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

The Toronto International Film Festival has begun, but with a twist. It’s #TIFF20 meets COVID19. Gone are celebrities, autograph hounds? Gone. Thousands of volunteers?  Countless parties? Gone, gone, gone. The press corps is cut by 2/3 with feature films chopped from 300 to 50. Indoor movies are few and far between, sparse and spaced, but you can watch the movies at home instead. Normally, I’d have viewed two dozen movies before the festival starts, but this year less than five. This week, I’m reviewing two movies about dysfunctional families, one from Italy and one from the US.

But first I’m talking about TIFF films I haven’t yet seen… bear with me.

#TIFF20: unseen recommendations

Here are a few movies playing at TIFF that caught my eye.

Idris Elba stars in Concrete Cowboy, as a man who rides horses dressed in hat, boots and spurs in North Philadelphia. The film’s about him and his estranged teenaged son who comes to live with him.

Beans (Dir: Tracey Deer) is about the 1990s stand-off between Mohawk communities and the Quebec town of Oka who wanted to expand their golf course onto indigenous land. It’s told through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl named Beans.

Summer of 85 (Dir: Francois Ozon: Frantz, Young and Beautiful, The New Girlfriend) is about a summer love affair on the beaches of Normandy between a young man who almost drowns and the 20 year-old guy who saves him. It’s like Call me By Your Name, but with a sinister undertone.

Quo Vadis, Aïda? is about a journalist trying to save her husband and son in the Bosnian genocide. After seeing Jasmila Žbanic’s first film, the stunning Grbavica 12 years ago, I’m dying to see what she’s up to now.

And finally Night of The Kings about a man in a Cote d’Ivoire prison in Abidjan forced to tell his epic story until the sun rises. Philippe Lacôte’s first film, Run, was brilliant which is why this one looks so good.

These are just a few of the films opening at TIFF.

Blackbird

Dir: Robert Michell

Paul (Sam Neill) and Lily (Susan Sarandon) are a happily married couple. They live in a beautiful wood and glass home, a short stroll to the Pacific ocean. Lily is retired but Paul still practices medicine. They’re getting ready for a big party with family and friends. Her uptight daughter Jennifer (Kate Winslet) is coming, along with her nerdy husband Michael (Rainn Wilson) with his requisite bowties, and their teenage son Jonathan (Anson Boon). Her other daughter Anna (Mia Wasikowska), excentric and needy might also show up, along with her non-binary partner Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus). And Lily’s best friend Liz who she’s known since childhood. The presents are wrapped, the cake is baked and Lily is wearing her favourite dress. Is it her birthday? Chistmas perhaps? A special anniversary?

No. It’s a deathday party. Lily is terminally ill and this is her goodbye celebration before her assisted suicide the next day. But once the liquor is poured and the joints are lit, the guests loosen up, and family secrets and rivalries are revealed. Will Lily go through with her plan? And will her family and friends accept her decision or try to stop it

Based on a Danish film from 2014, Blackbird is a low-key look at a family’s reaction to an important issuet. It’s slow moving but well-acted, like a traditional drawing room comedy, with a serious subtext. But I’m bothered by Lily’s reasoning. Here’s an example. At one point she breaks a glass and says “When you have to drink chablis from a paper cup, you know it’s time.” Really? She walks unassisted and dresses herself, largely free of pain. To me – if there’s ever a time – this seems way to early. But, like I said, Blackbird is a well-made movie and one that makes you think.

The Ties (Lacci)

Dir: Daniele Luchetti

It’s the 1980s in Naples, Italy. Aldo (Luigi Locascio) is a happily-married, bearded man with two kids, Anna and Sandro. They love the stories he tells them in his “radio voice”. He works as a literary critic and announcer at RAI radio – Italy’s CBC — at their headquarters in Rome, where he keeps an apartment. He’s a bit of a celebrity; “an ordinary man who says clever things”. Vanda (Alba Rohrbacher – she starred in this) his wife, has curly blonde hair. She’s a part-time school teacher and takes care of their kids on her own while he’s in Rome on weekdays. All is going great, until one day he confesses he slept with another woman. What he doesn’t tell her, but she suspects, is he’s having a long term affair in Rome with Lidia (Laura Morante) his beautiful co-announcer on their radio show. She kicks him out for the night, but it turns into a long-term separation, punctuated with arguments and fights – always initiated by Vanda. Aldo just passively takes it all in and does nothing but never taking responsibility for his actions. This leaves the kids floundering for attention from their dad, which they rarely get. Can this relationship ever be saved?

The Ties – the title refers to the family ties he has in Naples and the no-strings relationship he desires in rome – is a beautiful crafted look at a fractured family. It jumps back and forth, sometimes second by second, from the 80s to the present day, where Aldo and Vanda are elderly and the kids middle aged, still holding grudges against their Mom and Dad. I love Daniele Luchetti’s work – I always catch his films at TIFF – which is why I made sure to watch this one. He crafts great silent scenes, like behind the glass in a recording booth – and the costumes, set, cinematography are very pretty and cozy. But – like Aldo – the film is more passive than passionate, observing instead of delving deep into his mind. It’s not perfect, but I enjoyed The Ties.

Blackbird opens next week on VOD across Canada, The Ties is screening at TIFF as Industry Selects and premiered at Venice. Go to tiff.net for tickets and info on festival films.

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

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

Corporations were once thought of as benign entities that employed workers, produced goods, sold them in the market place and paid taxes on their profits. But certain things have changed. CEOs now earn salaries a thousand times higher than some full-time employees.

Lobbyists pour huge donations to politicians to change the laws in their favour. Environmental catastrophe is green-washed by fossil fuel corporations. Indigenous lands are seized by big agro, mining and oil companies. Pharmaceutical corporations promote opiates which now kill more people than illegal drugs. And they don’t even pay taxes anymore. Meanwhile their power and wealth grows exponentially, eclipsing national governments and international organizations, privatizing public housing, schools, prisons and hospitals. Is there anything we can do to stop the psychopathic behavior of some of these New Corporations?

The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel is a new Canadian documentary, a follow-up to the smash hit doc The Corporation from 2003. It combines shocking stats with cool animation, news footage and new interviews with activists and intellectuals, from AOC to Robert Reich and Diane Ravitch – and the corporate CEOs themselves. The film is co-directed by award-winning documentary filmmaker Jennifer Abbott and UBC law professor Joel Bakan who wrote the original book. (They both worked on the first film as well.)

I spoke with Jennifer and Joel via ZOOM.

The New Corporation is having its world premier at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, on Sunday, September 13th at 9 pm.

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

Photos of Michelle Latimer by Jeff Harris.

Jarrod is a highschool kid in Kitimat BC. He works at a fast-food drive through and does double duty peddling the happy pills he makes in a cabin in the woods. His mom is a party animal who is shacked up with a tattooed pot dealer and his divorced dad’s girlfriend is preggers. He ends up acting the adult in his family. But when he reconnects with his best friend, and a new girl with purple hair moves in across the street, things seem to be looking up. That is until weird things start happening. He’s chased by his doppelganger at a party. A crow seems to talk to him. And a strange man comes to town to tell him he’s his actual father. Are these things real or just drug-induced halucinations? And can that strange man be believed, or is he just a trickster?

Trickster is a new, slow-burn TV drama starting this fall that combines ordinary lives with mystery and magic told within the cloak of indigenaity. It has its world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, along with a documentary called The Inconvenient Indian. Inspired by Thomas King’s book, the doc exposes the erasure of history while celebrating a vibrant living culture. Both Trickster and The Inconvenient Indian are directed by the award-winning Michelle Latimer who is also known for documenting the Standing Rock protests at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. Michelle splits her time between Toronto and Treaty 9 territory.

The Inconvenient Indian will have its world premier at TIFF on September 12, 2020, with Trickster premiering on September 15.

I spoke with Michelle Latimer in person, in her Toronto home (two metres apart).

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

This week I’m looking at three new movies torn from the headlines, dealing with pandemics, the rise of the alt right and international intelligence. There’s a student searching for genetic data, a spy looking for quantum physics clues, and a cartoonist forced to dissect his favourite frog.

Feels Good Man

Dir: Arthur Jones

It’s 2005, in the early days of social networks, and MySpace is king. Matt Furie is an indie cartoonist who draws Boy’s Club, a comic about four slackers (in animal form) in their twenties who share a house. One image he drew goes viral: it’s Pepe the Frog peeing in a toilet while standing up with his pants pulled down, saying, in explanation, “feels good, man”. Somehow it captures the mood of the time. It spreads to 4chan – a non-commercial, anonymous comment board started by a 14-year-old – where it’s adopted as a meme, and repeated endlessly online. Soon Pepe the Frog turns into Sad Pepe, Smug Pepe, Screaming Pepe – his images are everywhere. A decade later though it’s co-opted by the nascent Alt-Right: Pepe with a Donald Trump wig, Pepe on a neo-nazi flag. Meanwhile, Matt Furie, is still just a comicbook artist, not a superstar like his character. And his beloved pepe is toxic. It’s declared an official symbol of hate by ADL (The Anti-Defamation League). What can a small time cartoonist do?

Feels Good Man is a brilliant documentary that follows the rise and fall of an internet meme. It also touches on crypto currencies, Incels, “punch-a-nazi” Richard Spencer, Hillary Clinton, Fox News… basically everything important from the past 15 years is somehow related to Pepe the Frog. It’s narrated by the people involved – on myspace, 4chan and elsewhere – as well as Furie’s fight to reclaim his character using pro bono lawsuits. (Good luck with that – there are 160 million unique Pepe images floating around online.)

And the film also features beautiful psychedelic, animation of Pepe and his friends – total eye candy. Loved it.

Tenet

Dir: Christopher Nolan

An American special ops soldier (John David Washington) wakes up after taking a poison pill to find out he’s still alive. He was captured by the enemy after trying to stop Chechen terrorists in a Ukraine Opera House. Turns out the pill was a fake, a test to prove his loyalty. And now the CIA sends on a special mission spanning continents. His goal? They don’t say. But it involves seducing the wife (Elizabeth Debicki) of a Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh) using a forged painting in order to uncover a secret weapon. But first, he and his accomplice (Robert Pattinson) must break into an impregnable tower in Mumbai to uncover information held by an international arms dealer named Priya (Dimple Kapadia). But wait – there’s more. A lab-coated scientist tells him powerful forces of quantan physics are at work: as he movies forward, other people and things are moving backwards through time. While we are shooting bullets they catching the same bullets in their guns, as they progress to the past. And unless he completes his mission the whole world will cease to exist.

Tenet is an action thriller about a Black American 007 with a bit of sci-fi jibber-jabber thrown in to make it more interesting. It’s visually stunning, full of brutalist architecture, stark railway tracks and brilliant birds-eye shots of vast industrial wastelands like an Edward Burtynsky photograph. And the special effects are great too, with airplanes plowing into airport terminals, and ingenious fist fights between someone travelling forward in time and someone going backwards. On the other hand, the story is as pointless as it sexless, the characters are dull and opaque, and – despite claims to the contrary – is very old fashioned in its outlook. Men fight while women scheme. Anglo-American spies are the good guys, the world’s policemen, while Russians are the villains. The script is full of fake profundities – “we live in a twilight world” – the plot follows a formulaic uncovering of clues, although with the time/space continuum to keep you interested.

Is Tenet a good movie? No, not really, but after going seven months without a single big-budget new release, seeing this one in an actual theatre (with physical distancing, of course) left me totally satisfied.

Biohackers

Created by Christian Ditter

Mia Ackerland (Luna Wedler) is a young medical student at German University. She lives with three geeky housemates: Chen-Lu (Jing Xiang), a fast-talking science nerd into gene splicing, Ole (Sebastian Jakob Doppelbauer), a socially inept inventor looking for friends; and Lotta (Caro Cult), a rich student who likes sex, drugs and parties. Mia enrolls in a biology class taught by prize winning Prof Lorenz (Jessica Schwarz) and her T.A. Jasper (Adrian Julius Tillmann). She quickly distinguishes herself, starts dating Jasper, and works her wat into the professor’s elite lab. But when she’s asked to supply a DNA sample she panics. What is Mia hiding? What does she hope to discover? What are the professsor’s motives? And can Mia depend on her bio-hacker roommates to join her mission?

Biohackers is a six-part science-thriller TV show about a young student looking for the truth. There are frequent flashbacks to a young girl and her twin brother who died in hospital as a child, giving clues to Mia’s motivation. It starts with a teaser – a mass pandemic aboard a passenger train where everyone collapses with a strange virus… except Mia. Which makes it especially relevant during he COVID crisis. (And the rivalry between her and the professor is like Glenn Close and Rose Byrnn in the TV show Damages.) Biohackers makes for a great binge-watch during a quarantine.

Tenet is now playing in theatres across Canada, Biohackers is streaming on Netflix, and Feels Good Man opens today on VOD. This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.