Filmfest 2005 - 10
Ah, Saturday morning cartoons - remember those joyous hours spent in front of the tv drinking in the wisdom of Josie and the Pussycats, the brilliance of Scooby Doo before Scrappy Doo hijacked a ride to stardom, and when the current zeitgeist was served up to you on a platter by the Banana Splits?
Well times have changed for the better, because this Saturday morning started with the first feature-length Wallace and Gromit movie, THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT! I gotta tell you, that’s a dandy of a cartoon, that one. Director Nick Park and Aardman Animations scored a winning feature length stop-animation film with CHICKEN RUN five years ago, so with plastercine comrades W & G having starred in three half-hour length shorts before, two of them Best Animated Short Oscar Winners, Wallace and Gromit were due for the promotion.
WERE-RABBIT is pure insanity, a warren of jokes of both verbal and visual origin, and a huge crowd-pleaser. This time out for our heroes, terribly clever creator Nick Park has Wallace and Gromit saving their town from a giant rabbit that is making mulch out of the townsfolk’s gardens right before the annual Vegetable Fair. Coming to the aid of Lady Tottington (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter - it’s a very talkative year for her cinematically), Wallace thinks he’s got the perfect solution in a giant rabbit vacuum contraption he’s invented. Not everything goes exactly as expected however, so the future hinges on the ability of Gromit, the dog, and the more even-keeled of the two, to sort things out. This will be out in time for Canadian Thanksgiving - see it right after you go to CORPSE BRIDE and have a very stop-action animated Fall!
THE SIXTH OF MAY, or 06/05 [site], was the last film made by Dutch writer/director Theo Van Gogh before he was murdered last November. Van Gogh was murdered for a short documentary film he made about the mistreatment of women under Sharia law. Somewhat ironically 06/05 is about another murder, that of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn on May sixth, 2002. Fortuyn was leading the polls three weeks before the election running on a xenophobic platform in the post 9/11 world.
This film fictionalizes some of the events leading up to and following the event, and serves to air a conspiracy theory about how the murder came to happen. With lots of intrigue about ethnicity and racism and state control of the press in modern day Holland, it’s a film that will leave you wanting to know a lot more about the situation…
…and wishing you had had time to stay for the Q&A, which I hadn’t. I don’t know if 06/05 will sell here. I would program it at an art house, it’s certainly good enough, but I suspect distributors will not expect enough interest in Dutch politics within North america to make it worth their while. Maybe the Independent Film Channel on digital cable will get it. I’ll have to look into that some more…
L’ENFANT was this year’s Cannes film festival Palme d’Or winner. Directed by the Dardenne Brothers, L’ENFANT tells the story of a few days following the birth of a son to a young unemployed mother and petty-thief father in a grimy industrial Belgian city. The Dardennes like realism, and try to make their movies as unmovie-like as possible, with strictly location shooting and no soundtrack. Certainly not a happy story, L’ENFANT shows what it’s like to be poor and feeling trapped in a situation when an opportunity comes along to make some serious money in a not so above-board way. It’s not always easy to like a tough movie like this, but I appreciate films that strive to be realistic and succeed through believable situation and which don’t stoop to complex contrivances. L’ENFANT was grim but real.
And then there was ATTENTE, which was simply really grim. Hampered by bad writing, bad acting, and bad directing, the film had a certian, uh, bad quality to it. ATTENTE tells the story of a filmmaker who lives in Gaza but is fed up with the hell that is daily life there and wants to leave. He is persuaded by the founder of the Palestinian National Theatre to stay for one more job however: find Palestinian actors now living in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and have them come home to be a part of the resident theatre company.
The good part of the film was getting to see some of Amman Jordan, Damascus Syria, and somewhere in Lebanon. The bad part was the 90% of the film that stitches the travelogue together with the contrived sequences that L’ENFANT completely avoided. As the low-quality of the filmmaking was pretty evenly maintained throughout, it’s hard to pick out good examples of its underachievements, but one characteristic of the film that’s worth noting is that not once in the film does anyone talk over anyone else’s lines: every actor waits for a prior line of dialogue to be delivered (badly), then allows for a brief pause, then responds with their line. It’s the most rehearsed looking thing I’ve seen in years.
And then there’s the character of the Palestinian news anchor who comes along for the audition trip. You pick news anchors because they can calmly read news about the daily atrocity with some objectivity, but this woman couldn’t possibly keep a straight face as I’ve never seen an actress screw up or roll her eyes, mash her eyebrows together, and wrinkle her forehead more in the cause of over-acting. It was either that from her or no acting at all, just walking around awkwardly on camera when she didn’t have a line to over-deliver.
Oooo, then there’s the mind-numbing repetition in this film. Auditions go on and on
and on. The director character refuses to direct. The news anchor repeatedly tells him he’s mean. The camera man can never work-under-these-conditions. No one learns a thing in this Allahforsaken work.
Too bad the real cameraman did work under these conditions. Beirut-al.
That was screening number 41, but this is it folks, screening number 42, the last of the festival: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is a debut feature directing job for Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman of GHOSTBUSTERS and a million other movies fame. It stars Aaron Eckhart (remember him, the boyfriend from ERIN BROKOVICH that starred in NEVERWAS earlier in the festival?) in a very effective role as the spokesman for Big Tobacco in the United States in the 90s. Eckhart is on his way to becoming a real star.
Very funny, with lots of caustic humour, SMOKING takes aim at lobbyists, at the news media, at the entertainment industry, at the government, at the commercialization of health, and at the lobby groups themselves - guns, alcohol, and of course, especially tobacco - and hits them all with its scattershot. No-one is hit lethally here, but they all get winged, and it’s a lot of fun to watch.
Strong supporting performances come from Maria Bello (get to know her in A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE out later this month) and David Koechner (check out how much 2005 and 2006 work this Saturday Night Live alumnus has on the go on the imdb) as two more lobbyists, Robert Duvall as Big Tobacco’s Big Chief, J.K. Simmons as Big Tobacco’s Little Chief, Sam Elliott as the Marlboro Man, William H. Macy as a US Senator, and as a Hollywood dealmaker, Rob Lowe in an especially hilarious bit.
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING also stars Katie Holmes. Don’t let that bit of toxicity scare you though: from the great opening credits onwards SMOKING will hook you.
So, there you go. It’s over. And I feel like a glutton for wanting more, but it’s been a very good year, and there were a lot of films that I wanted to see but could not schedule. The upcoming fall and winter release schedule is looking pretty good, with many promising films that I didn’t catch coming soon (PROOF, CAPOTE, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, ELIZABETHTOWN, SHOPGIRL, NORTH COUNTRY, the list goes on and on) and lots that I did see that I may want to catch again too. You can browse what’s-coming-out-when at a few sites on the internet; I like to rely on www.boxofficemojo.com/schedule .
One more post to wrap things up is coming your way. Cheers!
Craig James White
Toronto - see you in the dark!
Bacon number: 2