Moviemartyr @ TIFF

TIFF - Day 11

2011-09-18T18:32:00.003-04:00

Some quick hits, written on the airport shuttle, to finish up the fest:

Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola)

Equal parts idiotic and idiosyncratic, one wonders how this Twin Peaks knockoff could possibly be a personal film for Coppola until one recalls that the dude made Dementia 13. This is very stupid stuff, graced with a visual style that is roughly akin to an outdated computer game. As a mystery, it’s fairly sloppy, essentially content to let the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe show up and explain the whole thing. Perhaps in having the protagonist exercise his personal demons through the resolution of this mystery, Coppola’s making some sort of statement about auteurs who produce termite art, but really that is a tenuous thing to hold a goofy ass movie like this on. Scattered moments of fun here and there (e.g. Elle Fanning’s teen vampire with braces), but really nothing that would merit any attention at all were it from a less famous director.

Rating: 39/100

The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)

Fairly amazing, though it might help that Sjostrom’s The Wind is one of my all-time favorite films. Tarr distills his already spare style down even further, producing minute variations on already spare elements (potato cooking, wagon dragging, trips to the well). Cumulatively, they create a powerful statement on a state of life that seems to be wavering between resignation and perseverance. The sequence shots here are rather incredible (talk about a movie that makes you contend with its space!), and the horse wins my TIFF award for Best Actor (Sorry, Mr. Shannon).

Rating: 87/100

Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)

Almost more powerful for being so undercooked, this formally accomplished drama charts the various levels of exploitation that a young, disaffected girl exposes herself to. Leigh’s singlemindedness keeps a firm POV from emerging on this material, and that elusiveness helps to draw us in and endure the various tortures inflicted upon our young heroine. Though there seems to be no doubt that Emily Browning did precisely what was asked of her, there’s probably some missed potential here in offering a fuller portrait of this girl. I am not sure that platitudes were the answer, but more understanding of attitudes would be appreciated. This may be an “art film” first and a “good film” second, but I found its surfaces seductive enough.

Rating: 66/100

TIFF - Day 10

2011-09-18T15:45:00.001-04:00

Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes)

This is definitely guilty of playing like “Shakespeare for Dummies” at times since Fiennes is trying as hard as humanly possible to make sure we can follow the plot here. News reports, captions, protest signs, and big bold titles are used to make characters’ relationships blindingly clear. Numerous action scenes are included, with violent gunfights and bloody knife brawls frequently staged. It’s as if the film has been conceived out of a prevailing fear that we might lose interest otherwise. The original play is about war, to be sure, but something about the shift to contemporary trappings makes some of this stuff seem a tad desperate. Nonetheless, most of the drama works very well. A long scene in which public sentiment is swayed toward and then away from Fiennes’ Coriolanus is genuinely stirring. Brian Cox’s attempts to find ethics in politics make for good drama. The highlight, without a doubt, is Vanessa Redgrave’s performance. As a mother who has groomed her son to be a noble soldier, she is an indomitable presence, and her closing monologue is a Shakespearean screen turn for the ages. Gerard Butler, predictably, is a deficit, but he’s mostly asked to serve as a punching bag.

Rating: 60/100

Peace, Love & Misunderstanding (Bruce Beresford)

This is a dopey generation gap comedy, in which three generations of women come to better appreciate one another as they spend a week or so in a hippie grandma’s Woodstock abode. The title is an apt description for what lies within this rather routine film. Beresford could make something like this in his sleep, and apparently does here. There are charms to be had (Fonda is initially engaging, until it becomes apparent she has no character to play, Elizabeth Olsen also has been given next to no character, but genuinely inhabits her role) Women, I think are the target audience here (there are several male butts on display, but no female nudity), which is fine, but it seems curious that the most inspired segment comes at the hands of the leading male character. Near the end of the film, a teen who is an aspiring documentary filmmaker debuts his first work. Suddenly the narrative elements of this very conventional work are reconfigured into Love in Woodstock, an experimental (if somewhat crude) film within the film that probably sheds more light on the rhythms and conflicts in these relationships than all of the script’s clichéd dialogue combined.

Rating: 42/100

Melancholia (Lars Von Trier)

Filled with gorgeous moments and wryly observed condemnations about those of us who pretend to be happy, this is a strong, second-tier von Trier effort. The much-discussed opening, in which planets seem to kiss and the world ends beautifully, sets a breathlessly romantic tone that is immediately given a challenge by the bulk of the film’s depressed handheld camerawork. While I am somewhat underwhelmed by the depth of ideas here (Woody Allen has played the same take on depression for laughs with arguably greater profundity… not that Lars isn’t after a few laughs here…), there is still a great deal to admire. The performances, not just from Cannes prize-winner Dunst, but from the entire ensemble, are excellent. The juxtaposition of intimacy and scale becomes bewildering in itself. Throughout, the attempt to achieve normalcy seems desperate, driving home the film’s thesis. The ending, which sees the image utterly wiped away, is perfect.

Rating: 76/100

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)

An adaptation of Rattigan’s play, I suppose, but Davies more than makes it his own. We can tell we’re in his territory when, before the credits even give way to image, we’ve already experienced a ticking clock, a persistent rainstorm, and the promise of a suicide. This is a real “movie movie”, in which kitsch lacquered in nostalgia somehow becomes almost overwhelmingly heartfelt. There are several sequences here that left me breathless. By chopping up Rattigan’s text, the film enhances the potency of what remains. These three pathetic characters are equally tragic, all cursed by a present tinged with too much nostalgia. The frankly carnal nature of the central drama keeps things from ever feeling too staid. Probably underrating this.

Rating: 79/100

Albert Nobbs (Rodrigo Garcia)

Albert Nobbs is “such a kind little man,” except that he’s a woman in disguise in this curio of a film. Glenn Close plays the titular character in an intensely interior manner that seems somewhat at odds with the superficial tone of the film at large. Any iota of intelligence that’s here can be found in her performance, but even still, it’s not really a film that’s aiming for intelligence. Take genders out of the equation here, and you’re left with a simple plot, worthy of a silent melodrama. There’s a strange resistance here to presenting Nobbs as a proto-feminist, which should probably be viewed as an asset. Strangely, though, Nobbs’ quest for money and survival becomes her defining characteristic, which would probably be more compelling if she were not so completely “soft in the head.” A strange film, anchored by a strange performance that’s so tightly contained that it scarcely counts as a double role.

Rating: 50/100

Kill List (Ben Wheatley)

Essentially a British variation on the Tarantino-scripted From Dusk Till Dawn, with little of the verve that made that something of a classic. A large part of the problem here is that Wheatley’s improvisations cannot possibly compare to Tarantino’s meticulously crafted speeches. What we end up with is a film that is one-third kitchen-sink drama, one-third hitman saga, and one-third a brush with the occult. These three segments flow into one another less than holistically (indeed, a late-breaking flashback montage tries to cobble it all together), making the final act’s left-field twist seem rather dumb. The only thing that sustains the trajectory is a slowly building sense of non-specific dread. Conceptually clever, and not terrible by any means, but not well-executed.

Rating: 49/100

TIFF - Day 9

2011-09-17T01:18:00.002-04:00

Outside Satan (Bruno Dumont)

Dumont exerts his mastery on an open-ended narrative here, gradually turning narrative withholding into spiritual mystery. Though familiar territory for the director, he’s as good as anyone as working in this post-Bressonian mode. The light application of miracles inserted into a few hours of mundane human drama makes for a powerful, almost metaphysical, viewing experience. This is an achingly physical film, filled with repetitive, labored trudges across the French marshes, yet its meanings all seem to lie just outside of our earthly realm. Call it the anti-Ordet, if you will, but this is a deeply uncanny and unsettling film. It’s as if Dumont is retelling a myth about good and evil with no clear idea where the lines between the two lie.

Rating: 68/100

Habemus Papum (Nanni Moretti)

This starts charmingly as a gentle, middlebrow sendup of the Papal selection process, but it indisputably runs off the rails by its midpoint. Moretti, something of a footnote in his own film, plays a psychiatrist tasked with assessing the mental state of the reluctant new Pope (Michel Piccoli). Unfortunately, the Pope quickly flees the Vatican, and the film becomes as unmoored as its subject. Endless scenes involving a volleyball game between the Cardinals and the new Pope’s obsession with Chekov miss their satiric marks entirely, making what was a novel comedy turn into drudgery. Potent in a few moments (e.g. the Pope’s confession, “I’m an actor” hits with blunt force), but far too diffuse to sustain any comedy. I suppose Moretti is attempting to critique the Catholic Church’s disconnect from the real world, by focusing on a process that shows its leaders in a state of self-imposed exile, but any coherent theme is lost among the digressions.

Rating: 49/100

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols)

I wasn’t entirely sold on Nichols’ Shotgun Stories, but this second feature, which sees him switching inspiration from Greek tragedy to Biblical parable, suggests a second look is in order. Michael Shannon, giving a superb performance reminiscent of Robert Duvall’s best, plays a man convinced by his nightmares that a judgment day of sorts is coming. We’re made privy to his hallucinations, and Shannon’s work makes us aware of the tragic consequences that ensue when a man of action has to respond to a situation that he can’t fix with his hands. I am a sucker for male melodrama, and this worked me over. Scenes, such as the one in which we see the protagonist arrive at his counselor having already done his homework are heartbreakers. Indeed, the very premise, in which we are asked to watch a family disintegrate merely out of an obsessive desire to protect said family, is potent stuff.

Rating: 77/100

Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine)

This is a by the numbers British kitchen sink melodrama with unusually ferocious performances from its three leads. Surely an “actors’ movie” first and foremost, it’s somewhat disappointing then that only Mullan seems to craft a full-blooded characterization. The overall trajectory toward hard-won redemption feels somewhat forced and Considine’s tendency toward brief scenes seems like a shame. I would love to see these actors froth at the mouth in Mike Leigh-length shots. There are some nice details in the set design (the protagonist’s apartment is decorated with broken Hummel figurines and the photograph clearly removed from a shattered frame), but this is essentially a two-note film, alternating between redemption and confrontation, working the audience over ruthlessly with animal abuse and rapes.

Rating: 55/100

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold)
While the qualifications here as an adaptation of the novel are certainly questionable (it’s missing the second half, for starters), I found plenty to groove on here aesthetically. Maybe credit must go to cinematographer Robbie Ryan, but this feels as if Philippe Grandrieux got a hold on the Bronte work. The first half of the film, especially, rubs our noses in nature and the abuse that Heathcliff faces. While the plot rears its head more explicitly in the second hour and the older actors are outclassed by the younger, on a visual level things remain rather intoxicating all the same.

Rating: 75/100

TIFF - Day 8

2011-09-16T17:27:00.002-04:00

That Summer (Philippe Garrel)

My basic opinion that if you’ve seen one recent Garrel film you’ve seen them all might have been something of an asset here. Indeed, all of the director’s familiar tropes (suicide, infidelity, film sets, Louis Garrel, etc…) are present and accounted for here. Perhaps this is why this film, notably the only one I’ve seen so far at this year’s festival that garnered no post-screening applause whatsoever, didn’t strike me as being particularly bad. Indeed, I found plenty to appreciate here, no matter how predictable its overall tale of doomed love might be. Garrel always verges on self-parody (e.g. after finding out his girlfriend is pregnant, a man tells her “No more suicide attempts, ok?”), but that’s because his movies are delivered with such absurd conviction. He keeps returning to the same well, but that repetition makes his movies feel more heartfelt. This one struck me as being surprisingly bracing, with an effective high-wire performance from Monica Belluci. The inevitability of the relationships’ demise gifts them with a real romantic pulse rarely achieved in this sort of drama.

Rating: 58/100

Breathing (Karl Markovics)

Issues of guilt, death and abandonment are looked at from the point of view of an apprentice undertaker in Karl Markovics’ uninspiring debut Breathing. Though things begin well enough, introducing us to an 18-year old protagonist in a spare, seemingly accomplished style, as soon as Markovics begins to integrate narrative elements, things go awry. The lead character is entirely too passive to suggest any sort of interior activity. His on-the-job interactions are meant to demonstrate his overriding reticence in dealing with other people, I suppose, but they could just as easily be indicators of ineptitude. When he begins to seek out his estranged mother, things get even worse. A horribly misjudged series of scenes (including an extended trip to Ikea) reveal an entirely conventional narrative core, which eventually overrides any formal concerns.

Rating: 35/100

Terrafirma (Emanuele Crialese)

Crialese works in a familiar register here, with this contemporary story set on the isle of Linosa coming across as a companion piece to his Golden Door. After an extended opening which establishes the rhythms of the lives of the local fisherman, the film takes up the issue of illegal immigration. Instead of becoming didactic, though, he keeps things allegorical, firmly grounded in the experience of the island’s people. The pre-existent “law of the sea” is the best argument given against the Italian government’s laws against aiding and abetting illegal immigrants. The tourists, who come to the island hoping to shutter out any social realities, are stand-ins for the Italian populace at large. Though I wish I got more of a sense of the family’s emotional issues (the father figure who disappeared at sea seems like he should be a more glaring absence), there is plenty of great imagery on display here and a humanist perspective that genuinely comes through.

Rating: 57/100

Michael (Markus Schleinzer)

A fairly stupid, intensely empty-headed movie about a pedophile with a boy stashed in his basement. I’m not sure if the intended effect here was to shock or to create black comedy, but the film fails to work on either front. The supposed formal rigor that was attributed to the film at Cannes turns out to be superficial at best, delivering neither a sense of routine nor a deadening repetition of events. Schleinzer’s mock-rigor is about as convincing as the mock-shock that the film feigns in its exploration of its seedy subject matter. The last fifteen minutes, or so, in which we sit through misplaced suspense about the fate of the captured boy, expose the film as the cheap stunt that it is.

Rating: 30/100

The Day (Doug Aarniokoski)

A strange post-apocalyptic action film. Taking place almost entirely in one location, the first half is something of a chamber drama, in which (poorly acted) characters bemoan the state of humanity. Just as things begin to look what everyone feared when we learned that McCarthy’s “The Road” was being brought to the screen, Aarniokoski drops any pretenses and turns this into a home invasion thriller. As the cast fends off a group of largely anonymous cannibals and fight among itself, the film finds itself in familiar, yet acceptable, territory. Fans of this sort of thing will no doubt be pleased with the level of gore and sadism here. The obviously low budget is worn well.

Rating: 51/100

TIFF - Day 7

2011-09-15T17:38:00.001-04:00

Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)

Perhaps the overbearing film festival climate is to blame, but this light, witty comedy from the usually sophisticated Stillman hit a sweet spot for me. Set at a traditionally females-only east coast private university, the film follows a group of young women who are hilariously earnest in their “outreach” efforts to the local male population. Volunteering at the campus suicide prevention clinic and dating far beneath their means are their most notable acts of charity, and their unorthodox methods of helping (donuts, hygiene tips) provide many of the laughs here. Like Stillman’s past films, self-imposed social rules and standards are exploredS, and while this might not be his most insightful work, it’s quite possibly his most consistently funny. The characters here always threaten to become caricatures, but deftly avoid true glibness, giving the film the feel of a high-wire act that favorably recalls Heckerling’s Clueless. It’s disconnected from reality, but in a pleasing way. The cast is excellent, with Gerwig the note-perfect standout.

Rating: 74/100

Like Crazy (Drake Doremus)

Not sure what this was going for exactly. With a zillion snippets of conversation, it recounts several years in the mundane romance of two young college students who run into visa trouble. The toll that distance takes on their on-again, off-again relationship is anything but revelatory, and you would think that director Doremus would isolate more distinctive moments from their lives if he was going to chop them up like this. Instead, we get an infinite number of shots of the two inadequate leads sulking and absurdly stupid moments like the one in which she breaks the bracelet he gave her (inscribed “Patience”!) while having sex with another man. Neither of these lousy actors seems to have much of a character to play, and audiences who keep waiting for their tale to develop into something that works on a deeper level will be doing so in vain. Pretty unlikeable.

Rating: 42/100

Snowtown (Justin Kurzel)

There’s a thin line between creating a pervasive atmosphere and dragging one’s feet, and I think Justin Kurzel, in his debut film, falls on the wrong side of it. This true-crime story of what is apparently Australia’s worst series of serial killings, is told entirely from the perspective of the perpetrators, who acted in a small group. This gambit ensures that Snowtown is exceedingly seedy and capable of taking audiences into a dark place, but I found myself largely undisturbed by it. There’s little effort to focus on psychology here, as the film seems more caught up in procedure. The most surprising moments come as we see these people make a clear demarcation between the evils of, say, child molestation (many of their victims were homosexuals and pederasts) and the apparent acceptability of torturing people to death. Things are definitely not sensationalized here, as events are neither played for thrills nor turned into opportunities for lyricism. This gives Snowtown some hard-earned grit, but perhaps costs it perspective on the events that it depicts.

Rating: 47/100

Pariah (Dee Rees)

One suspects that the fluke success of Precious is desired for this well-acted and well-shot but predictable coming out drama. This is a far less singular effort, to be sure, which might be seen as an asset for those who found the histrionics of Daniels’ film to be a bit too much. In my view, as well done as it is and as vividly as it realizes its Brooklyn setting, Pariah’s decision to focus on its teenage protagonist’s anxieties and sensual experiences comes at a price. The film seems content to view the girl as a lesbian first and an emerging mind (she’s a straight A student) only as an afterthought. A better film would have paid more mind to her intellectual coming out. There’s little doubt here that the resilient young Alike will find her way in life, which limits the potency of the drama somewhat. Still, well done, if precisely what one would expect it to be.

Rating: 53/100

Kotoko (Shinya Tsukamoto)

A true mindfuck, this maternal drama is recognizable as the product of the director who brought us Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Tsukamoto uses an extremely loud soundtrack, vibrating camerawork, superimpositions and double vision in an attempt to approximate the mind of his mad heroine. A new, single mother, who soon has her child taken away from her, Kotoko’s waking hours are spent imagining horrible fates that might befall her child (many of which the director makes real). Her reclusive nature makes the film recall Polanski’s Repulsion, to be sure, but this is a more extreme (if less subtle) vision of madness. Gory scenes in which Kotoko cuts herself are interspersed throughout the narrative, and fantasies often threaten to take over, leaving us uncertain of where reality lies. This portrait of a modern-day Medea is a largely uncompromising vision of madness, taken farther than many viewers will like, but it’s been made with enough horrible conviction that it becomes tough to shake.

Rating: 69/100

Lovely Molly (Eduardo Sanchez)

In many respects this deliberately paced spiritual successor to Blair Witch is a tired retread of an overdone conceit. Still, I found it to be a somewhat unsettling viewing experience, so there must be something done right here. The narrative here is a simple tale of possession in which a recovering drug addict/abuse victim returns to the home where her dead father assaulted her. The gradual encroachment of madness here gives the film a deliberate pacing that really doesn’t pay off, but the sheer unpleasantness of Molly’s slow decline was enough to make the film work for me. Sanchez’s mixture of conventionally shot scenes and those done in the first person works well, and the film often manages to feel creepier than it has any right to, given how stupid it all feels by the time it’s ended.

Rating: 50/100

TIFF - Day 6

2011-09-14T20:40:00.001-04:00

Faust (Alexander Sokoruv)

Beginning with a graphic vivisection, Sokoruv’s Faust initially suggests a radical shakeup of Goethe’s text. It really isn’t one. The script here modifies the details of the original plot (indeed, the pact with the Devil is only signed in the final reel), but its spirit is true to Goethe’s play. Faust and the Devil travel about a German town and the surrounding areas (the scope here is smaller than the play or the Murnau adaptation), discussing the human condition. It’s engaging enough from moment to moment, and the central plot involving Faust’s romantic/guilty feelings toward a girl in the town is well-executed, but I was a bit too tired to get a firm appreciation of the picture as a whole. Stylistically, we seem to be in Terry Gilliam’s territory as much as Sokoruv’s. Fisheye lenses and other visual distortions abound, and the performance style seems as likely to irritate as draw empathy at any given moment. Various gross-outs, such as a dying homunculus or the Devil’s grotesque, seemingly cancerous body help to keep interest from flagging.

Rating: 59/100

Your Sister’s Sister (Lynn Shelton)

This confirms that my previous walkout of Shelton’s Humpday was the right call. She’s an incredibly inept director, barely elevating this “script” to the realm of bad theater, despite the fact that it asks next to nothing of her. The cast, each of them terrible in their own ways, struggle through awkward, overextended improv sessions, hoping to give some sort of energy to a plot that deserves no respect whatsoever (a man with a crush on an unattainable girl sleeps with her lesbian sister, only to discover than she’s loved him all along). There are too many clumsy establishing shots, a supremely embarrassing montage near the end, and an absurdly pat resolution to the idiotic premise. Certainly proof that extremely talky movies need not be extremely smart or clever.

Rating: 26/100

W.E. (Madonna)

As hopelessly self-absorbed as one would expect a movie directed by Madonna to be. Still, this is a competently, if conventionally made romantic drama with some real flashes of wit (e.g. She says, “You certainly know the way to a woman’s heart.” He replies, “I wasn’t aiming that high.”). Two plotlines are juxtaposed here, usually with clanking obviousness. The first details the trouble marriages of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), including her “fairy tale” romance with Prince Edward. The second, set in 1998, sees a woman named after her (Abbie Cornish) gain some degree of self-sufficiency through spending her husband’s money at an auction of Wallis’ estate. The fundamental premise here is so privileged that the script’s pleas to look at what was given up for fame and love seem destined to fall on deaf ears. Still, I found this glossy, enjoyable, and surprisingly unembarrassed by its melodrama. I’m sure to be in the minority, but I’d take this over The King’s Speech and its portrayal of monarch-as-underdog any day.

Rating: 48/100

The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

This seems to be, like many (if not all) Dardenne movies, a parable about forgiveness and unconditional love. In it, a troubled child finds himself systematically abandoned by adults, with the exception of a veritable stranger with no obligation to him. Her acts of kindness and capacity for forgiveness seem to approximate a state of grace here, and the suspense in this film seems to come from whether or not the boy whom she loves will recognize this miracle when faced with it. While I felt that this overtly Bressonian plotline was somewhat tidy, the details that comprise it are frequently striking. There are many heartbreaking scenes here, such as those involving the boy’s father (Jeremie Renier, very well cast) and the bravura tracking shots which show the boy racing somewhere… anywhere on the titular bike. The confrontations between characters here are especially well done, achieving a raw ferocity rarely seen outside of Pialat. Simple, but rather certain of what it is setting out to accomplish, which makes it feel like a breath of fresh air.

Rating: 67/100

ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos)

ALPS, in which a group of people offer to stand in for recently deceased family members, is so much in the vein of Dogtooth that one wonders if Lanthimos is already running out of tricks. One could assemble a checklist of similarities between Dogtooth and ALPS (e.g. pop-culture non-sequitirs, awkward, overly precise dialogue, a plot involving a secret outside culture’s brush with a “normal” world that is only slightly less outré, rehearsals that seem to eradicate personal identity, etc…) and when finished with the exercise, it would be very difficult to see what makes ALPS distinctive, indeed. Is this just a cynical bid for auteur status, or do these motifs have more to offer? For most viewers, it seems that getting more of the same has been somewhat disappointing. Dogtooth struck the international film community as the product of a unique voice, but at the same time there’s not much else like ALPS, outside of its predecessor (and Attenberg, I suppose). Trying to appraise this on its own terms, one suspects it’s trying to say something about the codedness of human interactions and our intense desire for familiarity. Lanthimos’ tricks still work, but this is generally a calmer, more sedate film than Dogtooth, which means its impact is reduced as well.

Rating: 58/100

The Moth Diairies (Mary Harron)

Like a teen drama that crawled off of the WB network, Mary Harron’s mostly inoffensive lesbian vampire tale is never as salacious as you want it to be. Indeed, things are so calm here at times that the overall vibe is closer to a Harry Potter movie than anything. In this movie, girls creep around a boarding school, suspecting that the latest addition to their roster might be a vampire. By midway through the film the mystery has its answer, and there’s little left for the viewer to do. Frequent invocations of Le Fanu’s Carmilla only underscore how unoriginal this is. One hopes that some interesting subtext will emerge here, but given the extreme frankness of the film in dealing with lesbianism, there’s really nothing left for the vampire myth to disguise.

Rating: 37/100

Sleepless Night (Frederic Jardin)

A straightforward police thriller with a focused plotline and an inspired locale, Sleepless Night stands out from most Midnight Madness selections. The plot, involving a police officer who is trying to rescues his son from drug dealers, doesn’t get in the way of the action, or slow down the film past the first fifteen minutes. Instead of a series of outrageous set pieces, Jardin delivers a consistently exciting tone here, with tension about the officer’s success riding high throughout. This cop is no superhuman with crazy kung-fu at his disposal, which actually raises suspense levels. The bulk of the film is set inside “Le Tarmac,” a sprawling nightclub. It’s a wonderful decision that helps to erase the sense of contrivance inherent in most action films. Worth seeking out.

Rating: 56/100

TIFF Day 5 - Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Incident

2011-09-14T02:21:00.003-04:00

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)
Pretty much what the positive advance buzz suggested it would be, this drama about an escapee from a cult/commune plays more like a horror film. Each cut threatens to find our heroine (Elizabeth Olsen, very solid) trapped back on the proverbial ranch, which lends the entire film a deeply unsettling feel. Olsen’s performance is largely non-verbal, but her nervous tics and constant backward glances make her anxiety palpable. “Fear… makes you truly present,” one character states, and that couldn’t feel more appropriate than in this film where the past is so ferocious that it threatens to overtake the present at any given moment. I’m less sold on the interactions in the present. The “real” family here behaves somewhat less than plausibly at times, some of the parallels between past and present are too tidy, and these scenes are often perfunctory opportunities for Olsen to spazz out (I imagine this stuff could make for a singularly fucked up sitcom). Still, a wonder of sustained tension that really helps viewers to understand how traumatic this type of trauma must be.

Rating: 69/100

The Incident (Alexandre Courtes)
Dismal. Four bandmates in a heavy metal band (for no reason whatsoever are they in a heavy metal band) take a day job at the local insane asylum. During a blackout, the patients rebel, taking down the hospital staff. Half of the run time here takes place before the run-time, and it’s excruciatingly slow-paced. After darkness falls, the film only offers a series of scenes in which people run around in the dark hitting one another (you’d be hard pressed to tell one character apart from another here). The last fifteen minutes are finally gruesome and mildly effective, but it’s far too little too late. Apparently, IFC picked this up for a Pay Per View release. That’s probably more than it deserves.

Rating: 21/100

TIFF Day 5 - Rampart, Whore's Glory, Roman's Circuit, The Woman in the Fifth

2011-09-13T19:14:00.003-04:00

In the interests of not falling hopelessly behind (these seven movie days are killer!), I’ll be brief:

Rampart (Oren Moverman)

Set in Los Angeles in 1999 and dealing with police corruption and brutality, this is exactly the sort of drama you would expect it to be. Harrelson is committed to a character that is barely more than swagger and debauchery. The script is something of a mess. It tries to incriminate every aspect of the Los Angeles justice system and the protagonist’s home life in an attempt to be comprehensive, but really it never gets below the surface. Ultimately, a very light, unsatisfying retread of Bad Lieutenant with no obsessive core to drive it.

Rating: 37/100

Whore’s Glory (Michael Glawogger)

A triptych of depravity. Rarely have I wanted a shower after viewing a film more. Glawogger shows us sights here that most of us will never see, though he seems as interested in architectural spaces as the people who live in them. The whores all seem like individual personalities, so no sense of what constitutes a typical life in any of these places emerge. Indeed, the best information here is usually gleaned through a process of comparison between one whorehouse and the next. While the women in the Thai brothel “The Fishtank” seem reasonably well adjusted and even go out to hire “bar boys” after their shifts end, the young girls who work in the Bangladeshi “City of Joy” seem to have little but the avoidance of homelessness on their minds. Admittedly, I found myself grooving on the soundtrack from time to time, taking questionable aesthetic pleasure in what could only be described as sheer abjection.

Rating: 52/100

Roman’s Circuit (Sebastian Braham)

I can tell that I’m in the minority in finding this one intriguing, but then again I am currently writing a thesis on French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories on memory and perception, making me part of this talky film’s very narrow target audience. It’s a promising debut, at times recalling Shane Carruth’s Primer, due to its stylistic commitment to its theoretical underpinnings and its willingness to indulge in babble. The schtick in this drama set in academia is that memories, when recalled simultaneously, tend to bleed into one another. Braham uses this as an explanation for why our patterns of behavior repeat, and this makes for an interesting thesis, if not quite a powerful dramatic core (I literally felt no emotional involvement here whatsoever). Formally, this means the early scenes end with abrupt cuts while later scenes blend into one another without any cuts whatsoever. It’s intriguing stuff, even if it’s extremely dry, and it suggests that Braham is a potential talent to watch.

Rating: 54/100

The Woman in the Fifth (Pawel Pawlikowski)

Not at all what I expected from the director of My Summer of Love and Last Resort, this comes across like a classier, less thrilling David Lynch film. In it, Ethan Hawke plays an American author who travels to Paris in hopes of reuniting with his estranged wife and child. Instead, he falls into relationships with two beautiful, dangerous women and hobnobs with Arabic gangsters. The style here relies heavily on translucent surfaces, out of focus images and reflections, giving the movie a dreamlike feel. The narrative is purposefully opaque, and never congeals into something that can be firmly interpreted, which is sure to frustrate some viewers. The Lynch comparison doesn’t do Pawlikowski many favors, given that his film is entirely too aimless and sedate to draw us in. Fine but forgettable.

Rating: 46/100

TIFF - Day 4 - Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Livid

2011-09-13T02:41:00.004-04:00

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky)

Thinking back about Paradise Lost 3, I realize that it’s possible I like it more for its extra cinematic impact than its cinematic qualities and I’m okay with that. While the third entry in this epic documentary saga is certainly made more proficiently than the second, most of the outrage that it stirs up is recycled from the seminal first entry (and the events recounted here are as outrageous as ever). New exonerating proof emerges here, thanks to changes in Arkansas’ laws governing appeals based on new DNA evidence. I do wish, however, there was more time actually spent with the West Memphis 3 in this film. That might not have been possible, due to their incarceration, but they, like Berlinger and Sinofsky, now almost seem like minor players in a movement and drama that has taken on a life of its own over the past eighteen years. The film’s efforts to hypothesize that the stepfathers on one of the three murdered boys could have been responsible for the killings seems slightly unscrupulous, even if the film eventually backs off on its accusatory tone.

This was a final cut, but given the recent release of the West Memphis 3, twelve minutes of the film will be added.

Rating: 60/100

Livid (Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo)

A visiting nurse coaxes some friends into robbing a creepy house on Halloween night, to disastrous results in this slow-burning horror movie from the directors of the cult hit Inside. While watching, Livid seems too slow. It takes forty-five minutes before any scares crop up. Still, in retrospect the dread that the directors generated in the film’s first half are probably more effective than the outright shocks that follow. There’s nothing original to see here, as the hauntings in question involve vampiric ballerinas and a creepy old hag. The final moments attempt to class the joint up (the filmmakers claim to have been inspired by old Hammer films), but they end up making the time spent watching feel silly.

Rating: 41/100

TIFF - Day 4 - Dark Horse, Girl Model, Crazy Horse

2011-09-12T16:58:00.000-04:00

Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)

Solondz continues to shoot fish in a barrel in Dark Horse, his latest exploration of arrested development. Focusing on a thirtysomething man who collects toys and lives with his parents, this comedy starts out by playing broader than Solodnz’s recent work. When his desperate wedding proposal meets with an unexpected acceptance the possibility of change arises. Of course happiness is fleeting at best in a Solondz film, so it’s only a matter of time before our rotund hero’s dreams are crushed. The narrative, which drifts off into the absurd after a major character falls into a coma (Solondz’s Bunuellian tendencies are at their worst here), is really just an excuse for the director to air his current grievances about culture and demonstrate his witty dialogue (her reaction to their first kiss? “Oh my God… It wasn’t horrible.”). Selma Blair makes less of an impact than one would expect as the would-be spouse and as the hero’s parents Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow barely register at all. The moral seems to be that none of us will ever live up to each other’s fantasies, but this might be best seen as a minor work, where the accumulation of cheap shots that Solondz lobs at pop culture targets (e.g. pre-show movie “entertainment”, Tron: Legacy, bad pop music) are designed to at least take some of the heat off of the characters. They can hardly be blamed for being awful, Solondz seems to be arguing, given how awful all of New Jersey is.

Rating: 46/100

Girl Model (Ashley Sabin & David Redmon)

This documentary tracks Nadya, a pretty 14 year old girl from Novosibirsk, who travels to Japan in hopes of achieving a modeling career. She discovers a ruthless industry instead, seemingly designed to exploit the families of young girls in the hopes of turning out a rare money maker. I appreciated the film’s jaundiced view of a world that I know next to nothing about, but at the same time, I felt that the filmmakers refused to press on any tough questions. The close alliance of these modeling agencies with the sex trade is underexplored, for example, and the degree to which Nadya’s family could have anticipated a terrible outcome for her trip is left vague, probably to boost drama (at one point she clearly states that her friends warned her that the business was a scam). Ultimately a sad portrait of young girls left to fend for themselves in a world that is too willing to exploit them, Girl Model is hamstrung by its somewhat slapdash construction and lack of formal interest.

Rating: 38/100

Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman)

With Crazy Horse, a documentary about the famed Parisian burlesque club, Wiseman varies his trademarked approach somewhat. Instead of merely observing anonymously, he shows several numbers here that have been obviously staged for his camera. These are a mixed bag, quality-wise, but they are generally interesting, especially insofar as they present the bodies of the female dancers at the Crazy Horse as assemblages of abstract parts. What works better here are the glimpses at the behind-the-scenes workings of the clubs. A conversation in which a costumer talks about achieving the appearance of a round buttock under stage lights is fascinating, for example, as are the few glimpses that we get into the business details of the club. These highlights do not comprise the bulk of the run time here, though, which suggests that Crazy Horse would be better still if it were as long as most of Wiseman’s other output. Beyond this, it’s interesting that Wiseman manages to get interviews from the club’s artistic directors by merely taping them as they are interviewed by other media personalities. This might be a violation of his usual fly on the wall style, but it’s a clever one. Odd too that there should be so little focus on repetition here, given that the girls perform essentially the same show each night after exhausting rehearsals. Wiseman’s desire to show us what a night at the Crazy Horse is like keeps Crazy Horse from showing us what life at the Crazy Horse is like to some degree.

Rating: 51/100

TIFF - Day 4 - Lipstikka, The Descendants

2011-09-12T13:38:00.003-04:00

Lipstikka (Jonathan Segall)

An absurd late-breaking plot twist undoes the largely credible relationship drama Lipstikka. Spanning a decade or two, the film examines the mostly unrequited relationship between two Palestinian women who relocate to the United Kingdom. There’s an odd distance between them when they meet in the present day, and director Segall uses flashbacks to fill in the gaps. The pivotal moment here occurs back in Israel, when the two have an unfortunate encounter with some Israeli soldiers, lending the film some political power that it can’t quite seem to focus into anything productive. Back in the present, their mindgames make for trashy fun. The two lead performances play well against each other and the director is unafraid to indulge in his salacious instincts. Still, the script can’t resist fucking things up. A final revelation about one of the women renders all of the interactions that have come before totally incoherent and leaves the viewer with unsatisfactory questions that distract from the emotional core of the film.

Rating: 36/100

The Descendants (Alexander Payne)

Heartfelt to a fault, Payne’s latest sees him largely dropping the satiric edge of his earlier work and working in a much more conventional tone. The question of “what’s really important in life” is central here, and Payne’s answers are all clichés. The plot, involving a workaholic’s recentering brought about by his wife’s impending death, begs for an airing of resentment and pain that has built up, but what we get is considerably kinder and gentler than one would expect. It is telling here that the best scene of the movie, in which a black sheep daughter learns of her mother’s inevitable decline, is probably the film’s rawest (Shailene Woodley is the lone performance of note here). Payne resists anything remotely biting, which is odd, given that an early scene involving a forced apology among children suggests a comedy of manners about behaving nicely under terrible circumstances. There’s the rare line here that suggests a movie with something to say about the rage that must surely be felt in this situation (e.g. “You were putting lipstick on a corpse!”), but trite homilies win the day. A subplot involving the future of a patch of unconverted Hawaiian beachfront property offers plenty of opportunities for Payne to pander with so-called hard-won wisdom. A braver movie would be far more direct and less willing to comfort us with lessons learned from sitcoms.

Rating: 44/100

TIFF - Day 3

2011-09-12T10:37:00.002-04:00

Trishna (Michael Winterbottom)

Trishna is Michael Winterbottom’s second adaptation of a Thomas Hardy, following his 1996 Jude, but while that film retained its period trappings and British locale, Trishna is a contemporary recasting of Tess of the d’Urbervilles set in India. This transfer has its benefits (there’s a travelogue quality to this country-spanning film that’s not to be discounted) and its drawbacks (moving the action from the English countryside, it’s lost much of its elemental power). Hardy’s plot is retained, for the most part, but Winterbottom gives the second half of the film an overheated vibe, out of In the Realm of the Senses. Here the film threatens to alienate audiences who have been drawn in my lilting music and pretty pictures, but it does credibly lift the tale to the realm of tragedy. What we end up with is lesser than Jude and certainly inferior to Polanski’s Tess adaptation, but still a damn fine adult romantic drama nonetheless.

Rating: 63/100

House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello)

Early in House of Tolerance a patron of the titular French brothel observes that the place never changes. “It changes slowly,” replies the woman he’s about to bed. In this bracing film Bonello brings that gradual sense of change as the “twilight of the 19^th century” gives way to the “dawn of the 20^th” into sharp focus. Through an accumulation of detail, as opposed to an overt presentation of back stories and dramatic incidents, we gain a sense of the mores of the women and men who work in this high-class brothel. The limits to the social relationships between the prostitutes and their patrons become clea. In its languid pacing and pictoral beauty it naturally recall’s Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai, but it reminded me of Demme’s Beloved adaptation, of all things, with its central trauma serving as a haunting reference point around which a forgotten way of life swirled. Still, this is probably a livelier film than either, with boldly imagined set pieces that are as close to pure cinema as anything I’ve seen at this year’s festival thus far. The final formal salvo struck me powerfully, with a cut to contemporary times inducing a real tear or two after Bonello’s ballsy imaginary ones. Not until the house was gone did I realize how deeply invested in it, which is probably something close to the point.

Rating: 71/100

Monsters Club (Toshiaki Toyoda)

No need to waste time here, as I can’t imagine that this terrible film, inspired by the writings of the Unabomber, will be much considered. I will say that Toyoda has at least made this material its own, transferring it to a snowy forest in Japan and adding a fixation on pancake makeup that could have come from a Matthew Barney film, but it’s difficult to see how he’s thought critically about Ted Kaczynski’s ravings (which are quoted at length here) or advanced his point of view beyond an adolescent anti-establishment stance.

Rating: 18/100

Alois Nebel (Tomas Lunak)

In the lousy tradition of Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis comes this crudely animated Czech trauma drama. The Holocaust, predictably, provides the central event from which the titular protagonist’s troubles sprout. When one considers his occupation (train station operator) unfavorable comparisons to Closely Watched Trains inevitably crop up. The cheap, inadequate black and white animation is going for a noir style, but this is a psychological drama with little action, making the choice seem more likely borne out of financial necessity. Ultimately, this goes for slow-burning psychological drama, but as with Waltz With Bashir, I find such a goal difficult to achieve when human faces have been replaced with crude flash animations.

Rating: 23/100

Low Life (Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval)

Klotz and Perceval’s Low Life presents an odd mix of socially aware, didactic drama and the navel gazing of young lovers. There are passages in Low Life that I adore, most of them luxuriating in self-absorption. One masterful shot, for example, set at a party without audible dialogue, sees two young lovers fight, make up, and break up again. It has a real pulse and typifies what works best in Low Life. The use of ambient music, the felicity of youth and the feel for a life spent at night mostly waiting around (or is it posing?) are all strong here. This mood doesn’t really last past the first hour, though. These young aspiring artists and scholars become increasingly tied up in the political problems of some local immigrants as the film moves on, shifting its focus radically. The film remains engaging, to be sure, but I was somewhat disappointed that the surface beauties I was reveling in had given way to something more explicitly important. Still well worth seeing, and very, very French, but something other than the movie I selfishly wanted it to be.

Rating: 56/100

You’re Next (Adam Wingard)

You’re Next is nothing less and nothing more than an expertly made and audience-pleasing slasher film. Wingard clearly knows his target audience here, and as such has crafted a gory and suspenseful thriller with a satisfyingly large body count. I can’t imagine it won’t be seen as something of a classic in a few years. Though there are a few funny nods to the conventions of the genre (one character wants to flee for safety at the first ominous bump upstairs; the final girl is entirely capable of defending herself), this is too happy to perfectly execute a proven template than to reinvent it entirely. The comic elements here, which arise largely from the family dynamics of the family placed under siege by mysterious fox-masked killers, only add to the general sense of hysteria. The inevitable plot twists, when they come, scarcely stop this rapidly paced film in its tracks and the ending does not disappoint. Really, just an extremely proficient, extremely enjoyable genre film with a good sense of what it needs to do.

Rating: 70/100

TIFF - Day 3 - The Artist

2011-09-11T09:46:00.001-04:00

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)

Opening in 1927, in the glory days of the silent era, the mostly silent film The Artist begins as a paean to Hollywood’s pre-talkie glory days. The opening moments, in which we see film star George Valentine (Jean Dujardin) screaming “I won’t speak” while in some villain’s torture device, suggest a more comic take on the sound vs. silent drama than is ultimately provided here, however. Indeed, after the first act, which is neatly sectioned off from the rest of the film, the movie is more Raging Bull than City Lights, examining a self-destructive case of overblown male pride. This dramatic turn is brave, to be sure, but somewhat misguided. As good as charming star Dujardin is channeling Douglas Fairbanks here, he is not half as interesting when he spends the final two thirds of the film glowering. His co-star, Berenice Bejo, seems a tad miscast as well, not quite having the certain “it” that the script insists that she does. These complaints are major ones, given that the film depends upon glamour to such an extent. The dramatic turn poses other problems too, mostly involving the shallowness of the plotting. For example, while having Valentine’s wife express her discontent by drawing silly faces on photos of her husband might be effective shorthand in the first part of the film, it grows increasingly insufficient as the film grows increasingly dramatic. The central romance as well is equally vague, straddling some weird space at the intersection between unrequited obsession, an obligatory debt of graditude, and an extended meet-cute. By the time it ends, The Artist gives the impression that the era when the talkies learned to speak was an uncomplicated one, and that the films of the time were equally simple, which is something of a disservice to one of cinema’s most aesthetically productive eras. All in all, less than the sum of its dog reaction shots and song and dance routines.

Rating: 43/100

TIFF - Day 2

2011-09-10T04:02:00.002-04:00

Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (Rithy Panh)

This documentary about a Cambodian Communist who oversaw the deaths of over 12,000 citizens during the Khmer Rouge genocide is important and powerful if somewhat diluted by its run time. The film opens with a Pol Pot speech playing out over a montage of documentary footage, but what follows is largely a single extended interview with the titular Comrade Duch. Over three decades after he oversaw an unfathomable atrocity, he’s mellowed into a startlingly reflective, soft-spoken old man. As such, the movie comes across at times as offering him a platform for his apologies and justifications. This would be immoral, to be sure, and Panh by allowing the man to speak allows him to largely indict himself. When he reveals that he’s converted to Christianity because it offers the hope of forgiveness, the reaction is one of disbelief. Panh doesn’t rub our noses in the horrors, offering only scattered images that he intercuts infrequently throughout the interviews and a few recreations of the torture methods used. These are appropriate, as Duch’s key role was one of education, instructing and brainwashing children in the ways of effective torture. Absolutely startling and gut-wrenching at times, yet somewhat tempered by the sheer scope of the genocide it’s trying to portray. The second hour of the film, which shows Duch poring over reams and reams of meticulously kept records about the actions at S21, where he was head, grow somewhat numbing after a while. Like those records, this is an important historical document, no doubt, but as cinema I think it’s held to an even higher standard.

Rating: 52/100

whiteonwhite:algorithimicnoir (Eve Sussman)

My review of this will on some level be useless to anyone else, as this algorithmically generated film will be different for anyone who watches it in the future. In it, a series of over 3000 film clips and voice over recordings are shuffled together, resulting in an international detective movie that never resolves itself into a coherent narrative. For me, this is less troubling than it might sound, as I can scarcely follow the intricacies of the plotting in your average Bourne movie. For those less likely to tune out plotting, I expect Sussman’s experiment will still have plenty to offer. Her exercise puts the generic in genre, showing how coded the experience of watching spy movie is in the first place. The cool, professionally shot images each evoke something just out of reach. Also visible, on a side screen in the installation are the code commands that call up the random clips. With metatags like “walking” “anxiety” “phone” and “writing”, several things become obvious. First, most films could be broken down so vaguely and incorporated into this mix. Second, the ability of voiceover narration to tie images together is never to be underestimated. Third, the establishing shots, which come between voiceover segments are nearly as potent as the dialogue in creating the impression that this randomness is building toward something. Ultimately fascinating (I could happily spend a few more hours with it) and a true testament to theorist Lev Manovich’s assertion that in the digital age the interface programmer might supplant the director as the leading creative force in cinema.

Rating: n/a (but awesome)

Restless (Gus Van Sant)

As twee and unsufferable as the reviews from Cannes suggested (certainly can’t blame high expectations this time), this emo teen romance is actively annoying instead of affecting. Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska play two too-cute teens with a morbid fascination with death. The question of how young adults handle death when it rears its head is potentially fascinating (see Elephant), but the treatment here insists that they do so by retreating further into childhood. As such, Restless is an endless series of scenes in which the two doomed young lovers play act (pretending to meet his dead parents at their grave), trick-or-treat, attend children’s sporting events, and so on. Sincerity itself is not a problem, but the terrible dialogue that is peppered throughout this script (“I like your cracker house” is her first pick-up line; the moral?: “death is easy, love is hard”) simply cannot be taken seriously. Van Sant should be ashamed, really. Harris Savides’ photography is the lone saving grace.

Rating: 28/100

Keyhole (Guy Maddin)

You might have a general sense of what to expect from Guy Maddin at this point, yet he’s a consummate risk-taker at the same time. His sexualized homages to film genres of old always walk a high-wire act between absurdity and inspiration. It’s my sad duty to report that for the first time in over a decade, he hasn’t pulled off one of his stunts. Keyhole starts promisingly as a mix of gangster film, old dark house thriller and paean to Homer’s Odyssey. The opening hail of literal machine-gun montage truly impresses, but sets the stage for a movie that entirely fails to live up to any expectations it creates. All of Keyhole takes place in one very ornate house, as Ulysses (Jason Patric) must ascend to his wife’s bedroom to reclaim her. The reference to Homer’s poem is obvious, but it still scarcely makes sense given that the film that follows takes place in a blatantly non-Homeric (though very homoerotic) fashion. Psychobabble is made literal, as the house is filled with ghosts who Ulysses must overcome to reclaim his mate. Cocks grow out of walls and the golden fleece is none other than a patch of pubes. The climax sees the characters literally regressing their home to an earlier state. This all sounds stupid and perhaps vaguely chuckle-worthy, I’m sure, but in practice it’s dreary. The tone of the film is monotonous and repetitive, and Maddin’s trademark playfulness is in generally short supply. There were a few clever moments, I suppose, and Maddin has a real ear of classic gangster talk, but this was a massive disappointment that I can’t imagine pleasing much of anyone.

Rating: 33/100

Good Bye (Mohammed Rasoulof)

While Rasoulof’s recent political persecution makes Good Bye a particularly brave film to make, it is somewhat less powerful than it could be. Telling the story of a woman who chooses to have a child because it will increase her chances of obtaining a visa to flee Iran, the film invokes comparison to the work of the Dardenne brothers. Like a mix of La Promesse and Lorna’s Silence, Good Bye focuses on transactional detail to the extent that the heroine’s pregnancy becomes another bargaining chip. Unfortunately, the comparison does Rasoulof few favors. While he mixes up the typical Iranian style somewhat with tight compositions and an expressively dark lighting scheme, his predilection for long takes (as opposed to the Dardennes’ jump cuts) makes the film a slog where it should be suspenseful. With the exception of one virtuoso shot that sees an apartment raid grow increasingly horrible and absurd, it seemed that Rasoluf would have benefitted from tighter editing. Coupled with a narrative structure that senselessly withholds key information from us, the film feels like an odd mix of art house film and thriller. Another problem lies with Leyla Zareh’s lead performance, which is too withdrawn for this type of film. I can’t tell if Rasoulof was after cultural verisimilitude (here’s where I profess to having no knowledge of how women in Iran act) or what, but she gives us too little (as opposed to, say, Lorna’s frequent histrionics). If this sounds harsh, rest assured that this is an extremely solid and detail oriented political film. It just seems a few snips from greatness.

Rating: 57/100

TIFF - Day 1

2011-09-09T10:39:00.003-04:00

Slow Action (Ben Rivers)

Kicking off my TIFF festival nicely was Ben Rivers’ Slow Action. A mock ethnographic documentary, the film is a strong test case in cinema’s ability to make images suggestive through mere context. For much of the run time here, we’re faced with landscapes of four imaginary “utopian” islands that don’t really exist as an amusingly deadpan narrator describes the cultures of the supposed indigenous people. It takes a force of imagination to will these people into existence, a feat somewhat assisted by the absurdity of the cultures, each of which seems to spring from an unearthed Baron Munchhausen tale (my favorite were the Elevenians, who worship holograms and communicate through trigonometry). The viewer is placed in a curious double-bind that lays bare the ethics of any such study. If we dismiss these absurd cultures we’re guilty of ethnocentrism. If we buy into the patently false claims of the narrators, we are being naïve. As the film unfurls, the ideal of a utopia becomes increasingly troubled, abstract, and subjective. Funny too.

Rating 64/100

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog)

This documentary about the morality of the death penalty struck me as being shockingly mundane, especially given its unusually-colorful director. Examining a triple homicide that is so bland it might have been picked for its sheer banality (to better shift the issue into focus), the film takes the form of an extended case-study. In practice, this means a work that is largely comprised of a series of interviews with the perpetrators, the victims’ families, and relevant law enforcement officials. Herzog’s style is functional at best, not markedly more accomplished than the police crime scene video he sometimes incorporates into the montage. One can surely read autuerist themes into the senselessness of the murders, I suppose, but I imagine one could do that for most any murder.

As a film about a controversial issue, it might flounder even more. Herzog adopts an emphatically anti-death penalty stance and largely refuses any other viewpoint. As such, there’s no particular moral development and little self-reflection (the director’s infamous voiceover is sorely missed here, replaced by bland on-screen text). The information that we receive as the film plays out does little to illuminate or challenge any preconceived stance the viewer might have on the issue. Sins of the father? Check. Victims of socioeconomic circumstance? Check. Tasteful emotional appeals from just about everyone? Check. Herzog, for his part, is respectful of his interviewees, almost to a fault, except when he relies on their local color to provide an easy laugh or two.

Rating: 39/100

From Up On Poppy Hill (Goro Miyazaki)

I have seen a few complaints that Studio Ghibli’s Arietty was a bit too down to earth to justify an animated treatment. Compared to the nostalgic and entirely realistic From Up on Poppy Hill, Arietty is downright surreal. Set in a glorified early 1960s Japan, the film involves the early romantic stirrings and political activism of a young girl, Umi. Umi’s questions about her family history are played out against larger concerns about Japan’s history, as much of the plot involves a bureaucratic decision to tear down a student center housed in an old building. Things are charming, as one would expect from a Ghibli production, and characters exude an infectious can-do spirit. Still, it would be disingenuous to fail to point out how predictable the film was. The second half of the film briefly threatens to shake things up by delving into bizarre territory, raising the specter of incest as Umi’s sexuality begins to emerge. Before long, however, Miyazaki has completely removed any complications from the scenario and the film ends up feeling overly idealized as a result. Essentially a mix of Only Yesterday and Kiki’s Delivery Service, but less enchanting than either. The few grace notes (e.g. a silverfish scurries by as Umi goes into the boys’ clubhouse for the first time) are the highlight here, but compared to the studio’s general output, this offers only minor pleasures.

Rating: 41/100

The Raid (Gareth Evans)

The impressive Indonesian film The Raid opens with a shot of a gun and a ticking watch, giving the impression that it will be something of a thriller. Instead, it’s a full-out action epic, with what is probably the best martial arts fight scenes seen on screen in the last few years. With a slim plot that seems entirely remake-ready, the film charges headlong into a series of elaborately choreographed face-offs between a SWAT team who are invading a kingpin’s illicit apartment building and the junkies and thugs who live there. Director Evans goes for the visceral here, emphasizing the brutality of each hit and frequently focusing on gory outcomes of fights. The film seems to alternate between flat out rumbles (many of which approach Romper Stomper's climax in scale and intensity) and more suspenseful moments. The latter are somewhat less successful, as is a decision to put a trio of extended dialogue scenes in the film’s back half, but this is undeniably kinetic and definitely the work of a filmmaker with incredible action chops.

Rating: 66/100

TIFF '11 Schedule

2011-08-25T00:49:00.004-04:00

Here's my festival schedule, pending some tinkering. Tips on what I'm doing wrong are always appreciated...

September 8
18:00 - Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog)
21:30 - From Up On Poppy Hill (Goro Miyazaki)
23:59 - The Raid (Gareth Evans)

September 9
16:00 - Restless (Gus Van Sant)
17:30 - Keyhole (Guy Maddin)
20:15 - Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof)

September 10
10:00 - The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)
12:00 - Trishna (Michael Winterbottom)
15:15 - House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello)
18:15 - Monsters Club (Toshiaki Toyada)
20:00 - Alois Nebel (Tomas Lunak)
21:45 - I Wish (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
23:59 - You're Next (Adam Wingard)

September 11
9:15 - We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay)
12:30 - The Descendents (Alexander Payne)
14:30 - Dark Horse (Todd Solondz)
16:30 - Girl Model (Ashley Sabin / David Redmon)
18:15 - Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman)
21:00 - Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (Joe Berlinger / Bruce Sinofsky)
23:59 - Livid (Julien Maury / Alexandre Bustillo)

September 12
11:00 - Rampart (Oren Moverman)
14:00 - Whore's Glory (Michael Glawogger)
19:15 - The Woman in the Fifth (Pawel Pawlikowski)
22:15 - Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)
23:59 - The Incident (Alexandre Courtes)

September 13
10:00 - Faust (Alexander Sokoruv)
12:15 - Your Sister's Sister (Lynn Shelton)
14:30 - W.E. (Madonna)
16:30 - The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre Dardenne / Luc Dardenne)
19:30 - ALPS (Yorgos Lanthimos)
22:00 - The Moth Diairies (Mary Harron)
23:59 - Sleepless Night (Frederic Jardin)

September 14
9:15 - Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman)
12:00 - Like Crazy (Drake Doremus)
15:15 - Snowtown (Justin Kurzel)
17:45 - Pariah (Dee Rees)
21:15 - Kotoko (Shinya Tsukamoto)
23:59 - Lovely Molly (Eduardo Sanchez)

September 15
9:00 - Cardboard Village (Ermanno Olmi)
12:00 - That Summer (Philippe Garrel)
15:00 - Love and Bruises (Lou Ye)
18:00 - Terrafirma (Emanuele Crialese)
22:00 - Michael (Markus Schleinzer)
23:59 - The Day (Doug Aarniokoski)

September 16
9:30 - Outside Satan Bruno Dumont)
11:45 - Habemus Papum Nanni Moretti)
14:15 - Take Shelter Jeff Nichols)
18:00 - Tyrannosaur Paddy Considine)
21:00 - Wuthering Heights Andrea Arnold)
23:59 - Smuggler Katsuhito Ishii)

September 17
9:30 - Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes)
12:00 - Peace Love & Misunderstanding (Bruce Beresford)
14:45 - Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
18:15 - The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)
21:00 - Albert Nobbs (Rodrigo Garcia)
23:59 - Kill List (Ben Wheatley)

September 18
9:45 - A Simple Life (Cedric Khan) - or -
10:00 - Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola)
12:30 - (The Turin Horse Bela Tarr) - or -
12:45 - Elles (Malgoska Szumowska)
16:00 - Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh)

More ratings...

2010-09-17T20:14:00.002-04:00

Day 7

Potiche (Francois Ozon)

Rating: 62/100

Buried (Rodrigo Cortes)

Rating: 73/100

Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe)

Rating: 60/100

Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)

Rating: 54/100

Kaboom (Gregg Araki)

Rating: 42/100

Red Nights (Julien Carbon | Laurent Courtiaud)

Rating: 37/100

Day 8

13 Assassins (Takashi Miike)

Rating: 67/100

I Saw the Devil (Kim Jee-woon)

Rating: 53/100

Sandcastle (Boo Junfeng)

Rating: 37/100

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apitchatpong Weeresethakul)
Rating: 88/100

Day 9

Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner)
Rating: 41/100

A Horrible Way to Die (Adam Wingard)
Rating: 52/100

I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke)
Rating: 50/100

TIFF Day 6

2010-09-17T19:53:00.003-04:00

Miral (Julian Schnabel)

Julian Schanbel’s Miral covers the period from the establishment of Israel up through 1994, but it’s less a historical account of Palestinian oppression in Israel than the tale of several Palestinian women and their relationship to that state of affairs. There is some considerable tension here between the script, which is didactic and blunt, and Schnabel’s direction, which always seems to be looking at the fringes for something of interest within this conventional framework. Extreme close-ups, color filters, Vaseline on the lens, and extensive handheld camerawork give the impression that the sensual backdrop is more interesting to the director than history or the people portrayed. Indeed, the stories of these women provide a mixed bag of material. Things start strongly with the account of a woman’s establishment of an orphanage. This plotline could have easily sustained the film, especially since Hiam Abbas is quite good in the role. Instead, Miral drifts toward the stories of other repressed women, until it finally settles on the titular girl (Freida Pinto), who is supposed to serve as some sort of hope for the future of the Palestinian state. That message becomes obscured, though, as the final segment is easily the film’s weakest. Abbas, so effective early on, becomes stranded in a tiny role and a ridiculous wig. Miral herself is strident (“You don’t understand anything because you’ve been hiding in the mosque your whole life,” she tells her father) and politically naïve. Pinto adds little to the character that exists on the page, making the future of Palestine seem quite vapid indeed. Still, Miral is better than its already damaged reputation would suggest. There are well-played scenes here, such as the one in which a woman exaggerates her Arabness to scare off an Israeli girlfriend, that work quite well, regardless of political import. Though the film is unlikely to change hearts and minds about the issue of Palestine, it is an effective, large-scale drama.

Rating: 53/100

Submarine (Richard Ayoade)

News came this week that The Weinstein Company picked up Submarine, Richard Ayoade’s debut feature. The decision to acquire this low-key Welsh comedy seems somewhat odd, as the American indie market is flooded with a million films along this line, many of them better. When we have superior films like Rushmore, there’s no need to import mediocrities like this.

In any case, Submarine tells the coming of age story of one Oliver Tate, a young intellectual who is about to discover his first love. The movie adopts a wry, somewhat distanced tone, but this is entirely familiar stuff, depicting issues such as his parent’s possible infidelity, his virginity anxiety, his mistreatment of an outcast girl, and a cancer scare. The best material here, by far, involves his well-mannered parents, played by Noah Taylor and Sally Hawkins. The two adopt comic personas that are based on extreme rationality and parental understanding. Their frankness becomes hilarious, providing the majority of Submarine’s laughs. As for, Craig Roberts, the young actor playing Oliver, his greatest asset seems to be his vacant stare, which is less damning than it sounds, given that the title refers to the feeling of being underwater brought about by depression. Ayoade’s direction is decent, with a reasonable visual sensibility, but he indulges in too many overlong musical montages, ending every chapter of this three-part film with a whimper.

Rating: 45/100

Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell)

I suspect that a few people might write John Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole off as clichéd claptrap, but I was completely disarmed and moved by its unerring ability to treat the aftermath of the death of a child with fresh eyes. Much has been made of the fact that this is a change of pace for director Mitchell (he’s previously directed Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus), but Rabbit Hole is far more a screenwriter’s or an actors’ movie than a showcase for its director or his personality. That’s more than fine in this case, as both the screenplay, based on a Pulitzer-winning stage play, and the performances are top-notch.

With affecting clarity and surprising humor, Rabbit Hole examines the difficult fact that we all have to mourn in our own ways, at our own pace. Set eight months after a couple (Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) have lost their only child in a car accident, the film sees the two struggling to mourn in a way that provides them comfort. Much is made here of the idea that there is a socially acceptable way of acting after a tragedy, and many of Rabbit Hole’s best scenes involve quiet, unstated judgments of others’ coping mechanisms. These pressures are palpable, thanks to Kidman’s performance, which at times works through similar terrain as There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview. Social circumstances require the repression of emotions, and much of the film is spent waiting for said emotions to explode. It’s a credit to Rabbit Hole’s intelligent script that that explosion comes without upsetting the delicate balance of sadness, humor, and healing that it works toward the whole time. A major achievement in a minor key.

Rating: 81/100

The Housemaid (Im Sang-soo)

This remake of a Korean film classic is glossier than the ‘60s original. In it, Eun-Yi, a wealthy household’s new maid, enters a realm of emotional manipulation and upstairs/downstairs class struggles. Im’s approach is far kinkier than expected. There are uncomfortable sexual situations galore, each of them a metaphorical struggle for power. The movie’s politics are entirely blunt, with the rich characters all too willing to resort to murder if throwing cash at a problem doesn’t work, but they result in a film that carries a wicked spirit. It’s dumb, but it’s fun, and it builds toward a truly jaw-dropping finale. Not the smartest movie I’ve seen at the festival to be sure, but one of the boldest.

Rating: 60/100

Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan)

Whereas I Killed My Mother was surprising because it came from a director of Dolan’s age, Heartbeats is precisely the sort of thing that you would expect from a 21-year-old director. What becomes obvious, in retrospect, is how much Anne Dorval brought to the sensibility of Dolan’s debut film (it certainly fell apart once she left the screen). She shows up here, in a cameo, and it’s the best scene in the movie, by far. The rest of it is shallow stuff, obsessed with questioning the existence of bisexuality, the allure of an unrequited romance, and the way that love makes us abandon other concerns. Ideas are tossed about, but there’s no vision. Slow-motion musical montages don’t advance the mood or narrative, faux-documentary interview sequences end up trumping the main story. Everything seems self-dramatizing and overly aestheticized instead of honest. It’s overextended for what it is, and the three leads all seem like weak performers. Only the wit of the final scene caught me off-guard.

Rating: 48/100

Leap Year (Michael Rowe)

A master-slave relationship develops over the course of a month, forcing us to gradually question who’s controlling who in Michael Rowe’s debut feature. Things begin cryptically here, with no clear motivation given for single-woman Laura’s odd, promiscuous behavior. As we watch her tick the days off her calendar, building to an ominously colored February 29th, though, her actions shift into focus, turning the movie into a sub-Repulsion study in sadness brought upon by abuse. The film is psychologically unconvincing. Monica del Carmen, who plays Laura, is whatever the script calls for in a given scene, with little connective tissue from one vignette to the next. We’re supposed to feel bad for a woman who can be so businesslike or empathetic one moment and so childlike and victimized the next, but there’s nothing bridging the two personalities. Much of this is due to Rowe’s formal approach, which tends to use one shot per scene. That directorial choice would be more acceptable if it were more consistent, but we get odd decisions like the one to open the film outside of the apartment, in a supermarket. A decent first feature, but I suspect that Rowe will have better luck in, say, another four years.

Rating: 57/100

Insidious (James Wan)

This haunted house movie is definite hackwork (from the director of Saw), but it has a clear eye on entertaining the audience, which makes much of its ineptitude forgivable. With a plot that shamelessly rips off the brilliant Poltergest (Wan claims homage), much of the work has been done for them. The scares here begin to build almost immediately, whether a scene is set in day or night. Better yet, they build off one another, with most scenes offering more than one opportunity for the audience to jump in fright. Every cliché from every haunted house movie resurfaces here. Barbara Hershey, from The Entity, even turns up in a small role. This is fairly straight-faced, totally unambitious stuff that knows what it wants to be. It only really falters in its disappointing last act, in which a trip to the spirit realm feels more like a trip to a wax museum. Still, good fun.

Rating: 60/100

TIFF Day 5

2010-09-16T02:16:00.003-04:00

Outside the Law (Rachid Bouchareb)

A polished historical epic about an Algerian family’s struggle against French oppression, Outside the Law ranges from 1945 to 1962. Covering such a large span of time, things are bound to get lost, even with a 140 minute run time. Unfortunately, what remains most obscured here is how these immigrants developed a political conscience that saw terrorist action as the most effective path to liberation. One or two brief conversations shown in a prison setting do not comprise an ethos. It’s difficult to separate the Algerian identity from the immigrant experience from the political sensibility here, which is somewhat damning, given that the film’s main goal seems to be to provide access to a terrorist’s mindset. Its inability to be revelatory might be more forgivable were it not so glossy or self-serious. There are moments of irony scattered about (e.g. “See You Later, Alligator” plays on a radio as a man is killed), but never a moment of levity. Still, there are things to admire here. The gritty picture of shantytown life and the community’s sliding ethical standards is compelling, and an early scene showing the mass slaughter of Algerian protestors and innocents sparks genuine outrage.

Rating: 46/100

127 Hours (Danny Boyle)

Danny Boyle delivers real-life drama, as thrillseeker Aron Ralston gets trapped under a rock and cuts off his own hand to escape. Boyle doesn’t try to make this scenario scary or tragic so much as ironic and relateable, which is a choice that feels questionable. The film’s focus on the sensual dominates, and it lends the ordeal a visceral, sometimes unbearable feel. Some edits, like that from an ant crawling on Aron to a memory of his girlfriend stroking his chest, show real inspiration. Other moments, like one in which Aron takes pleasure basking in the fifteen minutes of sunlight granted by his situation each day, universalize the action. Throughout it all, there’s some gallows humor (e.g. a urine Slurpee) to temper the dread, but that only goes so far. When Aron finally cuts off his arm, the moment is gruesome and painful, to Boyle’s credit. There’s not much going on here, really. The film seems designed as a showcase for the director. Franco makes little impression, given his screen time. Boyle’s visuals are inventive, but inconsistently so. It’s clever to show a change in temperature by focusing on the condensation in a water bottle, but considerably less so to place a temperature gauge on screen. Whenever the high concept gives way to a character study, things weaken considerably into a series of corny flashbacks and flights of quasi-spiritual significance.

Rating: 56/100

Home for Christmas (Bent Hamer)

There are several stories here, all arranged around a Yuletide theme, but none of them step outside of a very predictable, professional course of action. The performances are all fine, and Hamer resists sentimentality as often as he indulges in it, so the film is not nearly as mawkish as it might have been. Still, this feels inescapably like product. Beyond its mysterious opening sequence, in which a Christmas celebration gives way to sniper fire, it’s forgettable, watchable fare in every way.

Rating: 40/100

Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman)

A poetic meditation on remembering and the inability to forget, this documentary from Patricio Guzman examines links between astrology, archaeology, and political memory. Chile, and particularly its Atacama Desert, provides the unique backdrop. Its humidity-free climate makes it an ideal location for both star-watchers and historians. Throughout the film, Guzman interviews those who work there, finding common ground in their relationship to the past. The delayed images of the stars and the buried record of historical past provide equal points of obsession for the people of a country that actively denies its troubled recent past. That immobilization, triggered by the Pinochet coup d’état, has created a wound culture (as Guzman has observed in his other movies), and his work probes that wound, resulting in several heartbreaking, soul-searching interviews. Throughout, we are reminded of the true scale of history, with Guzman shifting effortlessly between macro and micro scales, broadening meaning in all of his chosen topics at once. A cloud of dust particles reminds us of the swirling cosmos. The calcium in the stars reminds us of the bones of Chile's Disappeared.

Rating: 65/100

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)

Granted unprecedented, exclusive access to the world’s oldest cave paintings (discovered in 1994), Herzog offers truly remarkable raw footage in a film that feels compromised by the limitations of its production. The strict limits on the access that Herzog was given to explore the caves means that we’re doing anything but venturing into uncharted territory here. It’s understandable given the precious nature of the caves, but it means that we are watching a guided tour from a filmmaker known for blazing his own trails. In typical Herzog fashion, a few of the talking heads (generally there to help contextualize the paintings) exhibit quirky personalities. A 3D effect is used to help the audience to get a sense of the contours of the cave surfaces. The best moment comes when it is revealed that several of the drawings were designed to simulate motion, almost as a prototypical cinema, as torchlight moves across them. The content here is indispensible, the film as a whole, merely adequate.

Rating: 53/100

John Carpenter’s The Ward (John Carpenter)

A group of girls in an insane asylum are stalked by the ghost of one of their former peers in this tepid and uninspired horror film from John Carpenter. Seeming like a work from hire from this usually distinctive director, The Ward lacks much of the compositional strength that distinguishes his usual output. There are a few mild scares to be had, but they seem like a weak payoff for a film that is not well-acted enough to function as the psychological thriller that it wants to be. Had this been a direct-to-video work from an anonymous source, it would have felt mediocre, but passable. Coming from Carpenter, who hasn’t made a feature film since the underrated Ghosts of Mars, it’s cause for alarm.

Rating: 41/100

The rest of Day 4

2010-09-15T12:01:00.002-04:00

Tabloid (Errol Morris)

Morris takes a break from his recent political documentaries with Tabloid, a frantic portrait of a former beauty queen and self-described “incurable romantic” who became a notorious media figure when she kidnapped and possibly raped her Mormon beau. The subject, Joyce McKinney, is endlessly quotable. Her conversational demeanor makes her the best person to recount her life’s story, even if Morris makes it clear that she’s not above taking liberties with the truth. What emerges is a tale of obsessive, mostly unrequited love, which grows increasingly unbelievable as the story unfolds (there are absurd disguises, sexy secrets, and clones). The tabloid press’s unethical obsession with figures like Joyce is a marginal concern here. It mostly permits Morris to play up the sensational aspects of the story, which he does most memorably by flashing headline-like graphics of the salacious terms that his interviewees use (e.g. “SPREAD-EAGLED”). The result is something less than a profound meditation on Joyce’s life, but it is one heck of a story.

Rating: 59 /100

Hereafter (Clint Eastwood)

After a harrowing, effects-filled opening, Eastwood’s latest transforms into a quiet consideration of death. Following three characters, the story adopts three approaches toward its subject matter, alternating between intellectual, emotional, and supernatural modes of inquiry. What results is an unpredictable, consistently beguiling work that could only have come from a master filmmaker. Its unrushed demeanor and willingness to hold back from commitment lend it a profundity that escapes the schematic traps of similar films like Babel. Instead of forcing a point of view upon us, Eastwood simply flirts with various ideas and genres, until his quiet search becomes a quiet release from that search. Because it’s so low key, it’s less immediately impactful than many of Eastwood’s recent work, and the scenes set in London sequences are weaker than the others, but this is a film of uncommon insight and patience.

Rating: 64/100

Vanishing on 7th Street (Brad Anderson)

This apocalyptic horror film, in which a mass disappearance afflicts an unnamed city, attempts to make us scared of the dark once again. Featuring a small cast of characters who must remain in light lest some shadowy boogeymen snatch them up, the movie boasts an intriguing premise at its start, but things barely develop, leaving the impression that we’re watching an extended, gimmicky episode of “The Twilight Zone.” Clumsy expoisition (e.g. one character just happens to be reading about the Roanoke colony’s disappearance at the film’s start) and some terrible performances (Thandie Newton’s in full-on Beloved freak-out mode) harm the overall effect, but really the most damning thing here is Anderson’s inability to capitalize on his dark versus light motif in any but the most obvious ways.

Rating: 38/100

2010-09-15T02:55:00.001-04:00

Tabloid (Errol Morris) 59

Hereafter (Clint Eastwood) 64

Vanishing on 7th Street (Brad Anderson) 38

DAY 5

Outside the Law (Rachid Bouchareb) 46

127 Hours (Danny Boyle) 56

Home for Christmas (Bent Hamer) 40

Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman) 65

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog) 53

John Carpenter’s The Ward (John Carpenter) 41

DAY 6

Miral (Julian Schnabel) 53

Submarine (Richard Ayoade) 45

Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell) 81

The Housemaid (Im Sang-soo) 60

Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan) 48

Leap Year (Michael Rowe) 57

Insidious (James Wan) 60

2010-09-15T02:41:00.002-04:00

Just a few of these for tonight... an especially tight schedule the last two days, some lingering illness, and school commitments threw me a bit behind.

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole)

Probably the sweetest movie ever made about a May ’68 rebellion, this is plays like a thoroughly tamed Norma Rae. The setting is in the titular town, at a Ford Motors plant, where a group of women choose to go on strike for equal pay. The film is sure to be the target of scorn, some of it rightful, but I found it so light on its feet and enjoyable that I could forgive its utter manipulation (e.g. every man is an ineffectual pig, with the exception of the one played by Bob Hoskins) and its complete predictability. There are nice turns from Sally Hawkins and Rosamund Pike. The audience for this is extremely self-selecting. If this general sort of thing would likely appeal to you, it probably will here, but it won’t convert those averse to braindead, feel-good movies by any means. Cole still isn’t much of a director.

Rating: 51/100

The Conspirator (Robert Redford)

Something like the inverse in grace and sophistication when compared to Redford’s superb Quiz Show, this anonymously-directed misfire feels like something that would premiere on cable, at best. The subject, the trial of Mary Surratt, the first woman sentenced to death by the U.S. government, should be a surefire one, but it falls flat at every turn. Famous names fill the roster, but many roles here are stunning miscast (James McAvoy, Justin Long, Alexis Bledel), killing whatever atmosphere is generated. The target audience for this seems to be history buffs, as there are plenty of presumably true details to be gleaned (e.g. soldiers were ordered to stand in front of Mary Surratt as her daughter testified in her defense), often at the expense of quality dialogue or narrative propulsion. Anyone expecting suspense or a competent visual sensibility will need to look elsewhere.

Rating: 37/100

The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet)

Sylvain Chomet sets out to revive Jacques Tati, an idol, by animating an unfilmed script by the master, but mostly proves that animation is a poor medium for Tati’s style of physical humor. The melancholy mood and small scale here, too, seem a far cry from Tati’s wondrous celebration of life in all its forms. The plot of this film, set in late-50s Europe, involves an underappreciated magician who yearns to protect the innocence of a young woman. It’s an exercise in sustaining delusion, which disturbingly recalls Vertigo, without generating any of the complexity found there. Because The Illusionist at least looks nice, it’s not as overwhelmingly unpleasant for me as The Triplets of Belleville, but that’s hardly high praise. The film is conceptually funny at best most of the time, and the well-realized watercolor visuals are scarcely enough to justify the entire thing. Many seem to be entranced by this, but for me, only the final moments were effective at generating any sort of emotional response.

Rating: 46/100

The First Grader (Justin Chadwick)

This feel-good effort about an 84-year old Kenyan who wants to take advantage of his government’s recent offer of free education to all by enrolling in primary school, has enough of a premise to sustain interest for about one-third of its run time. Director Chadwick brings more visual imagination than usual to what is essentially a character drama, and he manages to wring adequate performances from even his untrained cast members. The mix of modern-era grumblings about the decision to educate an old man and that old man’s flashbacks to his abuse at the hands of other tribes can only go so far, however, and the film quickly runs out of things to say about its scenario. What should be a powerful testament to the need for universal education suffers because the core issue becomes subsumed in a morass of petty squabbles. The characters here are too sketchily drawn to register. Kenya itself scarcely earns any sort of distinctive identity by the film’s end.

Rating: 43/100

TIFF Day 3

2010-09-12T03:03:00.004-04:00

The King's Speech (Tom Hooper) 49 - Crowd-pleasing and bound for Oscar glory, but it runs out of steam quickly. The first hour is charming, touching and funny. The second is overly important, and entirely too willing to turn the King we were struggling to know into a symbol. Firth's performance never evolves beyond a gimmick. Rush's best moments all come early on, but he's surely a frontrunner for awards. Still, that first hour is good, with lots of awkward comedy and very British charm.

What I Most Want (Delfina Castagnino) 36 – This ode to female friendship is seventy-odd minutes long, with many of them taken up with interminable, poorly framed shots. It’s something like a female-driven Old Joy, but that overstates its quality or ambition. It really only grows interesting in its final reel, as it becomes obvious that the two girls’ concerns in life are being contrasted. Just as tension begins to emerge between the two, the film ends. It’s so minor that it requires expert precision to be worthwhile, but first-time feature filmmaker Castagnino feels like a hack.

Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman) 57 – This unassuming observational documentary set in a Texas boxing gym is surely the most consistently entertaining thing that I’ve seen at the festival thus far. Wiseman doesn’t particularly deviate from his well-worn template here, but the chosen subject matter ensures that there is no bureaucracy to wade through, so no shot wears out its welcome. There’s a realization here that everyone shown on camera has a story and everyone has a unique motivation for being at the gym. Wiseman’s approach respects that, and therefore respects the viewer’s intelligence. The ringside philosophy picked up along the way (e.g. “You don’t pay your dues, you ain’t get shit.”) enhances the film considerably, although brazenly topical moments involving the Virginia Tech shootings or tech millionaire Richard Garriot seemed like odd distractions.

Armadillo (Janus Metz) 54 – Not especially impressive content-wise, but this documentary about the Afghanistan invasion probably looks more like a fictional feature than any documentary since Zoo. It’s extremely well-shot. It wrings its hands with predictable ambivalence over the raging boners that the young troops have for combat. When they finally get a taste of battle, the footage that’s been captured is rather extraordinary… to the point that some level of editorial trickery must have been involved. A last-minute questioning of the troops’ action under the gun recalls a similar debate in The Tillman Story.

Love Crime (Alain Corneau) 56 – Starting out as a witty comedy about workplace rivalries, this morphs into something a lot more plot-driven in its second half. The scenes in which Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier threaten each other are terrific. I largely lost interest as predictable the aftermath of a mid-film plot twist played out, though. Corneau’s style here is appealing and stands at a mild remove from the action, which makes sense in a story filled with such startling manipulations.

Break Up Club (Barbara Wong) 26 – I’m probably overrating this. It keeps rebooting itself, as it tells the story of a young Hong Kong couple’s on-again, off-again relationship. It moves from personal film diary, to bizarre meta-film in which characters document their own break-up stories, into a glossy and conventional soap opera format. None of these work particularly well, and all of them are undercut by a uniformly inadequate cast. Festival schedule filler all the way… I won’t remember this in a year.

Bunraku (Guy Moshe) 20 – You know a fight scene sucks when it can’t prompt a reaction from a TIFF Midnight Madness crowd. Three early fight scenes in a row from the overlong Bunraku failed to rouse much of anything at tonight’s screening. This is really dire stuff that will probably find some defenders due to its visual style, which combines German expressionism with day-glow Japanese stereotypes. My eyes mostly felt that director Moshe never met a color palette that he didn’t like. The performances are extremely bad, especially in the case of Josh Harnett, who is supposed to be some sort of Eastwood-channeling Western badass. What’s the point of endless visual invention if you are recycling a tired, aggressively boring plot?

Super (James Gunn)

2010-09-12T02:26:00.002-04:00

Big screen superhero parodies tend to be as terrible and over-caffeinated as the films that they target, so it comes as a mild surprise that James Gunn’s Super manages at least some level of storytelling coherence. Focusing on Frank (Rainn Wilson), a sad sack short order cook who experiences a religious epiphany after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a drug dealer (Kevin Bacon), Super surpasses recent attempts such as Kick-Ass in its efforts to make the superhero movie look ignorant. Wilson’s character here adopts the moniker The Crimson Bolt, and soon takes to the streets, fighting crime, wherever he finds it (even if that entails hiding behind a dumpster for hours, waiting for it).

Probably as a result of its modest budget, Super has an indie film feel. Gunn uses a great deal of handheld camerawork and natural lighting, which helps to ground the absurd plot in some level of reality. The film’s gross-out moments, which are myriad, actually do a good job of reminding audiences of the latent psychopathic tendencies that exist in the superhero genre. Watching a petty criminal get hit in the head with a wrench might be funny once, but watching it happen repeatedly, in gory detail is a definite buzz kill. Things get amplified on this front once Ellen Page, who has a manic energy here that she’s not shown before, shows up as a sidekick, and pushes the Bolt to greater levels of mayhem. Her too-brief time on screen energizes the film. Whether Page is bashing a possibly innocent young man’s head in with a statue or rubbing her crotch through her spandex, telling Frank that “it’s all gushy,” she gives a fearless performance.

It’s a shame that Wilson himself isn’t working at that level. His brand of self-deprecating humor soon runs out of targets (he can only make fun of his fat ass so many times…), and Gunn has nowhere to go but toward unwelcome sincerity. As Super winds to a close, it seems to forget that it’s a parody, and wants us to endorse the character it’s created. Such a miscalculation is unfortunate. Super offers less than its title implies, but it’s better than most of its ilk.

Rating: 46/100

Passion Play (Mitch Glazer)

2010-09-12T02:06:00.003-04:00

Passion Play, the debut feature from screenwriter Mitch Glazer, has been described as a fable. More appropriately, I’d say, it is a self-indulgent sexual fantasy run amok. Starring Mickey Rourke as a jazz musician who runs afoul of a gangster (by sleeping with his wife, naturally), the film offers superficial romantic noodling that kicks off when he comes across a girl in a carnival who sports real wings (Megan Fox). Perhaps it’s needless to say, but Rourke and Fox are a thoroughly mismatched screen couple, who exude zero screen chemistry with one another. Rourke possesses a down and out shaggy dog appeal only works in a very limited, realistic range of films. Fox is a sex kitten with little depth. This is probably her greatest acting challenge to date, and she fails miserably. When the film asks the two to play off one another, the results are disastrous. When sparks fail to ignite between the two in a story that entirely depends upon us getting caught up in their future together, the whole enterprise collapses.

Bill Murray, playing Happy, the previously mentioned gangster, is the clearest asset here, doing what he can by adding his signature comic timing to what is pretty sorry material. Glazer has no obvious skill behind the camera. His imagery recycles noir stereotypes to little effect, and the overall mood here recalls the L.A.-centric work of Alan Rudolph, with next to none of the quirky charm. Based on the way that Glazer trots about his real-life spouse Kelly Preston in Passion Play (she rarely wears more than underwear, and sometimes wears less), one could uncharitably read the movie as an autobiographical story about trophy wives. That’s disturbing, but par for the course, given the rest of Passion Play’s vapid, sexist content. A last ditch effort to add a spiritual dimension to the preceding wankery falls as flat as the rest of the film. Awful.

Rating: 12/100

Poetry (Lee Chang Dong)

2010-09-12T02:03:00.003-04:00

Sensitive, almost to a fault, Lee Chang Dong’s Poetry is a well-observed but minor effort from one of the top Korean filmmakers. Centered on Mija, a woman in her sixties who discovers that she is afflicted by the first stirrings of dementia, the film is a quiet study in repression. It traces Mija’s struggle toward articulation of her emotions, most expressly during scenes that show her enrolled in an adult education poetry course. There’s little plot to be found in Poetry, but most of what is there involves Mina’s discovery that her loutish grandson has been involved in a group rape of a girl that culminated in her suicide. Mina’s gradual process of identification with the dead girl becomes the movie’s emotional arc, which both helps to clarify the director’s attitude toward her illness and helps to confirm Poetry as yet another significant entry in the oeuvre of a director whose work has become increasingly centered on women’s suffering.

Like Lee’s earlier Oasis and Secret Sunshine, Poetry lives and dies by the quality of its leading actress’ performance. Yun Jung Lee, who plays Mija, doesn’t let her director down. She anchors every scene of the film, creating a character who is alternatively flighty, devoted, and despairing. Her struggles to assert herself emotionally are the film’s central concern, which gives her performance ample opportunity to shine. “The point is the feeling,” an amateur poet tells her while describing her writing process, and where Ms. Lee succeeds is in helping us to understand her uncertainty about her conflicting emotions. Elsewhere, director Lee’s devotion to women can be felt. Most of the men here are emotionally stunted louts. Even the one male who is attempts to describe his feelings in Mina’s poetry class talks somewhat superficially in comparison to the parade of women who rhapsodize about the glories of childhood or love.

Much of Poetry is spent watching Mija play an amateur detective, as she attempts to understand her grandson’s crime, or watching her scribble phrases in her poetry notebook. This makes for a singularly quiet and observational film, which creates mixed results. Many of the lyrical moments here (e.g. Mija’s hat blows off her head, into the river in which the young girl threw herself) work toward an intended, unmissable effect, diluting their impact. Mija’s few emotional outbursts seem somewhat uncharacteristic, given the film’s ultimate trajectory. Still, the overriding feeling of empathy that comes to dominate Poetry grows moving by the film’s inevitable final sequence. In many respects, this could be seen as a subtler companion piece to Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, which examined similar issues of death and devotion. Next to the sheer anguish displayed in Secret Sunshine, Poetry’s quiet despair seems bit slight, but its subtlety makes it a singular experience.

Rating: 58/100

Bad Faith (Kristian Petri)

2010-09-11T10:23:00.000-04:00

While introducing Kristian Petri’s psychological thriller, TIFF programmer Steve Gravestock described the film as “one of the most fun viewing experiences that I had this year.” Such a description is absolutely baffling, given that Bad Faith is anything but fun. This predictable, overly calculated Swedish misfire not only drains the thrills from its genre, but also traffics in absolutely inexplicable character behavior.

Things get off to a bad start as meek heroine Mona finds a dying man in an alley during the opening credits sequence. She immediately begins digging her hands in his wounds, getting blood on her hands, while passersby retreat from the scene, without offering assistance. Later that night, she randomly witnesses a confrontation that leaves another man lying wounded in a parking lot. She follows that up by disappearing from her job, attempting to track down a serial killer, and throwing herself sexually at a mysterious stranger.

Director Petri sets his chosen tone almost immediately, when he employs a series of glacial lateral pans. All of Bad Faith adopts a similarly narcoleptic stance, never generating the least bit of suspense until the final reel arrives. What should be a tense cat and mouse game, though, is undone by completely implausible performances (the script offers the actors nothing). Little about this film convinces, making it feel like an unnecessary in posturing. Thought it clearly is trying to say something about obsession and madness, it fails to ever grow articulate, partially because its main character scarcely has an identity to lose as she grows increasingly obsessed. Implying that a film might be a dream is about the furthest thing from being profound.

Ultimately, Bad Faith is less overtly awful than deficient in redeeming qualities. It moves sleepily along its predictable course, maintaining a sense of professionalism where it should be offering a sense of abandon. Petri has a sound visual sensibility, but he lacks any perspective on the events that unfold here. The obvious twist and mild sense of subversion that close out Bad Faith scarcely are enough to compensate for the tedium of viewing it.

Rating: 36/100

Day 2 Grades

2010-09-11T03:28:00.002-04:00

Bad Faith (Kristian Petri) 36

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong) 58

Passion Play (Mitch Glazer) 12

Super (James Gunn) 46

The Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (Andrew Lau)

2010-09-11T03:24:00.001-04:00

Andrew Lau, of Infernal Affairs fame pays tribute to Bruce Lee by reincarnating one of his most memorable characters in the formulaic yet passable The Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen. Donnie Yen, certainly the most prominent Hong Kong action star of the moment, has begun to star in a series of historical films, which consistently feature underdeveloped characters and too few action scenes. Over the last two years, he delivered two films loosely based on the life of Ip Man. Here, he tackles the same time period, even if he’s playing a fictional character this time out.

The Legend of the Fist is a sequel, of sorts, to the 1972 Bruce Lee classic Fist of Fury (the villain here is the son of the previous film’s bad guy). In it, Yen plays a revolutionary freedom fighter, who is struggling to reunite China and overthrow the Japanese occupation. The setting here is Shanghai, in 1925, which allows Lau to create images on an epic canvas. The visual opulence extends to the elaborate art direction, CG flybys, and no shortage of gaudy period detail. With much of the action taking place in the western-influenced jazz club “Casablanca,” glamour has as much place here as brutal action.

That glamour is best represented by actress Shu Qi, who plays a double-agent spy and showgirl named Kiki. Her relationship with Chen Zhen develops along predictable lines, but it does prevent the movie from feeling like a monotonous series of fight scenes. Still, fans of Yen’s action movies will not likely be too disappointed, as Legend has a series of scenes that feature torture, rape, and more assassinations than one can count. Most of the energy on that front, though, is focused on three extravagant set pieces. The opening sequence, which takes place in France during World War I, sets a bar of outrageous action that the rest of the film fails to match. Featuring a series of brutal knife kills and awesome acrobatic action from Yen, it definitely provides the film’s greatest thrills. A crowd scuffle on a rainy street, and a finale at a dojo, in which Chen Zhen takes on a crowd of Japanese soldiers, provide the other two battles of note.

The Legend of the Fist is blatantly commercial, but that’s not entirely bad. Yen may not be an accomplished actor, but playing a masked hero here, he brings much of the same charisma to his role that made Bruce Lee a star. Lau acquits himself well during the fight scenes, but some of the expository sequences are clumsily edited, giving the movie a slightly incoherent feeling. It shifts tones unpredictably, and shuttles characters on to screen, only to kill them later, without achieving much emotional impact. The movie only really comes to life when there’s fighting on screen, which is unfortunate, if not entirely unexpected.

Rating: 47/100

Inside Job (Charles Ferguson)

2010-09-11T02:52:00.005-04:00

Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job attempts to offer a consolidated explanation of the 2008 financial crisis. Since this is hardly an obscure subject, many of Ferguson’s insights will be old news, particularly for those who, say, listen to NPR or have seen the PBS Frontline Special “Inside the Meltdown.” No End in Sight, Ferguson’s previous documentary, was similarly premiered after most of its content was common knowledge, but it came out precisely as public opinion about the War in Iraq reached a point of no return. The 2008 financial crisis stirred public outrage even back in 2008. Without too many particularly new insights into the cause of the crisis, Inside Job will likely be less impactful than No End Left in Sight.

Literally by the numbers documentary filmmaking, Inside Job is divided into five distinct chapters. Beyond brief diversions in China and Finland, where Ferguson attempts to depict the global reach of the American market collapse, the bulk of the film is filled by a procession of talking heads, who work to either assign or deflect blame for the crash. The presence of many of the interviewees is a testament to Ferguson’s ability to get important figures to agree to speak on camera, but he has a disingenuous tendency to imply that anyone who refused to speak with him is guilty of ethical transgressions.

Where Ferguson’s documentary does seem to offer something new to the debate though, is in its fourth segment, entitled “Accountability.” Here, in a particularly vicious manner, Ferguson extends his conspiracy theory about the corrupted economics field back to its origins. Singling out business school professors at Harvard and Columbia Universities, Ferguson presents a series of damning circumstances that demonstrate that much of the professors’ income and scholarship has its roots in the corporate world. The suggestion that much of the economics discipline serves to lend bought credibility to corporate interests is damning, and the evidence that Ferguson presents is rather persuasive. The lack of disclosure of funds received in academic reports seems a definite conflict of interest. To see famed economists defend the blatant lack of transparency is shocking. If anything in Inside Job is likely to prompt real-world change, it is this segment.

Ultimately, Inside Job will not have much to offer those who follow financial news reports. Ferguson’s goal here seems not to create any sort of definitive historical record, but rather to create a palatable, two-hour distillation of a complicated and far-ranging systemic breakdown. Gripes that Ferguson doesn’t spend more time explaining the failure of our credit rating agencies or interviewing lower-level members of financial firms becomes more understandable in this context. At the end of the day, Inside Job finds something less than the smoking gun that it wants to, but when the picture it paints is so damning anyhow, who’s counting?

Rating: 46/100

Film Socialism (Jean-Luc Godard)

2010-09-11T02:49:00.002-04:00

TIFF started out its 2010 edition with a particularly sadistic decision. Namely, the festival programmers chose to show a totally unsubtitled print of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest feature, Film Socialism as the fest’s first public screening on its first day. At least forty percent of the film’s eager audience left before Godard’s work (and possibly career – this is said to be his last feature) ended. Presumably, many of those remaining, unlike me, spoke French, which is only the most frequently used of the many languages that Godard employs here. Though Godard is the very definition of one of our Masters (the name of the festival Programme that the film was included in), something this obtuse and aggressive toward its viewers’ expectations probably would have been better served by being included in the festival’s experimental sidebar, Wavelengths.

Lacking even the broken English subtitles that it sported during its Cannes premiere, Film Socialism in its current form forces analysis of imagery for all but the most polyglot of viewers. This lack of translation brings as much opportunity as frustration. The subservience of language here helps to illuminate Godard’s late period as a whole. Freed from interpreting the specific meaning of his aphorisms, we are able to focus on a style that builds a steady rhythm, interspersed with moments of sheer visual epiphany. Divided into three parts, if Film Socialism is intended to be Godard’s final coda, it’s clear that he has a great deal left to say (even if most of us won’t be able to understand what, exactly, it is that he’s saying).

The first act of Film Socialism is set aboard a cruise ship. The multinational societal microcosm depicted, though, doesn’t really live up to the film’s title. Instead of a socialist paradise, the boat is something of a consumerist nightmare, where hordes of anonymous passengers move from buffet to disco to church service. A group of attendants and servants are glimpsed throughout, as are a few recurring characters, who surface and resurface, generally to quote literature. Here, the style is invigorating, as Godard switches camera types, making the most of his various digital formats. Offering images that are either crystalline in their clarity or corrupted by artifacting (including a soundtrack that frequently becomes an indecipherable garble, brought about by the limits of consumer-grade microphones), this segment is a formal stunner. Much of the content eludes me, to be sure, but the closest point of comparison that came to mind for me is Manoel de Oliveira’s hilarious, glacial A Talking Picture, which similarly parodied our modern lives as it looked backward at our history.

Film Socialism’s second part, which seems to have a plot involving an unwelcome news reporter and a family at a filling station (tinges of the Spielberg lackeys from In Praise of Love can be felt), is the most bound by narrative, and therefore the least successful when viewed without the help of subtitles. Just when this segment, which has less impressive image-making than the first, is about to convince you that nothing in this work will be as ambitious as the montages in Notre Musique, Godard’s last feature, Film Socialism transforms itself into an essay film. The final third, which juxtaposes images with skill equal to Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema, presents an accelerated world tour of great sites of revolution, creating a beautiful procession of filmic citations and historical markers.

Obviously, due to my unfamiliarity with the various languages that it employs, I cannot make definitive statements about Film Socialism’s quality or meaning. That being said, it seems to operate with many of the same themes and stylistic flourishes of Godard’s later work, making it easy to interpret, regardless of language barriers, for those familiar with his oeuvre. Since no first viewing of a Godard film will ever offer up every citation and every intended meaning, ignorance of the bulk of Film Socialism’s dialogue has a less disastrous effect on one’s ability to appreciate Godard’s accomplishments than one might suspect. Hopefully, the opportunity to see a translated version of the film will present itself in the future, but even if Godard’s obstinate wish to withhold subtitles continues to be honored, Film Socialism feels like a significant entry in the director’s body of work.

Rating: 59/100

Tentative TIFF '10 Schedule

2010-08-25T16:16:00.004-04:00

This is certainly subject to change after buzz and the ticket lottery have their way with me, but here's my Festival plan as it currently stands:

09 September
18:00 Film Socialism (Jean-Luc Godard)
21:00 Inside Job (Charles Ferguson)

10 September
12:00 Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (Andrew Lau)
15:00 Bad Faith (Kristian Petri)
18:00 Poetry (Lee Chang-dong)
21:00 Passion Play (Mitch Glazer)
23:59 Super (James Gunn)

11 September
9:00 Wasted on the Young (Ben C. Lucas)
12:00 The King's Speech (Tom Hooper)
14:15 What I Most Want (Delfina Castagnino)
15:30 Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman)
17:45 Armadillo (Janus Metz)
20:00 Love Crime (Alain Corneau)
22:00 Break Up Club (Barbara Wong)
23:59 Bunraku (Guy Moshe)

12 September
9:30 Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole)
12:00 The Conspirator (Robert Redford)
14:30 The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet)
16:30 The First Grader (Justin Chadwick)
18:30 Tabloid (Errol Morris)
21:00 Hereafter (Clint Eastwood)
23:59 Vanishing on 7th Street (Brad Anderson)

13 September
9:00 Mamma Gogo (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson)
12:00 Outside the Law (Rachid Bouchareb)
15:00 127 Hours (Danny Boyle)
17:15 Home for Christmas (Bent Hamer)
19:00 Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman)
21:45 Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)
23:59 John Carpenter's The Ward (John Carpenter)

14 September
9:00 Miral (Julian Schnabel)
12:00 Submarine (Richard Ayoade)
14:30 Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell)
16:30 The Housemaid (Im Sang-soo)
18:45 Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan)
21:00 Leap Year (Michael Rowe)
23:59 Insidious (James Wan)

15 September
9:30 Potiche (Francois Ozon)
12:30 Buried (Rodrigo Cortes)
15:00 Brighton Rock (Rowan Joffe)
18:15 Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
21:15 Kaboom (Gregg Araki)
23:59 Red Nights (Julien Carbon | Laurent Courtiaud)

16 September
9:00 The Bang Bang Club (Steven Silver)
12:00 Dirty Girl (Abe Sylvia)
14:00 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike)
- or -
14:15 The Ditch (Wang Bing)
17:30 I Saw the Devil (Kim Jee-woon)
20:00 Sandcastle (Boo Junfeng)
22:30 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weeresethakul)

17 September
9:00 It's Kind of a Funny Story (Anna Boden|Ryan Fleck)
12:00 Sarah's Key (Gilles Paquet Brenner)
14:00 A Horrible Way to Die (Adam Wingard)
17:00 I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke)
20:00 Cold Fish (Sion Sono)
23:59 Stake Land (Jim Mickle)

18 September
9:00 Norwegian Wood (Tran Anh Hung)
- or -
9:00 Special Treatment (Jeanne Labrune)
12:00 Conviction (Tony Goldwyn)
14:45 Little White Lies (Guillaume Canet)
- or -
15:00 Guest (Jose Luis Guerin)
18:30 Promises Written in Water (Vincent Gallo)
21:00 Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)
23:59 Fire of Conscience (Dante Lam)

19 September
9:00 The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Briellat)
12:00 You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen)
- or -
13:00 Genpin (Naomi Kawase)
15:00 Monsters (Gareth Edwards)
- or -
15:15 Three (Tom Tykwer)

... and I come crawling back.

2010-08-25T15:53:00.002-04:00

So, after mistakenly deleting my blog over at MovieMartyr.com, I've decided to switch back to this site for festival updates. Hopefully that will prevent any future mishaps, but you never know if I'm at the helm.

Site Migration

2009-06-17T11:29:00.003-04:00

I've moved my blog onto my web site... any further updates will occur over there:

http://www.moviemartyr.com/blog/

Day 10 Grades

2008-09-13T11:08:00.001-04:00

The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008) 87
Genova (Michael Winterbottom, 2008) 48
RocknRolla (Guy Ritchie, 2008) 23
Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee, 2008) 29

Day 9 Grades

2008-09-12T19:37:00.002-04:00

Adam Resurrected (Paul Schrader, 2008) 47
What Doesn't Kill You (Brian Goodman, 2008) 56
Pride and Glory (Gavin O'Connor, 2008) 41
Birdsong (Albert Serra, 2008) 68
Achilles and the Tortoise (Takeshi Kitano, 2008) 69
Sexykiller (Miguel Marti, 2008) 49

Day 8 Grades

2008-09-11T16:19:00.002-04:00

Hooked (Adrian Sitaru, 2007) 63
With a Little Help From Myself (Francois Dupeyron, 2008) 56
The Sea Wall (Rithy Panh, 2008) 74
Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater, 2008) 79

The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda, 2008)

2008-09-11T13:45:00.000-04:00

The Beaches of Agnes, Agnes Varda’s latest, and most comprehensive, autobiographical documentary, opens with a shot of the director walking carefully backwards on a beach. It’s an appropriate image for a film that travels this deeply into the past. From revisiting her childhood home (which she discovers is now inhabited by a quirky train collector), to recounting her first steps into filmmaking, to describing the loss she felt when her husband Jacques Demy died, Beaches encapsulates a singular life with the effortlessness of a casual conversation.

Throughout the film, Varda is able to make profound statements about time and memory with the simplest of gestures. Quite appropriately given the subject matter, director Chris Marker (embodied in the form of a hand-drawn cartoon cat) is on hand to serve as a playful counter-narrator. Marker has fixated on these same themes, and many of Varda’s images would be at home in his work. There’s a wonderful moment, for example, where Varda writes her birth name in sand with a stick, and talks about how she had it changed as it’s washed away by the tide.

Varda has always been an autobiographical filmmaker, and her tendency to reveal herself in her movies has only grown in her most recent works. Although The Beaches of Agnes is self-indulgent by design, it still inevitably touches upon periods of Varda’s life that she’s already devoted entire films to. While the movie remains charming throughout, it will offer devotees of her films a few anecdotes that they’ve already heard. Despite this, the film will likely appeal most to those same fans. Varda presents herself as a confidante in her work, and willingness to forgive her repetition will be easiest for those who know her best.

Rating: 52/100

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

2008-09-11T13:41:00.003-04:00

Love conquers all, including all suspense, in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, a feel-good movie that puts the audience through extended torture, child abuse and a foray into desperate poverty in order to have them arrive at a predetermined, uplifting conclusion. India is presented as some sort of distorted parody of Britain here, ready for Western consumption. There’s a distinctly Dickensian plot, a scene that jokes about how Indian call center workers learn of the geography of Scotland, the familiar game show referenced in the title, and the British director, who ensures that the style and subject matter matches the built-in assumptions about India as closely as possible. Cheap, folksy moments abound. Under the guise of furthering cultural understanding, the film simply transplants our hero narrative to their culture. While such a treatment might be mildly preferable to something like The Love Guru, it still feels like an attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Throughout Slumdog Millionaire, the audience’s intelligence is underestimated by a film that hopes to get by on charm alone.

Casting an impressively broad narrative net, Slumdog uses a structure that initially seems clever, but quickly grows repetitive and contrived. The premise involves a game show guest who appears on the show in an attempt to attract the attention of his childhood sweetheart, who is being held in an abusive relationship by a gangster. As providence would have it, this barely educated scamp turns out to know the answer to every question he’s asked, thanks to a wide range of misadventures which not only taught him street smarts, but also trivia answers. Numerous extended flashbacks are provided to provide the character’s back story, and to show specifically where the boy learned each factoid.

It’s a weak setup, but Boyle throws everything he’s got at it in an attempt to make it work. Shot digitally, Slumdog fully embraces the music video aesthetic. Subtitles are superimposed around the screen as if we were watching a Powerpoint presentation. The loud score if filled with Indian-fusion hip-hop. Visually, the film aims for sensory overload, with a color palette that is a garish blur and many oddly canted camera angles. Such flashiness is expected, it seems, to distract from the plotting which is stupidly implausible, but convinced that more is most definitely more.

Rating: 38/100

A Year Ago in Winter (Caroline Link, 2008)

2008-09-11T13:30:00.002-04:00

Classy, but middlebrow, Caroline Link’s A Year Ago in Winter is a respectable effort in every meaning of the word. It’s a film that’s been so thoroughly polished that it scarcely seems possible that it could emit the smallest bit of emotional surprise, yet despite its many calculations and unfailing classiness, it manages to finally sell its story of grief relief. Picking up a year after the golden child of an upper-class Munich household has killed himself, the script tracks the underlying feelings that are dredged up when a painter is commissioned to do a portrait of the dead child and his older sister.

Well-played by Karoline Herfurth, older sister Lilli becomes the movie’s emotional center. Content for years to conform to her parents’ desires, she finds herself becoming more assertive about her own needs when she befriends the closeted portrait artist. As the two benefit from getting to know each other better, the family collectively comes to terms with the fact that they scarcely knew their lost loved one. It’s a setup that sounds trite, but somehow Link manages to infuse it with some real power by the film’s end, even if she often seems more concerned with the lavish set design than the characters’ souls.

Rating: 55/100

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)

2008-09-11T13:27:00.002-04:00

A Baghdad bomb squad becomes the subject of a study male angst in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Conceived largely as a string of set pieces, this action film relays the tension and fatigue that builds over the last 40 days of the squad’s rotation. For most of the film, Bigelow exteriorizes the psychological state of these men. Their mindset is relayed less by the actors than the way that they hurtle themselves into life-or-death situations. They are men of actions defined by actions, at least on the battlefront.

The Hurt Locker is designed in such a manner that characterization doesn’t get in the way of set pieces, even if the film is at its heart less a thrill ride than a contemplation. Bigelow does her best to act as if she’s made a mindless movie. The action scenes, which are tense enough, dominate the film, even if the meaning lies in the margins. Oftentimes, the visuals do all of the talking, such as when the director sets her cast in front of a scene of mass destruction at an emotional low point or when the protagonist takes a shower and washes off a cascade of blood. In some ways, it’s a strange approach, because it doesn’t provide the typical overall payoffs of the action genre, but it’s redeemed by the final twenty minutes of the movie, which make what was unstated throughout completely explicit, without cheapening what’s come before. The shot of a squad man, who we’ve seen for the last few hours making split second decisions, paralyzed by a choice of breakfast cereals packs a surprising punch.

Rating: 61/100

Day 7 Grades

2008-09-10T19:01:00.001-04:00

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) 61
A Year Ago in Winter (Caroline Link, 2008) 55
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008) 38
The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda, 2008) 52
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008) 51
Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008) 80

The Burrowers (JT Petty, 2008)

2008-09-10T18:20:00.000-04:00

Horror Westerns, while not unheard of, are something of a rarity, so news that the talented young director JT Petty was making one had me genuinely excited. I’m sad to say that The Burrowers, while fairly solid, still struck me as a disappointment. The movie blends together the creature feature genre with nods to Days of Heaven and The Searchers, but is less successful as a Western than as a fright flick. A big part of the reason for this is because Petty paces the movie more like a horror film. More than most genres, westerns need to celebrate the landscape and take their time to really create a convincing atmosphere. This stands in opposition to the thrill-seeking mode of horror that The Burrowers tries for. The fast editorial rhythms and visual atmospherics of the scary scenes ensure that when Petty tries to make a visual reference to Malick or Ford, the image barely registers as a moment of majestic beauty.

From time to time, Petty does reap the benefits of his generic fusion, though. He is able to locate horror in a few instances directly within the conventions of the Western. An Indian’s scrotum serves as a tobacco pouch. A brief scuffle between a posse and a group of Natives is far bloodier than usual. When the film makes reference to The Searchers, by talking about shooting out a corpse’s eyes to condemn the spirit, Petty zooms in for gory detail.

But The Burrowers has to satisfy horror fans as well, so it keeps moving back and forth between genres, derailing itself with regularity. To be fair, Petty does avoid letting this monster movie degenerate into a series of chase scenes, and he does devise an ending that is more resonant than a hunt to kill the monsters. The problem is that The Burrowers squanders its potential for more by not taking its time to serve both of its generic masters.

Rating: 50/100

The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson, 2008)

2008-09-10T18:15:00.001-04:00

If there was only a bit more romantic chemistry in Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom, it might warrant comparison to classic comic capers such as Trouble in Paradise and To Catch a Thief. Alas, this still-entertaining second feature from the skilled creator of Brick stands mostly as a testament to its maker’s considerable talent. This lark of a movie has the wild energy of a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon and the storybook conception of a Wes Anderson film. It introduces its two ingenious con men brothers to us in an opening sequence that feels like a children’s book (one, at least, that is narrated by the oily-tongued Ricky Jay) before jumping forward a few decades to find Bloom (Adrian Brody), the younger of the two, in a full-blown midlife crisis.

Ready to quit his grifter lifestyle in the hopes of finally feeling something real, Bloom is talked into one last con, which brings him into direct contact with the effervescent Penelope (Rachel Weisz), their eccentric mark. From the start, The Brothers Bloom sets a tone that winks at the audience. Rather than offer Mamet style hoodwinks, the film asks the audience to do as Rachel says and “enjoy the ride”. There is plenty to love here, too. The film offers what might be the year’s best costume design, a series of globetrotting backdrops, and a gleefully anarchic tone that’s encapsulated by Rinko Kikuchi's nearly wordless performance.

Problems only arise when The Brothers Bloom tries to engage emotionally. For all of its razzle-dazzle directorial invention, it can’t really manage to create a satisfactory romance. Brody and Weisz don’t exchange banter so much as they state themes. The film’s nonstop grappling with the pitfalls of living a lie only coalesces into a moving dilemma on a few occasions, and then quickly dissipates to make way for more hijinks. It’s a problem that keeps Bloom from achieving the greatness that’s within its grasp, but also one that can be easily ignored in light of the movie’s wonderful buoyancy.

Rating: 69/100

Tonight (Werner Schroeter, 2008)

2008-09-10T18:03:00.001-04:00

Tonight offers a heavily stylized play by play of a city’s steep decline into political chaos. Set over one night, this theatrical film features Pascal Gregory as a war hero searching for his estranged wife before he flees the decaying metropolis on the last boat out of town. Told to seek out clues at a seedy cabaret, he makes that locale only his first stop on a foray into depravity. Throughout Tonight, we watch as the city destabilizes and the patrons of this club are tortured one by one by an unchecked military force.

Schroeter stages all of this mayhem in a purposely artificial style. Using mannered performances, heightened lighting effects, frequent blares of music, and recurrent symbolic characters (such as a girl selling flowers), the movie is clearly not aiming for realism. The mood sometimes feels similar to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (though nowhere near as finely calibrated), with a stronger focus on politics than sex, even if sexual humiliation is employed at times here as a manifestation of political domination. What results is a film that is somewhat Brechtian in its distancing techniques, but nonetheless capable of communicating its message clearly.

Rating: 47/100

Flame & Citron (Ole Christian Madsen, 2008)

2008-09-10T18:02:00.000-04:00

Flame & Citron, which recounts the lives of two Danish assassins during World War II, has the extreme misfortune to come on the heels of Paul Veerhoven’s far superior, and equally epic, Black Book. Although Black Book was set in The Netherlands, the two films share a similar feel, and on every level Ole Christian Madsen’s movie comes up short in comparison. Flame & Citron, while watchable enough, lacks Black Book’s technical mastery, fascinating perversity, and gorgeous star. It’s difficult to imagine anyone preferring this film to that (much less preferring it to the towering classic of the resistance genre, Army of Shadows).

Director Madsen has done honorable work here, and has certainly created a movie blessed with great production values, but a dispassionate haze surrounds the project. The themes here, which examine the immorality that becomes rampant in wartime, are too thinly sketched to overcome the fact that this sort of thing has been done countless times before. The set pieces, which showcase the duo’s assassinations, are consistently less inspired than the time devoted to them warrants. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Madsen’s other films, it’s the soap-opera elements that filter into the expository scenes that give the most pleasure. They offer a texture and level of character that gets lost amidst the rest of the movie’s scope.

Rating: 46/100

Two-Legged Horse (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2008)

2008-09-10T18:00:00.003-04:00

Like a fable told in documentary form, Samira Makhmalbaf’s outraged – and outrageous – Two-Legged Horse is sure to exasperate many western audiences, who won’t be used to seeing such images of abject poverty and abuse. Set in Afghanistan, the film tells a simple, allegorical tale about a mentally handicapped boy who is hired as the professional piggybacker to a spoiled brat who had his feet blown off by a land mine. With no subplots and little else on its mind, the film focuses, perhaps exploitatively, on its two main characters, documenting their dysfunction as it spirals into a sado-masochistic, co-dependent nightmare

I’m not sure why Makhmalbaf chose to tell this particular story, but it transfixed me, in the same way that you can’t avert your eyes from a train wreck. The film is so blunt that it forces viewers to come to terms with it immediately. Its director uses forceful images of these two, especially as the legless boy whips his “horse”, ostensibly to create a message about power and poverty. It’s one-note, but at the same time kind of hypnotic, since so much of what it shows is taboo on American movie screens. Like some nightmare version of the Richard Pryor vehicle The Toy, it contains a traditional underdog setup, but refuses the audience the usual payoffs found in that genre.

Rating: 62/100

Flash of Genius (Marc Abraham, 2008)

2008-09-10T17:59:00.002-04:00

Fairly corny, and certainly predictable, Marc Abraham’s underdog drama Flash of Genius features Greg Kinnear as Dennis Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Covering a dozen years on Kearns’ life, the film sees him standing up, supposedly for little-guy inventors everywhere, against the rotten thieves at Ford Motor Company. It’s difficult who could possibly root against this family man, but the movie proceeds like there’s some level of suspense present.

Part of the problem with the film is that Kinnear simply isn’t what the role requires. Perfect for everyman roles (see his fine work in the recent Little Miss Sunshine and Fast Food Nation), the actor lacks the range to make his portrayal of Kearns as complex as the other characters seem to imply he is. Time and again, we hear what a difficult, stubborn man Kearns is, but all evidence of this on screen is lost behind Kinnear’s baby face. The one actor who does shine, at least for the ten minutes that he’s on screen, however, is Alan Alda. In a small character role similar to the one he played in The Aviator, Alda manages to command the movie. Playing a shrewd lawyer, he’s given no back story by the script, yet he radiates a level authenticity that is absent in the rest of the Flash of Genius.

Rating: 39/100

Day 6 Grades

2008-09-09T11:42:00.004-04:00

Flash of Genius (Marc Abraham, 2008) 39
Two-Legged Horse (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2008) 62
Flame & Citron (Ole Christian Madsen, 2008) 46
Tonight (Werner Schroeter, 2008) 47
The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson, 2008) 69
The Burrowers (JT Petty, 2008) 50

Acolytes (Jon Hewitt, 2008)

2008-09-09T11:34:00.002-04:00

Playing at times like a more brutal variation on Stand By Me, this Aussie thriller tracks three especially dumb teens who get into a world of trouble after they discover a dead girl’s body buried in the woods. The premise, which involves two serial killers, probably would sound scarier when described than it plays. Director Hewitt relies far too heavily on post-production effects to try to wring cheap scares out of a psychologically motivated story. The result is a movie that seems schizophrenically pitched between examining the teens’ guilt, presenting them as victims, and disturbing us when they turn vindictive. The plot, wobbly from the start, only gets worse as the film proceeds. By its end, Acolytes has sacrificed any semblance of nuance for the sake of loud noises and quick cutting.

Rating: 30/100

Plastic City (Yu Lik-wai, 2008)

2008-09-09T11:33:00.005-04:00

Yu Lik-wai’s dazzling Plastic City uses the gangster genre as a starting off point for a wild, visually intoxicating ride. Set in Brazil, the movie focuses on a group of bootleg merchandise peddlers who find themselves under siege on several fronts due to the changing political world that surrounds them. Thanks to globalization, the corrupt tricks they’ve previously used are no longer enough to keep a firm hold on their operations. This setup leads into a series of events that undercuts the typical trajectories of this genre, resulting in a style that grows increasingly fragmented as their places in the underworld become less certain.

Director Yu Lik-wai has made two decent previous features, but he’s been rightfully best known until now as Jia Zhang-ke’s frequent cinematographer. That training as a cameraman really is on display here, in a movie that fully captures the garish culture clash that is Brazil. Each scene jettisons the stylistic approach of the last, resulting in an experience that’s able to keep viewers off guard throughout. As the rise to power narrative that dominates the first half of the film is waylaid, the movie only grows more discursive, veering off into mysticism and outright hyperbole. The net effect of Plastic City combines disorientation with the affirmation that a bold new filmmaking talent has made himself known.

Rating: 72/100

Three Wise Men (Mika Kaurismaki, 2008)

2008-09-09T11:32:00.002-04:00

Before my screening of Three Wise Men, director Mika Kaurismaki bragged that he made this feature in five shooting days without a real script. Such an accomplishment might be worthy of praise if the results were worthwhile, but the movie that this process has produced has been obviously scarred by its slapdash production history. Flat lighting, sketchy characters, and a seeming unwillingness to edit indulgent sequences are the defining characteristics of Three Wise Men.

Set in Finland over a long Christmas Eve evening, the movie follows three losers as they get together for a round of carousing at the karaoke bar, which seems to be the only place that’s still open. Each of them has just suffered a great disappointment in their personal life, and each of them has reasons to dislike the others, but since misery loves company, they group together. The Christmas carols that waft across the soundtrack early on, point toward their eventual redemption. The only thing for the audience to do while waiting for it to arrive is to endure a series of poorly improvised speeches about the meaning of life and too many terrible renditions of Finnish pop songs. Soon the group swells, until it resembles a zany Nativity scene, and at that point the Christmas miracle arrives , universal reconciliation is achieved, and the audience is finally free to leave.

Rating: 21/100

Better Things (Duane Hopkins, 2008)

2008-09-09T11:31:00.000-04:00

If the opening images of Duane Hopkins’ debut, Better Things, don’t grab you, you might seriously want to consider leaving the theater, because this unremittingly bleak drama isn’t going to become any less of a tough sit with time. Starting out with a striking series of overcast landscape images and close-ups of drugged up young kids, this incessantly dour movie could not by any stretch of the imagination be classified as entertainment. It is so steadfast is it in its refusal to glamorize the depressive lifestyles of its cast that it is reluctant to let the least bit of levity into the frame.

Nonetheless, it is a respectable effort that suggests Hopkins might be a burgeoning talent. Throughout the film, you get a sense that the director is trying out ideas, searching for his voice, and more often or not his experiments work. Some touches here, like an edit that takes place immediately after a light is shut off, casting the audience into darkness, or the framing of a doorjamb’s reflection of a coat rack in a manner that suggests the image of a cross, are subtly striking. Such moments are acceptable as they never overwhelm the film’s miserabilism. The movie might have but one tone, but it remains sustained throughout the entire run time.

In Better Things, Hopkins is trying to approximate the detached perspective of his withdrawn characters, who largely shun interactions with others either due to drug use or mental disorders. More a mood piece than a message movie, the film pulses with portent. Better Things may not be especially insightful, and it may not offer much in the way of hope, but it certainly can’t be accused of betraying itself.

Rating: 57/100

Uncertainty (Scott McGehee & David Siegel, 2008)

2008-09-09T02:54:00.004-04:00

Delivering an unusual twin narrative featuring two different plot strands, and two different genres, but the same lead characters during the same twenty-four hour period of time, the high-concept Uncertainty radiates a warmth that’s rare for the sometimes overly intellectual filmmakers Scott McGehee & David Siegel. This is largely because the film’s prime thematic gambit is designed to convince the audience that the two young lovers that serve as protagonists have a world full of possibilities before them. Played by the likeable Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins, these characters turn out to be worth rooting for, regardless of circumstances.

Opening on the Brooklyn Bridge, the movie runs from its first scene in two strikingly different directions. One story, set in Manhattan, plays out as a chase thriller, in which a mysterious cell phone leads to a dangerous game of blackmail. The second story, which ranges across Brooklyn and Queens, is a family drama relayed in a lower key. The dual plot strands offer autocritiques that expose some of the limitations and strengths of each genre. Cutting between the two plots undoubtedly provides a bigger picture than either could provide alone, but it must be noted that sometimes that’s the result of incidental dialogue that could have as easily been inserted into one episode as the other.

While Uncertainty can’t manage to make each of its stories equally interesting at all times, the unique structure it employs is less gimmicky in practice than one might initially suspect. A few moments, such as cloned sex scenes that redefine the term “simultaneous orgasm”, really maximize the approach, but one must admit that this ploy hardly results in the revelations that might have been unlocked by such a boldly deconstructionalist style. Nonetheless, Uncertainty certainly remains engaging enough as it unfolds, and it stays true to its title in its refusal to conclude by providing easy answers.

Rating: 53/100

Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2008)

2008-09-09T02:29:00.003-04:00

All of director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films thus far have been preoccupied with death, and Still Walking, his latest work, is not much different. Set almost entirely during a 24-hour period, the movie examines the tensions that arise when a family gathers under one roof to observe the thirteenth anniversary of a son’s tragic passing. More audience-friendly than anything Kore-eda has made since After Life, this movie still has been crafted with considerable skill. Almost nothing seems extraneous here. Everything that’s included increases our understanding of the way that this group of people grieves and celebrates together. One shot which lasts 7 or 8 minutes, and features 9 actors seamlessly interacting at a dinner table for the entire time, is typical of the way that the filmmaker corrals his ensemble cast and convinces the viewer that these people actually are related.

One of the more impressive aspects of Still Walking is the way that it shades characters in such a way that undermines first impressions. As viewers spend more time in this household, they come to understand that the curmudgeonly father is not as detached as he might seem at the outset. Similarly, the mother, who initially seems welcoming, turns out to be quite capable of snubbing those who displease her. The pressures that the houseguests feel are sketched out in the early sequences, and then fully realized later on, even though nothing as indecorous as a confrontation ever occurs. Subtle, but not so subtle that its audience could miss its universally applicable observations, Still Walking is possibly Kore-eda’s finest film yet.

Rating: 70/100

Day 5 Grades

2008-09-08T14:16:00.003-04:00

Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2008) 70
Uncertainty (Scott McGehee & David Siegel, 2008) 53
Better Things (Duane Hopkins, 2008) 57
Three Wise Men (Mika Kaurismaki, 2008) 21
Plastic City (Yu Lik-wai, 2008) 72
Acolytes (Jon Hewitt, 2008) 30

Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008)

2008-09-08T13:59:00.002-04:00

Sure to bolster the Netflix queue of anyone other than interviewee Quentin Tarantino, Not Quite Hollywood offers a wild and dizzying tour through the subgenre of Ozploitation films. From naughty sex films, to gory creature features, to gonzo action movies, director Hartley covers all bases, and bolsters his coverage with an impressive array of interviewees. The film focuses less on obscurities than films that were seminal to the movement of their respective genres, meaning that depth is prioritized over breadth. Nonetheless, it offered this devout cinephile the rare opportunity to watch one of these catalogue documentaries without having already seen the majority of movies under discussion.

Rating: 50/100

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Kevin Smith, 2008)

2008-09-08T13:58:00.000-04:00

Kevin Smith’s movies are somewhat critic-proof, because they don’t depend on cinematic competency, but rather on crude jokes and a likeable cast. It’s a given when going to see one of his movies that there will be some major shortcomings. The only question becomes whether or not the script and performances are strong enough to distract attention from the ineptly framed shots, the immature worldview, and the sophomoric soundtrack. Therefore, I can’t make any great claims for the formal rigor or deft structuring of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but I can confess that I laughed a lot while watching it and quickly developed a rooting interest in its underdog characters.

Though Zack and Miri is shameless in its presentation of a formulaic premise, it can’t be denied that since it features absurdities such as an extended envisioning of Star Whores, which is precisely the Star Wars cum porno that it sounds like, it represents the ceaselessly juvenile Smith in his unique métier of geek raunch. Probably a bit late in its envisioning of the mainstreaming of pornography, it nonetheless manages to offer a fast and furious parade of profanity that makes the movie at times feel more like a wild sex romp than the likeable romantic comedy that it actually is.

Rating: 67/100

Jerichow (Christian Petzold, 2008)

2008-09-08T13:57:00.000-04:00

East German director Chrisitian Petzold skillfully, but perhaps too faithfully, recycles film noir tropes in his cleanly-directed Jerichow. Using one particular noir tale as its basis (I will refrain from revealing it, lest I spoil the plot), the movie actually represents a reimagining similar to Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. That film modified the premise of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows to make a statement about racism in then-modern Germany. Here, Petzold does the same, crafting a tale that’s centered on the reactions of a Turkish man who has learned to expect the worst from people.

Jerichow unfolds rather predictably for anyone familiar with its genre, but its visuals and thematic nuances elevate it somewhat. To be sure, this movie, which pits lily white Germans against a suspiciously drawn immigrant, creates audience identification that forces the viewer to question their prejudices. The noir genre depends upon the viewer’s willingness to be compassionate toward criminals, and the audience’s willingness to sympathize with people simply because they've grown familiar is exploited to create a potent message in the film’s denouement.

As a side note I’d like to point out that this foreign noir revisionism seems to be a trend, based on the slate of movies that I’ve at this year’s festival seen including Three Monkeys, Zift, and Revanche. I can’t help but feel, though, that Americans tend to work within genres better than directors from abroad. When an American filmmaker like Tarantino or Haynes takes a revisionist approach to a genre, the result is not a polite counterpoint to what’s come before, as is the case in Jerichow, but a full-blown shakeup to the values system embodied by the works. Not to generalize too broadly, but these foreign films bluntly smuggle subtext that seems to emerge more naturally when it's been inserted on home turf. That isn’t to say that Jerichow is bloodless, but it does lack much of the vitality that makes genre filmmaking so captivating to begin with.

Rating: 56/100

Is There Anybody There? (John Crowley, 2008)

2008-09-08T03:10:00.002-04:00

Michael Caine mugs endlessly for the sake of a curious little boy (and for the camera) in John Crowley’s whimsical British comedy Is There Anybody There? Set in a home turned into an old-folks home by overzealous parents, this movie attempts to at once be irreverent and warm-hearted. The mix, difficult to manage for even the most proficient of filmmakers, proves too much to handle for the relative newcomer Crowley. The resulting movie is tonally wobbly and less entertaining than ingratiating.

Centered on a boy’s pursuit of the question of what happens to us after we die, this script comes up with nothing more than the tritest answers imaginable. Instead, it offers plenty of shenanigans, in which Caine, playing a retired magician, goes through a predictable cycle of friendship, misunderstanding and reconciliation with the boy. The fundamental problem is that the boy’s character is thinly sketched. There’s no good reason, beyond a child’s typical morbid curiosity, that he should be so captivated by the afterlife, so the entire film seems a bit arbitrary. It might have worked as an actor’s showcase, despite its deficits, if only Caine weren’t so obviously on autopilot throughout.

Rating: 34/100

The Secret Life of Bees (Gina Prince-Bythewood, 2008)

2008-09-08T02:51:00.006-04:00

Gina Prince-Bythewood finally follows up her debut Love and Basketball with The Secret Life of Bees, a disappointing, deep-fried batch of clichéd characters and manipulative tearjerking. Set in South Carolina, during the first days of mandatory integration, this coming-of-age story leaves few Southern clichés unexploited. It follows a 14-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning), as she flees her abusive father and ends up bunking with a group of wholly empowered black women.

Too simple-minded to seem sincere, Bees wastes no energy in making sure the audience can’t help but side with it. From its too-obvious musical montages (which seem designed to sell CDs instead of support the story), to its pre-determined attitudes toward each of its characters, to its trite philosophy lessons delivered via Queen Latifah, the movie is self-aware and aware of its own supposed importance. Fanning seems like a grounding presence through all of this hand-wringing, forced bonding, and pontificating, but in her most dramatic scenes, she tends toward the shrill. Although she is playing a character who is supposedly destined to be a great writer, she gives little evidence of depth, instead only whining incessantly about her mommy and daddy issues. Sure to reap plenty of Image Awards next year (one forward-thinking character even wears an NAACP t-shirt), the film is nothing if not marketable. Ironically, in its pre-digested judgments of its villains, who never reveal much additional texture, it is as biased as any of the bigots it attacks.

Rating: 43/100

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)

2008-09-07T20:39:00.003-04:00

The sensitive camera of master director Claire Denis reveals the inner stirrings of an extended, working-class, French family in her superlative 35 Shots of Rum. Fans of this immeasurably talented filmmaker will know that she has already made movies with titles such as Trouble Every Day and I Can’t Sleep. From this body of work, it’s obvious that one of her key themes creates an alliance between emotional health and the daily routine. Through 35 Shots’ quiet observations of a father and daughter who appear to be living a normal, quietly happy life, the ability of routine to distract us from our pain is made clear.

Even though it’s spare enough to be called minimalist, 35 Shots is extremely subtle in conveying its meanings. Pointed feelings are ever-present, but many lay undisclosed until most of the tale has been told. Father Lionel (who’s not coincidentally a train operator by vocation) and daughter Jo clearly love each other enough, but their relationship is complicated by unspoken strains. Watching these tensions resolve themselves, with an unreal amount of delicacy from Denis, provides the film with its considerable sense of compassion.

Denis’ work here is just as pleasing to the head, however. The opening overture, composed mostly of POV shots from the train conductor’s window sets the measured rhythm that will remain throughout the film. Backed by a Tindersticks score, it is only the first of many sublime and effortless wonders on display here. One sequence, which occurs when the cast heads out for a concert, but is forced to take refuge in a restaurant, is utterly remarkable in its use of music and its ability to be simultaneously loaded with character tension and vacillating emotional beats. 35 Shots of Rum casts its magical spell with few words, but the mojo that it works is exceptionally powerful stuff, to be sure.

Rating: 84/100

Day 4 Grades

2008-09-07T11:34:00.009-04:00

35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) 84
The Secret Life of Bees (Gina Prince-Bythewood) 43
Is There Anybody There? (John Crowley, 2008) 34
Jerichow (Christian Petzold, 2008) 56
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Kevin Smith, 2008) 67
Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008) 50

Deadgirl (Marcel Sarmiento / Gadi Harel, 2008)

2008-09-07T11:26:00.001-04:00

For those willing to forego quality production values and decent acting for a brush with the taboo, Deadgirl offers plenty of repulsive excitement. Mixing sexual deviance and zombie gore like no movie since Return of the Living Dead 3, this twisted thriller follows the fallout that ensues after two undersexed teens find an immortal and naked woman tied up in the basement of an abandoned mental asylum. Upon laying eyes on her gross but attractive form, one of the boys suggests, “We could keep her.” It’s a moment that the film doesn’t manage to sell, but for those who can accept the decision, it sets of a series of gross-outs that reward the suspension of disbelief.

To Deadgirl’s credit, it’s less reliant than gore or shock scares than the inherent perversity of its premise to freak out its audience. As the boys start looking at the dead girl as a sexual object, they begin to fight both their raging hormones and each other. Before long, the situation spirals out of control, resulting in additional mayhem. I’ll refrain from spoiling the story from that point, but I will assure readers that what results is fairly original by the standards of horror movie plots. While Deadgirl has its problems, such as its poor performances, weak dialogue, and gaping plot holes, it is undoubtedly creepy enough to make its roughness forgivable.

Rating: 57/100

Pontypool (Bruce MacDonald, 2008)

2008-09-07T10:34:00.001-04:00

Playing, at least for its first half, like a top-notch episode of TV’s “The Twilight Zone”, Bruce MacDonald’s Pontypool unfortunately gets bogged down by its own pretensions as it continues. Set almost entirely within the office of a local AM radio station, the film unfolds in a manner similar to Orson Welles’ radio play “The War of the Worlds”. Through audio contact with the outside world, we’re given an impression of widespread chaos, even as the visual backdrop barely changes. A take-no-prisoners talk radio DJ, played with verve by Stephen McHattie, becomes our narrator as apocalypse looms.

The threat, as far as I could tell, comes from words themselves. Apparently, certain words in the English language have mutated here, resulting in an affliction that creates zombie-like behavior in its victims. It’s a premise that the film never satisfyingly sells, despite plenty of babble (the title is taken from the town where the action unfolds, but is also a complicated play on words). Nevertheless, MacDonald creates an impressive sense of escalating tension throughout the film’s early scenes. By the midpoint of Pontypool, this strain reaches a fever pitch, as callers to the radio station relay audio evidence of the terror that lies outside the shelter of the church that doubles as the broadcasting hub. For a brief passage, Pontypool offers edge-of-your-seat suspense.

Unfortunately, Pontypool seems to have been designed with the pretense that it has something powerful to say about the power of words. Hitler’s name is invoked more than once, and the chanting of the unthinking crowds point to the fact that this disease is supposed to stand as a metaphor for the ability of language to twist people toward evil ends. The message, despite the backdrop of talk radio, never becomes more than bland, though. One can’t help but wish MacDonald had taken the film in a less intellectual direction instead, if this was all that his pontifications would have resulted in.

Rating: 55/100

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett, 2008)

2008-09-07T02:13:00.001-04:00

This hipper-than-thou romantic comedy tries to create a modern-day romp in the spirit of John Hughes’ Sixteen Candles, but ends up being more comparable to forgettable fare such as 1988’s License to Drive. It comes as a particularly disappointing second feature for director Peter Sollett, whose debut Raising Victor Vargas embraced the lumpiness of family and community. Here, the focus is placed on a group of self-absorbed teens who pride themselves on their trendiness. The plot, which involves two of these kids (Kat Dennings and Michael Cera) getting out of inexplicable relationships and into each others’ pants, is an overextended meet-cute that gives the audience little reason to become invested.

Set entirely over the course of one wild night, the film presents New York City as a carefree urban playground for bridge and tunnel brats. For all of the rampant binge drinking and casual sex on display, though, the feeling here is less like a cautionary Larry Clark film than a live action feature from Disney. Interesting mostly in the way that it seems to place its high school-aged cast in a social sphere that eschews labels such as “jock”, “geek”, or even “popular” (begging the question of whether it is this film or the recent documentary American Teen that’s hopelessly out of touch), this is both unfunny and endowed with surprisingly little heart.

Rating: 36/100

Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz, 2008)

2008-09-07T01:32:00.001-04:00

Emmanuel Beart and Rufus Sewell star as parents who travel to tsunami-ravaged Burma in a hopeless quest to find their missing son in Fabrice Du Welz’s trippy second feature Vinyan. As insistently disorienting as The Ordeal, Du Welz’s debut, the film takes a headlong dive into the heart of darkness, using risible but effective orientalism to create a moody and anxiety-ridden feel.

These expatriate parents’ quest, which begins with the glimpse of an indiscernible image in a video, only grows more desperate as it proceeds. It quickly becomes apparent that the guides they’ve hired are out to swindle them, and as they delve deeper into the rain forests of the region, it becomes increasingly possible that they’re hopelessly lost. Even before they head out into the wilderness, Du Welz throws garish dream sequences on screen. As the situation becomes more dire, and the psychological toll the search is taking increases, the movie becomes only more chaotic.

Throughout Vinyan, as in any good horror film, the threat of the other looms large. Thanks to committed performances by Beart and Sewell, though, it becomes obvious that the relationship their characters share might never be the same again, regardless of their son’s fate. The unspoken tensions that exist between the two seem to manifest themselves in the phantasmagoric rain forest that they descend into. While some might object to Vinyan’s portrait of the region as a place where madness becomes an asset in the quest for survival, there’s no doubt that in both generic and human terms Du Welz does a superb job of crafting menace.

Rating: 59/100

Dioses (Josue Mendez, 2008)

2008-09-06T23:14:00.006-04:00

There’s not really anything that we haven’t seen before in Josue Mendez’s class-based drama Dioses, but that scarcely hobbles the film. While this may not qualify as trenchant satire and may stack the deck against its wealthier characters, it is sure enough of its tone that one can ignore those facts. Focusing on one rich Peruvian family’s dysfunctions, Dioses presents their lives as a hollow series of meaningless parties and sexual dalliances.

Four characters sit at the center of the film. Twenty-one year old Andrea lives the life of a socialite, at least until she discovers she’s pregnant. College-ready Diego is pressured by his dad to enter the family business, but is more focused on lusting after his sister. Prospective stepmother Elisa is desperate, both to hide her working-class roots and to indoctrinate herself in a group of vapid trophy wives. Presiding over the clan is papa Antonio, whose defining characteristic is his blindness to his family’s dissatisfaction.

The film manages to make this stereotypical collection of characters engaging, however. Filmed in a glossy style, Dioses certainly makes the appeal of the lives of Lima’s social elite clear. To provide a point of contrast, director Mendez always keeps the hired help of the family on the periphery, outlining a surprisingly nuanced dynamic between the two groups over the course of the film. It’s to Mendez’s credit that the film resists escalating into the violence that always seems to lurk as a threat in the air. The conclusion he provides instead is both more depressing and probably more realistic.

Rating: 52/100

Zift (Javor Gardev, 2008)

2008-09-06T23:08:00.001-04:00

Debut director Javor Gardev delivers a stylish but empty Bulgarian noir with the perhaps too-appropriately titled Zift. Taking its name from a slang term for the word “shit”, the film initially gives one hope with its black-and-white scope cinematography. Such faith is soon squandered, however, as Gardev fails to provide much else of interest. Part of the problem here is the heavy reliance upon voiceover narration. It is so prominent that it, when combined with an overcomplicated flashback structure, drains any sense of urgency from the film. As the movie stumbles inevitably toward its conclusion, it recalls any number of classic film noir set pieces, but fails to create any gripping personality of its own. The noir genre, perhaps more than any other, is dependent upon the presence of entertaining character actors in supporting roles. Pleasure in these films usually comes from being able to brush up against shady types we’d never meet in our daily life. The cast of Zift is a disappointingly generic series of Cold War-era archetypes. No one is able to enliven the film enough that we can shake off the narrator’s disaffected tone. If nothing else, Zift provides a lesson to those willing to tackle the genre: a double-cross won’t sting if we never cared in the first place.

Rating: 27/100

Day 3 Grades

2008-09-06T14:39:00.004-04:00

Zift (Javor Gardev, 2008) 27
Dioses (Josue Mendez, 2008) 52
Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz, 2008) 59
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett, 2008) 36
Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, 2008) 55
Deadgirl (Marcel Sarmiento / Gadi Harel) 57

Detroit Metal City (Toshio Lee, 2008)

2008-09-06T14:35:00.000-04:00

A preppy young boy leaves behind his idyllic small town to pursue a career as a bubblegum pop idol, only to somehow wind up as the frontman of an aggressive death metal band in Toshio Lee’s frequently hilarious Detroit Metal City. Adapted with reckless abandon from a popular Japanese magna, this movie is anchored by a game performance from the rubber-faced Ken'ichi Matsuyama. Playing the dual role of trendy pop wannabe Negishi and kabuki gone mad Krauser, his exaggerated body language and equal comfort in either role turn this into a mistaken identity comedy par excellence.

Not since This Is Spinal Tap has the absurd world of heavy metal music been so successfully mined for laughs. Director Lee exaggerates everything, which not only captures the spirit of the original cartoon, but also allows for narrative lapses (such as how Negishi actually got cast in this ridiculous role) to matter little. Featuring numerous comedic music performances with absurdly aggressive lyrics (e.g. “I’m a terrorist from hell / I raped my mom last night. / I’ll do my dad tomorrow!”) and four or five episodic narrative arcs, the film runs a bit long, but the laughs come frequently enough that it seems churlish to complain. I remember seeing a headline in Variety a week or two ago stating that a film based on the video game Guitar Hero has been planned. Such a movie would be hard-pressed to top the appeal that this film would have for fans of heavy rock.

Rating: 66/100

The Burning Plain (Guillermo Arriaga, 2008)

2008-09-06T12:03:00.005-04:00

Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga made headlines last year when he suggested that director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who has made three films from Arriaga’s scripts, was not the dominant talent behind their collaborations. This public airing of grievances inevitably led Arriaga strike out on his own, but his feature debut, the lamentable The Burning Plain suggests that the scriptwriter has wildly underestimated the contributions of his former collaborator.

Although the energy of Amores Perros drew me in, I was no great fan of the films based on Arriaga’s other screenplays (these include 21 Grams, Babel, and Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada). Each of them used an achronological narrative structure that was designed to bestow cosmic importance on a melodramatic scenario, but only yielded self-importance. The Burning Plain, which uses a similar gotcha setup, is as overinflated as anything Arriaga has penned, and suffers even more from its storytelling deficits since it lacks the visual strength and solid ensemble acting that defined González Iñárritu’s work. Arriaga, rather than proving he was the reason for his previous success, reveals himself to be an inadequate stylist and a helmer who can’t capitalize on the talents of the actors that he employs.

Despite the presence of talented collaborators such as cinematographer Robert Elswit and Hans Zimmer, who provides the film’s distractingly bad score, Arriaga can’t capitalize on the script that he’s written. Concerning two romances involving Caucasian women and the Mexicans that save them from their ineffectual white mates, the film is too bloated to connect with the heart. The Burning Plain’s grandiose plot begs for melodramatic exaggeration, but Arriaga attempts to ground his story with naturalism. Since that reality is predicated on scenes that see actresses like Kim Basinger going to K-Mart or Charlize Theron punishing herself for her sexual transgressions by scarring her leg with a rock, it’s difficult to buy in, however.

The Burning Plain is completely unaware of how overcooked it is. It moves so predictably that its attempts to shock us with its chronological tricks feel pathetic. The film might have worked to some degree if the cast was able to transcend the script that they’ve been given, but all of the performances here are surprisingly awful. Perhaps no one can do anything with a line like “I can’t get rid of the smell of the burning! I can’t get rid of it!”, but none of the thespians do Arriaga’s purple prose any great favors. When it’s all said and done, The Burning Plain is less than meets the eye. Its structural convulsions actively detract from a contrived story that would have probably been better left untold, regardless of director.

Rating: 32/100

Serbis (Brillante Mendoza, 2008)

2008-09-06T11:27:00.003-04:00

By many conventional standards, Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis is amateurish. Its editing is rudimentary, its sound work is rough, its narrative sprawls without much order, and its tone is crude. Despite this, the film crackles with energy. Mendoza, it seems, is a better dramatist than a filmmaker. As his handheld camera spins through the family-run porn theater that Serbis is set in, he finds excitement, conflict, and community everywhere he looks. The movie, though presenting itself as a casually observed day in the life of its characters, ends up creating a convincing portrait of a matriarchal society, in which suffering women must compensate for the shortcomings of the ineffectual men they have the misfortune of falling in love with.

Similar to Mendoza’s The Masseur, which saw its titular character both servicing his clients and coming to terms with his father’s death, Serbis locates the humanity that exists within a world of sexual exploitation. The Filipino culture, or at least the segment of it on display here, has looser sexual mores than ours, and as a result a family can function, even when it feeds itself by operating a den of vice. The stresses of maintaining family values when your customers are transsexual prostitutes is made explicitly clear throughout.

The movie theater that serves as Serbis’ setting is run down and filthy. Mendoza does a superb job of conveying the squalor and cacophony of his homeland. A chaotic mood comes to dominate the film’s events. Fights break out, characters yell, and scenes are randomly interrupted by such things as a goat on the loose or a thief who is being pursued by the police. There aren’t many dull moments in Serbis, even if it largely eschews plot in its efforts to produce a portrait of an entire family. The film seems to confirm Mendoza as a strong talent, reminiscent of the spirit of Altman, even if he lacks that filmmaker’s polish.

Rating: 58/100

33 Scenes From Life (Malgoska Szumowska, 2008)

2008-09-06T11:24:00.000-04:00

The title 33 Scenes From Life suggests that Malgoska Szumowska’s film will feature distinct divisions between each narrative segment that it presents. It doesn’t. This is a conventionally told story, without fades to black or clear barriers between one sequence and the next. Then again, the title also suggests that this will be film about life. It’s not really. Rather, it focuses on the process of death, or at least how the death of two Polish artists impacts their daughter, who is technically an adult, but lacks much maturity.

The early scenes in 33 Scenes reveal a warm and casual portrait of family life, but that idyll is soon disrupted by the revelation that the family’s matriarch has terminal cancer. The remainder of the film is submerged in a dour mood. Szumowska wants to demonstrate how the process of death can force family members to put their lives on hold, and she does that without resorting to soapy plot twists or cheap sentiment. While the family remains at arm’s length throughout (I suspect their occasional racist and homophobic remarks were supposed to be endearing, but they had the opposite effect on me), the film manages to stay on point for a while. The last act, however, sees it transforming into a bizarre feminine wish-fulfillment fantasy, in which the protagonist has to choose between two men and the third option of becoming a fully realized person and artist. It’s an odd, self-centered capper to a cancer movie that undoubtedly reduces the life lessons that were imparted along the way.

Rating: 35/100

The Sky Crawlers (Mamoru Oshii, 2008)

2008-09-05T23:17:00.003-04:00

Mamoru Oshii’s latest animated feature opens with a self-consciously cool dogfighting sequence. This aggressive series of gory explosions and ostentatious slow-motion belies the contemplative, even soporific, film that is to follow, however. Set in a hazy alternate universe where genetically modified mercenaries fight battles on the behalf of competing corporations, The Sky Crawlers brings enough mind-numbing baggage to the table to challenge even the most ardent of anime fans.

As soon as Oshii cuts from the planes to the pilots that fly them, the marked contrast between his animation style for his characters and their machines is made clear. The action sequences strive for realism, in their level of detail and camerawork. The scenes featuring the dramatic contortions of his animated cast, however, are stylized and simplified. They lack much definition, both graphically and emotionally, and quickly turn the movie into a slog to sit through.

The majority of The Sky Crawlers is a drawn-out nosedive into pretension. In the script’s last quarter, however, it unleashes a few revelatory (if clumsy) dialogue sequences that almost pull it out of that sharp decline. The characters’ emotional worldview becomes clear, and suddenly many of Oshii’s stylistic choices (such as the affectless character designs, the glacial pacing, and the dominant feelings of angst and detachment) make perfect intellectual sense. These last-minute existential musings may not make The Sky Crawlers a film that ultimately felt worthwhile, but they do at least transform it into something comprehensible. It may be boring, but it’s boring for a reason.

Rating: 39/100

Revanche (Gotz Spielmann, 2008)

2008-09-05T23:14:00.003-04:00

Director Gotz Spielmann reveals heretofore unseen (and for my tastes, unwelcome) heart in his tricky noir thriller Revanche. The first half of the film finds the filmmaker in familiar territory. Set in urban Austria, it presents a thoroughly debased love triangle between a Ukranian immigrant, an ex-con, and a pimp. In these early scenes, Spielmann uses harshly lit visuals, aggressive sexuality and no shortage of sleaze to suggest that the city is hopelessly corrupt. He objectifies his actors by keeping his camera held back, and even finds moments of wit without breaking this mood. We see his hooker heroine taking a coffee break between clients, and later stating that her lifestyle is “perfectly normal” while preparing a line of cocaine.

These moments remind me of the Spielmann who directed the scabrous Antares. Unfortunately, the midpoint of the film sees him becoming a kinder, gentler, less-skilled storyteller. In the second half of Revanche, once the titular revenge plot gets kicked into gear, the movie begins increasingly relying on contrivances that undermine the tension that’s supposed to be forming.

Worse still, the film soon starts flirting with the possibility of redemption. As Revanche plays out, it becomes increasingly audience-friendly, but it betrays its initial worldview. The story reversals that it unleashes are easily anticipated, and the symbolic view of the country as a place that mollifies the evils the city never seems to develop fully (check out the classic On Dangerous Ground to see how well this stuff could work). While Revanche is not inept or poorly made, it represents an unfortunate step in the direction of the mainstream for an artist who once had a definite maverick streak.

Rating: 48/100

Day 2 Grades

2008-09-05T15:08:00.005-04:00

Revanche (Gotz Spielmann, 2008) 48
The Sky Crawlers (Mamoru Oshii, 2008) 39
33 Scenes From Life (Malgoska Szumowska, 2008) 35
Serbis (Brillante Mendoza, 2008) 58
The Burning Plain (Guillermo Arriaga, 2008) 32
Detroit Metal City (Toshio Lee, 2008) 66

JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri)

2008-09-05T14:51:00.004-04:00

Less the Being John Malkovich-inspired romp that pre-release hype suggested, than the action genre’s Scream, JCVD is an oddball film that is likeable, but quickly runs out of steam. Things start promisingly with the opening credits sequence, which features an action extravaganza that exhibits a series of Van Damme’s still-impressive moves in one uninterrupted take. Unfortunately, these are by far the most action-packed moments in the film. What follows instead is a mildly clever premise that features the Muscles from Brussels playing himself as he’s caught up in a goofily implausible hostage situation.

Things begin with a great deal of comic energy, but before long, the basic jokes at play here (that Van Damme’s celebrity is embarrassing, that he’s still the best that Belgium has got, etc…) begin to repeat themselves, much like the Tarantinoesque narrative. As the bank robbery is played and replayed from slightly different perspectives, little that is new comes to light, resulting in a film that seems to be crawling further and further up its own ass. The whole enterprise seems designed to give the audience permission to embrace a guilty pleasure by providing ironic distance, but that approach underestimates the audience’s willingness to accept entertainment on its own terms and quickly turns self-congratulatory in the worst possible way.

Savvy without being sophisticated, JCVD grows more and more interminable as the headaches that face poor Jean-Claude pile up. As he is dealing with the demands of his lawyer, his agent, his fans, the cops, and bumbling bank robbers, the celebrity is pushed toward a breaking point. This tension culminates in an exasperating, fourth-wall-breaking, tearful confessional monologue that may have been designed to be the film’s emotional centerpiece, but feels opportunistic and ill-phrased in practice. Much like JCVD in general, it probably sounded better in theory.

Rating: 45/100

Ocean Flame (Liu Fendou)

2008-09-05T14:40:00.002-04:00

The opening minutes here are disorienting to such an extent that it took me a long time to determine if I was watching an arty send up of gangster movie clichés or a pretentious film that failed to realize how clichéd it was (surely, those pregnant pauses couldn’t be meant seriously… could they?). It turned out to be neither, really, as it seems director Liu Fendou is presenting an idyllic romance in the opening reel only to undermine it as that relationship grows increasingly perverse and masochistic. As the film wears on, and an innocent young girl falls in with a group of conmen who force her to humiliate herself time and again, it becomes apparent that there’s not enough psychological depth here to sustain that decline. This means Ocean Flame soon starts to feel like a series of melodramatic reveals and shock effects.

While this shallowness means that this is a bad movie, it’s at least an entertainingly bad one. There are enough abuses doled out that the central relationship never has a chance to grow dull, and the lead performance from Fan Liao is pleasingly devilish, as if he was in on how much of a joke this all is. Monica Mok, who plays his battered mate, however, attacks her role with so much vigor and exteriorized suffering that you suspect that the movie supposed to be playing more seriously than it does. At best, this is a poor man’s Lust, Caution. It shares much of the same repulsive sexuality that marked that film, but while Liu Fendou has something of an eye, there’s none of the political or personal depth that elevated Ang Lee’s film.

Rating: 40/100

One Day You'll Understand (Amos Gitai, 2008)

2008-09-05T14:36:00.004-04:00

Mom’s hope chest turns out to be a veritable Pandora’s box of suriviors’ guilt in this self-serious, but fairly misconceived slog through Holocaust memories. It starts out well enough, with the novel intention that a woman’s choice to hide her Jewish identity is a protective gesture toward her son, but as the film proceeds it becomes increasingly ridiculous. Poor Hippolyte Girardot is asked to take the crushing weight of the genocide on his shoulders, and is expected to do so in a series of laughably expositional scenes that offer him little chance to exist as anything else.

Gitai’s formal approach, which begins with extended sequence shots, seems to at first suggest that the film’s roving camera mirror’s the protagonist’s search, but the director abandons any pretense of rigor by the midway point. He throws away the movie’s cogent perspective on memory and the toll that this sort of investigating takes on the soul for an ill-advised flashback and an embarrassing dramatic recreation of a Gestapo raid. Whatever strengths Gitai might have as a director, he is incapable of creating engaging montage, which means that what should be the movie’s climax feels completely hollow. From there, it only gets worse, as the movie becomes some sort of bland commercial for cultural acceptance and another tiresome statement that no amends are possible for the Holocaust.

Rating: 37/100

Day 1 Grades

2008-09-05T02:16:00.001-04:00

One Day You'll Understand (Amos Gitai) 37
Ocean Flame (Liu Fendou) 40
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri) 45

Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy, 2008)

2008-09-04T17:21:00.002-04:00

Tulpan, the first narrative feature from Kazakh filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy, augurs well for this former documentarian’s future cinematic career. The film tells the uncomplicated story of Asa, a fresh-faced young sailor who only wishes to find a wife and live the simple life of a herdsman on the Steppes. Back home from a tour at sea, Asa has gained the ire of his parents after foiling several marriage arrangements. Given one last chance to wed, he meets the beautiful, titular character, but is stymied by her parents, who find him an unsuitable prospective mate (and by her complaint that his ears are too big). The plot that follows sees Asa furthering his quest for love and balancing the demands of his father with those of his dreams. Really, though, Tulpan exists just as much to show the daily lifestyle of Asa’s family and countrymen as it does to tell any tale. The movie locates drama in the pressure that the young men of the region feel to migrate to the city, pays close attention to the family dynamics in the tight quarters of Asa’s yurt, and yields surprisingly effective comedy by highlighting the social awkwardness that the awkward Asa must overcome to successfully court his bride.

More than most ethnographic cinema, Tulpan devises a formal strategy that makes the film about aesthetic concerns in addition to its sociological ones. Dvortsevoy’s background as a documentarian, and his tendency to let the camera keep rolling in hopes of capturing some unexpected sliver of reality, pays major dividends on more than one occasion. His scenes unfold as uninterrupted takes. They are frequently unchoreographed, but that quality only adds to the impression that Dvortsevoy is showing us an unmitigated glimpse at a foreign culture. One scene in particular, in which a baby lamb is delivered, nearly dies, and is revived, is especially miraculous. It’s the sort of serendipitous cinematic moment that could never be planned for. It’s difficult to imagine any better-scripted climax to this story. As it unfolds, Tulpan generally reveals itself to be both more controlled and more structured than it does at first glance, though. Despite a seeming lack of artifice, Dvortsevoy shapes this material with the skill of a natural born storyteller.

Tulpan does admittedly make concessions toward the expectations of western audiences. Its plot is formulaic, and some of its characters are sketched vaguely enough to seem more archetypical than authentic. There are a few pandering pop cultural references scattered about, and there is never much doubt about the ultimate direction of the story. Nonetheless, there’s something special at work here. Because Tulpan allows us a look at an area seldom seen on movie screens, and because it manages to do that while remaining entertaining (and, in a few instances, thrilling), it stands as a noteworthy achievement.

Rating: 55/100

Pre-Festival Review Roundup

2008-09-04T14:10:00.000-04:00

I've been posting reviews of TIFF '08 films that I've seen in advance of the festival for a few weeks now, but now seems like a good time to post a more convenient set of links to everything that I've reviewed thus far:

I’ve Loved You So Long (Philippe Claudel, 2008)

2008-09-04T01:47:00.002-04:00

A magnificently nuanced performance from Kristen Scott Thomas sets the tone in Philippe Claudel’s equally subtle debut film, I’ve Loved You So Long. Focusing on the tentative reestablishment of a relationship between two sisters who have been estranged for fifteen years, this sensitive French drama steadily spins a series of quiet, observational moments into a fugue of uncanny intensity. The clean, uncluttered visual design of the film reflects its initial emotional containment, but belies the storm brewing beneath the good manners that its characters first exhibit. This movie’s modulated rhythms, much like the few drops of rain that fall during the opening scenes yet never quite become a storm, prepare the audience for a smartly calibrated game of withholding that is to follow.

Throughout the intelligently wrought script, there exists an undercurrent of unease that continually threatens to push this familial reconciliation into oblivion. Whenever a small step toward recovery seems to be made, a plot revelation occurs, jeopardizing the delicate relationship of older sister Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) and younger sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein). Despite the screenplay’s structure, though, I’ve Loved You So Long is too smart and too keenly observed to feel dependent upon the shock value that these disclosures provide. Watching these characters, one grows to appreciate how much Claudel manages to say with each of his concise scenes. For example, the opening sequence of the movie, which features the two sisters meeting at an airport, telegraphs a great deal of character detail without a word of dialogue. In fact, if the film has a great flaw, it’s that it truncates many of its early scenes. Too often, interactions are cut short, leaving the audience to guess at how moments might have played out after the camera stopped filming. Because we understand so little of Juliette at first, we desperately want to learn about her. Nothing that Claudel puts on screen rings false, but the mystery that surrounds Juliette is so captivating that we want to see more of her bonding with her sister, more of her sitting in uncomfortable silence as she’s judged, and more of her considering the possibility of reaching out to another.

Without a doubt, Juliette begins to dominate I’ve Loved You So Long, even though the film’s title insists that the relationship between the sisters is central. Kristin Scott Thomas is so overpowering a presence that after a certain point, she owns this movie. The dominant concern changes from whether or not Juliette and her sister will reconcile, to the possibility that the storm that brews inside Juliette’s head will be calmed. Scott Thomas has so thoroughly conceived Juliette that the film inevitably becomes about her interiority.

Throughout every moment of I’ve Loved You So Long, Kristin Scott Thomas is nothing less than brilliant. This is plain from the film’s very first scene, in the way in which she chokes back her tears as she first glimpses her fully grown sister. From the initial moment onward, she’s blunt and hardened, refusing to give an inch of herself. When she’s embraced by another family member near the end of the film, her reaction, a heart-wrenching facial recoil that occurs without any other physical movement, is a breathtaking piece of screen acting. As conceived, Juliette is an intellectual who refuses to suffer fools. As her past becomes clearer, she turns into a complicated monster – the kind who seems to as easily get lost in a good book as commit an unspeakable sin.

Juliette’s character is so intimidating and rich that the audience has no choice but to withhold judgment of her until she decides to present her case. Scott Thomas is an ideal actress to play such a character, with her coolness, her subsumed passion, her fierce intelligence, and her ever-present, self-effacing wit. Hers is a performance that bears genuine comparison with Streep’s in Sophie’s Choice; not for its technical marvels, but for its ability to convince us that a woman can be an endless vessel for contained suffering. Because Scott Thomas’ performance is so layered, it soon justifies the film’s tendency to withhold character information from us. This process of slow revelation allows it to gradually dawn on us just how completely considered a character Juliette is and how completely Scott Thomas embodies her. When, in the final scene, she says, “I’m here,” it’s no understatement. At that point, a fully realized woman sits before us on screen.

Rating: 68/100

Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)

2008-09-04T01:43:00.004-04:00

Treeless Mountain, the apparently autobiographical second feature from director So Yong Kim, confirms the arrival of a distinctive talent among American independent filmmakers while simultaneously suggesting that its creator might benefit from branching out of her comfort zone in the future. Much like Kim’s debut work, In Between Days, this film quietly observes a young Korean girl as she attempts to grapple with the uncertainty and alienation of living in a world where she feels unwanted. Set in South Korea, this uncommonly intimate experience follows two sisters as they find themselves abandoned by their mother and placed in the care of their indifferent drunkard of an aunt. While In Between Days featured a teenage protagonist, the sisters who anchor this film are much younger, and therefore capable of a much smaller range of emotional understanding. It is this downward shift in scope that both enables Kim to present a more comprehensive worldview than in her previous film, and limits her from expanding her palette.

The older of the two girls that Treeless Mountain follows is just mature enough to begin to recognize how miserable her situation is. Kim skillfully manages to convey both her confusion and comprehension as she comes to terms with her sorry situation. From the opening scenes of the film, it is made clear how sensitive a child she is. We see the sting of rejection that she feels when her mother scolds her, yet also quickly come to understand how dependent she is upon her mother’s attention. It must be admitted that few films so perceptively capture the exaggerated outlook that marks early childhood (Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro certainly comes to mind). As Kim chronicles the downward slide of these two girls, she underlines their disappointments, their small victories, and their fleeting moments of levity. Since the plot of Treeless Mountain is even sparser than the one in In Between Days, tonal control is of utmost importance, and it must be admitted that Kim always manages to achieve the precise effect that she desires.

That might not be enough for some viewers, however. Determinedly minor, Treeless Mountain attempts to make simplicity a virtue, but constantly threatens to achieve only slightness. Kim is undoubtedly a skilled director, but she’s someone who seems more content to observe than state. Her placidity behind the camera turns her films into experiences that are somewhat inert, no matter how impeccably crafted they might be. Treeless Mountain finally delivers a touching ending, in a sequence that shows how a grandparents’ farm, which has served as a threat to the two young girls throughout the film, might become be the closest the girls have yet had to a home. For impatient viewers, though, the subtlety of this emotional payoff (it’s communicated mostly through a shift to warmer oranges in the film’s cinematography), might make it too minor to embrace.

Rating: 53/100

Toronto Star Coverage

2008-08-31T11:32:00.002-04:00

There's some good pre-fest coverage now available online in the Toronto Star.

It includes a slew of capsule reviews, and their annual buzz poll.

Lottery Results

2008-08-30T11:13:00.002-04:00

My confirmation email arrived about 20 minutes ago. I received all of my top choices. Hurrah!

Tentative TIFF Schedule

2008-08-29T13:38:00.005-04:00

With news of the lottery results behind me (Box #9 was drawn, out of 78... My order was probably in the 20s), I feel like I can post my tentative schedule without jinxing myself. It is:

04 Thursday
One Day You'll Understand (Amos Gitai) 18:00 Ryerson
Ocean Flame (Liu Fendou) 20:30 Varsity 4
JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri) 23:59 Ryerson

05 Friday
Revanche (Gotz Spielmann) 9:30 ScotiaBank 3
The Sky Crawlers (Mamoru Oshii) 12:00 ScotiaBank 1
33 Scenes From Life (Malgoska Szumowska) 15:45 ScotiaBank 3
Serbis (Brillante Mendoza) 18:00 Varsity 2
The Burning Plain (Guillermo Arriaga) 20:30 Winter Garden Theater
Detroit Metal City (Toshio Lee) 23:59 Ryerson

06 Saturday
Zift (Javor Gardev) 9:15 ScotiaBank 3
Dioses (Josue Mendez) 12:45 AMC7
Vinyan (Fabrice Du Welz) 15:15 ScotiaBank 2
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (Peter Sollett) 18:00 Ryerson
Pontypool (Bruce McDonald) 20:00 AMC6
Deadgirl (Marcel Sarmiento / Gadi Harel) 23:59 Ryerson

07 Sunday
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) 9:15 ScotiaBank 4
The Secret Life of Bees (Gina Prince-Bythewood) 12:00 Isabel Bader
Is There Anybody There? (John Crowley) 15:00 Ryerson
Jerichow (Christian Petzold) 17:30 ScotiaBank 4
Zack and Miri Make a Porno (Kevin Smith) 21:15 Ryerson
Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley) 23:59 Ryerson

08 Monday
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda) 9:15 ScotiaBank 1
New York, I Love You (Various) 12:00 Ryerson
Uncertainty (Scott McGehee / David Siegel) 14:45 AMC9
Better Things (Duane Hopkins) 17:45 AMC7
Three Wise Men (Mika Kaurismaki) 19:45 AMC2
Plastic City (Yu Lik-wai) 21:30 AMC6
Acolytes (Jon Hewitt) 23:59 Ryerson

09 Tuesday
Flash of Genius (Marc Abraham) 9:00 Ryerson
Two-Legged Horse (Samira Makhmalbaf) 12:00 ScotiaBank 4
Flame & Citron (Ole Christian Madsen) 14:45 ScotiaBank 2
Tonight (Werner Schroeter) 18:15 ScotiaBank 2
The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson) 21:00 Ryerson
The Burrowers (JT Petty) 23:59 Ryerson

10 Wednesday
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) 9:00 Ryerson
A Year Ago in Winter (Caroline Link) 12:00 Ryerson
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle) 15:15 Ryerson
The Beaches of Agnes (Agnes Varda) 19:15 Varsity8
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso) 21:30 Jackman Hall
Martyrs (Pascal Laugier) 23:59 Ryerson

11 Thursday
Hooked (Adrian Sitaru) 9:45 ScotiaBank 4
With a Little Help From Myself (Francois Dupeyron) 11:45 ScotiaBank 3
The Dungeon Masters (Keven McAlester) 15:15 AMC10
The Sea Wall (Rithy Panh) 17:30 Ryerson
Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater) 21:00 Ryerson

12 Friday
Adam Resurrected (Paul Schrader) 9:45 ScotiaBank 2
What Doesn't Kill You (Brian Goodman) 12:45 ScotiaBank 2
Pride and Glory (Gavin O'Connor) 14:45 Ryerson
Birdsong (Albert Serra) 17:00 AMC4
Achilles and the Tortoise (Takeshi Kitano) 20:00 Varsity 8
Sexykiller (Miguel Marti) 23:59 Ryerson

13 Saturday
The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky) 9:00 Ryerson
Genova (Michael Winterbottom) 12:00 Ryerson
RocknRolla (Guy Ritchie) 14:45 Ryerson
A Woman in Berlin (Max Farberbock) 17:45 Varsity 1
Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee) 20:30 Ryerson

Venice/Telluride Review Roundup

2008-08-29T13:00:00.043-04:00

The Venice and Telluride Film Festivals have already begun. As the weekend wears on, I'll provide additional links to reviews of significant TIFF titles in this post:

35 Shots of Rum
The Hollywood Reporter (PRO)
London Times (pro)
Screen Daily (pro)
Variety (PRO)

Achilles and the Tortoise
The Hollywood Reporter (pro)
Screen Daily (con)
Variety (mixed)

Adam Resurrected
Cinematical (PRO)
Variety (mixed)

The Beaches of Agnes
Screen Daily (pro)

The Blind Sunflowers
Variety (mixed)

The Brothers Bloom
Toronto Star (PRO)

Burn After Reading
The Daily Telegraph (pro)
The Hollywood Reporter (pro)
The London Times (pro)
Screen Daily (PRO)
Time (con)
Variety (con)

The Burning Plain
The Daily Telegraph (PRO)
The Guardian (mixed)
The Hollywood Reporter (con)
The London Times (mixed)
Screen Daily (PRO)
Variety (con)

Cold Lunch
Screen Daily (mixed)

A Country Teacher
Screen Daily (mixed)

Dioses
Variety (CON)

The Duchess
The Hollywood Reporter (mixed)
Screen Daily (pro)
Variety (mixed)

Everlasting Moments
Cinematical (PRO)
Variety (PRO)

Firaaq
Spout (mixed)

Flame & Citron
Cinematical (PRO)
Spout (pro)

Flash of Genius
Cinematical (pro)

Goodbye Solo
Screen Daily (pro)
Variety (PRO)

The Heart of Jenin
Variety (pro)

Hooked
The Hollywood Reporter (pro)
Variety (mixed)

The Hurt Locker
Toronto Star (PRO)

I'm Gonna Explode
Screen Daily (mixed)

Inju, The Beast in the Shadow
The Guardian (mixed)
The Hollywood Reporter (mixed)
Screen Daily (pro)
Variety (CON)

Jerichow
The Hollywood Reporter (mixed)
Screen Daily (mixed)
Variety (pro)

Kabuli Kid
Screen Daily (pro)

Machan
Screen Daily (mixed)
Variety (con)

Mark of an Angel
Variety (pro)

Milk
Screen Daily (pro)
Variety (mixed)

PA-RA-DA
The Hollywood Reporter (pro)

Paris 36
Variety (pro)

Passchendaele
The Globe and Mail (mixed)

A Perfect Day
The Hollywood Reporter (mixed)
Screen Daily (mixed)
Variety (con)

Plastic City
The Hollywood Reporter (con)
Screen Daily (con)
Variety (con)

Rachel Getting Married
The Hollywood Reporter (PRO)
Screen Daily (pro)
Variety (PRO)

RocknRolla
InContention.com (CON)
The Independent (mixed)
The London Times (con)

The Sky Crawlers
The Japan Times (pro)
Screen Daily (mixed)

Slumdog Millionaire
Cinematical (PRO)
Spout (con)
Variety (PRO)

Teza
Screen Daily (mixed)
Variety (mixed)

Valentino: The Last Emperor
The Guardian (pro)
The Hollywood Reporter (mixed)
The London Times (mixed)
Screen Daily (pro)
Variety (mixed)

Vinyan
The Hollywood Reporter (con)
Screen Daily (PRO)
Variety (mixed)

More useful ratings...

2008-08-28T09:54:00.003-04:00

Now Toronto has posted a slew of pre-festival reviews:

http://www.nowtoronto.com/guides/tiff/2008/

Eye Weekly has posted capsules as well:

http://www.eyeweekly.com/tiff/main