September 19, 2004
So here’s this year’s list of what I think you should look for, down through to what to avoid. I have tried to rank everything, but they are of course apples and oranges, so depending on my mood swings, I would reorder the list within each section from time to time. Also, there’s a very fine line between Ehhh and Uh, Well… Why? however, is unequivocal.
FILM Where from principally Note
Features
Yes!
PALINDROMES U.S.A. Not for everyone, but brilliantly assembled commentary on U.S. mores
MOTORCYCLE DIARIES Brazil Great road trip through South America with Che Guevara
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE U.S.A. No Shakespeare scholar I, but terrifically engaging
A GOOD WOMAN U.K. Terrific adaptation of Oscar Wilde in gorgeous Italy
ASTRONAUTS Spain Intelligent and funny story about a poet getting his life back from drugs
A DIRTY SHAME U.S.A. Not for everyone, very raunchy, extremely silly, quite funny
SUMMER STORM Germany Fun gay coming-of-age story
DAYS AND HOURS Boznia and Hercegovina Slow but well observed slice-of-life comedy
CLEAN Canada/France Intelligent story about a rocker getting her life back from drugs
UP AND DOWN Czech Republic Fun collision of 3 crises, satisfyingly resolved
MYSTERIOUS SKIN U.S.A. Not for everyone, tough child abuse flick from abused’s POV
DUCK SEASON Mexico Slow but amusing day in the life of 2 bored teenagers and friends
LOS MUERTOS Argentina Slow but mesmerizing trip in the Argentine jungle
THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS U.S.A. Not for everyone U.S. white trash
Yeah, Okay
ELECTRIC SHADOWS China Films play big role in small town China, slightly too schmaltzy
KONTROLL Hungary Gritty but fun underworld of Budapest subway, but unsatisfying end
WHISKY Uruguay Sssssssslow (nearly inert) but amusing look at a man who doesn’t get life
Ehhh
STEAMBOY Japan wow factor is the imagined Victorian era machinery, but heart is lacking
FERPECT CRIME Spain Too silly revenge comedy set in a Madrid department store
MODIGLIANI France/U.K. Too much bluster, too much made up in bio-pic without much art
SMALL MALL Iceland Sort-of documentary about mall workers just too dull
5 x 2 France Interesting backwards timeline, but central male character is so unsympathetic
NICELAND Iceland Histrionics a little unbelievable, international cast not explained by story
CHASED BY DREAMS India Hard to fathom combo of serious and slapstick road movie
Uh, Well…
NOTRE MUSIQUE France Heaven and Hell easily visualized, Purgatory not so easily
HARVEST TIME Russia The bad old days in Russia, before they got worse
SIBLINGS Canada Wanting black comedy about kids whose awful parents get knocked off
9 SONGS U.K. Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll and Antactica, porn with an art chaser
INNOCENCE France Allegory of childhood disconnection amplificatio ad absurdum
SHARK TALE U.S.A. Low rent washout drowns in clichιd story. Bail out!
Why?
REAL LIFE Greece funny-as-hades melodrama, so bad the Acropolis burns
DEMAIN ON DΙMΙNAGE France operates at frequency for which I have no converter
Documentary Features
Yes!
FANTOME D’HENRI LANGLOIS France founder of the French Cinematheque remembered
THREE OF HEARTS U.S.A. A New York threesome try to make a go of marriage
DOUBLE DARE U.S.A. Two stuntwomen’s careers are studied
Yeah, Okay
A SOUTH AFRICAN LOVE STORY South Africa ANC stalwarts the Sisulus remembered
ANDREW AND JEREMY GET MARRIED U.K. two Brits from opposite side of the track attract
Documentary Shorts
Yes!
BERLIN 99.00 Switzerland Wild visual assault along the path of the Berlin wall
ANACONDA TARGETS U.S.A. infrared death delivered from above in Afghanistan
Yeah, Okay
IT’S NOT MY MENORY OF IT U.S.A. the CIA deals with the release of information
WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN U.S.A. home movies of back when and way back when
Ehhh
MOUTHS OF ASH Columbia songs tell the pain of terrorism
Shorts
Ehhh
AS FOLLOWS Uruguay Growing up quickly in South America
Uh, Well…
MOZART - THE MUSIC OF THE VIOLIN South Africa black youth rejects European standards
I did not get the feeling that I had seen the Peoples’ Choice Award winner this year. In fact - I did not see any of the award winners. If you’re interested, you can find the winners here.
Anyway, it’s been another fun year. Only 355 days ’til the next! Later…
Posted by cjw under reviews | Comments (1)
September 19, 2004
Every year since the festival’s 25th anniversary 4 years ago a classic silent film has been drawn from the vaults and presented at the Elgin Theatre or Massey Hall with a full orchestral accompaniment. It has always been fun.
This year’s, sans orchestra but with a newly restored and rerecorded soundtrack, Buster Keaton’s 1927 classic THE GENERAL was presented. A brisk and terrifically fun story of a train engineer from the South whose locomotive is stolen by Union spies, Keaton engages in magically fluid physical gags as he races into enemy territory to retrieve his beloved engine.
Classics like THE GENERAL show up all too infrequently these days: luckily you can find it and other of Buster Keaton’s films on dvd.
The evening, and festival, ended for me with two films in the Masters program, and I didn’t quite get either of them.
CHASED BY DREAMS is an Indian - comedy? -drama? -dramedy? by director and poet Buddhadeb Dasgupta about a government employee who brings educational films around to remote villages. On the road with his driver, the two meet a pregnant Bangladeshi woman fleeing to her homeland in wake of her husband’s death. While grabbing a bite to eat at a roadside restaurant, the projector is stolen from their unattended jeep, and events get beyond the control of the protagonists.
It’s mostly a serious story of past tragedies and unrealized dreams, but it has moments of slapstick, and a number of jokes about social standing in India that only the Indian members of the audience got. For me the seriousness of the film is detracted from by the silliness of the comedy, but it’s a cultural thing and did not seem to bother those more used to this kind of filmmaking.
The last film of the festival was a real head-scratcher for me. DEMAIN ON DΙMΙNAGE, which means “Tomorrow We Move”, is the first film I have seen by Chantal Akerman, who as it turns out, has had the most films of any director ever screened at the festival. Akerman makes dramas, documentaries, and allegedly, comedies.
DEMAIN stars Sylvie Testud in a life-threatening role as Charlotte, a writer who has a commission to create an erotic novel, and a cigarette habit that would bankrupt the Sultan of Brunei: there isn’t a scene where is she isn’t lighting up the next one. Oxygen tanks were likely just off set for every break, Testud was likely hospitalized in an iron lung every night.
Conflict appears when Mum, played by Aurore Clιment, moves in with Charlotte after Dad has died, and brings her grand piano, her noisy piano students, and an unbelievable amount of furniture with her. I don’t use ‘unbelievable’ lightly here, as nothing about this comedy is close enough to reality to elicit the laughs I think its grasping for.
We soon meet a cluttered cast of caricatures including a real estate agent and a number of potential buyers all of whom have one-note eccentricities and who move about in an oddly choreographed manner. They prattle on ridiculously, dropping lines which Charlotte transcribes into her non-sequitur laden novel. If we cared about any of the characters, if anyone said or did anything interesting, if all of this added up to something, if DEMAIN had made the leap into Theatre of the Absurd territory, it might have worked for me. It is merely a collection of disconnected thoughtlets however, and it doesn’t get beyond aggravating Theatre of Stupidity.
Some of the audience thought this cacophony was cacofunny: out of 450 filled seats, it sounded like there were about 30 people laughing consistently throughout. Their reaction puts me in mind of France bestowing Jerry Lewis with the Legion of Honor. I just wanted it all to end, and I would have walked out had I not been 1) with a number of friends, and 2) in the dead centre of the theatre. Each painful non-joke seemed to further telescope the length of he filled seat row on either side of me, so feeling trapped, I began checking my watch often and contemplated suicide more than once. DEMAIN was not an appropriate way to wrap up the fest.
In the Q & A Akerman stated that she was not trying to imitate real life, she didn’t know what exactly she was doing. She’s right.
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September 19, 2004
Amedeo Modigliani: painter extraordinaire, upcoming retrospective subject at the AGO, and if the new film MODIGLIANI starring Andy Garcia is true-to-life, major screw-up drunkard who had an allergy to success.
Not on par with POLLOCK, not on par with GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING, but hey, we get to wallow in bohemian Montmartre for a couple of hours with Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Utrillo, Pablo Picasso (with whom Modigliani had a tempestuous rivalry) and Jeanne Hebuterne, Modi’s muse, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship. They’re all played by well by actors most people have never heard of, so I’m moving on…
This flick just doesn’t get under Modigliani’s skin - Andy Garcia either blusters his way through scenes, as if this man lived only to compete, or suffers miserably when he is beaten. We are rarely privy to any internal dialogue, and no attempt is made to explore Modigliani’s unique painting and then connect it to the man. We don’t have to see many of Modi’s paintings to see what a great artist he is - we certainly don’t get any close ups or real feel for his painting process or technique - but we don’t need to because we know how great an artist he is because he’s such a failure as a human being. He was tormented! Of course he’s a genius! It’s just the man that is the story here, and that’s where POLLOCK and EARRING work better: the art is connected to the artists in those titles.
Elsa Zylberstein merits a mention as Jeanne, Modi’s lover and eventual wife. She provides an emotional core for the film, tendering portraying a put-upon woman caught in a love affair with a magnetic but unreliable and tormented man.
Speaking of tormented, a taxi ride to the Paramount then brought us to THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS, a quote from the book of Jeremiah, and a tour of America’s white trash underbelly, or more specifically, Knoxville Tennessee. Well, Knoxville actually stood in for a whole countryful of trouble. HEART, second film by bad-girl director/star Asia Argento, tells the story of messed-up, drug-addled Sarah and her son Jeremiah. The poor kid’s been living peacefully, brought up by loving foster parents, when at the age of 7, his messed-up mother manages to win back custody of him. She and he are soon on the road and free of the constraints of social services. Sarah needs money to pay for her addictions and finds it turning tricks, sometimes turning them into husbands briefly.
When Jeremiah manages to run away, he ends up in the custody of his grandparents, fundamentalists who believe in discipline, actually who believe in disciplining above all else. Kidnapped back by his mom, he gradually comes to depend upon both her love and abuse.
Despite how sad it all sounds, I was surprised by how watch-able it all was. Peter Fonda plays an amusingly stern cult-leader-like Grandpa, Jeremy Sisto is one of Jeremiah’s drugged-out father figures, the blonde kid from Gus van Sant’s ELEPHANT is a straight-laced but evil cousin. The soundtrack is deliriously thrashy punk with a bit of hardcore country thrown in. The settings are the best white trash can offer, including my favourite, a restaurant called the Burger Barrel.
Next it was on to KONTROLL, part of the festival’s Midnight Madness program. Filmed entirely in Budapest’s subway system, KONTROLL tells the story of a team of ticket checkers who run into all manner of bizarre types who ride the system. It seems that those who don’t buy tickets to ride are more than just transit scofflaws - they’re the vilest and most threatening people who one would ever care to arrest and they make the job of Bulcsϊ’s team a growing nightmare. Our hero Bulcsϊ has another nightmare to worry about: somebody is pushing passengers in front of trains, and the rest of the team isn’t so sure it’s not Bulcsϊ himself…
While KONTROLL casts a spell with its shady but endearing characters in an out-of-control, grungy and menacing alternate world, it sadly fell apart for me with an unsatisfyingly easy ending. Ultimately KONTROLL is another of those sci-fi flicks that promises to mine deeply into the human psyche’s dark side, but which never finds the motherlode.
LOS MUERTOS, from Argentina, tells the story of Vargas, in his 50s, and just released after a very long jail stay: many years ago Vargas murdered his brothers.
The film takes place over the course of his journey home: at first driven to the town nearest the prison, then off across country through the jungle and to a landing along a river where a friend has left a boat for him. The boat journey will take him two days, through a very sparsely populated and undeveloped part of Argentina.
It’s a quiet film: Vargas interacts with a few characters along the way, mostly we just experience the landscape with him. At one point while rowing along the river Vargas spies a young goat on the bank. He pilots the boat over, snags the goat, slits its throat, and once it has bled to death, guts it and cleans the cavity. Several people walked out during this scene: it is not often that a film depicts survival at this basic a level, but everything, from the actors to the setting is so thoroughly authentic one has the feeling that the goat surely fed some of the poverty stricken people we’ve been meeting on screen. I wish I had had time to stay for the Q & A: I am sure that the first questions would have been about the goat and the truth of what we were seeing.
An extremely simple and elemental story with a documentary feel, LOS MUERTOS was at turns gentle and brutal, and entirely engrossing.
To end the evening, a number of friends and I decided to attend a different type of festival event; a tribute to Brian Linehan, known in Canada for his years of interviewing celebrities on Citytv, good friend of the Toronto International Film Festival, and cancer victim from earlier this year.
Linehan, who had not worked much in the last few years as the full length interview has fallen out of vogue, always managed to amaze his subjects by preparing incredibly in-depth research into their lives. He actually made friends with many of the screen greats he met, a very rare thing for someone from the press to accomplish, as we learned from the panel.
Included on stage that night, Festival Director Piers Handling and Toronto media writer George Anthony for introductions, film critic and festival friend Roger Ebert as host, and guests film director Norman Jewison, comedian Martin Short, actress Sharon Gless, and comedienne Joan Rivers, all of whom called Brian their friend.
The evening proceeded with many clips dug up from Linehan’s hundreds of interviews with such stars as Peter O’Toole, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Robert Duvall, and many others, interspersed with stories recounted by the panel. It was surprisingly personal and pretty emotional for those on stage. The evening was very funny too: Martin Short’s Brock Linehan satire was played a bit, and Joan Rivers (and I know a lot of people hate her) was both caustically funny as can be expected, and also surprisingly tender - something we don’t see so often in her.
The audience was heavily made up of Toronto media types in black, dressed to the nines: thank goodness I had at least worn long pants and a long-sleeved dark shirt that day, this was not the usual festival crowd. The whole thing felt like a little bit of Festival history unfolding before our eyes, and I was glad to have been there.
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