Arcand’s last few films, if only for the perverse reason that defeatism and limited achievement are more tonally matched to the material than his usual flimsy bravado. And the last few scenes do have a faintly touching pastoral quality.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Wayne Wang)

The festival strangely categorized Wang, whose last film was Queen Latifah’s Last Holiday, along with Rivette and Rohmer in this year’s “Masters” category. Maybe it was an over-reaction to Wang’s relatively rare feat of having two new films on display. I caught one of them, about an aging man visiting his daughter in the US for the first time. She’s been there a dozen years, is now divorced and assimilated – in particular to using English as the only medium to fluently express her emotions – and since the two never had much of a relationship to begin with, it’s a largely desolate visit…until a confrontation about both past and present pulls them into at least incrementally better mutual understanding. It’s a modest film for sure, following familiar themes of thwarted communication across cultural and generational chasms – even though it’s only 83 minutes long, it feels repetitive at times. Still, I did find it somewhat touching, although it’s possible I’m a sucker for this subject of language as a wedge, which has some relevance to my own background. It’s hardly the work of a master – it actually feels more like that of a tentative new filmmaker, which I guess may have been exactly Wang’s intention. If this is indeed the start of a new path, it looks more promising than the old one had become.

And here are two festival films I caught up with in their current commercial release

The Brave One (Neil Jordan)

This is the one with Jodie Foster as a New York radio commentator whose fiancée is brutally murdered; frustrated with the ineffectual police investigation, and newly aware of the city’s scary underbelly, she buys an illegal gun and becomes a vigilante. The film has provoked quite a debate, turning on whether it’s an artful comment on vigilantism and on the Death Wish genre, or merely a tarted-up specimen of same with a gender twist. I’m of the latter opinion – this is merely Charles Bronson land with better literary references. If it had any real investigative intent, or a desire to do more than pander to its audience, it would construct a less comprehensive identification with Foster’s character (in the circumstances her performance is too good). It would offer fewer glib one-liners, fewer scumbags virtually tripping over themselves to get blown away, a less comfortable pacing and stylistic approach, and – above all perhaps – an ending that didn’t let everyone involved (not least of all the audience) off the hook so completely. And it wouldn’t have a quasi-romance between villain and cop (Terrence Howard, also too good for the movie) that’s conceived entirely in movie terms. The title (brave!) is just about as manipulative and inappropriate as everything else in the movie.
 

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

This is a fairly logical follow-up to Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, again taking a story of institutionalized brutality erupting into normal lives. The setting this time is London, one of the world’s great thriving melting pots of course, and one in which at least some of the current boom may represent the wages of sin. Naomi Watts plays a nurse who’s drawn into the orbit of the Russian mob while looking for the family of an orphaned baby; Viggo Mortensen (once again excellent) is an ultra-contained chauffeur and clean-up man whose motives are more complex than they seem. If nothing else, Cronenberg seems now like one of the most accomplished of genre directors; every aspect of the film – style, pacing, visceral impact, not least of course in an already notorious bathhouse fight sequence – is quite superb. He’s also masterly at weaving in some black humour without being gauche about it. The subculture depicted could easily seem caricatured or melodramatic – gangster-type swaggering has consumed more screen hours than car chases – but Cronenberg makes it persuasive as an anthropological study. The deft ending is satisfying in narrative terms while leaving a distinct despair about the two solitudes of our real and shadow societies. The only caveat is simply the broad similarity to the previous film – Cronenberg is working at such a high level now that you’re hungry to see what he might bring to a wider range of material.

2007 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part One

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in September 2007)

This is the first of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.

The Man From London (Bela Tarr)

I’ve seen only one Bela Tarr film, The Werckmeister Harmonies; I especially regret not seeing his seven-hour (OK, it’s a qualified sort of regret) Satantango, most famously championed by Susan Sontag (note – I subsequently rectified this). The new film, which made it through numerous production challenges, is his first since Werckmeister, seven years ago now. Based on a George Simenon story, and a mere two and a quarter hours long (and sadly feeling no shorter), it tells of an ordinary man who witnesses a crime, retrieves a suitcase full of stolen money, and gets drawn into the consequent spiral. In interviews, Tarr expresses a complex set of ambitions for the film – “it deals with the cosmic and the realistic, the divine and the human…” – but I don’t think these are fully realized. His notoriously exacting technique – shooting in pristine black and white, involving very long, deliberately paced, meticulously orchestrated takes – seems rather constricting here, and the story is too generic for the “cosmic” aspects to soar very high. Amid an authentically unhealthy looking cast, the presence of recognizable (and badly dubbed) Tilda Swinton as the protagonist’s wife just seems like a mistake. A couple of very long close ups of a secondary female character might oddly be the film’s most riveting moments, but suggest a latent desire to have taken all this in a different direction entirely. Sadly, you get the feeling that the struggle to make the film may have slightly calcified a great artist’s intuition.

Les chansons d’amour (Christophe Honore)

This is the first film I’ve seen by young French director Honore, and it certainly goes down easily. He seems to be aspiring here to be a modern-day Jacques Demy in presenting the tangled love lives of a few young Parisians, who frequently articulate their feelings by bursting into song. Louis Garrel (who has a real throwback quality about him, sometimes reminding me of Truffaut’s original muse Jean-Pierre Leaud) is the centre – a young professional who travels through superficial bliss, through terrible loss, to a state that’s far less definable but perhaps more sustainable. He’s surrounded by an endlessly shifting network of plausibly needy, uncertain, flawed people, and the movie is a great uncliched hymn to Paris. Honore’s vision and style aren’t as joyously all-encompassing as Demy’s (and the songs aren’t as memorable either) but he certainly takes advantage of contemporary pragmatism while exhibiting a classical good humour and emotional curiosity. The film’s closing line – “Love me less but love me a long time” – is a nice summing up of its underlying sense of neediness, and given where the film begins (a deliriously attractive guy-and-two-girls-in-a-bed set-up), one would never guess the parties to that final exchange, nor its setting.

The Past (Hector Babenco)

This is an unexpectedly intimate work from Argentinean director Babenco, best known for his Hollywood stint that produced Kiss of the Spider Woman and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. It starts with a young married couple undergoing one of the all-time amicable breakdowns, after which he (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) initially falls on his feet more comfortably than she does. But as he goes through a string of break-ups and personal reversals, all somehow linked to the periodic reappearances of his ex-wife, it starts to seem their fates are still linked after all, something that she attributes to his failure to provide adequate closure when he ignored her parting request to help sort through their old photos. At times then it resembles a morality tale; at others it functions as a tribute to feminine patience and fortitude; the pieces are often melodramatic, and yet the protagonist’s reinventions of himself (his transition from overweight crapped-out alcoholic into a sleek personal fitness trainer is particularly startling) almost have the feel of science fiction. It’s certainly interesting, although never really fulfilling. Gael brings a lot to the essentially passive main character, although the actress playing his ex-wife, with far fewer scenes, dominates the film, creating a character who seems capable of lurching at any given moment in any direction, and yet is still true and moving.

Le voyage du ballon rouge (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

Hou has been moving recently from his original project of dramatizing the political and social history of his homeland Taiwan toward a more universally-based immersion in cinematic joy; the new direction may be less rigorous in some ways, but it’s starting to look as if Hou should perhaps be counted as being two of the world’s best directors! The new film is a tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 The Red Balloon (which I’ve actually never seen), and it’s Hou’s first to be made outside Asia. It’s breathtaking under those circumstances that it’s suffused in such easy naturalism. Juliette Binoche (in one of her most colourful, magnetic performances) is an actress and single mother who engages a Chinese film student as a nanny for her young son; scenes of everyday life around their wonderfully cluttered Parisian apartment contrast with vignettes of the red balloon, which may or may not belong to a short film the student is making. There’s little plot and no narrative closure as such, and the pace is serene, articulated through Hou’s usual long takes (which are so much more intoxicating than Bela Tarr’s), but the film swells with possibility and connection. It deconstructs cinematic magic by laying out some digital tricks, but only to remind us (and virtually every character in here is a creator of some kind) how our sense of beauty in art is enhanced rather than dulled by an appreciation for the underlying process. This is easily one of the best films of the last few years.
 

The Walker (Paul Schrader)

In my preview article I cited this as being perhaps my top pick among the festival’s English-language offerings; consequently, it ends up perhaps being the greatest disappointment of the films I saw. On paper it sounded great, bearing some echoes of Schrader’s early success American Gigolo. The (gay) scion of an esteemed political family (Woody Harrelson) now spends his life as an amusing bauble on the arm of Washington’s wealthy older women; but when he’s caught up in a murder investigation, in which he’s protecting a compromised senator’s wife (Kristin Scott-Thomas), it all starts to unravel. Lauren Bacall and Lily Tomlin are in the mix as well, so it’s certainly an interesting cast, and Harrelson’s stylized performance becomes more persuasive as it goes on. The sexual and political themes of Schrader’s best work are certainly implicit in the material, but the handling is dull, and the whole thing becomes increasingly swamped by (often barely penetrable) plot mechanics, yielding only the vaguest and most generic of insights into the devious workings of the machinery of power. I’ve enjoyed Schrader’s work most of all when his famously turbulent psyche has been closest to the surface – his delirious version of Cat People being the prime example – but The Walker is just too drab and conventional to be any fun.

That's entertainment!

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2007)

D J Caruso’s Disturbia is an entertaining thriller about a teenager who’s sentenced to three months’ house arrest for punching a teacher; when his exasperated mother takes away his X-Box and itunes, he’s reduced to spying on the neighbours for kicks. This all goes fine as long as he’s checking out the sexy new neighbour to the left, but what about the creepy guy who lives alone on the right? The premise is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, but the film’s nowhere near as rigorous – Hitchcock’s exacting creation of dramatic and thematic space is replaced here by something far more haphazard (for one thing, I could never figure out how the kid could possibly see so clearly into so many adjacent houses). It’s not a bad movie though. Shia Laboeuf is quirkily persuasive in the lead role, voyeurism remains a nearly unbeatable subject for cinema, and events are pretty nicely plotted until the end, when the climax seems under motivated and over the top. It still stays within the bounds of the PG-rating though.

Fracture/Hot Fuzz

Gregory Hoblit’s Fracture is an entertaining suspense thriller, although lacking even as much distinctiveness as Disturbia. Anthony Hopkins (in some scenes displaying a lighter touch than usual; in others succumbing shamelessly to Lecteritis) shoots his wife, confesses to it, and looks like a slam dunk conviction for prosecutor Ryan Gosling (as inherently interesting to watch as always), who’s so confident he barely bothers to prepare. The trial generates shocking revelations and the case falls apart, taking much of Gosling’s life with it. There’s more to come of course. Fracture is a modest creation, just centering really on one neat idea involving the murder weapon; everything else is just padding, but of a very plush, easy on your rear end quality.

The British Hot Fuzz is an entertaining comedy about a tough London cop who’s transplanted to a sleepy rural village. Initially the lackadaisical attitude of his colleagues and the inconsequentiality of the local transgressions drives him nuts, but then people start to die, and it turns out he’s headed for the biggest shoot-em-up of his life. Explicitly inspired by the likes of Point Break and Bad Boys 2 (and I figure I caught only around 5% of whatever other references are packed in there), the movie is remarkably effective in integrating action movie tropes with a rather touching respect for traditional English values – I can’t think of a similar project so free of cheap shots, and even the dastardly plot has a kind of deranged misplaced sweetness to it. Winking at the audience is also kept to an absolute minimum. It’s as good as, but not massively different from, director Edgar Wright’s earlier movie Shaun of the Dead, but you feel he’s working in his comfort zone, so why complain.

Dog Movie!

Year Of The Dog is an entertaining oddity, and a bit of a surprise – generally advertised as a comedy, it’s surprisingly raw and depressing at times, and then morphs into a (apparently) sincere portrait of how an unfulfilled woman finds her calling in pro-animal activism. Molly Shannon plays Peggy, an office assistant who channels her affection into her little dog Pencil; when he dies of toxic poisoning, she’s devastated, but the chain of events presents the possibility of a more rounded life, accompanied by growing social awareness, all of which gradually strains her equilibrium, if not her sanity.

I was thinking of devoting a whole article to this one, but I would just have ended up rambling about dogs, and I’ve gone that way several times before. Suffice to say that at the moment I can’t think of a movie that devotes as much time to dog ownership without getting overly cute about it (not that Pencil isn’t a very sweet-looking dog). That aside, the film is rather strange, with a deadpan, sometimes even creepy tone, and a rather depressed view of people (among other things, you’ve never seen such a badly dressed bunch in an American movie): its intention is rather hard to gauge at times, but it’s always, well, entertaining. Shannon is a bit of a weak link unfortunately, relying on limited technique and often seeming outclassed by the (real) actors around her, but you forget about it as the film’s wacky suspense takes hold. The director is Mike White, who’s previously written and acted in several films: Year of the Dog is most reminiscent perhaps of the even more peculiar Chuck & Buck (although dog obsession is way healthier than Buck’s fixation on reconnecting with his old friend was).

The French Avenue Montaigne is an entertaining confection set in the Paris theatre district, juggling eight or so primary characters, all at different points in the complex graph of personal/professional satisfaction. The main point, I think, is the potentially stifling underside of high culture: in the thematic climax, an esteemed but dissatisfied concert pianist suddenly stops mid-performance, rips off his white tie and penguin suit, and keeps on going in his undershirt.  But with that mild critique, of course, comes a huge amount of good nature, affection, and scenic views of Paris. The film, directed by Daniele Thompson, is ultimately limited; Agnes Jaoui’s work, for instance, feels superficially similar while ultimately yielding true philosophical and psychological surprises, even near-revelations, which just doesn’t happen here. But if you like French cinema of the kind people mean when they talk about “French cinema,” this is absolutely failsafe.

Back to Disturbia

The Canadian Radiant City is an entertaining treatment of the subject we started with, the dismal underbelly of suburbia. Specifically, we’re in the environs of Calgary, where people live in surroundings that would once have been considered palatial, but at the cost of spending half their lives in the car, barely knowing their neighbours, and evidencing all kinds of neuroses and dissatisfactions. The film focuses on one apparently typical family, while weaving in an assortment of talking heads to make Jane Jacobs-type points (although Jacobs herself isn’t mentioned). For most of its length the film is an interesting but not particularly surprising or original documentary (particularly to us downtown types), and then suddenly there’s a twist that puts a slightly different spin on everything; it could be seen as backpedaling a little, or else as a final kicker that even more establishes the superficiality of what we’ve been studying. Or as something in between.
 

The film makes some interesting points on the future of the suburbs, given their inherent unsuitability for evolving and remaking themselves in the way that downtowns, with their mix of building types and functions, can do. And while they promise space and cleanliness and tranquility, they’re also evil masterpieces of psychological and economic engineering, rendering their inhabitants infrastructure-heavy, obligation-laden and existentially bewildered. In the long run it’s likely neither environmentally or psychologically sustainable. Disturbia indeed!

Caught and Released: The Wrong Movie

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in February 2007)

The perpetual question – why can’t mainstream movies be better? How could I find myself in a weekend when, having already exhausted the possibilities of every award hopeful in sight (except for Miss Potter, which I wouldn’t see even under threat of having Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle shoved up my rear end), the choice was this: Catch and Release, Epic Movie, Blood and Chocolate and Smokin’ Aces? Well, that’s a bit of a false set-up of course. For one thing, Stomp the Yard and Arthur and the Invisibles were still playing from previous weeks. More damagingly to my own credibility, since I’m subscribed to every movie channel in sight, have hundreds of DVD’s I never get enough time to watch, and am not exactly a million miles away from some of Toronto’s finest rental venues, there’s no rational reason why I wouldn’t have stayed at home and watched something absolutely transcendent. Jeez, I would even have been better off watching Every Which Way but Loose again. Or The Nutty Professor. The Eddie Murphy version.

Walking to the Scotiabank

But you know, I just like going to the movies. I like doing the walk, say to the Paramount, about fifteen minutes distance from where I live, and listening to my ipod there and back (this time it happened to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik, which I never thought I liked that much, but everything sounds better on the ipod walking to or from a movie) getting my snack (I must confess I’ve taken to smuggling stuff in lately, usually from Starbucks) and settling down and following the whole routine. The previous day my wife and I had been to the Ansel Adams/Alfred Eisenstaedt exhibit at the AGO (great stuff but hey AGO guys, maybe letting a thousand people into two smallish rooms all at the same time isn’t really consistent with any known theory of how to facilitate aesthetic appreciation) and then over to Kensington Market for the first time in years. So that was a real solid “Best of the City” kind of day. And then there I was on Sunday, with the demands of my new job not having kicked in yet, and with my wife working, and nothing else on the agenda…how would I possibly not go to a movie?

Anyway, I chose Catch and Release. The reasons for this include a writer-director of modest pedigree (Susannah Grant, who wrote Erin Brockovich), two thumbs up on Ebert And Roeper (albeit for highly suspect sounding reasons), and most of all that if I’m going to trawl the bottom of the barrel I’d generally rather indulge my chick side than my guy one (although there have been many exceptions to this statement). So there I was at the Paramount, which by the way isn’t called the Paramount any more, but rather the Scotiabank Theatre, following a big naming rights deal of some kind. The premise I believe is that when the monied middle-class of the future comes to see Harry Potter or Hostel Two at the Scotiabank Theatre, it’ll subliminally attribute its cinematic pleasure not just to the wonders of the Hollywood machine, but also in part to the venerable sponsoring institution, which will consequently wrap up customer loyalty for life. I said that rather sarcastically, because that’s my chosen tone for this week I guess, but obviously these guys know more about value creation than I do, so I’ll assume they’re on to something. Insofar as the branding stuck in my own mind during the film, it was via the vague sense of being locked inside an ATM machine.

Catch and Release

Catch and Release stars Jennifer Garner as Gray (I don’t get these names either) whose fiancée is killed on the eve of their wedding, and is thus thrown into grief and turmoil. She has the support of her always present male friends (director Kevin Smith plays one of them) and the unwelcome dynamic of another buddy she never liked (Timothy Olyphant), who’s sleazy enough to have sex at the funeral with one of the caterers. And then, as she puts the dead man’s affairs in order, she starts to find things out – such as a million dollar bank balance she never heard about before, and then an apparent four year old son, from a liaison with a masseuse (Juliette Lewis).

The guest critic on Ebert and Roeper made much of the film’s affection for its characters, and indeed there’s a general affability to events here. Lewis for example turns out not to be the gold-digger one initially suspects, but rather a well-meaning if mixed-up woman trying to survive the hard knocks. A shame that her characterization makes no sense whatsoever. Niceness, as Dick Cheney might say, may be a personal virtue, but is not a basis for sound examination of modern living. Neither, indeed, is Garner a basis for much of anything – her quirky beauty here mostly seems merely pinched and washed out.
 

The underlying notion is of adversity casting aside illusions and allowing a more mature renewal. The film doesn’t quite come out and say the fiancée’s death was the best thing that could have happened to these people, but that’s the conclusion you have to draw – that his golden boy attributes kept everyone in arrested development for years. If the movie really grappled with that, it might have an appealing nasty streak, but given the affability I mentioned, it merely circles its themes like an exhausted vulture, consistently telling us about pain rather than showing it. It’s suggested that Garner’s excessive prim and proper ways drove her fiancée into the haven of Lewis’ arms, but nothing we see on screen provides a basis for assessing this. The Smith character actually attempts suicide, or at least a “cry for help,” although up to that point his main interest in the departed seemed to be in conniving to loot the now-unwanted wedding gifts. I suppose the earlier behaviour is meant to be just displacing his grief, but since Smith is about as graceful an actor as he is a director, the character is merely a blob of incoherent activity.    

 

Watch TV next time!

The combination of female director and female star always provokes hope of a more progressive approach to familiar material, although God knows how that hope survives so much evidence to the contrary. Suffice to say that although at the end Garner makes a big brave decision of sorts, this merely involves her driving hundreds of miles to deliver herself into the arms of the man she’s decided she wants. Even a couple of hours after the film ended I’d forgotten what her career was meant to be (the film’s modest fidelity to economic plausibility is one of its minor virtues, although it’s yet another concoction where no one’s job seems to detract too much from having time to hang out), and her character never expresses an interesting thought in two hours, so I guess it’s not much of a loss. Overall, Catch and Release is just a big glossy blank space. Like I said, Hollywood perpetually tests one’s allegiance to the magic of the movie going experience. Next time, I swear, I’m staying home with Bresson.