Day 5, So Far...

No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers) 68


The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik) 54

Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007)

There's no doubt while watching Ang Lee's Lust, Caution that you're in the hands of a supreme filmmaker. Clocking in at about 160 minutes long, this espionage thriller set in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation has scarcely a second of wasted time. Extremely talky, it's never less than spellbinding to look at. Furthermore, even though Lee downplays action, he infuses even the most outwardly mundane sequences, like that of the opening mahjong game, with the graceful, fluid camerawork of a Crouching Tiger fight scene.

Telling a politicized tale of sexual repression, Lust, Caution focuses on Wang Jiazhi, played by Wei Tang in a wholly accomplished performance that feels like as much of a breakthrough as Zhang Ziyi's CT,HD turn was a few years back. A young student turned revolutionary spy, she engages in an extended undercover stint in which she attempts to set the traitorous, but careful, Yee (Tony Leung) up for an assassination attempt. Leung remains elusive for most of the film's duration, and a large portion of his performance is delivered through a series of sex scenes that demonstrate just how sadistic a traitor he is playing. Several Hitchcock references are made during the movie, and the obvious touchstone is his Notorious, which definitively covered this ground.

Despite its epic runtime, Lust, Caution is a straightforward, laser focused narrative with an intimate scale. Most of the film is spent questioning to what degree a person can separate personal feelings from political ones. This theme emerges early on as the youth group joins the nationalist cause through a mix of genuine want to help their motherland and peer pressure. Lee keeps probing it throughout, mining considerable drama from the central question of where Wang Jiazhi's loyalties lie. It's worthy stuff, delivered with all of the class one would expect from one of our most consistent and exciting moviemakers.

Rating: 66/100

Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2007)

Advance word reported that George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the latest in his epic horror franchise, used the gimmick of presenting all action as if it were recorded by the characters in the film. That knowledge prepared me for the worst, given the number of post-Blair Witch genre films that have done little with the conceit. Shame on me for doubting the great Romero, though. One of the indisputable masters of the genre, he has amassed a body of socially conscious, genuinely frightening work. Through its clever advancements of the zombie genre and its consistently surprising series of set pieces, Diary of the Dead earns the right to stand alongside anything that Romero has made.

A re-imagining and updating of the original Night of the Living Dead, Diary follows a group of film students who are on location in rural Pennsylvania when news reports hit that the dead are now walking the earth. Slyly commenting on just how media-saturated today's youth are, the initial response that these kids have to the news is to make a documentary about the events. Skeptical of traditional media, the film celebrates bloggers, MySpace publishers and all forms of DIY reporting. Many of the limitations here feel like assets, given then way that Romero presents what we see as the home-edited, internet-posted work of a film student with a social conscience. Judging by the jokes, such as those featuring a deaf Amish man, that would feel right at home on YouTube, it's clear that Romero is as in touch with the times as ever. Alongside his biting Land of the Dead, Diary presents powerful evidence that Romero might be the American filmmaker most tapped into the new hypocrisies and fears of the post-9/11 era.

That's not to suggest that Diary of the Dead is so socially conscious that it forgets that it's a horror film. To the contrary, the new stylistic approach seems to re-energize the filmmaker, leading him to invent an endless series of scares as the young documentarians move from one zombie-infested disaster area to the next. If the prevailing sense of dread that so distinguished the original never materializes, it's only because Romero's ambitions are far greater here. He reasserts himself again as the definitive expert of his subgenre (one hilarious bit reasserts that the undead shouldn't run in movies) and delivers a wholly original entry in a series that might have seemed to have said it all already.

Rating: 72/100

Day 4 Ratings

Lust, Caution (Ang Lee) 66


Ex Drummer (Koen Mortier) 46


Les Chasons d'amour (Christophe Honore) 43


Nightwatching (Peter Greenaway) 64


Chaotic Ana (Julio Medem) 39

The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase, 2007)

Oddly enough, having now seen two films by Japanese director Naomi Kawase, I can say that the filmmaker that she most recalls for me is master animator Hayao Miyazaki. Like his animated films, Kawase's live-action work has a meditative outlook, allows space for the pleasures of nature, and is deeply immersed in Japanese culture. The Mourning Forest, Kawase's latest, strikes me as a mild disappointment after the revelatory experience that was her Shara, but, whatever its shortcomings, it certainly doesn't betray the sensibility that I so admired in that masterpiece.

Things start promisingly. The pre-credits sequence, which cross-cuts between a funeral procession, ritualistic preparations, and impressive landscape shots while a minimalist piano score builds, is no small achievement. Once the film begins proper, the movie finds itself still on sure footing. As we're introduced to a group of residents and caretakers in a senior citizens' community, Kawase starts introducing a series of philosophical concerns, setting up the journey that fills the second half. Life, death, mourning and guilt are the topics at hand here, but what's refreshing is how the director manages to bring up such subjects while not denying her characters a sense of spontaneity or pleasure.

Even though it's less strikingly casual than Shara was, Forest is structured so that it has plenty of room to breathe. At the film's end, it is revealed to have been pretty deterministic, but it never feels that way while you're watching it. Repeated like a mantra throughout are the words "There are no formal rules, you know". They clearly seem to inform Kawase's stylistic approach. She's partly such a strong filmmaker, even when working in a decidedly minor scale, because she's able to recognize the difference between being sentimental and simply being alert to emotions like love, fun and loss. Ultimately, The Mourning Forest is not so much flawed as it is unable to create a very powerful impression. One or two scenes, such as a river crossing in a downpour, are exciting, but the exceptionally contemplative nature of the film makes it a long, somewhat dull wait for cathartic release.

Rating: 56/100

Day 3 Ratings

The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase) [56]
Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) [51]
The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin) [62]
Erik Nietzsche The Early Years (Jacob Thuesen) [29]
Nothing is Private (Alan Ball) [7]
Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero) [71]

Day 2 Roundup

One Hundred Nails (Ermanno Olmi) 43 [Purportedly Olmi's final film, this conflicted saga is a less than stellar note to end on. Bipolar in the extreme, this attempts to be both a philosophical discourse about the role of acquired knowledge in our pursuit of happiness and a crowd-pleasing feelgood comedy in which a professor abandons his title, money, and home in order to shack up with a group of lovable squatters. As the former, it works well enough, but the latter is a constant distraction. It's pretty clear that Olmi has acquired some knowledge from middlebrow crud like Waking Ned Devine, much to the detriment of my pursuit of happiness.]

Disengagement (Amos Gitai) 49 [For about an hour, this is an unmitigated disaster. Its extended first act features Juliet Binoche as a slightly unhinged Parisenne who has recently lost her father. When the film later relocates to the Gaza strip, taking her character on a quest to find her estranged daughter, it improves considerably, even if Binoche seems to be suddenly playing an altogether different person. No longer a chamber drama, it becomes more recognizably Gitai's work, presenting the Israeli political situation as a barely navigable morass of checkpoints. The long takes that show scenes of mob near-violence dominate the movie's second half and redeem the enterprise.]

The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy) 28 [As Good As It Gets for Post-9/11 America, with mediocre performances.]

Frontiere(s) (Xavier Gens) 34 [This Gallic gorefest is not half as inventive or gruesome as most of this year's homegrown torture porn, to be honest. For all of the intimations of cross-breeding, for example, nothing here comes close to the truly horrific opening of The Hills Have Eyes Part 2. Not an entirely bad time at the movies, though. Though they might be sporadic, there are highlights, such as the bits with the crazy Nazi.]

The Banishment (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2006)

I wasn't a fan of The Return, Andrey Zvyagintsev's Golden Lion-winning debut film, but it had its ardent admirers, which raised expectations for The Banishment, his second, considerably. Unfortunately, it's tough to imagine that even Zvyagintsev's biggest fans will fully embrace this leaden, empty-headed misfire. Things start promisingly, with an expertly shot sequence in which a car races from the country to the city. As soon as the film's family-driven drama becomes clear, however, the accomplished widescreen lensing emerges as the only real asset. Almost embarrassingly portentous, the plot mostly concerns the aftermath that occurs when a wife reveals to her husband that she's carrying a baby that's not his.

Konstantin Lavronenko, who plays Alex, the husband, inexplicably won the Best Actor prize at Cannes this year. His performance is almost entirely interior. Combined with a script that doesn't ever adequately flesh out his (or anyone's) character, the impression that he most often gives on screen is that of a man thoughtlessly staring off into empty space. The film fares better as visual feat than drama, to be sure. Two shots, which happen to be the two most striking in the film, are fully indebted to Tarkovsky. The first explicitly recalls the extended, behind-the-car tracking shot in Solaris, while the second, which is a long camera track looking into a mud puddle, seems to nod toward similar shots in Stalker.

Much like Tarkovsky, Zvyagintsev also fills his work with Christian symbolism, pushing the story vaguely into the realm of allegory. Unfortunately, the effect is more heavy-handed and reductive than a way to deepen the resonance of the ultimate tragedy. Crosses dot composition frequently, and in one moment that's far too on the nose for its own good, a young girl reads a passage from the Bible on the importance of love, giving the film a moral that totally reduces the potential audience response to character actions. Furthermore, since the character behaviors are psychologically implausible in the extreme and because the plot is predicated upon inane contrivances, The Banishment fails to connect even on a surface level. For now, the best that can be said about Zvyagintsev is that he seems like he could potentially be a master filmmaker someday, even if he's still not made a good movie.

Rating: 29/100

You, the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007)

You, the Living, distinctive Swedish auteur Roy Andersson's latest comedy of despair, doesn't stray far from his usual work, appearing to be cut very much from the same mold as his Songs From the Second Floor, despite the fact that seven years have passed since that film's release. Comprised, as usual, as a series of creaky tableaux, the film chugs along with an amusing, deadpan sensibility that sees its cast of pallid, depressed miserables endure the agony and disappointments of modern life. Andersson creates a decidedly artificial world, and it is at its funniest when it is most hermetically sealed off from reality. For example, one episode featuring a despairing daughter and her senile mother cuts too close to the bone to inspire many chuckles, even if one can abstractly grasp the comedy that arises as she unsuccessfully begs her ailing mum to recall her childhood miseries.

Unfortunately, after a jaunty, semi-musical first half-hour, despair becomes the prevailing emotion. By the one-hour mark the returns have diminished pretty severely. The deliberate pacing, which actually served the comedy well in the early scenes, becomes something of a liability as the laughs becomes more sporadic. The dull, dingy pastel color scheme becomes increasingly suffocating. The vignettes become ever more mundane. The injection of political commentary into the pastiche does little to shake the feeling that this is a live-action cartoon. What Andersson achieves here is occasionally funny in the same way that Jacques Tati's movies are funny, but it rarely manages that master's level of visual complexity or wit. Nonetheless, despite any shortcomings, this is not a work to be ignored. Andersson's detailed, largely static compositions beg to be seen on as big a screen as possible. To complain that his skits are difficult or boring to sit through because they seem too close to the pain of daily life is to pay them some kind of a compliment.

Rating: 55/100

Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (Dario Argento, 2007)

First a few words about the screening...

Surely by the standards of Toronto's Midnight Madness audiences, a new film from horror maestro Dario Argento is an event of the highest order. Few venues anywhere could offer a group of genre fans so excited and so devoted, so the energy at the start of the show was electric. Dario Argento, and his daughter and leading lady Asia were both in attendance, which only contributed to excitement levels. She thanked her father for making her the freak she is. He, clearly in an emotional state, didn't have much to say, but when Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes let it slip that it was Dario's birthday, the crowd serenaded him with a rendition of "Happy Birthday".

Thankfully, after all that buildup, the movie itself did not disappoint many. The third entry in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy, it immediately presents the director in good form. An early, astonishingly brutal disembowlment scene sets the gruesome tone at the start, and Argento rarely lets up from there, creating a chaotic thrill ride of a movie. Lacking the self-conscious artistry of many of his earlier, and finer, films, Mother of Tears: The Third Mother finds Argento in balls-out entertainment mode. He includes a plot only insofar as it will move the audience along to the next gory set piece, filling most of the screen time with chase scenes, bloody slayings, and mayhem-laden montages.

A follow-up to the genre classic Suspiria and the somewhat lamentable Inferno, Mother of Tears traces the exploits of a young scholar who, after unwittingly unleashing a long-hidden evil, discovers that she is the only one who can stop the malicious third mother, the final in a trio of witches that operate like the Three Fates, and represent an incarnation of chaos. Ultimately, the story is beside the point, though. Argento's movies often use the supernatural to justify a certain illogic, and the approach here is no exception. Scenes play out with little regard for overall coherence, always striving to maximize effect in the moment. The director employs nearly his entire bag of tricks to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, from shock cuts and loud chords on the soundtrack, to performances that devour the scenery, to a wicked little monkey that terrorizes the heroine.

Ultimately, enjoyment of Mother of Tears requires some degree of complicity in the director's game. This film is obviously not as classy as many of Argento's best. It rarely feels eerie, and instead goes for shocks. That shift might come as a letdown to a devoted few, but even they could never accuse Argento of doing things halfway here. He goes deliriously over the top and carries us with him.

Rating: 64/100

Not much to see here...

You, the Living (Roy Andersson) 55
The Banishment (Andrey Zvyagintsev) 29

Day 1 Grades

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg) 74 [This London-set Russian mafia movie is clearly a step down from Cronenberg's last two films, and it feels like more of a work for hire than usual, but at the same time it's thematically coherent, making it feel like an obvious entry in his body of work. Too plotty for my tastes, it also lacks the broad iconography that made A History of Violence so powerful, yet it's filled with one intelligent directorial choice after another. I suspect it will be more successful than most of Cronenberg's films with the mainstream, but that doesn't really imply that it's a betrayal of his values. In any case, one action scene, late into the film, is destined for classic status.]

Starting Out in the Evening (Andrew Wagner) 38 [With its character-driven plot, its unattractive digital photography, and its spare, sad musical cues, this literary May/December romance film is clearly in Sundance territory. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the actors fail to generate much from the script they're given, and the third act is a hopelessly extended series of catharses. The occasional good line does slip out (e.g. "I can accept that he's going to die... I just can't accept that he'll be dead forever."), but, really, it's slim pickings.]

The Mother of Tears (Dario Argento) 64 [The best thing Argento's done in years, which isn't saying much, this finds him sacrificing most of his artistic pretensions, and shifting into balls-out entertainment mode. The plot, which features Asia Argento as a reluctant white witch battling evil in a Rome gone mad, is clearly an excuse for a series of imaginative, gruesome set pieces. Extremely gory, and extremely fun (especially with the Midnight Madness crowd), it's closer to a return to form than I would have suspected.]

Beyond the Years (Im Kwon-taek, 2006)

Beyond the Years is veteran South Korean director Im Kwon-taek’s 100th film. Surely such a mammoth filmography must be chock full of variety, but based on my limited experience of his work, it seems that his specialty lies in telling the stories of Korean folk artists. More specifically, he seems focused on pansori singing, which is a genre of Korean folk music that combines simple drum beats and throat singing. To people who aren’t Korean, it’s an acquired taste, to be sure. Fortunately, Im’s devout attention to his performers has a way of making the style seem like high art, even to outsiders. Having seen Im’s previous films Sopyonje and Chunhyang, each of which prominently featured pansori singing, I was prepared both for Beyond the Years’ meticulous attention to its pansori performances and its classy, yet somewhat dull, presentation.

A determinedly old-fashioned melodrama, Beyond the Years explores the fragile bonds that exist between pansori singer and drummer, seeing them as exceptionally noble yet fraught with ceaseless difficulty. Im presents the lives of his singers as a chronicle of adversity. Poverty, blindness and endless sacrifice are the price that these people pay for their art. With no small degree of sincerity, the director uses a flashback structure to detail the lives of a brother and sister who once performed together, yet have drifted apart. Well before the closing image of two cranes flying together in the sky flits across the screen, it’s patently obvious that Im views this bond as a noble one, and has nothing but distaste for the country, which has little place for art or beauty, given its constant upheaval.

Shot in autumnal hues to reflect the cultural glory of a bygone day, Beyond the Years suggests, rather simplemindedly, that purity of heart and endless practice are the keys to a great performance. Despite covering decades, the film scarcely shifts its attitudes toward its characters, suggesting, as the title does, that pansori is an art form that can weather the ravages of time. As a viewer, I felt that the unfettered devotion was questionable, but perhaps that is a problem of perception. Beyond the Years is one of the rare foreign films that makes me feel like I am too divorced from the culture in question to appreciate any subtleties on display. Sincerity is perhaps harder to translate than cynicism, and there’s no question that Beyond the Years is sincere.

Rating: 42/100

Lottery Results

After much anxiety, the box office has e-mailed me my lottery results. I did exceptionally well, getting every film I asked for, with the exception of Atonement. During that slot, I will be seeing In the Valley of Elah instead.

Chacun son Cinema (Various, 2007)

Thirty-three directors contributed three-minute shorts to create Chacun son Cinema, a better than average omnibus film that was commissioned to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. Given its roots, it might seem somewhat awkward to have it presented in Toronto. I'd disagree, though, as there are several good reasons to see it at TIFF:

• It’s just as much as celebration of cinema in general as it is of Cannes as a phenomenon. Youssef Chahine’s contribution excepted, these shorts see cinema as a global, collective experience, and celebrate the experience of watching movies worldwide. Given the international nature of TIFF, the vibe is entirely appropriate.

• Many of the directors who participated (nine by my count), also have a feature showing in Toronto this year. This tally is actually higher than the five directors who had features playing at Cannes this year. (It could be higher still, if TIFF programmers were able to secure Assays’ Boarding Gate or Wong’s My Blueberry Nights. Alas, that was not in the cards.)

• Unquestionably, two of the strongest entries come from Canadians. Atom Egoyan’s strangely eerie Artaud Double Bill presents a possible vision of a future cinema, in which the primacy of the theater can be overcome with technology. David Cronenberg’s dark At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World is exactly as described, but funnier than one would expect, given the title.

• Beyond those Canadian shorts, there are several others that I would classify as excellent. The Coen Brothers (who bring No Country For Old Men to Toronto this year) deliver what’s probably the most obvious crowd-pleaser of the bunch with their uproarious, but dead-on, World Cinema, featuring Josh Brolin as a cowboy who’s trying to decide whether he should see Renoir’s The Rules of the Game or Ceylan’s Climates. The Dardennes Brothers, longtime devotees of Robert Bresson, effectively pay tribute to that master with their microcosmic morality play In the Darkness. Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien (also presenting The Voyage of the Red Balloon this year) doesn’t disappoint with The Electric Princess House, which feels entirely in step with his work in its examination of film’s relationship to time.

• Ultimately, everyone who sees this collection of shorts seems to have a different set of favorites. Just because I found the Salles to be too cute by half, the Gonzalez-Inarritu to be hilariously clichéd, the Van Sant to be self-parodic, or the Cimino to be intolerable, doesn’t mean that you will. The experience of watching a few dozen shorts in quick succession, and discussing which ones you liked best with friends, is pretty close to the ideal TIFF experience. Don’t be surprised if a consensus never emerges from those debates, though. To Each His Own Cinema, indeed.

Rating: 56/100

Preliminary TIFF Schedule

This is all very dependent upon my luck with the ticket lottery, but my festival itinerary will likely look something like this:

Thursday, September 6
16:00 - Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg) [press]
20:00 - Starting Out in the Evening (Andrew Wagner) [V1+6]
23:59 - The Mother of Tears (Dario Argento) [Ryerson]

Friday, September 7
9:15 - You, the Living (Roy Andersson) [S4]
12:30 - The Banishment (Andrey Zvyagintsev) [S1]
16:00 - One Hundred Nails (Ermanno Olmi) [S1]
18:00 - Disengagement (Amos Gitai) [V8]
21:15 - The Visitor (Thomas McCarthy) [Ryerson]
23:59 - Frontiere(s) (Xavier Gens) [Ryerson]

Saturday, September 8
9:45 - The Mourning Forest (Naomi Kawase) [S4]
12:00 - Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) [Ryerson]
15:30 - The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin) [S4]
18:30 - Erik Nietzsche The Early Years (Jacob Thuesen) [S2]
20:45 - Nothing is Private (Alan Ball) [Ryerson]
23:59 - Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero) [Ryerson]

Sunday, September 9
9:15 - Lust, Caution (Ang Lee) [S2]
12:30 - Ex Drummer (Koen Mortier) [S14]
15:30 - Les Chasons d'amour (Christophe Honore) [S2]
18:00 - Nightwatching (Peter Greenaway) [Elgin]
21:15 - Chaotic Ana (Julio Medem) [Ryerson]
23:59 - Vexille (Fumihiko Sori) [Ryerson]

Monday, September 10
9:00 - No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers) [Ryerson]
11:00 - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik) [Elgin]
14:30 - Sad Vacation (Shinji Aoyama) [S4]
17:00 - Unfinished Stories (Pourya Azarbayjani) [V2]
19:00 - The Savages (Tamara Jenkins) [Bader]
21:00 - Atonement (Joe Wright) [Elgin]
23:59 - Stuck (Stuart Gordon) [Ryerson]

Tuesday, September 11
11:00 - Across the Universe (Julie Taymour) [Elgin]
14:30 - Jellyfish (Shira Geffen / Etgar Keret) [C1]
16:15 - The Band's Visit (Eran Kolirin) [S2]
18:45 - Dr. Plonk (Rolf de Heer) [V2]
20:15 - Happy New Life (Arpad Bogdan) [C1]
21:45 - Naissance des pieuvres (Celine Sciamma) [S14]
23:59 - Sukiyaki Western Django (Takashi Miike) [Ryerson]

Wednesday, September 12
9:00 - To Love Someone (Ake Sandgren) [C2]
11:00 - Cassandra's Dream (Woody Allen) [Elgin]
13:45 - Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog) [V8]
15:30 - Eat, For This is My Body (Michelange Quay) [C2]
17:45 - Iska's Journey (Csaba Bollok) [C1]
19:15 - Christopher Columbus, The Enigma (Manoel de Oliveira) [V8]
21:00 - Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung) [C2]
23:59 - The Devil's Chair (Adam Mason) [Ryerson]

Thursday, September 13
9:15 - The Sun Also Rises (Jiang Wen) [S2]
12:00 - Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach) [Elgin]
15:30 - Help Me Eros (Lee Kang-sheng) [S4]
19:00 - Avant que j'oublie ( Jacques Nolot) [S2]
21:30 - The Girl in the Park (David Auburn) [V8]

Friday, September 14
9:00 - Glory to the Filmmaker! (Takeshi Kitano) [V8]
11:15 - Encarnacion (Anahi Berneri) [V5]
13:00 - Corroboree (Ben Hackworth) [S3]
15:30 - Import Export (Ulrich Seidl) [S4]
18:45 - Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings) [Ryerson]
21:30 - Weirdsville (Allan Moyle) [Ryerson]
23:59 - Dainipponjin (Hitoshi Matsumoto) [Ryerson]

Saturday, September 15
9:15 - Les Bons Debarras (Francis Mankiewicz) [V6]
11:45 - Smiley Face (Gregg Araki) [Bader]
14:30 - L'Amour cache (Alessandro Capone) [V3]
16:00 - Mutum (Sandra Kogut) [V5]
17:30 - XXY (Lucia Puenzo) [V2]
20:00 - My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin) [Bader]
21:15 - It's a Free World... (Ken Loach) [Ryerson]
23:59 - A l'interieur (Alexandre Bustillo / Julien Maury) [Ryerson]

California Dreamin' (Endless) (Cristian Nemescu, 2007)

Cristian Nemescu was posthumously awarded the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section for California Dreamin’ (Endless), his first and only feature. Alongside Cristian Mungiu’s Palm D’Or win at this year’s festival, it represented the crest of what’s being referred to as the Romanian New Wave. Over the last few years, the country’s output has captured the attention of festivalgoers, who have declared it a hotspot of world cinema. That being said, it’s unlikely that many will find California Dreamin’ (Endless) to be the most impressive movie to come from Romania over the last few years. It’s a strong film, but it happens to be in stronger company.

Set in 1999, the movie follows what’s euphemistically referred to as a U.S. Peacekeeping mission. As a small group of American soldiers are forced to stop at a tiny town’s train station, the film begins introducing a barrage of characters. A lot of balls are kept in the air here, as the audience meets the American troops, the rascally station agent, his daughter (who hopes to run away with the troops), her schoolmates, the conniving mayor, and a group of protesting gypsies. The townsfolk devise a plan to restage their centennial in order to lure American investment to the country, then later try to use the U.S. military might to stir an uprising. The finale brings all of these groups together, and the cross-cutting between the different characters becomes less problematic as the film picks up speed. For a while, though, the plot is difficult to get into because of how busy it is.

California Dreamin’ (Endless)’s creator died before the editing of the feature was completed, and it shows, especially during the first hour. Sloppy and perfunctory, the expository scenes feel hopelessly overextended for what seems to be a simpleminded and overly cynical look at buffoonish characters. Boorish American troops are contrasted against hopelessly naïve Romanian villagers, who try to entertain and swindle them as they are held captive by a bureaucratic snafu. Thankfully, the remaining 90 minutes puncture that setup, shifting these character dynamics in unexpected ways. Eventually each of the characterizations deepens, finding a happy medium between comic and realistic extremes. The film also gradually takes on a satirical, but grounded, vibe, acquiring more sting than one would initially expect. When it’s all said and done, it’s obvious that the complicated plot has been working overtime to set up a tragic conclusion, which is surprisingly effective in tying up all of the storylines.

Nemescu’s film is strong enough that it can be considered genuinely unfortunate that his career has been cut so short. He creates some fine visual moments, here, despite a general predilection for realism. California Dreamin’ (Endless) ultimately reveals itself as a surprisingly ambitious debut. Although it starts out taking cheap shots at its characters, it cannot be accused of this by the end of its runtime. By the time the caustic ending unfolds, Nemescu has presented both a world-weary outlook toward the country’s complicated past and an almost startling role-reversal in which the Americans, and not the Romanians, are revealed to be the naïve ones. There’s no doubt that California Dreamin’ (Endless) could do with some editing (indeed, the parenthetical in the title refers to its unshaped state), but there’s just as little doubt that Nemescu’s work is pretty worthy as is. When a foreign film this accomplished strikes you as somewhat second rate, you can definitely take it as a sign of a healthy national cinema.

Rating: 58/100

Buzz In Action

Less than two hours ago, individual tickets for Galas and Special Presentations went on sale. Individual tickets for popular films always go fast at Toronto, and there's been a flurry of sell outs already. Here's what's already gone:

Rendition (Gavin Hood)
[Starring Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep]

Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy)
[Starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton]

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)
[Starring Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel]

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur)
[Starring Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen, Geoffrey Rush]

The Jane Austen Book Club (Robin Swicord)
[Starring Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Hugh Dancy]

Sleuth (Kenneth Branagh)
[Starring Michael Caine, Jude Law]

Across The Universe (Julie Taymor)
[Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess]

Cassandra's Dream (Woody Allen)
[Starring Ewan MacGregor, Colin Farrell, Tom Wilkinson]

Cleaner (Renny Harlin)
[Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Mendes, Ed Harris]

Reservation Road (Terry George)
[Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Connelly, Mira Sorvino]

The Walker (Paul Schrader)
[Starring Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Ned Beatty]

Closing The Ring (Richard Attenborough)
[Starring Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, Mischa Barton, Gregory Smith]

These films, which will mostly be out before the end of the year, are hot enough that people are ponying up $37.50 for the opportunity to see them early. These are the sort of movies that I generally skip myself in Toronto, since my tastes tend toward to the obscure, but it's always interesting to see what the public-at-large is eager to check out.

The rest of the slate...

Today's announcement finalized this year's TIFF slate. After last week's 73-film blowout, anything would likely seem underwhelming. The most recent slate certainly didn't wow me. Added were two by Wayne Wang, a new film from Michael Moore, Demme's Jimmy Carter documentary, and the latest from De Palma, Zia, Sachs, & Lumet (each of which were already confirmed for the New York Film Festival) . Surely each of these movies has their audience, but I'm hardly dying to see any of them at TIFF.

The most pleasant surprise, from my perspective, was Wang Bing's 184-minute Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, which will certainly present some scheduling challenges, should I choose to see it.


I'm hardly complaining, though, narrowing the existing list down to the 50-odd films I'll watch will be a daunting task.

Flash Point (Wilson Yip, 2007)

While watching the flurry of nigh-incomprehensible cuts in the fight scenes of Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum, I worried that the prevailing trends toward hyperkinetic editing might mean that the days of impressive chop-socky choreography were on the wane. Luckily, Wilson Yip’s Flash Point shows that that’s not yet the case in the world of HK action films, where more restrained filmmaking and more impressive athletics still reign and entertain. Near the start of Flash Point, which stars Donnie Yen as a police officer who has irked Internal Affairs because he’s too rough on criminals, we’re shown a scene in which his character is reprimanded for his rough handling of a felon. He’s threatened with suspension if he doesn’t tone down his brutal behavior. He grudgingly complies, and as a result much of Flash Point’s run time is spent waiting for him to snap. It takes about two-thirds of the film’s length for it to happen, but when a bad guy injures a child, Yen finally goes ballistic, unleashing a flurry of violence in time to salvage the film somewhat.

Set in Hong Kong before the 1997 Handover, Flash Point is strikingly shot, even before the fighting begins. Yip employs a bright color palette and a strong sense of humor throughout, making the wait for the action less painful that it otherwise might have been. Nonetheless, there’s far too much in the way of routine characterization here. Eyes will likely glaze over during the densely plotted first hour, in which a romantic subplot, and some unintriguing undercover intrigue are deployed to little effect. In many respects Flash Point is the same film as Yip’s SPL, which also starred Donnie Yen, although the Yen’s mixed-style fighting doesn’t quite have the same impact here as it did there.

Still, the final half hour the film is not exactly disappointing. Beginning with a bloody fight inside an elevator, the final act of Flash Point features a series of inventive, well-choreographed set pieces. Once the movie kicks into high gear, it rarely lets up. The face-offs are filled with brutal limb-busting. Even the gunplay is more kinetic than usual. Perhaps the most impressive displays of athletics are showcased during the training clips that accompany the closing credits, though. Ultimately, Flash Point is a solid if unspectacular entry in the Hong Kong action genre. Fans of the genre will likely leave it satisfied, although it's not as likely that they’ll feel satisfied the whole time they're watching.

Rating: 49 / 100