TIFF08 - Day 6
Day 6? Already?
It’s 9:21 AM - the earliest I have been in a cinema for a film this year, but I’m just practicing for a 9 AM film I have tomorrow, and I’ll have to get there earlier than that. Some films - not many - are starting as early as 8:45 AM at this fest. I mean, Breakfast Television hasn’t even ended by then. I’ve heard tell that some folk in the hinterlands start their days as early as 6 AM, so they would be able to make it down for 8:45 I suppose, but that just seems like crazy talk to me.
So, I am seated in the Paramount 2, and I’m waiting for the start of a Jennifer Anniston film? What? Am not! I’m at a Steve Zahn film. Steve’s this underused, under-appreciated comic actor (funny is enough in his case: if he has range, I don’t want to know about it) and I am just happy he’s in a film here called MANAGEMENT.
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Okay, the flick’s over now. Ehhhhhh: nice try, but too contrived.
I should be fairer to Jennifer Anniston though. Several years ago in an attempt to distance herself from her ‘it girl’ image, she starred in a little independent film called The Good Girl, which was a very good film in which Anniston showed serious ability, and it earned her some real cred. For a while. Now she’s trying to recoup that, or build on it, with MANAGEMENT, another little independent, a small romantic comedy that is out to charm its audience with winning, understated performances by Anniston and the aforementioned Steve Zahn, along with a splashy nutbar cameo by Woody Harrelson. Too bad it just seems like they filmed some guy’s bedtime fantasy.
Zahn plays Mike, the nighttime manager at his parents’ motel in Kingman, Arizona. One day Sue (Anniston) drops in, and Mike decides to make a pass at her. She’s from the East Coast (= far more sophisticated) and isn’t falling for Mike’s lines. Or is she? It goes back and forth and then an hour and a half later the movie ends as do all thoughts about it.
KISSES tells the story of two Dublin 12 or 13 year-olds, next-door neighbours Dylan and Kylie, who run away from home when Kylie rescues Dylan from his raging father. The two have grown up in unenviable situations - poverty, alcohol, abuse - and this latest incident is the last straw: off they go, never to return.
Director Lance Daly begins his film in black and white, but adds colour as the kids make good their escape, bringing it up to full saturation as they arrive in the hustle and bustle of downtown Dublin where everything seems supercharged to the kids. If they weren’t smart enough when left to their own devices you’d say that it all goes like a dream for Dylan and Kylie initially, a while pair are resourceful, it isn’t long before gritty reality comes crashing in on the two after the setting of the sun. What’s their long term solution? What are they going to learn?
Wonderfully authentic with natural performances and smart writing, KISSES moves past the average coming of age film into something really special. With thick Irish accents throughout, the sometimes tough-to-catch dialogue will leave film distributors on this side of the pond second guessing KISSES’s commercial potential, but let’s hope somebody sees a little gold in it. During the Q&A, director Daly asked the audience whether or not to release the film subtitled. While the result was an overwhelming show of hands against that prospect, I will admit to turning on the subtitling on DVDs occasionally - I mean, well, take BILLY ELLIOT for example; who knew that Tyke for ‘nothing’ is ‘nowt’? Now I can spell it too. (Tyke, by the way, is the Yorkshire dialect.) Still, DVDs are the only proper place for subtitles for British or Irish films.
The Q&A also featured the most fidgety kid I had ever seen. Kelly O’Neill, the girl who played Kylie, would not stand still, or even stay on stage, and could barely answer a question. If you’re 12 years old and great on camera, it is no guarantee that you know how to act in public yet, or that you even want to. You could see rebellion was hardwired into these kids. Very interesting.
The EU declared Liverpool the European Capital of Culture for 2008. They do it every year to one city or another. Amongst Liverpool’s subsequent commissions was a film to commemorate it and tell its history, and it went to hometown iconoclast Terence Davies to do the deed. OF TIME AND THE CITY is Davies’ reminiscence of growing up in a tough city, one beset by poverty and since repudiated urban renewal policies that left hollow housing estates in place of tumbledown slums. Davies rails at all that is English, but finds some humanity to love amidst the institutions he despises. Were the complaints merely hurled epithets the film would be a drag, but Davies’ caustic wit charms and turns viewers into colluders.
Might you ever see this film? I can’t think where, other than in an art gallery in Liverpool, or maybe on very late at night on Bravo.
It’s the really dark ages. War and the plague are sweeping across the German lands, and one night 14 year-old orphan Krabat is told in a dream to follow the ravens that are waiting to lead him out of a life of misery. So begins direktor Marco Kreuzpaintner’s sorcery fantasy KRABAT, an engrossing story of boys enslaved in a medieval mill in exchange for being taught about the dark arts.
The festival has for a few years now included a select handful of family films that they allow children to go to. The darkest of these this year was KRABAT, and as Harry Potter fans I knew my nephew and niece would be swept up by the mystery and magic of this tale, so along with more family friends, seven of us, including 4 kids, invaded the Varsity for the evening. Turns out my hunch was right, and on Wednesday those 4 kids get to go to school and tell their friends how cool a film was that they actually had to be read subtitles for.
Kreuzpaintner gathered a number of young German stars for his movie including Daniel Brühl and Robert Stadlober, an excellent art director, great special effects artists, and created a really compelling world from Otfried Preußler’s novel of enslavement and freedom… and sold it to 20th Century Fox. Will 20CF release a subtitled German language film for kids here though? I dunno. It’s really good, but how do you sell a foreign film to teens? How will Lucas and Leah’s friends react when they tell them they saw a really great film they had to read?! It’s curtains for KRABAT on this side of the Atlantic I fear, but maybe a DVD release will find a “cult” fan base.
Craig James White
Toronto - see you in the dark!