Daniel Garber talks to OCADU artist-in-residence Isaac Julien with Yuling Chen
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Thatcher’s England was a place of great unrest and mistrust. The country was rocked by strikes, demonstrations and riots. It was also the time of a burgeoning music scene, with fashion, art and the punk movement inspiring international change. It was into this world that Isaac Julien came of age in London’s East EndAs an artist and filmmaker he embraced three separate movements: the Afro-Caribean scene, London’s gay nightlife and the largely white progressive left. His work incorporated themes of sex, politics and interracial 
relationships. Over the decades to follow, his focus shifted from film to art installations.
From young soul rebel to international art star, Julien’s moving image installations can now be seen in Europe, Asia and around the world. Recently two of his works ran at the Royal Ontario Museum, another is on at the Museum of Modern Art, and two of his early films will be screening at Toronto’s Images Festival. He’s artist in residence at OCAD University (the Ontario College of Art and Design) where he is mentoring five students who will follow him to London.
Yuling Chen is a Toronto artist, originally from Hainan, China. She creates animation, video and performance art and is studying with Isaac Julien.
I spoke to Isaac Julien and Yuling Chen in studio at CIUT.
Fighting Monsters. Films Reviewed: Tickling Giants, The Void, The Zookeeper’s Wife
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
If relationship, family, work or school problems are too hard to handle, a movie is a good place to escape it. Especially if the people on the screen are fighting real monsters. This week I’m looking at movies bout people facing monsters. There’s a Polish zookeeper facing the Nazis, a political comic facing a military government, and a smalltown sheriff facing something scary… he’s just not sure what.
Tickling Giants
Dir: Sara Taksler
Bassem Youssef is a heart surgeon in Cairo. In the heady days of the Arab Spring, he heads to Tahrir Square to help support protesters as best he can. Many of them are beaten and need medical attention. But what he really wants to be is a comedian – specifically a political comic like Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. Under Mubarek, outright criticism of the government was not permitted. But with the newfound freedom that came with the popular
uprising, he is able to launch a TV show, known simply as the show. With a team of writers and producers it brings political satire to the masses. The show is wildly popular, but the newly elected president Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t like him one bit. So he takes him to court and loses! Baassem Youssef is a free man. Until… Morsi is overthrown in a military coup, putting General Sisi 
in charge of Egypt. Sisi is popular and dictators don’t like criticism. SomeoPro-Sisi protesters declare Youssef a traitor for criticizing the army, while others fear he will disrupt the relative calm the military coup brought. Is Bassem Youssef just what Egyptians need? Or is he too much, too soon?
Tickling Giants is a funny and informative documentary about how US style political humour fares in Egypt’s. Illustrated with political cartoons by a young man Andeel, it offers behind the scene look at TV production and how it influences and is affected by politicians. One criticism: it could have been a bit shorter; it doesn’t take almost two hours to tell this simple story.
The Void
Wri/Dir: Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski
Daniel (Aaron Poole) is a police sheriff in a small town – a place with very little crime. So he’s startled to see a bloodied young man, under the influence, come stumbling out of the woods. But when he takes him to the nearby hospital where his wife Alison (Kathleen Munroe) is a doctor in the ER, things get strange. Patients behave erratically, and two heavily armed men show up at the gate threatening to kill the kid. Stranger still, a group of identically-dressed men appear outside the hospital 
brandishing large knives. They are wearing white sheets and hoods, sort of like flat-topped Klansmen, but with a mysterious triangle painted on the front their faces.
And otherworldly visions appear in Daniel’s mind, full of dark clouds roiling over a lunar landscape. Has the town been invaded by satanic worshippers, drug fiends or sex-crazed maniacs? Nobody knows for sure. It’s up to the people trapped in the hospital — including a 
pregnant woman, a kindly doctor (Kenneth Welsh) a young intern, and a state trooper (Art Hindle) – have to settle their differences and fight the mysterious powers before they tear each other apart.
The Zone is a horror and psychological thriller about ordinary people driven to extremes in there resistance to unknown killers. There are some fun scenes and a few shocking parts — and I loved the weird images that appear in Daniel’s head — but on the whole, it’s more unintentionally funny that genuinely scary. Some of they dialogue is atrocious, and much of the movie left me scratching my heads as to what exactly is going on. (For example, when two characters are fighting in an imaginary landscape, you don’t know which of them is hallucinating.) I kept waiting for the robot commentators from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 to appear on the screen to explain it all to me.
The Zookeeper’s Wife
Dir: Niki Caro
It’s 1939 in Warsaw. Husband and wife Antonina and Jan Zabinsky (Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh) run the zoo as if the amimals are family members. Especially Antonina. She’s a female Doctor Doolittle, who really does talk to the animals. She goes for daily runs around the park with a dromedary and sleeps with a white lion cub. And at a party, everyone sees her save an elephant calf from choking. Especially impressed is Lutz 
Heck, a leading German zoologist (Daniel Brühl). But when the Germans invade, their world is turned upside down. The zoo is bombed and wild animals run rampant across the city. Afterwards Lutz offers to help save the zoo animals by sending the best ones – the purest breeds – to Berlin. (Purest breeds? Sounds a bit Nazi…) Sure enough, the next time she sees him, he’s dressed in full Nazi regalia. He’s a high-ranked officer. And he has his eye on the beautiful Antonina. But she and Jan have a 
plan of their own: to help save their Jewish friends and colleagues from certain death in the Warsaw Ghetto, and help move guns to the resistance. The concoct a complex plan to smuggle people out of the ghetto inside a garbage truck holding slop to feed their pigs. (They’ve turned their beloved zoo into a pig farm.) They are hidden in plain sight, inside the Zabinsky villa even while Lutz is operating an army base on the same premises. Will there plan succeed? Or will they and their rescued friends be sent to their deaths?
Based on a true story, the Zookeeper’s Wife is a romantic drama set in war-torn Warsaw, where a zoo serves as a secret sanctuary for Jews escaping the Nazi death machine. It’s also a Holocaust rescue story… with furry animals. As 
such, it abbreviates familiar images that have been shown in movies so often: broken windows, Nazi banners covering public buildings, ashes falling like snowflakes, children loaded onto cattle cars… At the same time, it avoids most of the blood, death and gore — the camera always turns away. There are some devestatingly sad parts, like a young girl, Urszula (Shira Haas) who is raped by two German soldiers before she is rescued. Still the movie didn’t show me much I haven’t already seen, aside from the zoo — which had new, haunting images.
Good as a tearjerker.
The Zookeeper’s Wife and The Void both open today in Toronto; check your local listings. Tickling Giants is playing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival this weekend. Go to tiff.net/human-rights-watch/.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Family relations. Films reviewed: The Second Time Around, Wilson, Personal Shopper
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Family ties can span generations. This week I’m looking at movies about family relationships. There’s a grandmother looking for love, a middle-aged misanthrope looking for his daughter, and a young woman in Paris looking for her twin brother… even though she knows he’s dead.
The Second Time Around
Dir: Leon Marr
Katherine (Linda Thorson) is an elegant, silver-haired widow who loves the opera. She dreams of someday seeing a performance at La Scala. She lives with Helen, her grouchy daughter (Laura de Carteret), Helen’s husband, and her granddaughter Sarah, an art student (Alexis Harrison). But when she breaks her hip, she is placed in a retirement home for rehab and recovery. It’s a huge 
change. Up to now, she has always lived in a family home: with her parents, then her husband and finally her daughter. Not to worry, her temporary home is full of new friends.
There she meets Isaac (Stuart Margolin), a gruff and grumpy old man who complains about everything. A former tailor, he smokes cigars, plays poker with his buddies, and is never far from a mickey of rye. But when she catches him unobserved, mending clothes for a friend while softly singing a yiddish tune, 
she discovers Isaac is actually a pretty nice guy. Sparks fly and their relationship develops… perhaps to something bigger?
The Second Time Around is a gentle, low-key drama with the feel of a high school movie of the week. Retirement homes apparently 
have clubs, cliques, lunchroom gossip, even a senior prom — in a place where everyone’s a senior. It also deals with a slew of real life issues, including death, disabilities, depression… as well as passionate sex. And it features Canadian TV stars from the past half century: Louis Del Grande, Paul Soles, Jayne Eastwood and the late Don Francks in his last movie role. I just felt it hard to connect with what was, essentially, The Retirees of Degrassi Street.
Wilson
Dir: Craig Johnson (Based on the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes)
Wilson (Woody Harrelson) is a middle-aged man who lives in a tiny house, with a small dog, in an unremarkable city. He has two personality traits that don’t go together. He 
loves social contact and will talk to strangers; but he also hates people and thinks the world is going to hell. He’s an opinionated, overbearing misanthrope who swears like a sailor. When his old man dies and he realizes he’s all alone in this world, he climbs into his wood-panelled station 
wagon and sets out to find his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern). She was a pregnant, drug-addicted sex worker when she left him 17 years earlier. Last thing he heard she got an abortion and moved far, far away. But Wilson doesn’t use computers, smartphones or social networks. So he doesn’t realize she lives in the next county over, and that all those years ago, she put their baby up 
for adoption. Now they team up to find the 17- year-old. But can a misbegotten family hold together based only on rude behaviour patterns and DNA?
Wilson is a very funny, dark comedy about a man looking for his place in a world he doesn’t like. It’s based on the graphic novel by the amazing cartoonist Daniel Clowes, who brought us works like Ghost World, and Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. It’s not your typical slapstick comedy. Rather, it’s a hilariously sad look at the fate of unlikeable outcasts and what they can learn.
Personal Shopper
Wri/Dir: Olivier Assayas
Maureen (Kristin Stewart) is a personal shopper for a super celebrity named Kyra. Her boyfriend lives in Oman, and her twin brother is dead. She roams the aisles of haut couture houses choosing sequinned gowns, leather harnesses and priceless baubles for her boss. She carries blank cheques to pay for it all but earns little money herself. She puts up with Kyra’s tyrannical 
behaviour because she needs to stay in Paris until she receives a sign from her twin brother. Lewis had the same heart defect she suffers from and they both vowed who ever died first would communicate with the other.
She spends the night in the spooky, empty house where Lewis used to live, to see if he would talk to her. Instead she sees a troubled spirit that scratches crosses into the 
furniture. Later she starts receiving anonymous texts on her phone, by someone who seems to know her every thought. It pays for hotel rooms and sends her cryptic paper notes. Is the mysterious stalker a man or a woman, living or dead? And should she be excited… or terrified?
Personal Shopper is a great new drama – in English, but set in Paris – from French director Olivier Assayas, who recently brought
us Clouds of Sils Maria. This one’s even better. It neatly combines theosophy and spiritualism with high fashion and celebrity culture. Maureen bridges the two sides. I like Kristin Stewart – my main problem with her is she’s not a great speaker. She tends to mumble and always speaks the same way. Luckily in this movie she relies less on her voice, and more on her body, her face, her movement. She broods and she panics. She poses with her naked torso at a fashion house, or curls up into a ball in a haunted mansion. Stewart is the movie, and she does a good job of it. I really liked this movie.
Personal Shopper, Wilson and The Second Time Around all start today in Toronto; check your local listings. The Canadian Film Fest is on now, and Sundance Now — a curated indie, doc and art house channel — starts streaming in Canada today.
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 Sarah Kolasky and Adam Garnet Jones about Great Great Great
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Lauren and Tom have been together for five years. Lauren is smart, sexy and successful, while unemployed Tom is a mild-mannered homebody who really loves her. They’re a perfect couple… until two things happen. First Lauren’s parents divorce. Her mom says a good marriage isn’t good enough – she deserves a great one. Then Lauren discovers her new boss is Dave, a man she had a passionate tryst with years before she ever met 
Tom. Dave is older and aggressive; Tom is faithful but wimpy. Should she stick to brunches and Lego with Tom? Or go for 50 Shades of Dave. Which relationship is just good enough, and which one will be great, great, great?
Great Great Great is a new feature, a bittersweet comedy drama, shot in Toronto and playing next Thursday at the Canadian Film Fest. It’s co-written by Adam Garnet Jones and Sarah Kolasky. Adam 
also directed the award-winning film Fire Song – I spoke to him on this show in 2015. Sarah who plays Lauren, is an accomplished producer, writer and sketch comic from Toronto.
I spoke to Adam Garnet Jones via telephone from Winnipeg and Sarah Kolasky in studio at CIUT.
We talk about sex, relationships, nudity, Toronto, Daniel Beirne, comedy… and more!
GREAT GREAT GREAT won Best Feature at the 2017 Canadian Film Fest.
Dreams and Memories. Films reviewed: An American Dream, The Sense of an Ending
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Spring film festival season continues in Toronto with the Canadian Film Fest. This annual event showcases new indie features along with short films before each movie. Films range from horror to comedies to dramatic thrillers, but they’re all made by Canadians. There’s even a Rob Ford movie.
This week I’m looking at movies about memories and dreams. There’s a British look at a forgotten past, and a Canadian take on the American dream.
An American Dream: The Education of William Bowman
Wri/Dir: Ken Finkleman
William (Jake Croker) is a corn-fed high school football player whose NFL dreams are shattered with an untimely tackle. So he sets out to make it on just his moxie and good looks. He bounces from Wall Street to skid row, from porn actor to bible thumper in a matter of days. And the omnipresent cameras, reality shows, and fake news networks turn William into a national hero. This is an outsiders’ view of America as a land of God, guns, and puritans obsessed with pervy sex. There’s government surveillance and a culture of fear that’s all but drowned out by a steady stream of celebrity adulation. That’s the American Dream covered by this picaresque, dark comedy.
It’s by Ken Finkleman, known for his screenplays and CBC comedies. This one is a lot of fun.
The Sense of an Ending
Dir: Ritesh Batra (Based on the novel by Julian Barnes)
Tony (Jim Broadbent) is a divorced, retired Englishman whose adult daughter Susie is pregnant. He and his divorced wife, a lawyer, take turns going to pregnancy classes with Susie. And he spends his time running a tiny, vintage camera shop. But his dull, eventless life is shaken up by an unexpected letter. In university, he fell for Veronica, an aloof and pretty woman. He spent a crucial weekend at her home, where he met her sexually vivacious mother Sarah, her ineffectual father and her Cambridge-educated brother. The letter he receives is a legal document — Veronica’s 
mother Sarah is dead, and he’s mentioned in her will. She left him the diaries of Tony’s best friend Adrian Finn who died many years ago. This brings back a flood of memories of his youth.
Adrian once remarked that history is written by the victors of wars, and we can never know the thoughts of a dead man, one who chose his own ending, unless we are inside his head. So he is determined to read 
Adrian’s diary. But he’s blocked from doing so by Veronica (Charlotte Rampling) who hands him a letter he wrote instead of Adrian’s diary.
You see, when they were all students Tony discovered that his best friend had an affair with his first crush. And faced with such a cruel act of betrayal he wrote a spiteful letter to Adrian cursing him and Veronica and any children they might have. To hell with them all. And now, he is haunted by those words.
So to clear his conscience, and to find out the truth, he starts following Veronica around and enquiring about her family and her past. But the truth he finds is way beyond what 
he ever expected.
The Sense of an Ending is a fantastic retelling of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-winning novel. It’s told through Tony’s recollections, as he relives his lost past with the revelations of these letters. And as his perceived memories change with each shocking revelation, we see the old Tony superimposed in his memories of his younger self. I love Julian Barnes’s novels, and it turns out I read this one years ago, but 
the movie version was different enough that it didn’t spoil the story. This is a surprisingly moving film told in a gently shocking way. And the acting is fantastic – not just Broadbent and Rampling, but the entire cast. Great movie.
The Sense of an Ending starts today in Toronto; check your local listings. An American Dream is the opening night film at the Canadian Film Fest. For tickets go to canfilmfest.ca. 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 Hirokazu Kore-eda about After the Storm at #TIFF16
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Ryota is a middle-aged man, separated from his wife and son, and estranged from his mother. Once a rising star in Japan’s literary world, his one novel gathers dust in second-hand bookstores. He hasn’t published anything for 15 years. Instead he earns his living at a skeezy detective agency, 
taking incriminating photos and selling them back to the victims caught on film. What money he does earn goes not for rent or child support but directly to the racetracks. A death in the family brings all the players in his life — his mother, his ex-wife Kyoko and Shingo his son – together again, in his childhood home. But clouds are gathering as a typhoon approaches. Will they still be talking… after the storm?
After the Storm is the name of the newest film by festival favourite and award-winning filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu. He wrote, directed and edited this film, a bittersweet, yet tender look at families, disappointment and loss. This film had its Canadian premier at the Toronto International Film Festival. I spoke to him on location at TIFF16.
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s feature After the Storm is now playing in Toronto.
Photos by Jeff Harris.
Daniel Garber talks to filmmaker Kevan Funk about Hello Destroyer
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Tyson Burr is a minor league hockey player in Prince George, BC. He’s a rookie at his first job but is already getting a reputation as a destroyer, an enforcer who keeps the other teams’ players at bay. Violence on the ice is strongly encouraged. But when an overzealous fight sends a player to hospital, Tyson falls from hero to zero overnight. He is forced to move back home,
work at manual labour and try to pull what’s left of his life back together in the rise, fall and rise again of a hockey destroyer.
Hello Destroyer is a first feature which premiered at TIFF16 and was chosen as one of Canada’s Top
Ten Films of 2017. It’s a thoughtful and impressionistic examination of violence and self-worth in a distinctly Canadian setting. The film is written and directed by prize-winner Kevan Funk, and opens today in Toronto.
I spoke with Kevan Funk, in studio, about hockey, violence, masculinity, Canadian machismo, Todd Bertuzzi, hockey movies… and more!
Heimat Films. Movies reviewed: Schultze Gets the Blues, Window Horses
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Heimat is the German word for home, homeland and fatherland… with hints of blood and soil. It’s also the name of a particular postwar film genre. Backed with strong American encouragement it helped Germans forget their economic problems and troublesome past, and look blithely forward toward a better tomorrow. Heimat films were made in southern Germany and popular in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, depicting traditional small towns filled with girls in blonde
pigtails. Heimat films are having a comeback in contemporary Germany, perhaps in response to Conservative governments and feelings of turmoil and insecurity. They concentrate on a mixture of traditional, homogeneous, smalltown Germany, so-called authentic culture, and a longing for a simpler past. Toronto’s Goethe Films: Heimat Now series is running until March 14th.
This week I’m looking at movies about home. There’s a comedy about German man whose accordion leads him to zydeco; and an animated feature about a Canadian woman whose poems lead her to Shiraz.
Schultze Gets the Blues
Wri/Dir: Michael Schorr
Schultze (Horst Krause) is a miner in a small town Germany. This town is so small that the radio traffic report is just a long pause. The village is dominated by a railroad crossing, a motorcross track and an enormous slag pile, expelled from the mine where Schultze works with his two friends Jurgen (Harald Warmbrunn) and Manfred (Karl Fred Muller). But when the three men retire they find they have nothing to do. Chess games end in fights, and trips to the local pub means 
just the same old faces, over and over.
At least Schultze has his garden gnomes and his trusty accordion. Like his father before him, he’s been entertaining townsfolk with his polkas for two generations. They’re even planning on sending a cultural emissary to its twin city in Texas. Nothing ever changes, until one day, out of nowhere, he hears accordion music 
on his radio that isn’t quite right. It disturbs him. It’s not a polka, it’s faster, jumpier, and catchier. What is this Amerikanische music? It has entered Schultze’s brain and will not go away. Locals listen in horror and shout the N-word at him. So Schultze sets off for the swamps and bayous of America in search of Zydeco. And he finds the people in small town Texas a whole lot like the ones he left back home.
Schultze Gets the Blues is a simple, endearing comedy about a big-bellied man looking for meaning in music. I have to admit watching this movie felt, at first, like watching paint dry. I guess I’m a city boy used to a faster pace. But once I adjusted to the slower small-town rhythms, it was funnier, fascinating, almost profound. I ended up liking it.
Window Horses
Wri/Dir: Ann Marie Fleming
Rosie Ming (Sandra Oh) is a young woman with pigtails who lives in Vancouver but dreams of Paris. Her mom died, and her dad abandoned her when she was just a little girl so now she lives with her kind but overprotective grandparents.
She works in a fast food joint, and loves poetry, berets and the romance of far-off France. She writes down the words that come to her as she strums at her guitar, and publishes a collection of these poems at a vanity press. Imagine her surprise when she’s invited to a poetry festival far away. Not in 
Paris, France, but in Shiraz, Iran. With her grandparents consent she arrives there, a Chinese-looking Canadian dressed in a black chador, the most conservative type of Iranian dress, a combination black hijab and full-length gown.
At the poetry festival, she seems out of place. Iran is a land of poetry and Shiraz its poetic capital. At poetry 
slams she tries to understand what she hears, but the poems in Farsi, German and Chinese evade her. Gradually she meets people who had heard of her… through her father. Far from abandoning her, she discovers her dad was forced to leave her and kept away from her by outside forces. Not only that, but he was Iranian, loved poetry and once lived in Shiraz. His story, and its connection to Rosie May is gradually revealed through the music, the poetry and the people who seek her out. But will she ever discover the truth 
about her Iranian father?
Window Horses is a visually and musically beautiful movie, portraying a naïve Canadian woman exposed to a colourful and culturally rich country. This is an animated film with simple drawings. Rosie is a stick figure with two lines for eyes, who almost disappears in her Chador. Others have faces decorated with oblong jowls and curlicue eyes. Animation shifts from traditional two dimensional figures to sepia -coloured 3-D frescoes. Voices are provided by Sandra Oh as Rosie, with Don McKellar, Ellen Page and Shohreh Aghdashloo in other roles.
I like this movie.
Window Horses starts today in Toronto; check your local listings. And Schultze Gets the Blues is playing at the Heimat Now series at the Goethe Institute in Toronto.
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 Raindance founder Elliot Grove
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Movies look so easy on the screen, but the trip from story to script to finished product is 
long and arduous. So how do you do it? How do you break into the film industry?
You may have heard of the festival called Raindance. Based in London, 
Raindance is a combination of movies, courses, lectures and networking, a veritable indie hub for aspiring actors, writers and filmmakers. It’s where many new players turn to learn the ropes of filmmaking.
Founded in 1993 it is the work of author and filmmaker Elliot Grove, who is in Toronto for two weeks of intensive panels on pitching, writing and selling films.
I spoke with Elliot Grove in studio at CIUT.
Lions and Lambs. Films reviewed: Handsome Devil, Before I Fall, Bitter Harvest, Table 19
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
March came in like a lamb, followed by a pride of lions, roaring at the gate. I’m talking about the spring film festival season, which is on now with films from Ireland and more.
This week I’m looking at movies with lions and lambs: a few comedies plus one tragedy. There’s friendship in Ireland, tragedy in Ukraine, fantasy in the northwest and a wedding in the midwest.
Handsome Devil
Wri/Dir: John Butler
Ned (Fionn O’Shea) is a skinny redhead at a boy’s boarding school in Ireland. He likes reading and indie music, and dresses in hip rocker gear. Popular kid, right? Wrong. He’s bullied, reviled and labeled as gay just because he’s not into rugby. and rugby is the school 
sport.
Enter Conor (Nicholas Galitzine) his new roommate. Conor was kicked out of his last school for fighting. Is he an outcast? Just the opposite. He’s handsome, athletic and on the pitch he’s both nimble and brutal. He quickly becomes the king of rugby, a 
veritable idol at his new school. He’s even nice to Ned, and stops the bullies — especially one called Weasel — from beating him up. Has Ned found a friend?
Things get even better when a new English teacher, Mr Sherry (Andrew Scott) encourages the kids to broaden their interests beyond just rugger, to include music and literature. But that’s sacrilege, and the coach won’t have it. He decides to break up Ned and Conor’s friendship whatever it takes.
Handsome devil is a funny and moving coming-of-age story about an unexpected friendship. I like this one.
Before I Fall
Dir: Ry Russo-Young
It’s a big day for Sam (Zoey Deutch), a teenaged girl in the Pacific northwest. It’s Valentine’s day and she’s going to have sex with her boyfriend for the first time. Her dad and mom (Jennifer Beals), and her cute little sister who likes origami, are all nice but they just don’t get it. It’s her posse, her three best friends, that she shares everything with: Ally – rich but insecure; Elody – sexually 
audacious; and Lindsay (Halston Sage). She’s the alpha dog, the honey badger: she always keeps her cool; just don’t get on her bad side.
Her school has special traditions for Cupid Day. All the girls (except the class lesbian) receive messages from their admirers. While the teacher drones on about the myth of Sisyphus, Sam gets baskets of roses delivered to her desk… including one 
from Kent (Logan Miller), a geeky poet in her class that she ignores. In the café, the four friends relentlessly mock Juliet Sykes (Elena Kampouris) a blonde woman with frizzy hair. She’s the school pariah… are Sam and her friends bullies? That night at the party, things spiral out if control, with a breakup, a drunken fight and a terrible car crash.
But the next morning it’s a new day and everything’s back to normal. Until Sam realizes… it’s the same day as yesterday! Her little sister’s origami, the rose from Kent, Juliet in the cafeteria, and the fight at the party. Like Sysiphus, she’s caught in a cosmic, karmic loop, and she can’t escape. No 
matter what she tries to change, she still wakes up each morning on Valentine’s Day. Can Sam right all her wrongs in a single day, or will she be stuck to repeat them forever?
Before I Fall, is a fantasy set in the present day. There have been others about people caught in a repeating loop – Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code – but this is the first I’ve seen from a female point of view. Like the Twilight series, it’s set in the Pacific North West but without its unbearable soppiness. This is a good YA movie.
Bitter Harvest
Dir: George Mendeluk
It’s the 1930s in a small village in Ukraine. Yuri (Max Irons) is a young farmer who is also a skilled artist. He’s the grandson of a great swordsman named Ivan (Terrence Stamp), and is in love with his childhood sweetheart Natalka (Samantha Barks). They paint, frolic in the woods and attend church regularly. All is going well until the Russian Bolsheviks come to town, led by a man with a scar across his cheek. Sinister 
Sergei (Tamer Hassan) is dressed in black leather from head to toe and carries a whip. Sign this paper, he orders, and collectivize those farms! Your farm, your wheat, even you belong to the state now! The people refuse and chase Sergei out of the village. But he will return.
After hiding the treasured town icon of St Yuri, his namesake sets off to Kiev carrying his grandfathers prized knife. In the city, he studies art and spends time with his best friend, Mykola. Mykola also happens to be the head of the Ukrainian Communist 
Party, uniting Ukrainian nationalism with socialism. But he doesn’t realize that in Moscow, Stalin has other plans at work. Stalin despises Ukrainians and vows to kill them all. Party members are purged, Yuri is sent to prison, and Stalin, with evil subordinates like Sergei, send all the wheat to Mother Russia, leaving Ukraine with a terrible 
famine killing millions. A Bitter Harvest indeed.
Bitter Harvest is the story of a Ukraine village during the Holodomor, the horrible famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. It’s an important part of history, rarely portrayed, that deserves to be shown on the big screen. This movie, unfortunately, doesn’t quite cut it. While it includes authentic-looking Ukrainian costumes, locations and folklore, the rollicking story is just not told very well. The movie is clunky and Kludgy, unintentionally campy and melodramatic, and full of comic-book villains. It lacks the gravity it deserves. Bitter Harvest isn’t bitter enough.
Table 19
Dir: Jeffrey Blitz
Eloise (Anna Kendrick) is a grudging guest at her best friend’s wedding party at a lakeside hotel in Michigan. Grudging because her boyfriend Teddy – the bride’s brother – dumped her. Blonde, bearded Teddy (played by Wyatt Russell, looking like a younger and dumber Owen Wilson), is best man but Eloise has been demoted from maid of honour at the centre table to the dreaded table 19.
Table 19 is a veritable land of Lost Toys, the cast offs of the wedding party. Bina and Jerry (Lisa Kudrow, Craig Robinson) a bickering middle aged couple; Rezno (Tony Revolori) a socially-awkward adolescent; elderly Jo (June Squibb), the bride’s childhood nanny; and gangly ex-con 
Walter (Stephen Merchant). Eloise is mortified by her table mates and just plain depressed. But things start to look up when a suave and handsome stranger, named Huck, arrives. They dance and kiss before disappearing into the mist like a male Cinderella. But when jealous Teddy confronts her, mayhem ensues, resulting in a ruined wedding cake. The Table 19ers, retreat to their hotel rooms to clean up, and their they learn that they’re a lot more fun than they expected. Together they vow to find love for Eloise, a first date for Rezno, a reunion between Jo the Nanny and the bride, and more.
Table 19 is a gentle social comedy that shows that, once you get to know them, even outcasts are real human beings with foibles of their own. The script is co-written by the Duplass brothers, known for their indie movies about quirky oddballs. It’s tame for a comedy, with a few too many pratfalls, but it’s also touching, with a cute, romantic ending. Hendricks is terrific as Eloise, and the rest of Table 19 all keep their characters from falling into dumb stereotypes.
Table 19, Before I Fall, and Bitter Harvest all start today in Toronto; check your local listings. And Handsome Devil is playing this weekend at Toronto Irish film fest. Go to toirishfilmfest.com for info.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
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