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

Toronto Fall Film Festival season continues with three festivals on this weekend: ImagineNative, showing indigenous films from around the world, including an art crawl! Toronto After Dark, with action, horror and fantasy and a devoted audience of fans like you’ve never seen;  and Planet in Focus showing some great ecological documentaries, including world premiers. 

But this week I’m talking about two more movies that played at TIFF and are now opening theatrically in Toronto this weekend. There’s a long-distance swimmer battling sharks, and two Wall Street sharks searching for their hidden history.

NYAD

Dir: Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

Diana Nyad (Annette Benning) is a long-distance swimmer, at the top of her game. A competitive swimmer since she was a teen, she broke world records for marathon swimming, starting in 1970. She swims in Naples, Lake Ontario, the English Channel, and other challenges around the world. But her biggest dream is to do something no one has ever done before: swimming from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida. But those are shark infested waters, so they build a special metal shark tank to save her from being eaten. Sadly, the swim proves to be a washout, and after that failure, she gives up competitive swimming altogether, becoming a TV sportscaster instead.

Thirty years later, on her 60th birthday, she has an epiphany: looking at herself in the mirror she just sees a “bag of bones”. But with the encouragement of her best friend (and ex-lover) Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster), she decides to give it one more try… but only if she agrees to be Diana’s coach. This time, they’re going to do it right. Bonnie finds a guy who knows how to scare away approaching sharks, and a captain who never speaks but knows how to handle a boat. Most important, she finds her a navigator (Rhys Ifans) who knows how to read the gulf stream and the weather to avoid swimming against the tide.

After extensive training they all go to Cuba to start the journey. Diana is armed with a playlist of hundreds of songs inside her head to keep swimming to the rhythm,  and Bonnie has food and water to drop into her mouth all along the way (Diana is not allowed to board or even hold onto the boat for a short rest.) Can a woman in her sixties accomplish something no one in the world has done before? Or is it just a delusion?

Nyad is an inspirational biopic about the famous long-distance swimmer and her many tries at accomplishing a seemingly impossible goal. In general, I hate biopics, sports movies, and inspirational stories. But in this case, it totally works. I wanted to see it mainly because it’s directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, a husband-and-wife team of documentarians who specialize in movies about driven individuals trying to accomplish the dangerous and impossible. Like Free Solo, their Oscar-winning doc about a mountain climber who wants to scale a sheer cliff without nets or other safety measures. But this is their first try directing  actors. Annette Benning plays Diana realistically, as a sometimes difficult, self-centred woman with a 60-year-old body without the usual Hollywood nips and tucks. Jodie Foster and  Rhys Ifans deliver reserved but supportive performances. And the underwater photography is brilliant, all the way through.

If you feel like giving up, watch Nyad for some reasons to keep on trying. 

Dicks: The Musical

Dir: Larry Charles

It’s present-day Manhattan. Trevor (Aaron Jackson) and Craig (Josh Sharp) are dicks — in the sense they are selfish, insensitive and obnoxious. They both sleep with beautiful women on one nights stands and make big bucks in sales, due to their ruthless ambition — they’re Number One in their respective regions. They live next door to each other, but they’ve never actually met.  Until Gloria, their hard-ass boss (Megan Thee Stallion), brings them together in a company-wide competition. It’s hate at first sight… until they make a startling discovery: they’re not just cut-throat rivals, they’re identical twins, separated at birth! They were each raised by one of their parents.

With their sudden ties, they put their careers on hold in favour of a new goal: to meet each other’s parents discover why they did it, and perhaps to bring them together again. Since this is a musical comedy, they switch places using wigs and

disguises. Turns out, both their parents are totally whack. Harris (Nathan Lane), their Dad, is gay and has no interest in remarrying  a woman. Furthermore, he keeps a pair of tiny demons with pointy teeth in his apartment; he calls them the sewer boys, Backpack and Whisper. Evelyn (Megan Mullally) has been a recluse since her vagina fell out, and presumably ran away. Can the two dicks ever get their parents back together again?

Dicks: The Movie is a funny, very campy musical-comedy based on the play of the same name, written by the two stars.  Each song is more ridiculous than the one before, featuring an amazing number with Megan Thee Stallion. And there’s a thread of absurdity running through the entire film.   It simultaneously makes fun of musical comedy while  totally embracing it. And it really is hilarious, like a Parent Trap without kids, or a Fringe comedy with a bigger budget. It’s directed by Larry Charles, best known for Seinfeld, Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm, so expect lots of ribald, in-your-face comedy. Bowen Yang narrates the story playing God as a gay man, while Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally are hilarious as the eccentric parents. But it’s mainly all about writers and stars Jackson and Sharp.

Never heard of them before, but I can’t wait for the next thing they do.

Dicks the Musical and Nyad both open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings.

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