Daniel Garber talks with director Simon Stadler about Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’Hoansi
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM
The Ju/’Hoansi are a people living in the Kalahari desert for millennia. They feed themselves as hunters and gatherers with minimal contact with outside groups. But not so long ago, hunting wild animals in the bush was banned in Namibia (in Southwest Africa.) Deprived of their livelihood, they were forced to turn to tourism to earn money selling handicrafts and posing for pictures. And the white tourists – known as ghostpeople – flocked in from all over. Later, some members of the village were shown other parts of Namibia, and four of them taken to Europe, a land filled with ghosts.
Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’Hoansi is a new feature documentary that 
follows the four as they discover Europe, teach people there how to live as they do, and carry some of the wealth and technology they encounter back home to their families in the Kalahari. It is directed by Simon Stadler, a prize-winning filmmaker and known for his background in anthropology.
I spoke with Simon in Germany by telephone from CIUT 89.5 FM studio.
The film opens on Christmas Day at Toronto’s Hot Docs cinema.
Christmas movies. Films reviewed: Julieta, Fences, La La Land
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s Christmas weekend with lots of movies to choose from. This week I’m talking about three excellent movies to see. There’s a woman in Madrid haunted by her past, a married man in Pittsburgh fighting off his demons, and a young couple in LA looking for love in a city of lost souls.
Julieta
Dir: Pedro Almadovar
Julieta (Emma Suarez) is a middle aged woman who lives in Madrid. She is making a big change, leaving her longtime lover Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti) and moving to Portugal after countless years of waiting. What is she waiting for? Word from her daughter Antia, who disappeared without a trace many years earlier. She’s all ready to go when she runs into her daughter’s childhood friend Beatriz on a street corner, who says she saw Antia in Lac Como. And so begins the telling of a mysterious story divided into three chapters.
As a young woman, Julieta (Adriana Ugarte) is a brilliant and beautiful prof. Her 
students all love her. But when she meets Xoan — a handsome and rugged fisherman — on a train, her life is turned upside down. A man is killed, a deer runs past the train, and she falls heavily for Xoan. Is it love at first sight? She visits Xoan (Daniel Grao) at his home by the water. But he’s not at home, just a suspicious and protective housekeeper (Rossy de Palma) who won’t let Julieta wait for him inside. Eventually they live as a couple and raise their daughter Antia together. Julieta meets Xoan’s friends, including the sultry 
sculptress Ava (Inma Cuesta),
But after a tragic turn of events, Julieta is back in Madrid, raising her daughter alone. She falls into a deep depression, and young Antia spends more and more time with her best friend Beatriz. Still later, Julieta retraces her steps, trying to explain why she lost her daughter so many years ago.
Julieta is a great drama, the product of an unexpected combination. It pairs Almadovar – known for his lush, passionate melodramas and over-the-top comedies — with Canadian author Alice Munro’s quirky, understated stories about women in small town Ontario. Does it work? Yes, yes, yes. With its small fishing boat on a lake, classrooms, caribou running past a train, along with jealousy and infidelity, it’s an intrinsically Canadian story… and yet perfectly Spanish. I really liked this movie.
Fences
Dir: Denzel Washington
It’s the 1950s. Troy Maxton (Denzel Washington) works as a garbage man for the city of Pittsburgh. Each Friday, he comes home from work with the same things: a sack of potatoes, a piece of lard, a mickey of gin, and his pay envelope. The money goes to his wife Rose (Viola Davis) but he shares the gin with his best friend Bono. Troy met Bono in jail as a young man. It’s also, where he learned to play baseball, and where he met Rose a kindly visitor. He has two sons: Lyons who is a jazz musician (Troy calls it Chinese music) and Cory (Jovan Adepo) a high school athlete. His brother Gabriel – with a metal plate in his head — carries a trumpet to play for St Peter at the pearly gates. Troy, though, is more worried about the Devil.
Troy and Rose are deeply in love, Cory’s doing great in school, everything seems perfect… but it isn’t.. Troy wants to show he’s the man of the house, and everyone’s afraid of him. He tries to stop Cory from going to college on a football scholarship. (He once was a pro baseball player once but now he’s hauling rubbish.) Gabe has moved out, and best friend Bono says Troy is looking too closely at other woman. Can this family stay together? Or is it teetering on the brink of total collapse?
Fences is a small movie that feels more like a filmed play. Great dialogue — adapted from his own script by August Wilson – and basically one setting, with little action other than crossing the floor or sawing a board. Flashbacks are talked about, not shown. But the grandness of the characters and the stories they tell does come through. Director Denzel Washington doesn’t hog the screen; instead he lets all the other actors bloom before the camera. Davis and Adepo are outstanding, in fact all of them are great. But this film is more stage-worthy than cinematic. Fences is a moving and revealing look at an African-American family in the 1950s.
La La Land
Dir: Damien Chazelle
Mia and Sebastian are strangers in LA. Mia (Emma Stone) is an aspiring actress. She commutes to a major Hollywood studio each day, to work not as an actress but as a barista at a coffee chain. She lives with other actresses who enjoy the party scene but none of whom has made it big. Each audition Mia goes to is worse than the one before. But she’s hoping her one woman show wi’ll convince Hollywood she’s ready for stardom. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a serious musician who composes grand jazz opuses on his grand piano. He’s a jazz purist who would rather die than perform with a fusion band. He pines for the old jazz joints, now rapidly turning into tapas bars. Ironically he ends up working in a rundown piano bar where his hard-ass boss (JK Simmons) makes him play Jingle Bells, over and over again.
Mia and Sebastian first meet in an LA traffic jam, and it’s hate at first site. Later, when he rescues her from a bad date, they hit it off. This leads to more meetings where together they explore the classic sites of old 
Hollywood: like the planetarium from Rebel without a Cause.
Together, supporting one another, they think they can conquer the world. But will their success be what tears their relationship apart?
La La Land is a very good movie that’s also a musical. That means extras singing and dancing their hearts out on the LA freeway. Gosling and Stone use their real voices and legs, but they’re not Gene Kelly or Julie Andrews. They’re popular actors trying hard to sing and dance. It makes their performances real and touching, but not super fantastic. It combines fantasy, a complex plot, extended flashbacks, and touching moments of love, with beautifully shot images and catchy songs. It’s a tribute to a forgotten Hollywood by young people yearning for purer days. A very good movie.
Julieta starts today and Fences and Lala Land open on Christmas Day in Toronto; check your local listings. This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Behind the Camera. Films reviewed: Cameraperson, Harry Benson: Shoot First
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Every film is actually just a series of still images, sped up to appear to be moving. We don’t see the still shots only their motion. But did you ever wonder who is behind the camera, who is taking these pictures? This week I’m looking at two new documentaries about life behind the camera. There’s a celebrity photographer who always pulls out his camera in the right place at the right time; and a documentary cinematographer who captures war and death, but is affected by what she sees.
Cameraperson
Dir: Kirsten Johnson
What would you do if…
A baby is delivered by a midwife in a hospital in Kenya. She leaves the room, but the filmmakers are still there… and the baby doesn’t seem to be moving. Should they just observe? Or run after the midwife to save the baby’s life?
In the aftermath of the war in Bosnia, an elderly woman in Foča refuses to tell American reporters about the rapes and massacres: nothing happened, she says. But earlier another woman described what happened to four young women who talked to a reporter in the sports stadium where they were interred. They were taken away and never heard from again. Should all journalists bear responsibility for deaths caused by one reporter?
A boxer in blue shorts, storms out of the ring, furious after losing a match. He is followed down the halls by a camera that catches him punching at walls, storming past people, knocking over tables. Then he turns to face the cameraperson with fire in his eyes. Should the cameraperson keep shooting, or should she run for her life?
These are just some of the dilemmas and dangers faced by a cinematographer
shooting real-life events, things that she caused or what shooting the documentaries did to her. This film follows seemingly random shots taken from films that cinematographer Kirsten Johnson – the cameraperson of the title — has worked on. These include Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour, Johanna Hamilton’s 1971, and Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War. But don’t expect a conventional “greatest hits” collection of scenes from famous docs. This is an arthouse flick and much subtler than that. It differs from the usual fly-on-the-wall style of filmmaking by bringing the cameraperson into the story.
The clips you see are made of footage that usually ends up on the cutting room floor. The wobbly camera before it is fixed, the setting of the shots before they 
decide on the framing. They don’t show Johnson herself, but you get to hear her voice and reactions before they get edited out. She gasps when there’s a sudden lightning bolt striking across a field. And she starts to cry when a young boy tells what happened when a bomb hit his brother… even though he she doesn’t speak his language or understand what he said (the subtitles are added much later.)
This is a beautiful and powerful film about how a photographer affects what she sees, and how it haunts her long after the film is made. It’s quirky and spontaneous, with lots of unexpected turns. (Like a filmmaker who loses it on camera, just as a tiny avalanche of snow off the roof falls outside the window behind her.) Through clever editing, seemingly unrelated events are tied together, with athletes and abstract modern dancers followed by rows of gravestones in Bosnia or prison tents at Guantanamo Bay. It has striking scenes that seem to come out of nowhere, like the unexplained jerky movements and bizarre facial contortions of (what appears to be) dancers in Uganda. What does it mean? (Who knows?) But just like the rest of Cameraperson, the photography and its consequences stay with you long after it’s finished.
Harry Benson: Shoot First
Dir: Justin Bare, Matthew Miele
Harry Benson is a famous photographer born to a working class family in Glasgow, Scotland. He makes his way to Fleet Street in London – and the fiercely competitive world of gutter journalism – to work as a news photographer. But he catches his big break in 1964. He is sent to Paris to follow the Beatles just before they hit it big. He is with them, 
shooting their famous hotel room pillow fight, the moment they receive word they are headed to America to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. And he is going with them. He never looks back. He continues his winning streak 
by always being right there in the nick of time. He chronicles youth culture and the baby boomers as they gradually age against the background of rapidly changing world events. Some examples: Harry goes camping with Bobby Kennedy’s family… and is right beside them when RFK is murdered in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan. He was the one with the camera even as Ethel Kennedy tries to shoo him away: shoot first (think later). He is there in Memphis the day Matin Luther King is shot, and is invited into Richard Nixon’s home when he resigns in shame.
After the early seventies, Benson is famous enough to concentrate on celebrity pics. For some reason, even the
most reclusive and private figures seem to trust him. He is allowed to photograph football star Joe Namath’s in his secret bachelor pad, OJ Simpson naked in the shower, and Bobby Fisher with a white horse in Iceland. By the 1980s, he is part and parcel of the Reagan Era’s glitz and glamour, a time of Vanity Fair and Ralph Lauren. His photos are geared more toward People Magazine than LIFE. But his eye for beauty — even in tragic circumstances – is why the rich, famous and powerful let him into their inner sanctums: he always makes them look fantastic.
Is he to blame for the glamorization of politics — the film shows his photos of both First Lady Hillary snuggling up with Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump snuggling up with a million dollars in cash — and our obsession with celebrity culture? Probably.
I had never heard of Harry Benson before this film, but I sure knew his pictures – they’re everywhere, engrained in the collective unconscious. If you like glamour and celebrity caught in unusual ways at the cusp of history – this is a the film for you: it’ss hocking, exciting and amazing.
The documentaries Cameraperson and Harry Benson: Shoot First both open today in Toronto; check your local listings. This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Warm your cockles, flex your mussels. Films reviewed: Tampopo, Sugar Mountain, Office Christmas Party
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
With short days, long nights and sub-zero temperatures, winter is clearly here. So this week I have three movies to warm your cockles (or flex your mussels). You can take a brisk walk in the snow with an Alaskan crime thriller, dive into a spiked punch bowl with an Christmas comedy, or try a hot bowl of ramen with a Japanese classic.
Tampopo
Dir: Itami Juzo
Goro (Yamazaki Tsutomu) is a Japanese trucker. He wears a cowboy hat and drives a tanker with bullhorns at the front, along with his junior partner Gun (a young Ken Watanabe). But Goro’s real passion is ramen, that Chinese soup-noodle so popular in Japan. Each glistening slice of pork, each slurp of noodle, each sip of fragrant broth, represents the culmination of years noodle 
evolution. They stop at a roadside ramen joint but are dismayed by what they see: A boy being bullied out front while a gang of drunken louts harass the ramen chef inside. Goro and Gun manage to rescue the boy and clear out the abusive customers but the ramen they finally eat is just not good.
The chef’s name is Tampopo (Miyamoto Nobuko) and she’s also the mother of the little boy they rescued. She thanks them 
profusely, but admits she doesn’t know how to make ramen. She inherited the store from her late husband but not the recipe or technique. So Goro vows to train her to make the perfect bowl of ramen, in a one-woman bootcamp. On the way, he enlists more help: Sensei, a homeless man who lives with a gang of hobos; Shohei, the chef of a rich man whose life they save; and Piss-Ken one of the drunken hoods they met at their first visit to Tampopo’s ramen house. Will Tampopo – a woman — ever become a genuine master ramen chef? And who will she fall for: Goro or Piss-Ken?
Tampopo was originally released in 1985; this rerelease is a newly-
remastered 4K version. It’s a comedy/western and one of the first foodie movie ever made. The main humour comes from treating something simple and popular like fast food as if it were a vintage wine. It was made during the Japanese economic bubble when conspicuous consumption of elite, expensive imports was a national pastime. The movie consists of dozens of short tableaux with hundreds of characters — including a hedonistic couple dressed in white who mix food with sex — separate, but somehow linked to the main story. The late Itami Juzo was a great satirical filmmaker, and Tampopo his first international hit, basically creating a new genre: the food movie. Definitely worth seeing.
Sugar Mountain
Dir: Richard Gray
Miles and Liam West (Drew Roy, Shane Coffey) are brothers who work in the tourist trade in the scenic port Seward, Alaska. Liam is as honest and , trustworthy as Miles is shifty and undependable. Liam can fight a bear, while Miles is a newbie in the wilderness. Because of a recent accident – they 
crushed the fingers of a famous concert pianist – the family business is in dire straits. So Miles – the sketchy one – comes up with a scheme to make tons of money. It’s flawless, he says, as long as they do it right. They pretend Miles is lost, without a phone, on the banks of the formidable Sugar 
Mountain. Only to reappear 10 days later to sell his exciting story to the media. Miles’s girlfriend Lauren (Haley Webb) is in on it too, and she helps manipulate press coverage, including a fake story that Liam fought with — and possibly murdered! — his own brother. The problem is, Miles really seems to be lost, or 
possibly dead. And the town cop, who us also Lauren’s dad, (Carey Elwes) suspects Liam
To top it all off, Liam doesn’t realize his brother’s other motive – he needs the money to pay off other debts. And the guy he owes them to (Jason Momoa), is not a happy camper. If he doesn’t get the money, he’ll take it out in blood… most likely Liam’s.
Sugar Mountain is a solid, dramatic thriller, with lots of unexpected twists. And the fact it’s all played out against the breathtaking mountains, glaciers and forests of southern Alaska really adds to the pleasure.
Office Christmas Party
Dir: Josh Gordon & Will Speck
Josh (Jason Bateman) is a recently divorced manager at a Chicago-based internet provider. They’re making good money, and, thanks to Josh’s good nature, the employees all seem to like it there. Tracy (Olivia Munn) is a tech genius who works on his team. She has a plan to revolutionize wifi. Josh’s boss is Clay (TJ Miller) the son of the company founder. Clay is an extreme sports devotee who majored in Canadian TV Studies. He may be irresponsible but he can throw a mean party.
Everyone is excited about their bonuses and the end of the year festivities, until… in walks the CEO. Carol (Jennifer Aniston) is 
the opposite of Clay. Where he is a partier she’s a wet blanket. Where Clay is fun and spontaneous, Carol is uptight with a sadistic streak. They’re also brother and sister, carrying all the emotional baggage that entails. She announces austerity plans — what a Grinch! what a Scrooge! — with no parties, no gifts, no bonuses and laying off 40% of the staff. Unless they can somehow land a major corporate client within 48 hours. But the client they want, a Mr Davies, thinks the corporate culture there – with all its layoffs 
and uncertainties — is no good. So it’s up to Josh, Clay and Tracy – and the rest of the company — to hold the best party ever… and to convince Mr Davies to save the company and their jobs.
The rest of the movie is a just a wild office party, exactly what the title suggests. Picture live reindeer, cocaine, naked people sitting on 3-D printers, a Santa with cash taped to his body… and widespread mayhem and destruction. It’s like the movie Project X but for grownups. Is it funny? Yes it is. Constant gags and laughs, with truly funny ones every so often. And the small parts are even funnier than the main ones, including Jillian Bell as a deranged female pimp.
Office Christmas Party, Tampopo, and Sugar Mountain all open today in Toronto; check your local listings. Sugar Mountain is also available today on Video on Demand.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Out of Sight. Movies reviewed: The Unseen, Castle in the Sky
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Not everything you see is the plain truth. Sometimes you have to dig deeper to see what’s really there. This week I’m looking at movies about things kept out of sight. There’s a classic Japanese anime about a city that can’t be found, and a new Canadian thriller/horror about a man who’s not all there.
The Unseen
Wri/Dir: Geoff Redknap
Bobby Langmore (Aden Young) was an NHL golden boy, a wizard on the ice. He was happily married to Darlene (Camille Sullivan) with a young daughter, Eva, when something happened. He still felt healthy and normal, but his skin and flesh 
appeared to be rotting away. This was a secret he had to keep hidden. He climbed into a truck and never looked back. Now, eight years later, he still works in a saw mill in northern BC. His only family contact is the monthly cheques he sends them. His life up north is drab and desolate, his only friend the joint he smokes after a hard day.
Bob is equal parts gruff, tough, and scruff.
Meanwhile, in the lower mainland, his daughter Eva (Julia Sarah Stone) is 16 now and barely remembers her dad. 
She’s a cute non-conformist with a chip on her shoulder. She lives a comfortable life with her mom and her mom’s wife. But she is increasingly troubled and alienated from family and friends, and threatens to just take off and never come back. Darlene sees something of 
Bob in her, so she gives him a call: I think you need to talk to Eva.
He walks off his job the next day… but needs help getting there. He makes a deal with Crisby (Ben Cotton), a sketchy local drug dealer, to pay for truck repairs. But soon after he reaches his former family, Eva disappears. You see, she has the same mysterious affliction, but no one has 
told her what it means. So she explores a boarded-up mental hospital with hopes of finding her grandfather’s files. He committed suicide there years before and Eva wonders if she’s headed down the same path. Can Bob find his missing daughter and tell her what’s what? Or will history repeat itself for another generation?
The Unseen is a creepy look at a working class family with a strange condition in small town BC. It’s dark and misanthropic, with only family loyalty – and a few kind strangers – to counter its dark and grumpy view of humanity. The acting is angry but good, and the film has a raw, realistic feel to it, from the scenic sawmill to the ramshackle houses everyone seems to live in. It’s a good, strong, dramatic horror film.
And the special effects that finally appear – or disappear! – toward the end of the film are fantastic.
Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) 1986
Dir: Miyazaki Hayao
Pazu is an orphan who lives in a hillside mining town. He sleeps in a crumbling stone home with a dovecot on the roof, and starts each morning with a trumpet to rouse the all the people in the town below. All that he has from his parents are photos and drawings of a mythical place called Laputa. But one day while working at the complex machinery above the mineshaft, he sees something falling from the skies. It’s a little girl, 
unconscious, drifting slowly down to earth. He catches her and brings her home. Who is she and where did she come from?
Her name is Sheeta, raised in an alpine town north of there. She’s an orphan like Pazu, her only possession a glowing crystal she wears around her neck. And it’s that jewel that keeps her on the run. She was kidnapped by 
soldiers — and a haughty government agent named Muska – who flew her away in mechanical blimp. But hey were attacked by a gang of air pirates who attacked the ship. Both groups are after one thing – Sheeta’s crystal. It’s made from a rare stone with special properties – it can counteract gravity. But it can only be activated by the incantations Sheeta knows. But their real aim is to locate Laputa, the mythical island in the sky mentioned in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Dola and the pirates crave the treasure, the military its potential weapons, while Muska has far more sinister plans.
Sheeta and Pazu have only their wits, stamina and each other to depend on. So they embark on a series of highspeed train rides, car chases, and flying machines 
battles, making odd alliances on the way. There are even long armed metallic robots. But which of them will find that castle in the sky?
This film is 30 years old, and was the first made by Japan’s famed Ghibli studios. It’s filled with kid-pop references. Pazu’s moustachioed uncle looks like Super Mario, Sheeta was raised in Heidi country near the Alps, and Dola — the head pirate with her giant red pigtails — is a grown-up Anne of Green Gables gone to seed. It has vaguely subversive views, anti-military and anti-government, with strong female role models. Replete with steampunk exploits and amazing views from the sky, I just had a chance to see this kids’ cartoon on the big screen for the first time and it really grabbed me. Great movie.
The Unseen played at last week’s Blood in the Snow Canadian film festival (Winner: Best Feature: The Unseen, Dir. Geoff Redknap, Katie Weekley, Producer; Best Actor: Aden Young, The Unseen) and The Castle in the Sky is opening as part of Spirited Away: the Films of Studio Ghibli at TIFF; go to tiff.net for showtimes. It’s playing on Christmas Eve.
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 director Tiffany Hsiung about The Apology
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Japan joined the European race for colonies late in the game. But they took to it with a vengeance, expanding ever southward. First Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, and by the 
1930s they began to seize territory in Eastern China, Southeast Asia and Islands of the Pacific and South China seas. And at the vanguard of all this was the Japanese Imperial Army. To keep the soldiers free from disease they initiated a program of Comfort Women (従軍慰安婦). Over 
200,000 girls and young women from Japanese colonies across Asia were forced into sexual slavery to serve the troops. Because of the shame involved, the survivors remained silent for fifty years. What happened to them, what are their stories, and what apologies do they seek?
The Apology is a new NFB feature documentary that follows three elderly Comfort Women – from Korea, China and the Philippines — who survived that horrible ordeal. It is a highly personal film, seen through Hsiung’s eyes as she documents the three Grandmothers’ lives while they still have a chance to tell their stories.
The Apology opens in Toronto today. I spoke with Tiffany Hsiung in studio at CIUT.
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