Day one was supposed to be the easiest and least irritating day — only one movie — but it proved highly annoying. I decided to get two or three extra tickets for myself and I could try to get a pair for a friend that requested some but had no luck getting any. No luck on the latter as both of that movie’s screenings were “off sale” but the movies I wanted were still available so I got in line. I expected a line, having bought only individual tickets for the last two years, so I was prepared for it.
After thirty minutes of slow shuffling, from the outside heat into the cool AC breeze of the College Park doorway, the line stopped. Ten minutes passed and not a single step forward. Then twenty minutes. Then an announcement: the system is down. All of it. The website, the ticket booths, everything. But, “we hope to have everything back up and running in ten to fifteen minutes.” I already committed all this time so I wasn’t going to leave quite yet.
Forty minutes later and it was still dead. A new announcement was made. IF the system is back online before 6:30 everyone in line will be processed. The emphasis was on the if. I couldn’t afford to waste that much time, I had a movie to catch! So I cut my losses and left. What a waste of an hour and a half that was. Maybe I’ll try the rushline tomorrow.
An hour later and I was once again in line. This time, though, it was for something I already had a ticket for so I was more patient (I swear, half of the film festival is spent waiting in line). Jar City was my first film of 07.
Jar City is an Icelandic murder mystery that weaves together a modern day crime to a series of long forgotten scars in the 1970s. Holding it all together is a chain of heredity and genetics based on a controversial real-world genetic database of the country. It’s an interesting tale and an interesting premise marred by the predictability of that genetic hook. It’s a shame that a film that expertly reveals each little mystery fails to hide its biggest surprise.
That’s not to say that the journey to that end isn’t an enjoyable one. Complementing the wonderful shots of Icelandic wastelands and the interesting police choir score is the performance of Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson. In the Q&A after the film, the director said that in his previous movies he tended to make fun of the police and that, for this movie, he “owed them one.” Ingvar’s Detective Erlendur character is that debt repaid[1]. He’s a grizzled veteran that’s seen it all but still remains sympathetic and sad. His personal life, with his daughter, is a contrast to the lost relationships that shaped the motivations of the crooks in the film. And that side-story is kept brief enough to not detract from the main plotline.
It has its flaws and the end is predictable, though it does throw some curveballs to try to make you second guess your expectations, but overall not a bad way to start the festival. Thumb up!
I received my final tickets for the Toronto International Film Festival yesterday and I was fortunate enough to get all 35 of my first picks! Individual tickets went on sale today and I’m considering buying an extra two but for now it’s enough.
I am annoyed that the previously sold out The Assassination of Jesse James is now on sale again and the only way I could get a ticket to that is if I were to give up a ticket to No Country for Old Men. Not going to happen. I’m excited but as per usual I seem to be stricken by scheduler’s remorse. Rather than looking forward to the movies that I will see, I’m upset about the ones I will miss. The schedule:
It’s that time of the year again. Only a week until the Toronto Film Festival starts up again and the excitement has just crossed the threshold from not palpable to palpable. This is my third year, so I’m still an amateur festival goer, but I’ve been ramping up my attendance nicely. From fourteen movies last year I’m going up to a potential thirty five. This is also the first year that I’m getting them in advance with a festival program and it’s all quite overwhelming. Buying individual tickets, as I have previously done, is easy. I just go online, see what hasn’t been sold out and try to arrange it into a nice schedule. This attempt to cram thirty-five movies into less than ten days is something else entirely.
I spent a good four hours on a patio yesterday afternoon making my way through the schedule and the 500 page program book. It left me feeling woozy. I’m sure all those beers had something to do with it too but I feel no less closer to my final list of first and second choice picks than I did before I received my order form.
That said, here’s a list of some of my stand-out films:
Flashpoint: I saw SPL three years ago as my first ever Midnight Madness showing and it was such a blast. Flashpoint is a new Wilson Yip / Donnie Yen action movie to follow that up. Instant top of the list!
The Edge of Heaven: I really enjoyed Fatih Akin’s Head-On. It was very raw and honest, I felt. Interested to see how he follows it up.
Ulzhan: The description makes it seem like a mix of Paris, Texas with the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Good enough for me.
No Country for Old Men: Yeah, this will likely get a wide release but who cares? It’s Coen Brothers.
Control: A biographical film on the life of Joy Division‘s Ian Curtis directed by the perfectly suited Anton Corbijn.
Run, Fat Boy, Run: Yes, it’s directed by that David Schwimmer, but it has Simon Pegg and that’s all that counts. Plus, I tend to see too many depressing films so a comedy is needed.
The Passage: The description calls it a an artistically rendered horror film that is “channelling” Alfred Hitchcock. Sold.
Lust, Caution: Ang Lee’s film on pre-revolution Shanghai.
Blood Brothers: A mob movie set in… pre-revolution Shanghai.
I try to make it a habit to see every Western that screens at the film festival but it’s becoming a futile quest. There are only two Westerns this year. One is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , but that’s only getting the Visa Screening Room treatment and, no doubt because of Brad Pitt’s starring role, it’s already sold out. There’s also SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO and I do hope to see that, but I’d only count it as a half-Western. There has been some talk of a potential Western revival because of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the upcoming 3:10 To Yuma remake. It might be true but I don’t think it’ll ever be anything more than a small blip on the film radar. When there are more movies about pre-revolution Shanghai than there are about the American (Canadian/Australian) frontier, it’s hard to call it a revival.
Here’s my review of Bomberman Live on XBox Live Arcade: It’s Bomberman. Online. With eight player support. Review over.
The only problems that I have with it is some nagging issues with the interface and net code. The actual in-game lag isn’t too bad. You’ll see some occasional jumping, especially from people with multiple “speed up” power-ups, but other than that it runs fine. The problem is that sometimes, because of lost packets or something, the game completely glitches out. I’ve had games start where nobody could move. I had a game where the game was over and I could here people over the headset complaining that the next round isn’t starting when I was still in the game. Weird stuff like that. It’s not too frequent, but it’s annoying that these issues are there at all.
With the interface there are a few minor grievances but the biggest of all is the fact that once you start a hosted player game on XBox Live, you can’t ever change the settings for that game unless you disconnect and start up a new room. It so ruins the flow of a nice room. So annoying.
But the game itself is awesome.
The Metal Gear Solid 4 gameplay trailer. You know, I used to be a pretty big fan of the Metal Gear Solid games. I remember playing the MGS1 PS demo over and over. I remember playing the full game non-stop for two weeks, beating it — start to finish — five times in that span. Including on extreme difficulty (that fucking Hind-D!!) But after seeing that weak E3 trailer and then being irritated by the gameplay trailer, my interest in the series is falling drastically.
Put bluntly, the series is getting stupid now. Looking at a bikini magazine to stop yourself from vomiting? Stupid. That Raiden+Vamp thing? Ridiculous. The AI? Good for a PS1 game. La Li Lu Le Lo? Fuck off.
The games do a good job of interfacing with the player and fucking with him (the late parts of MGS2 were fantastic), but they’re starting to tow this line between goofy and realistic, between serious and stupid and between melodramatic and provocative that I can no longer come to terms with. The series is too polarizing and I think it’s given more attention and relevance than it deserves. It’s not a system seller. Not anymore. But it sure is pretty.
Maybe it’s not the games but the fans that I hate.
Shakespeare is but one standout in a history of literature and storytelling spanning thousands of years. Imagine if all of literature existed for thirty years and was nothing but Tom Clancy novels and clones of Tom Clancy novels. Would you think of literature as an art form in that case? Probably not. This is where the game industry is at now. It has a thirty year history (and, really, the history of ‘serious’ game design is even shorter.) Give it time. Given a hundred years — or longer — will there be standouts that transcend the medium? Most definitely.
You can argue that there aren’t any real “art games” now. That’s fine. Debatable, but still understandable. But to dismiss the whole medium for all of eternity? How shortsighted can you be. It’s like saying that film can never be art because the only films that exist are sideshow novelties showing oncoming trains that do nothing but frighten the audience.
Today was a rather interesting new release day, with three films of note hitting DVD. Three very visual films with good soundtracks, but varying degrees of quality with regards to the other aspects of film making.
The Fountain. A disappointing film, though not all bad if you approach it the right way. I wrote about it last year during the film festival and my opinion hasn’t changed much. I still don’t have a massive boner over it and a second viewing didn’t fulfill as I thought it might, but the visuals are still dazzling and the soundtrack (though still mixed a little too loud) is still stunning. In fact, I think I’d recommend getting the soundtrack ahead of the movie.
Pan’s Labyrinth. Quick write-up. Still quite good. DVD package is quite nice, coming with a ton of extras and a little art book and so on.
Army of Shadows. Typical Criterion release quality. The packaging proclaims it “The Best Film of 2006″ despite it being almost forty years old, and it’s a claim that isn’t too off base (2006 is when it was first released in America). A little long, but thoroughly tense and imposing. I saw it at Cinematheque Ontario a little over a month ago and I’m ashamed to say that it was my first Pierre Melville film. But I was so impressed by this that it definitely won’t be my last. Highly recommended.
As I’ve been growing increasingly fond of The Wire, I’ve been reading more about it from a cultural and creative point of view. This is perilous as a lot of the material out there talks about season four, which I’m just getting to after ending season three with a non-stop four episode awesomefest. I make note of the things I come across and save them for future reading. For when I’m done with season four.
One of these things of note is this series of QAs with The Wire creator David Simon and some music guy. I briefly perused a couple of them trying not to come across spoiler material when I saw Simon’s commentary about leaked DVD screeners on the internet. It’s hard to read tone, but from the looks of it he doesn’t seem overly upset about it because, in effect, it helped provide buzz for the show. He was, however, mighty distressed about spoilers.
I’m most disappointed in the viewers with bootlegged copies who have consistently posted spoilers on websites and impaired the viewing experience of others. I find that to be selfish and not a little bit infantile — the sort of behavior that denotes someone who is unable to, say, sustain a sexual act for more than a few seconds, thereby proving themselves a huge disappointment to any and all partners. Yeah, I’d definitely say that any asshole, who, armed with a bootleg copy of a show, posts a clip of a major character being killed on YouTube or headlines a website posting with “XXname hereXX R.I.P.” has pretty much defined himself before the world as a hopeless, useless premature ejaculator.
Though, to be honest, I kind of lost interest in BSG after “Exodus.” Or, more to the point, pretty much right after I started watching The Wire. I only have room for one TV show at a time in my life and right now, I’m committed.
Though one thing bugs me about it. The title “El Laberinto del Fauno” translated to “Pan’s Labyrinth” which would mean that “Fauno” would be “Pan” — but in the actual subtitles, they never once say “Pan” and instead call the creature “Faun.” This bugged me more than it should have.
Pan’s Labyrinth was one of about four movies that I wanted to see at TIFF but couldn’t on account of it selling out before individual tickets went on sale. The massively positive buzz that it received during the course of that festival further fueled my own preconceived hype. Well, it lived up to it. Great film.
* Protip: leave site open to listen to what seems like the entire soundtrack. I’m guessing bandwidth wasn’t a concern here.
Back in February I started compiling a list of movies watched using a pbwiki. I kept good track of everything until mid-July, which was about the time when I bought an XBox 360. No coincidence there. However, using various other posts across the internet (including on flickr — I honestly don’t know why I started doing this), I can try to fill in the blanks.
In no specific order, with my favourites and stand-outs in bold, the list is:
It’s that time of the year again. List season! I, too, have to partake and call out my favourite things from the past year from, in some cases, a rather small sample. But we make due with what we have.
Favourite Games of the Year
This was really the year of the XBox 360 (and DS). Sure, the Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii launched to much fanfare in 2006, but one console’s rediculous price and the other’s popularity (SOLD OUT) means that the 360 was it this year. Not surprisingly, my favourite game of ’06 was a 360 game: Dead Rising.
Favourite Film of the Year
This is what I mean by “small sample.” I hate going to the theatre. Apart from the Toronto Film Festival (the one exception), I’ve been to the theatre a total of one times this year, for Manufactured Landscapes. So, out of all the 2006 films that I’ve seen, my favourite will have to be my Film Festival favourite: Climates.
Favourite Album of the Year
The majority of the albums on Pitchfork’s Top 50 albums I have not heard. Vast majority. However, I find myself (for the first time?) in agreement with their number one pick. The Knife – Silent Shout. I heard this playing on the speakers in my favourite independent music store in Toronto, Penguin Music. After a brief listen and a recommendation by the clerk, I picked it up. Best “blind” purchase I’ve made this year (though The Proposition would argue with that).
Favourite TV Show of the Year, sort of
I might be five years late to the party, but The Wire is the best show of the year. Maybe even last five years (though I really do like Deadwood too, which comes in a close second.)
Favourite Podcast of the Year Connexion Bizarre. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts in the last half of this year, mostly at work, and this one is my favourite. It’s fairly specific in its musical picks, sticking with that whole industrial/noise/IDM/synthpop/experimental/EBM cluster, but it’s varied enough so that you never know what you’re going to get each week. Sometimes it misses, but most often it’s consistently awesome… so long as you are into those genres. I am. ffwd’s linklog is thanked for that link.
It seems as though the “older” I get, the more drawn I am to deliberately paced movies. I say “deliberately paced” beacause it’s a lot more appropriate and a lot more positive than the often used, and negative, “slow” label. Movies by the likes of Terrence Malick and Nuri Bilge Ceylan are some of my favourites, and I’m currently trying to catch up with the filmographies of Tarkovsky and Antonioni, amongst others.
In the commentary for Antonioni’s “The Passenger”, Jack Nicholson says pretty much exactly why I find these movies so appealing. They’re the complete opposite to all the testosterone fueled mindless shooters and the high-fantasy adventures and all that shit that we see in nearly all narrative driven games. It’s my media of choice but, really, at times it can be so mentally draining. Here’s an audio clip of it.
it’s exactly the opposite of the twenty-five years [...] cycle of melodrama we’re in where the audience is stimulated and, I suppose, you could say video games oriented… so this kind of pace is, to me, still fascinating.
You know what’s a little disconcerting? Seeing several cop cars, police tape and a forensics truck every day for a week when you step out or come home. I’m not scared for my life because some lowlife had the decency to get himself shot in the head across the street for me. I don’t think the neighbourhood (the city. the world!) is going to hell. I wasn’t and I won’t be afraid to step out at night. And I’m definitely not like one of those cliched in-denial people you see on the news everytime some crime happens in their neighbourhood as if nothing can ever happen there because “it’s always been such a quiet area.”
Nonetheless, a forensics truck is still something you notice each and every day. That’s the part that bugs me. A serious homicide occured outside of my front door, yet everytime I see that truck I can’t help but imagine a Canadian version of Gil Grissom digging for clues in a pool of blood. I don’t even like CSI that much. Maybe there’s something to say about media effects from all this. That the perception of reality and fantasy is being blurred by the oversaturation of fiction that we are exposed to. Maybe.
Maybe I’m thinking about it too much after seeing The Science of Sleep on Friday. Gondry’s latest film is about an inventive loser incapable of dealing with matters of love and has trouble discerning between his dreams and reality. Obviously, this dreamworld is where Gondry gets to play, meticulously creating cities out of toilet paper rolls and TV studios out of cardboard and egg holders. There are various sequences of stop motion animation, rear projection, blue screens, paint swirls, creative edits and general weirdness. This is well suited for Gondry.
The parts of the film firmly planted in reality don’t hold up quite as well. They’re charming and the acting is good, but after Eternal Sunshine it is painfully obvious that Gondry is not Charlie Kauffman. That’s an unfair comparison and it might be unrealistic to expect the same kind of script and narrative from Gondry himself, especially from his first stab at it, but that comparison to Sunshine will haunt all the reviews of this movie. Though if you’re going to be dogged with comparisons to another film, that’s as good a one as any.
An indie version of Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” albeit with none of the star power, a quarter of the budget, half the angst, and twice the charm.
A daydreaming, inventive loser shut out on matters of love? I’d relate to the character a lot more if I looked like Gael Garcia Bernal. As it stands, I’m nothing like his character. Just white and nerdy.
So the festival is over, some crappy awards were given, and it’s back to work. I hadn’t seen any of the award winning films, but I still deem the award selection crappy (Death of a President was clearly a bullshit political choice.) If I were to give awards, I would just rank all the movies I’ve seen in order from favourite to least favourite, like this:
Climates (local link) — the very first movie I saw this year still remains my favourite.
Volver (local link) — a little too Spanish soap-opera-ish at times, but… Penelope.
Severance (IMDB link) — not the best of movies, but it was the most fun I’ve had in a theatre in a loooong time, though a lot of that was due to the midnight madness crowd (also the best Q&A I saw this year.)
Alatriste (IMDB link) — who knew that Viggo Mortensen was fluent in Spanish? I was really surprised by how bloody this film is and at times it’s a great swashbuckling yarn, but it tries to cram too much storyline into too little time and it just feels disjoint and unnecessarily jumpy.
(this space void to seperate the above movies from the following stinker)
Un Crime (IMDB link) — horrible script that brings everything else crumbling down.
Unlisted: Paris, Je T’aime (IMDB link, full credits) really fantastic series of twenty short films by a lot of top directors. It was the last movie I saw and it was introduced as a self-contained “mini film festival,” which was very apt. The shorts vary in quality but there are many more good segments than there are bad ones which makes the whole of the film enjoyable. And with the short time each story has, the bad ones don’t overstay their welcome while the lukewarm ones don’t have enough time to get boring. Of the bunch, my favourites were the ones by Wes Craven, the Coen Brothers, Tom Twyker, Oliver Schmitz and Alexander Payne.
The film festival is over but I’m still catching up. Last Wednesday evening I caught the (world?) premiere of Seraphim Falls, a western starring Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson. Though everything else is starting to blur — it feels as though it’s been ages since I saw the film — several scenes from this still stand out prominently. There are some truly memorable moments in Seraphim Falls. Unfortunately, the film as a whole is a lot harder to take. I’m undecided where I stand with it.
It starts off well enough. Brosnan’s character is being chased through the snowy mountains by Neeson’s character and a posse of trackers. You don’t know why he’s chasing him, but you know he means business. The unpleasant kind of business. He’s nearly caught right at the start but manages to escape, the trackers catch up, he kills one of them and escapes again, eventually setting on some ranchers cabin where he stays the night. After taking off with their horse in the morning, the trackers arrive, cause some trouble, and resume the pursuit.
This is when the movie starts to weaken. The further they get away from the mountains and closer to the desert, the more it starts to breakdown as it settles into a repetitive pattern. Brosnan’s character comes upon a situation. The trackers catch up. A little drama happens. Brosnan’s character escapes. Repeat. First it’s a gang of bank robbers. Then some settlers. Then a chain gang. Then missionaries. Then a mystical indian. And then, in the end, I’m not sure what the hell they get into.
The deeper they travel into the desert, the more symbolic the movie becomes, ending with an almost surreal sequence. I don’t have a problem with symbolism or mysticism in a film — even a western, as it worked in High Plains Drifter — it’s just that the slow progression away from the brutal realism that starts the film creeps up on you that by the end it feels almost like a different movie.
There are still those great scenes (the horse part — you’ll know when you see it) and it’s worthy of a viewing, but if you want a good new western, I’d suggest the recent (and more modern) Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada instead.
It is 10pm and I’m home between movies. I just saw “Retrieval” and I have “Severance” coming up at midnight. Earlier this afternoon I saw The Fountain.
It was an… interesting movie. A lot of people are going to dislike it. I predict that many will interpret the tales too literally, which is partly due to how the movie is being pushed. It is not a story of some immortal-like man living through different times trying to save a woman that also exists through those times (as either the same person or a sort of reincarnation of the same person — sort of like “Jade Warrior“). This is what I thought the movie was going to be like. It’s not.
It’s a contemporary story. A story about a man that can’t come to terms with life and death. The past and the future settings are allegories. This is where I think there will be a failure to understand when this movie gets wide release. It is too easy to think of the past, present and future settings as all part of one linear narrative. The narrative exists in the present. I think that’s all I can say without giving too much away.
Originally, my impression was I think I liked it, but I don’t have a massive boner over it. I’m undecided. However, the more I let it settle in my mind, the more it agrees with me. I think a second viewing is necessary.
Great use of sound, though. Very nice Clint Mansell score (again) — it’s very much present throughout the movie, giving it an almost ethereal quality. Some of the visuals are stunning, of course, and Hugh Jackman is actually very good in this. Overall a positive. I think.
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
