Daniel Garber talks with Angry Inuk director Alethea Arnaquq-Baril at Hot Docs
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photos by Jeff Harris.
We’ve all seen the photos: a white-furred harp seal pup looking up at the camera with tears in its eyes, almost saying won’t you please save me from those evil, greedy hunters who want to skin me 
alive just for my fur? Images like these have been seen worldwide and raised millions of dollars for animal rights and environmental groups, from Greenpeace to IFAW.
What is wrong with that picture? A lot, say Inuit activists, and it’s making them angry.
Angry Inuk is a new documentary from the NFB, that’s having its world premier at Hot Doc’s documentary festival. It looks at the role of the seal hunt in Inuit culture, and the terrible consequences the well-meaning EU ban on seal products has had on Inuit lives. It also follows a group of Inuit people trying to change minds. Their stories — and her own — are told by filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril.
I spoke to Alethea at CIUT during Hot Docs.
Behind the scenes. Films reviewed: Chasing Asylum, Gulistan Land of Roses PLUS I Am What I Play
Hi this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s late April in Toronto, and that means it’s documentary season, with movies that take you behind the scenes. CIUT is presenting a special screening of I Am What I Play at the Carlton Cinema next Friday. It takes you behind the scenes at rock radio stations from the 1960s – 1980s. It features Toronto’s own David Marsden. The Mars Bar, broadcasting out of CFNY in Brampton, Ont., introduced the whole alternative music scene — punk, new wave, dance music, British pop — to everyone in the GTA. Incredibly influential. I Am What I Play is at the Carlton Cinema next Friday as part of a series of films presented by this station.
And Hot Docs, Toronto’s international documentary film festival, in on for the next 10 days.
It’s showing a huge number of new documentaries, many having their world premier. And remember, if you’re a student or senior, all daytime screenings until 5 pm are free for you.
This week I’m looking at documentaries that take you behind the scenes. There’s a group of women preparing for battle against ISIS, and a group of refugees unprepared for the trouble they’ll face… from Australia.
Chasing Asylum
Dir: Eve Orner
In most countries, refugees have a right to seek asylum upon arrival. The UN charter declares it. Except in Australia. Any migrant arriving by sea is summarily rejected and deported. This, government spokesmen explain, is to deter future migrants. But what happens next is shocking. For
several years now, the Australian government has been deporting asylum seekers to camps in the Pacific islands of Nauru and New Guinea. This includes women, children (who receive no schooling) and even babies. What are these detention camps like? The inmates are locked behind metal fences and housed in tents policed by 
former prison guards. And they are stuck there indefinitely.
All whistleblowing related to these detention centres is illegal in Australia, as is taking photos or footage at the camps. But this documentary managed to sneak in hidden cameras to interview detainees, and to speak to former employees. It’s shocking. Conditions there are said to be worse than at actual prisons within Australia. There are numerous cases of women being sexually assaulted, suicides, hunger strikes and even riots and death. Just 
shocking.
And here’s the clincher: it’s not a money issue. Canberra ends up spending half a million dollars per year on each prisoner housed in conditions so squalid it’s described as Australia’s Guantanamo. Watching the film is hard to do: it’s slow paced and depressing at times, and the hidden cameras means you often can’t see faces.
Still, it’s definitely worth seeing. It’s a terrific example of investigative journalism exposing government malfeasance of the worst kind.
Gulistan: Land of Roses
Dir: Zayne Akyot
It’s Iraqi Kurdistan two years ago. Peshmerga fighters dressed in baggy khaki uniforms with colourful sashes at the waist are training in the forest. They are learning to shoot and engaging in political discussions. Soon they’ll be heading to the battlefront to fight ISIS in the city of Mosul. Just another war documentary, right? Not exactly.
All the fighters in this brigade are women, They are led by a beautiful and charismatic 
sergeant named Rojen, She speaks candidly, directly to the camera, saying things like she would feel more beautiful if she had a battle scar on her face. The soldiers switch between combing their long 
black hair with nettles and sharing the names they give their rifles. Names like “Patience” and “Beloved”.
There is no up-close violence in this film — it finishes before the actual fighting begins. But a heavy shadow hangs over the brigade, not knowing who will live and who will die.
This is a beautiful movie. It is directed by a Canadian filmmaker from Montreal. But as a kurdish-speaking woman she was allowed to follow the soldier’s intimate lives first hand. This is a rare example of behind-the-scenes footage of the women soldiers challenging ISIS’s rule in Syria and Iraq.
Gulistan, Land of Roses and Chasing Asylum are both having the world premier at Hot Docs — go to hotdocs.ca for showtimes. And this station is presenting I Am What I Play next Friday. go to ciut.fm for details.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com
Daniel Garber talks to Migrant Dreams director Min Sook Lee
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Canada is a land of opportunity for citizens and permanent residents alike. Immigrants, students and asylum seekers share in the country’s bounty. But not everyone has the rights and privileges the average Canadian 
takes for granted. Temporary Foreign Workers lead a precarious existence, subject to fraud, abuse and neglect by their employers. Many come saddled with a crippling debt owed to the recruiters who bring them here. Workers who fight back are threatened with job loss or even deportation. Will Temporary Foreign Workers ever achieve their migrant dreams?
Migrant Dreams is a new documentary having its world premier 
at Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival on May 9th. It follows the plight of a group of Indonesian women working in the greenhouses of Leamington, Ontario. It was directed by award-winning filmmaker Min Sook Lee, known for her documentaries on the plight of persecuted minorities and precarious labourers.
I spoke to Min Sook Lee at CIUT.
Significant Hair. Movies Reviewed: Viva, Green Room, Sing Street
Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Can hairstyles hold messages about your job, your politics, your musical preference or your sexuality? This week I’m looking at movies about men with significant haircuts: a family drama from Cuba, a thriller/horror from the US, and a musical from Ireland. There’s a boy in Havana who’s dying to try a wig on; some punks trying to avoid dying when the skinheads are wigging out, and a kid in Dublin who will change his hairstyle for a girl he’s dying to meet.
Viva
Dir: Paddy Breathnach
Jesus (Héctor Medina) is a young man who lives alone in Havana. His dad was a prize fighter who ran off when Jesus was three (his picture is still on the wall.) Later, his mom died leaving only her record collection of classic Cuban boleros and torch singers. And her threadbare apartment. Now he’s 18 and all alone, an adult orphan. He earns a meager living cutting the hair of old ladies in his neighbourhood, along with one important client.
Mama (Luis Alberto García) runs a bar popular among foreign tourists. It features travestidos, drag queens who perform on stage in makeup, wigs and gowns, lip-synching and dancing for an appreciative audience. Jesus is there backstage to 
clean and style their wigs.
But when one performer suddenly quits and Mama is left with an open space, Jesus volunteers to take her place. He knows all the songs by heart, and he longs to express himself. Mama is dubious. It’s not just the clothes she says, you have to feel it, get inside of it, live it. But after begging and cajoling he’s allowed to try out. His persona is named Viva. At first clumsy and awkward soon Viva dares to get off the stage and walk among the clients. Viva spots a new customer, a rough-looking middle-aged man, and gathers her courage to approach him. But when she sings to him and touches him, he punches her in the face, knocking her to the floor. They kick the man out, and help patch up Jesus’s split lip. He goes home feeling miserable. But who does he find in his apartment? The same man. I’m Angel, he says, and I’m your father.
Turns out, Angel didn’t exactly run away. He’s been in prison for 15 years, and now he’s home again. He’s a mean, selfish drunk and spends all his money on cigarettes and rot-gut rum. He takes over the apartment: food, coffee and bed. He’s macho and wants his son to harden up. Jesus is self-reliant and tough in his own way, but definitely not macho. Jesus hates this stranger who has taken over his life, but… Angel is his father, and the only family he has. Or is he? Mama says Jesus is welcome to come back to the club, to stay with his new “family” — he’ll even get a room to live in. Angel forbids him from dressing up like a woman and “humiliating” himself on stage. But that is the only place where Jesus finds fulfillment… and his sole source of money. As a gay man in Cuba there are very few jobs open for him. It’s that or the sex trade.
But Angel has a secret of his own — the reason he’s come home to spend time with Jesus. Can the two of them get along? Can they accept each other for who they are? And will Viva ever enter the picture again?
Viva is a moving drama about contemporary gay life in Havana. The cast is all Cuban, and is shot on location. It doesn’t cover up or apologize for the seamier side of Havana, including its poverty. It stars Jorge Perugorría as Angel, one of Cuba’s best-known actors, famous in North America for his role in Strawberry and Chocolate, another Cuban movie with a gay theme. Héctor Medina is a newcomer but also very good. Surprisingly, though, this movie is officially considered an Irish production — its writer and director are both from there. I don’t speak Spanish, but I’m told the dialogue, words and accents are muy authentico.
Green Room
Dir: Jeremy Saulnier
Sam, Pat, Reece and Tiger are hardcore anarcho-punks from the east coast. Their band is touring middle-America, playing at dive bars and roadhouses in Corn Country. They’re musical purists – no social networking or iTunes. It’s vinyl discs and live performances – or nothing. The 
problem is they’re not making any money. And when a promised gig goes south, they have to siphon gas out of parked cars just to keep driving. So when a local punk offers them a paid show at a country roadhouse, they jump at the chance. Just don’t talk politics they’re told. And don’t play 
anything political.
The place turns out to be a bar for white-supremicist skinheads. And the green room (that’s where bands wait before they go on stage) is laden with neo-nazi, stickers, confederate battle flags and white power logos. Nice…But a few skins aren’t going to stop them. They start their set with a cover of the Dead Kennedy’s classic Nazi Punks F*ck Off! Dead silence. The skinheads aren’t pleased. Still, once they switch to their heavy loud tunes the crowd is slamming and enjoying the concert. All is good. But just as they head out, Pat (Anton 
Yelchin, Chekov on Star Trek, 2009) remembers he left his smart phone in the green room. He busts in only to see something he shouldn’t have seen: a skinhead girl lying dead on the floor with a knife sticking out of her head. Pat dials 911 but they grab his phone.
Soon enough, the whole band is locked into the room with one door and no windows, along with a nasty-looking skinhead guard and Amber (Imogen Poots) a skin who was friends with the dead woman. No telephone. And no one knows they’re there.
Things take a turn for the worse once Darcy shows up (Patrick Stewart, Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek:The Next Generation). He’s cold, sinister and forboding. A big guy in the Stormfront circuit, Darcy owns the club. He doesn’t want the police there, and he doesn’t want the punks talking about the murder. And he has dozens of True Believers – young neo-nazis who want to make their first kill – at his beck and call.
It turns into a battle between the punks (and a skinhead ally) armed with nothing more than a box-cutter, lightbulbs, a single handgun and a fire-extinguisher; and a gang of skins looking to kill. Once killer dogs enter the battle, people start dying. Can any of them survive an all-out attack? Or will they disappear in a shallow grave in the woods?
Green Room is a great action/thriller/horror movie. My heart was pounding about a third of the way through, and didn’t let up til the end. It’s a typical house-in-the-woods type horror movie, but without the bikini-clad college students of a typical slasher pic. The women – including Sam (Alia Shawkat)– are as tough as the men. And Imogen Poots is amazing as the Chelsea who joins the fight; so good, I didn’t recognize her until the closing credits.
Sing Street
Wri/Dir: John Carney
Cosmo (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is a middle-class kid at a private Jesuit school in Dublin in the 1980s. He lives at home with his parents, his little sister and older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor) a pothead who dropped out of college. But when his family falls on hard times he is sent to a rougher school run by the Christian 
Brothers. (Canadians know the name from the Mt Cashel orphanage in St John’s, Newfoundland, notorious for its horrific abuses.) Cosmo gets bullied from day one, especially by a skinhead. The school is run by men in black priestly gowns from neck to feet, and who are not adverse to corporal punishment. But all is not 
lost. Because across the street from the school he sees a beautiful girl who looks like a model. She even has a proper model’s name: Raphina (Lucy Boynton). Thinking quickly he invites her to star in his band’s video for their next song – and she agrees. Only problem is, there’s no video, no song, and no band. Somehow Cosmo has to make it happen. He meets Eamon (Mark McKenna) and together they start writing music. But will they have it all ready in time for the school prom?
Something about this movie grabs me – I really like it. It’s your basic boy-meets-girl/ coming-of-age story, and it’s set in the 80s but there’s nothing old or tired about it. Sing Street feels fresh and new.
Green Room and Viva both open on April 29th in Toronto: check your local listings. And starting today in Toronto is the wonderful Irish musical Sing Street.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Daniel Garber talks with curator Jon Davies about Conundrum Clinique at Images Film Festival
Hi this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 fm.
A place like Toronto is known for its reputation. Migrants from farms and small-towns and far-away countries flock here to recreate themselves as 
someone richer, more attractive, more famous and talented. Their new images are reinforced through fancy condos new cars, hairstyles and fashions. It is plastered on TV in movies, online, and in advertisements. But where does a facade end and reality begins?
A new collection of films called Conundrum Clinique examines 
Toronto’s invented images and facades as viewed in 1975 and today. It’s a world of collapsing castles, flashing lights, and real estate ventures lighter than air. It includes work by Janis Cole and Holly Dale, Oliver Husain, Robin Colyer and many others. Conundrum Clinique is the work of award-winning Toronto curator Jon Davies and has its world premiere on Saturday as part of the Images Film Festival.
Jon tears off Toronto’s cultural façades and examines them. I spoke to him in studio at CIUT.
Politics. Films reviewed: Speaking is Difficult, The Measure of a Man
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Art, journalism and movies are discrete entities operating within self-sustaining universes that rarely cross paths. And in movies there are documentaries and there is entertainment. But with the rise of new media the lines between all of these are starting to blur. This week I’m taking a look at movies with political themes from France and the US. There’s an art-house drama about unemployment that reads like a documentary; and a documentary about mass shootings that looks like an art-house flick.
Speaking is Difficult
Dir: A.J. Schnack
Picture a schoolyard on a sunny day. A quiet calm feeling. An American flag, the Stars and Stripes, ripples in the breeze. And then the sound of gunshots rings out. Screaming, chaos, panic, despair. A voice calls out for help. Now picture this scene repeated over and over again: short glimpses of scenic American, beautifully-composed, in three-second takes. Schools, strip malls, bridges and movie theatres. The Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Sandy Hook elementary
school in Connecticut. A movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado.
Dubbed over the top of this calming new footage are grainy tapes of 9-1-1 callers. On many of them you can hear the shots still firing in the background as people, including the caller, run for cover. And each 20-30 second sequence is silently labeled with where it took place and how many people were killed.
It finishes with testimony before congress by Gabrielle Giffords who suffered a brain injury from one of these shootings. Speaking is difficult, she says. Indeed.
What the film never shows is the killers’ names (unlike the nightly news where “if it bleeds, it leads”). This is not an exploitation film meant to inspire copycat killers looking for their moment in the sun. Instead, it’s a visual memorial to the people who are killed in mass shootings in the United States. It happens every 78 days now, 2 ½ times more often than just 5 years ago.
Speaking is Difficult is a powerful short film. It’s part of Field of Vision, a new online documentary channel that combines the news – ongoing and developing stories – with cinematic directors. Pretty pictures mixed with hard-hitting stories. It’s co-founded by Schnack, Charlotte Cook and Laura Poitras. She’s the director who brought us Citizenfour, that great documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
All these films are free and available online on Field of Vision.
The Measure of a Man (La loi du marché)
Dir: Stéphane Brizé
Thierry (Vincent Lindon) is a taciturn man in his sixties. He has worked as a tool-and-die machinist for many years in a unionized factory job. He lives with his wife (Karine de Mirbeck) and his son (Matthieu Schaller). They’ve nearly paid off the mortgage on their nice apartment and own a modern mobile home to spend August at the beach. They still go out dancing as a couple, and have a caregiver who helps Matthieu, who plans to study science in college, with his disability. It’s the French version of the American dream with pensions and medical care all taken care of. Thierry’s happy family can devote its time to studying, hobbies and relationships.
Then, all of the sudden the company– the place he’s worked for most of his life — suddenly fires him without cause. The union objects and files a grievance, but Thierry is left rudderless without income and with few prospects at his age. And he soon discovers the 
vaunted French welfare state is fraying around the edges. They pay him for retraining, but in a profession with no jobs. They send him to low-wage interviews with condescending employers who don’t want to hire him. His banker tells him to sell his home and casually tells him to buy life insurance instead – implying he’s near the end. His union reps tell him to keep on fighting against his former employer in solidarity and testify at an upcoming trial… but can’t give him money.
His life is on a downward spiral, a race to the bottom. He finally gets a job in retail security, where he spies on customers with aerial cameras that zoon across the store’s ceiling. Treat every shopper as a potential shoplifter he’s told. He watches customers and staff accused of theft brought behind glass mirrors and humiliated. He tells them to hand over the missing 5 euros or misused coupons 
or suffer the consequences. But how long can Thierry be part of the system that ground him down?
The Measure of a Man is a realistic drama that feels like a documentary about the decline and fall of France’s working class. Except for Vincent Lindon, the entire cast is made up of non-actors, shot in real places not on a movie set. It’s heart-breaking in parts, but it still leaves you with a sense of hope about Thierry’s integrity and self worth. Lindon is fantastic in this film.
The Measure of a Man opens today in Toronto: check your local listings. And Speaking is Difficult just premiered on Field of Vision on theintercept.com.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Life and Death. Movies reviewed: Oddball, I Saw the Light
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s spring film festival season in Toronto right now. There’s Cinefranco Special Quebec showing French language movies for free. Next week is the 29th annual Images festival, with galleries and movie theatres both 
presenting art on film. And Hot Docs, Toronto’s documentary festival is on later this month. But right now, starting today, is TIFF Kids, with movies from all over the 
world for kids age 3-13, including many free screenings.
This week I’m looking at movies about life and death. There’s a real-life drama about a dog trying to keep some animals alive, and a biopic about a country and western singer trying to drink himself to death.
Oddball
Dir: Stuart McDonald
Emily (Sarah Snook) is a conservationist from a small town in Australia. It’s a tourist village filled with locals dressed in historical outfits. Emily lives with her young daughter Olivia (Coco Jack Gillies) and her boyfriend, Bradley (Alan Tudyk) a tourism exec from New York. Her job? To keep alive a tiny flock of fairy penguins. These adorable little birds return each year to nest on a rocky island just offshore. It’s a wildlife preserve. But the penguins are threatened by an invasive, European species – foxes – that is knocking down their numbers. For the
island to remain a sanctuary, free of development, it has to have at least ten little penguins.
So they set up a watchman with a tranquilizer gun to stop the foxes, and build special boxes for the penguins to nest in. But still the numbers decrease. What can they do to save them?
Enter Olivia’s Grandpa (Shane Jacobson) and his dog Oddball. Swampy is a husky, bearded chicken farmer, given to frank talk and wild schemes. Oddball is a furry white dog who keeps the foxes out of Swampy’s chicken coops. Olivia adores her grandpa and his dog. Emily does too, but finds them a bit if a nuisance. Bradley can’t stand the dog. When Oddball runs rampant through the town, all hell breaks loose. He messes up an important event and upsets the apple cart. Literally. The town bigwigs are furious and banish Oddball to the farm 
forever.
But when Swampy notices how kind Oddball is to a penguin he saves, he and Olivia hatch a secret plan: Oddball becomes the official Penguin Guard on the rocky island. But they mustn’t let the bad guys who want to develop the island into a tourist trap – know what they’re doing. Can they save the penguins, outsmart the townfolk and preserve the sanctuary?
This is a cute movie based on a true story. It’s full of fair dinkum Aussie culture. And it avoids most of the pitfalls of kids movies: it’s not too violent or scary, no talking dogs, no princesses, nothing supernatural, and no commercial tie-ups. The only thing this movie is selling is conservationism.
I Saw the Light
Wri/Dir: Marc Abraham
It’s 1944, in Andalusia, Alabama. Hank and Audrey are young musicians madly in love. Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen) is pretty as a picture with her doe eyes and auburn hair. Hank Williams (Tom Hiddleston) is skinny and tall with jug ears. They’re getting married on the sly, with no wedding, no preacher, no guests. They hope to be famous someday, but for now they still live with Hank’s single mom, Lillie (Cherry Jones). She’s a classic stage mother chauffeuring her son to shows for 10 years now. 
Her Hank can do no wrong, but that Audrey – she could be trouble.
Hank and his band — guitar, bass, fiddle and steel — perform their hillbilly tunes on local radio each morning and at a bar at night. Some people like the sad songs he writes, but it doesn’t stop the hecklers and fighters from making his life miserable. One man nearly breaks his back in an unprovoked barroom brawl. So Hank shows up drunk as a skunk at most gigs. Alcohol eases his pain. His mom keeps him happily inebriated dropping bottles of hooch into his coat pockets, and Audrey doesn’t like it one bit. She thinks they’d be famous by now if he weren’t such a lush. And when he drops her from his radio show – her screechy voice is unpopular — things get dicey between them.
Though he’s a prolific songwriter, churning out hits by the dozen, he wants to be known as a performer. His ultimate goal? To join the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.
I Saw the Light follows Hank Williams’ quick rise to fame, cut short by a heart attack at age 29. Based on a tell-all biography, the movie concentrates on his problems at home and his troubles at work. So we get to see his fights with his wife, his extramarital affairs, his alcoholism, his back pain and his 
addiction to painkillers. At work we’re privy to the back room deals of the country music industry, with his agent/manager Fred Rose (Bradley Whitford) as our guide and sometime narrator. The question is — why? His agent is boring. And his home life is depressing. It’s all very sordid and sad with hardly any good moments to relieve his relentless funk. I’m not saying the movie’s boring, just not fun to watch. We can ogle Hank’s hard times from afar, but we never get to see into his heart or share his passion.
The one redeeming factor is Hank Williams’ music. Something about his songs — both the sad tunes and the upbeat ones – always brings a tear to my eye.
I Saw the Light opens today in Toronto: check your local listings. And Oddball is the opening night movie for TIFF Kids. Go to tiff.net for details.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Retro+Active. Movies reviewed: Here Come the Videofreex, Everybody Wants Some!!
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Retro doesn’t mean boring. This week I’m looking at two retro movies, a drama and a documentary. There’s sexually active college jocks in the early 1980s and politically active filmmakers from the late 1960s.
Here Come the Videofreex
Dir: Jon Nealon, Jenny Raskin
The late 1960s is a time of huge changes in the US. People are out on the streets, holding demonstrations, civil disobedience, and sit-ins. Against the war in Vietnam and the powers that be, and for black power and women’s rights. At the same time a strange new medium is making its first appearance. It’s recording events as they happen. Its images are black and white, fuzzy, and a bit distorted around the edges. It wobbles when you watch it. It’s a medium that lets you see what you’re filming as it’s going
on. The concept is unheard of in a time where film takes days or even weeks to develop. It’s revolutionary!
And what is this new medium? Video. People are carrying their own mics and Sony cameras to rock concerts (like Woodstock) and recording everything they see – not what’s on stage but who’s in the audience.
CBS News takes notice. A producer puts up the money and the equipment for a group of young men and women to go where journalists aren’t 
welcome. They call themselves the Videofreex. They go to California to take in the mood. They travel east again, to record Yippie Abbie Hoffman before he’s arrested and Fred Hampton from the Black Panther Party only weeks before he’s killed by the Chicago police. The Videofreex are not dispassionately observing things like a TV journalist. Video lets them be a part of what they’re filming. And with women and men both starting from 
scratch in a new medium, there are no glass ceilings to break.
In the end, though, CBS News rejects their work as too radical and different. CBS wants to use it their footage on their news shows but under network control. The Videofreex say no way. The venture is short lived. But the members keep recording things for decades to come. And they start their own community TV station in a small, rural town in upstate NY.
This movie is an amazing look at the old videos from the dawn of public-access video. They’ve been lovingly restored and are explained by the former members of the collective still around today. It’s a great documentary on public journalism decades before youtube,
Everybody Wants Some!!
Wri/Dir: Richard Linklater
It’s late August, 1980. Jake (Blake Jenner) arrives at a university town in Southeast Texas with a milk crate full of record albums and the glow of small town success. it’s just a few days before classes start. He’s a baseball pitcher on an athletic scholarship. But he’s not impressed by s new home. Two ramshackle, clapboard 
houses donated by the city, holding 25 guys – more than two baseball teams worth. In high school he pitched the team all the way to the state championships — but here he’s less than nothing. Everyone’s a former best in town. Now he’s just a freshman, subject to hazing, sneers and brutal competition. And he’s in a house filled with highly competitive, intimidating guys, all baseball jocks with awful moustaches. Guys brimming with machismo, including one who can hit a baseball with an axe in midair — and chop it in half. They hate pitchers, they say. And freshmen. It’s up to Jake to fit in to the house without 
giving up his true character.
But there are entitlements, even for freshmen. These include Lone Star Beer, and free entry to the local mirror ball disco. The boys go there to strut and try to pick up girls. And despite the constant homoerotic fog over their locker room practices, they never stray from conventional gender roles.
Jake is better than that. He likes poetry, listens to Devo, and doesn’t treat women as goals to be conquered and bragged about to his buddies afterwards. And he really likes Beverly (Zooey Deutch), a woman studying performing arts. She’s from a 
separate universe, with its own teams, hierarchy and competitiveness.
I really like Everybody Wants Some!! It’s a lot of fun, with great acting and a terrific soundtrack. But don’t be misled by the trailer; this is not a reboot of Porkies or Animal House. It’s not a formulaic, slapstick comedy. What it is is a typical Richard Linklater film, like Dazed and Confused. If you saw Boyhood two years ago, think of this as Manhood. Boyhood gives you 12 years, while this one is condensed to three days. There’s a great ensemble cast that you get to spend a bit of time with.
Everybody Wants Some!! opens today in Toronto: check your local listings. And you can see Here Come the Videofreex beginning on Wednesday. And be sure to check out the Canadian Film Fest this weekend for the latest in new Canadian movies. Go to canfilmfest.ca for more information.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Daniel Garber talks with Sean Garrity and Jonas Chernick about their new film Borealis
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Trouble is brewing in Winnipeg. Jonah (Jonas Chernick) is a compulsive gambler – he can’t pass a card table without placing a bet. He’s in debt up to his neck to a bookie named Tubbie. Jonah is also a relentless liar — even his girlfriend doesn’t know why he needs 10,000 bucks, stat. And when the doctor tells him his estranged, teenaged daughter Aurora (Joey King) is about to go blind he keeps his cards close to his chest and doesn’t tell her. He packs up his car and vows to show
Aurora the northern lights in far-off Churchill, Manitoba. But will she see Aurora Borealis before she goes blind… or before the bookies catch up to them?
Borealis is a new feature now playing at the Canadian Film Fest and opening next Friday in Toronto. It’s a buddy pic, a road movie, a coming-of-age drama and a new look at the far edges of 
Manitoba. It’s funny, surprising and calmly beautiful. It’s made by two long-time Winnipeg collaborators: award-winning director Sean Garrity and the equally notable actor/writer Jonas Chernick. I spoke to Sean in studio at CIUT, and to Jason (on set) by phone. We talk about road movies, gambling, romance, Sean’s hometown, travelling, card games, Churchill, cold weather, polar bears, Joey King, Bruce McDonald, Paper Moon… and more!
Sean Garrity won the DGC Ontario Best Director award for Borealis at the Canadian Film Fest.
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