Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Fall festival season is gearing up right now. Toronto’s Russian Film Festival is featuring actor Alexey Serebryakov, who starred in last year’s stunning Leviathan. Now’s your chance to see him on the big screen and in person. ImagineNATIVE, the international indigenous film and media arts festival is showing award-winning, Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk’s newest movie Angirattut (Coming Home). EstDocs – the Estonian film festival — has amazing animation, documentaries and short films from that tiny Baltic nation. Next comes Planet in Focus looking at environmental films. And Toronto After Dark brings horror, action and science fiction movies to get you ready for Halloween. This week I’m looking at films that played at TIFF that are opening today across the country. Ones about a female cop pushed into the war in drugs; the other’s about a male astronaut who wants to be pulled out of his life on Mars.

Sicario
Dir: Denis Villeneuve

Kate (Emily Blunt) is an FBI agent investigating a kidnapping near the Mexican border. She shoots the bad guys, but uncovers a grisly scene: countless murder- victims’ bodies packed into the walls of a drug-smuggler’s house in the desert. Shocking and revolting. So she agrees to join Matt (Josh Brolin) and his special team of agents (not part of the FBI) in order to bring down the Mexican kingpin responsible for all these deaths.

They fly her out to El Paso Texas where she meets the rest of the team, including a mysterious man named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). Soon she’s being ferried across the border into Juarez, playing a small part in a big confusing raid. She used to save kidnap victims, now she’s helping kidnap people (albeit accused criminals)? What’s going on?

She tries to piece it all together. What’s her role in this exactly? Is this above board or is she being pulled into a nasty scheme run by crooked cops? Why are they doing this and who’s really in charge. She stays with the group, but finds herself involved in or witnessing a world of robbery, murder, drug smuggling, and undocumented migrants. Is she stopping it or part of it?

What’s going on is a total shift in the movie’s point of view. It’s not about Kate at all, it’s actually about Alejandro, his role and his goals. Huh? What? Wait a minute…

Sicario is a beautifully shot, suspense drama set in the world of organized crime around Juarez. It’s also a total mess. It starts like a horror/ police investigation, but turns into something completely different. It’s hard to follow, hard to understand, and really boring in parts. There are exciting chase scenes, but there are also driving scenes: long sequences just about people driving along highways. (Zzzzz….). Characters are introduced with long build-ups… and then prove to be unimportant. Even Kate, the ostensible star of the movie, seems peripheral to most of the plot. And Mexicans seem to be there just to die. Denis Villeneuve is usually an excellent director (Incendie, Polytechnique) and the movie does make sense in the end (no spoilers), but even so, at two hours, Sicario is just not very interesting.

The Martian
Dir: Ridley Scott

Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is an astronaut collecting soil samples on Mars, the windy and dusty red planet. He’s a botanist, part of a NASA team. When a storm hits the planet, the crew all rush for shelter in the space ship. But Mark gets struck down by a satellite dish and presumed dead. The rest of the team, headed by Mellissa (Jessica Chastain), fly off on their long trip back to earth. But wait… he’s not dead, just hurt. He patches himself up and takes stock of his situation, recording it all on a video log. Limited oxygen, water, and food, and no way to communicate with earth, and no way to get off the planet, with the next space ship coming four years down the road. And only 70s disco music to keep him company. So he makes do with what he has: rusty soil, a shovel, some potatoes and his own excrement. Can he grow enough to feed himself?

Meanwhile back on earth, a woman at NASA spots movement on Mars. How can that be? It’s him – he’s alive! The various players spring into action. Teddy (Jeff Daniels) the stuffed-shirt head of NASA, is more concerned about budgets and public image than saving Mark’s life. Vince (Chiwetel Ejiofor) wants things to work, Mitch (Sean Bean) wants to save him, and Annie (Kristen Wiig) wants the news to be released in the best possible way. And a whole bunch of others trying to build things, and calculate the math. Now Mark can communicate with earth… but how will he ever make it back?

I liked the Martian. It’s about pluck, ingenuity, improvisation and perseverance, with lots of science, math and IT geekiness thrown in along the way. One goofy guy (Matt Damon is totally likeable in this role) with thousands of people rooting for him. It’s not really a science fiction movie, though. No space battles, no aliens, no Klingons. It’s also far from the pristine, antiseptic world of space travel – instead Mars is plastic tarps, dirt, duct tape and shovels. This is a movie for guys who like tinkering in their toolsheds. Making do with what you’ve got. Remember, this is a Ridley Scott movie – the guy who made Blade Runner and Alien. And while this one is much more mainstream, with absolutely no sex – the only kiss is through a glass space helmet — it’s still got dirt, blood, 4-letter words.

The Martian and Sicario both open today in Toronto. Also opening is Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home; and a weird and wonderful documentary about mould – yes, mould, slime mould to be exact – called the Creeping Garden.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.