Archive for the 'tiff' Category
TIFF: All Hat
I went to see All Hat at the Isabel Bader Theatre on Tuesday. All Hat is a self-described “neo western” involving the horse racing scene in southern Ontario (Fort Erie, to be specific.) It stars Luke Kirby (the big shot Hollywood actor in season one of Slings and Arrows) and Keith Carradine (Wild Bill in Dead Wood) and some other people.
The Isabel Bader Theatre is part of the University of Toronto and it’s a decent, if small, place for a movie but it’s clearly not its only function. There’s no concession stand and no cup holders and the seats feature fold out tables for lecture note taking. It also has a balcony that seems ignored by most patrons so, being the isolationist that I am, I always make use of. Front row center, balcony.
A few minutes before the film started, some ten minutes after the scheduled time, an older couple sat down a few seats to my right. Before they sat down she complained about the lack of beer in the theatres here “unlike at Cannes”. I assumed they were either globe trotting, film loving retirees or industry people of some sort. Either way it was safe to guess they were married. Maybe.
Not long after they secured their seats the woman said that she had to go to the washroom and left. The movie was well underway by the time she returned, maybe fifteen minutes in. I thought nothing of it. Every once in a while they would chatter a little bit but it was infrequent and not intrusive. I thought nothing of it. The movie kept on and the deeper it went the louder her voice became. The chatter quickly turned to single word responses to the dialog in the film. She’d say, loud enough to be heard across the balcony and below, “Yeah!” to some witty talk-back by a character or emote a loud “Ooooh” when the antagonist would do something shady. Sometimes she’d repeat lines. By this point, she was getting quietly “shoosh”ed.
It didn’t stop her. I would exchange looks of disdain with the woman on my left, she was getting as annoyed as I was. But I was closer to the loud-mouth so I politely asked her to “keep your comments to yourself”. She mumbled something and her husband answered here “mumble mumble comments to yourself mumble mumble.” She mumbled something back.
A couple minutes later she did it again. Her husband, no doubt getting embarrassed, stood up and walked down the aisle and out the back. Ten minutes later I realized that he wasn’t coming back and without him there the woman got even louder.
“Will you shut. The fuck. Up?”
She looked at me and mumbled something. She was five seats away, but I was immediately struck by the scent of alcohol. “Oh no,” I though, “I just made a mistake here. Loud drunks when agitated get even louder!” The expected response came when she told me to “shut the fuck up.” She mumbled off again when the woman behind me leaned over the seat and whispered that someone has gone to get assistance. “Thank you”, I said.
A headset clad man came down minutes later and talked with the woman. She got up but quickly sat down again. They talked more. She finally conceded and was escorted to the aisle where she promptly fell on her ass. She was picked up and forcibly “escorted” out and the whole balcony managed to enjoy the rest of the film in peace.
After the credits rolled and the Q and A was done and the house lights came on I noticed an empty Mountain Dew bottle lying where the woman was sitting. Making my way out I picked it up and had a whiff and was overwhelmed by the strong smell of booze. She was doing something and it wasn’t “The Dew”.
Before I made my way out headset man approached me and asked if I witnessed “the incident”. Yes, I did. “Do you know if there was, at any time, somebody with her?” She was still there ready to be taken home (or to the hotel or wherever) but nobody was there to take her. The man, which I described to him as a “gray haired old guy with a flannel shirt” was no where to be seen. He ditched the drunkard.
All in all, I give All Hat a 2.5/5.
On Walking Out
Walking out of a movie is like a big capital F capital U to the film maker, especially if the director is in attendance. It says “I spent time and money to be here and I’m not even going to dignify this by sticking through to the end. I’ve seen enough.” Up until yesterday I’ve never walked out on a film. Not in the last two film festivals. Not ever. It’s not that I haven’t seen some real stinkers before — I was very close to walking out of Un Crime last year and The Duelist the year before — I just have a high level of patience. Or tolerance. Just not yesterday.
It’s quite simple. This year I purchased my tickets in advance, getting a Day Pass, greatly lowering the per ticket cost so I didn’t feel as though I had wasted so much money. I also had seen about 17 films, in less than five days, before last night’s screening. I was tired. My patience was shot. The price was minimal. I left.
And the film? M. The director’s last film? The Duelist. Note to self: next time do more research and don’t rely so much on the program guide’s writeup.
TIFF Day 3 and 4
Days three and four are a haze. The films are all blurring together into a giant katamari consisting of breakups and tears and suicides and subtitles and pointy nipples and Tony Leung’s testicles. After an early wakeup and multiple snooze alarms I cabbed my way to the Paramount Scotiabank Theatre at about a quarter to nine in the morning. A little after noon I wandered around on the quiet streets and went over to the Corned Beef House for lunch on the patio. It was nice and quiet. Several hours later I was at Naz’s eating a chicken shwarma. It was a lot busier on the streets. At midnight, I was out. It was even busier. The first few blocks of the walk home was a giant slalom of walking. All the revelers were out in the “entertainment district” and were all conspiring to annoy the fuck out of me.
I was home at a quarter to one in the morning. In between those sixteen hours there were movies. Control was a thumb up! The Man from London was a thumb sideways (just way too slow but there were some brilliant scenes). The Edge of Heaven was a very strong thumb up! It was a film that relied a lot on invisible connections and coincidence, a film staple, that had a masterfully pieced together script and a very strong ensemble cast. Ploy was a thumb sideways. Happiness was a thumb sideways. Actually, I liked it a little bit more than that. It was very, very close to being potential asian soap opera melodrama — not good — but it managed to avoid those cliches and was well acted enough to feel genuine.
After a brief sleep I was right back at the Scotiabank theatre for Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. The reviews of it are mixed, to say the least. I didn’t like it all that much when I saw it but now that it’s sinking in I’m liking it more and more. Not a great film but one that could warrant a second viewing (when I’m not so fucking tired). Thumb slightly up! Two more movies followed but right now I need to let those set in, get some sleep and get all excited for No Country For Old Men early tomorrow.
TIFF Day 2
The thing that I both hate and love about the film festival is how it reinforces how little I have seen and how little I know about films. Sure, I know of Dario Argento and Hsiao-hsien Hou, but I’ve never seen their films. The film festival often provides that first impression. Exposure to some director’s latest film makes me want to seek out more from their back catalog or, in some cases, makes me want to avoid it altogether.
Glory to the Filmmaker! starts off as a goofy, Japanese comedy version of 8 1/2 before it falls into this weird absurdist comedy. It’s full of humour that I often did not get. Glory to the Filmmaker! was clearly self-referential and I might have been better served, and better amused, if I had prior experience with Kitano’s films (beyond his Zatoichi remake — which might explain why I liked the Zatoichi spoof in the film the best). Thumb sideways!
Argento’s The Mother of Tears is a trainwreck. In the first few minutes of the film a woman gets gutted and then strangled by her own intestines. This is a promising start for a horror film! But, unfortunately, it’s all down hill from there (it wasn’t that high a hill to start with). Bad acting, bad script, no real “horror” and an ending so ridiculous that it could easily be mistaken for one long joke. It’s not. On top of everything it also comes across as overly misogynistic. Thumb down!
Le voyage du ballon rouge is a homage to 1956’s Le Ballon Rouge, which I have not seen. So that too I can not comment on, but it has Juliette Benoche and she’s great as usual. I might write more after I go through my Q&A footage since it’s interesting how it was filmed. Thumb sideways but tilted up!
Ulzhan. I liked it a lot. Variety didn’t (though I really don’t get their comparison to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, they’re similar in so far as the main character goes somewhere.) Thumb up!
But now I’m tired and I have to get ready for 25% more movie tomorrow. Oi. I’m already sick of those pre-movie bumpers.
(Also, Jar City has already been purchased. Seems it impressed a few people, myself included.)
TIFF Day One: Jar City
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!
Twitch review. Variety review. Torontoist review. NOW review.
Tomorrow I have four movies and Saturday I have five. Don’t expect similar writeups!
- Although Erlendur’s police partner is pictured as a foreign trained “pussy”.
The Schedule
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:
THU
Jar City 07:45pm
FRI
Glory to the Filmmaker! 09:00am
The Mother of Tears 11:45am
Le Voyage du ballon rouge 02:45pm
Ulzhan 06:00pm
SAT
Control 09:00am
The Man from London 12:45pm
The Edge of Heaven 3:30pm
Ploy 07:00pm
Happiness 09:30pm
SUN
Lust, Caution 09:15am
Starting Out in the Evening 01:00pm
Le Deuxieme souffle 04:00pm
MON
No Country for Old Men 09:00am
Silent Resident 02:00pm
Garage 04:45pm
M 09:15pm
TUES
Night 09:00am
The World Unseen 12:45pm
Sleuth 03:45pm
All Hat 06:00pm
SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO 11:59pm
WEDS
Trumbo 09:45am
The Passage 12:45pm
Run, Fat Boy, Run 03:15pm
Deficit 09:30pm
THURS
Silk 09:00am
Blood Brothers 12:15pm
Help Me Eros 03:30pm
Time to Die 08:00pm
Flash Point 11:59pm
FRI
And Along Come Tourists 10:15am
Dans la ville de Sylvia 12:45pm
Mad Detective 03:00pm
SAT
Encounters at the End of the World 09:00am
TIFF Countdown
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.
TIFF end
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.
- Away From Her (IMDB link) — Sarah Polley’s, the quintessential Canadian actress, directorial debut shows the signs of a long and promising career
- 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.)
- The Fountain (local link) — like I said, it’s grown on me.
- Rescue Dawn (local link)
- Seraphim Falls (local link)
- Retrieval (TIFF description) — the TIFF site calls it a
Polish equivalent of Scorsese’s Mean Streets
, which is a bit excessive but also… not. - Exiled (twitch review) — Hong Kong gangster shootout film which works well at times and at others feels a bit hokey
- Winter Journey (local link)
- 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.
- Born and Bred (local link)
- Jade Warrior (local link)
- (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.
TIFF: “Seraphim Falls”
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.
TIFF: Quick “The Fountain” impressions
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.
TIFF: “Rescue Dawn”
Perhaps it’s shocking, but this is the first Werner Herzog film that I’ve seen. Ever. Based on the acclaim and the status that Herzog has, though, Rescue Dawn seems like a bad first introduction. It is a good film — by no means is it bad — but most of the reviews that I’ve seen say that it is a poor Herzog film. Of course, I don’t know that canon so I can only look at it as its own movie.
It tells the true story of an American pilot shot down in Laos before the Vietnam War. A story that Herzog previously told in his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This is the fictionalized version of that.
Rescue Dawn is essentially split into three sections: the crash, escape and capture; the prison camp; the prison camp escape. The middle section is the weakest as it’s drawn out for far too long. I can understand why, but as a contrast to the jungle escapes it just feels dull. Those scenes, when the thick (Thai) Jungle is a character of its own, are by far the better parts. There’s more tension. There’s more to look at. They are better paced. And they seem to suit Christian Bale best.
Bale’s performance can be described as being very Christian Bale-like, and when he’s alone in the jungle it works well. When he’s in the camp, though, he’s second fiddle to Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies, whose portrayals of long-time (well, longer than Bale) prisoners are tremendous. Steve Zahn is especially good. In their presence, Bale doesn’t feel as convincing.
The story is about how Dieter, Bale’s character, survived through the whole ordeal, but by the end of it I was far more interested in the fates of Zahn’s and Davies’ characters. In this sense, the main focus of the movie fails somewhat.
