Earnest movies. Films reviewed: Champions, Blueback, Nico
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Some movies are just for entertainment, while others have a message. This week, I’m looking at three new movies with an earnest theme, from the US, Australia and Germany. There’s a marine biologist who wants to save a coral reef, a basketball coach who wants to bring a team of disabled people to the championships, and a geriatric nurse who wants to learn how to defend herself… after a racist attack.
Champions
Wri/Dir: Bobby Farelly
Marcus (Woody Harrelson) is a professional basketball coach who has fallen on hard times. Now he’s an assistant coach for a third tier team in Iowa. He’s an arrogant know-it-all who doesn’t know when to shut up. He hooks up with women he meets online but they rarely stay the night. Things go from bad to worse when he’s fired from his team for losing his temper during a game. And then he gets in a car accident for driving while intoxicated.
But the judge shows some sympathy, and sentences him to community service… as a basketball coach. What’s the catch? Everyone on the team has a developmental or intellectual handicap. And they’re hoping to make it to Winnipeg for the regional championships. Problem is, they have no coach and team spirit is near zero. Marcus is equally clueless as to how to coach disabled people.
But gradually they start to get better, and bring back some of their star players. And when they need a bus to take the to away games, a 
woman named Alex (Kaitlin Olson), a Shakespearean actor, volunteers to take them in her costume van. The problem is she’s also one of Marcus’s past one night stands (the danger of living in a small city). They make up and start to get along, even as the team pulls together. But can they make it to Winnipeg? Will Marcus return to his selfish ways or is he a keeper? Is Alex ready to commit? And what are his plans once his three month sentence is up?
Champions is a heartfelt comedy about a down-and-out coach trying to accomplish the impossible. On the downside, it has a fairly predictable plot and Woody Harrelson and Kaitlin Olson are likeable, but seem to coast through their roles. What’s great about this movie is the rest of the cast. The actors playing them have real-life disabilities (they were mainly cast in Winnipeg) including one player who has won a medal at the Special Olympics. They are also funny, wacky and good at what they do. And the characters they play have personalities, sex lives, jobs and families, which you rarely see in films. They’re not there as figures of fun; they’re sympathetic characters who happen to be funny. Thank God the days of Forrest Gump, Gilbert Grape, Nell, and Sling Blade are long gone. Keep in mind, the director previously brought us such gems as Dumb and Dumber and Shallow Hal. So maybe Champions is Bobby Farrelly’s apology?
Blueback
Wri/Dir: Robert Connolly
A small fishing village in Western Asutralia. Abby (Mia Wasikowska) is a marine biologist, who spends much of her time studying samples aboard her boat. Raised by a pearl diver and an activist, Abby grew up as a part of the sea. She has felt at home underwater ever since her mother Dora (Radha Mitchell) taught her how to hold her breath and swim down to the ocean floor. (Her father drowned when she was still little.) On one of these underwater journeys, she encounters an enormous blue fish, bigger than she is. Initially frightened, she soon realizes he’s gentle and intelligent, and will eat from her hand. A western grouper (or groper as they say in Australia), can live for 70 years and rarely strays from its home. Soon they become fast friends — she spends time alone with him, just the two of them, in his hidden alcove within the coral reefs. She also begins to record what she sees, painting watercolours of the fish she encounters. And she names her special friend Blueback.
But all is not well. A rich developer is trying to buy up the land and tear down all the beachfront houses, including Abby and Dora’s. He’s also behind the dredging of the ocean floor, and allowing industrial fisheries and voracious spear hunters to kill endangered species. Is 
Blueback’s life at risk? Will their idyllic home soon be razed? And what will the future hold for Dora and for Abby?
Blueback is a gentle, slow-paced drama about a mother and daughter living in harmony within an aquatic ecosystem. The story is told through a series of flashbacks of Abby as a child and as a teen, living with her single mom. (Her memories come flooding back when she returns home after her elderly mother has a stroke). Dora leads many of the protests and demos in the village, chaining herself to tractors and petitioning the government save their bay. So there are two or three actors playing Dora, Abby as well as her best friend Briggs (Pedrea Jackson, Clarence Ryan). I approached this film with trepidation — oh god, do we really need another talking fish? Luckily, the fish here don’t talk, they just swim around looking pretty (or bulbous with beady eyes in the case of Blueback.) I wasn’t deeply moved by this film, but I liked Doras political protests. And the scenery — both underwater and on land — is gorgeous.
Nico
Co-Wri/Dir: Eline Gehring
Nico (Sara Fazilat) is a Berliner who works as a home-visit nurse for the elderly. She is zaftig, with curly hair and a warm smile. She enjoys going to parties and hanging out with her best friend Rosa (Javeh Asefdjah). She laughs a lot, but don’t get on her bad side — Nico will stand up to anyone who gets in her way. Until one day she is attacked by a group of people in an underpass. They pull her hair, punch her, kick her and hurl racist taunts. She wakes up in hospital in horrible pain with a black eye and bruises and bandages all over her face and body.
Worse than that, she is scared and withdrawn, suffering from PTSD flashbacks to her trauma. To try to win back some of her confidence, Nico signs up for lessons at a karate dojo whose sensei is a former champion. Maybe learning to block a violent stranger will equip her to face any future attack. But so far she is drained of all energy. In the hope of cheering her up, Rosa takes her to the Fun Fair in the park. There they meet a carnie named Ronny (Sara Klimoska). She’s an undocumented young woman from Macedonian who speaks no German, so they use English instead. Ronnie takes them to rides and bumper cars. Nico feels a bit better, but things are still not back to 
normal. Will she ever feel good again? Is Karate the answer? And why is Ronnie being so friendly to her?
Nico is about a woman who loses her identity and self image when attacked by a racist gang, and her attempt to win it back again. She is an assimilated German Berliner, who in just a moment has her entire essence stripped away because of her looks. Nico and Rosa are both of Iranian background but to her attackers she is just another Muslim foreigner. Her feminism, her beliefs, her droll sense of humour, her opposition to wearing a hijab — none of that matters to the people who attack her. The film delves deep into her emotions, both internal and external, as she struggles to recover. Sara Fazilat is excellent as Niko as are the raw-but-real characters surrounding her.
Nico is a realistic film with lots of emotional oomph.
I like this one.
Champions and Blueback open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings. Nico has its Canadian premier on March 14th, 6:30pm, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of Goethe Films: I Have A Crush On You series.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Women in trouble. Films reviewed: Halloween Ends, Tár
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto Fall Film Fest season continues with ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival from the 18th to the 23rd for in-person movies, with online screenings continuing till the end of the month. ImagineNative, celebrating indigenous works from Canada and around the world, features 19 full-length films and over a hundred shorts.
And there are some real goodies to watch; here are four I really like: Slash/Back is about a group of teenaged girls who fight back against mysterious zombie aliens in Nunavut. We Are Still Here tells eight stories from Australia and Aotearoa; Rosie, set in Montreal in the 1980s, looks at a 6-year-old indigenous girl adopted by an aunt she’s never met; and Bones of Crows is an epic, 100-year-long drama about the life of a Cree woman who barely survives a residential school as a piano prodigy, later becomes a code operator in WWII, and what happens in the years to follow. Bones of Crows, Rosie, We Are Still Here, and Slash/Back or just four of the many fantastic films, videos, games and art at ImagineNative.
This week, I’m looking at two new movies about women in trouble. There’s a Berlin conductor facing increasing setbacks, and a small-town woman in Illinois facing a serial killer… and decides to fight back.
Halloween Ends
Co-Wri/Dir: David Gordon Green
It’s Halloween night in a small town in Illinois. Haddonfield is famous for all the wrong reasons: it’s the site of repeated attacks by a demented and violent serial killer. He has terrorized the locals for half a century, wearing a white mask and carrying a long blade. But Michael Myers has disappeared, possibly forever, and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) — who survived his first incarnation as a young babysitter, and has fought him off countless times since then — is glad to see him gone. Now she lives with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) who works as a nurse at a local medical centre. With her parents (Laurie’s daughter) gone (both killed by Michael Myers, along with dozens of others) Alyson sticks around to keep her grandma company. Laurie spends her time writing a book about the essence of pure evil, based on her own 
experiences fighting the monster. And she also wants to stop this malaise from infecting the whole town.
But there’s a new factor in the equation. Former college student Corey Cunningham (Canadian actor Rohan Campbell) also experienced bad times as a babysitter in this benighted town. But unlike Laurie and Allyson who emerged as fighters and survivors, Corey has a different reputation. The kid he babysat was killed one halloween night in a terrible accident that locals blame on him. Now his life is confined to working in his dad’s junkyard on the edge of town. But Laurie recognizes him as a kindred spirit and introduces herself to Corey. (Dubbed Psycho meets Freakshow by a gang of high school bullies.) Allyson and Corey hit it off — could they build a future together? But when the bullies throw Corey off a bridge and leave him for dead, and an unknown man drags him into a drain pipe, something 
changes in his psyche… signalling the return of the notorious Michael Myers. Can Corey be saved and will he and Laurie escape this town forever? Or has he been infected by the same evil that drives the monster? And who will triumph in their final showdown: Laurie or Michael Myers?
Halloween Ends is the final chapter in David Gordon Green’s trilogy, after Halloween, and Halloween Kills, based on John Carpenter’s original classic. This one is missing much of the humour of the first chapter and the unbelievable hysteria of crowds in the second film. This one is extremely dark, violent, bloody and gory. That said, I liked the introduction of Corey and his nihilistic, crash-and-burn relationship with Allyson. Myers 
plays a much smaller role, almost a cameo, this time. It also lets Jamie Lee Curtis have her final, final, FINAL Halloween showdown… well, at least in this trilogy.
The entire film takes place in the present, but is firmly set in a retro environment: cars, houses, clothing, hair — even the soundtrack, titles, art direction, and camerawork — all come from decades past, giving it a very cool look. If you’re craving a dystopian, nihilistic “burn-it-all-down!” thriller/horror then Halloween Ends will probably satisfy your urges, but otherwise, you may find the pessimistic violence and gore too much to handle.
Tár
Wri/Dir: Todd Field
Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a musician at the peak of her career. Not only is she one of the world’s only female conductors — Leonard Bernstein was her mentor — but she’s also a noted composer. She conducts the Berlin symphony orchestra, and is working on her magnum opus — a recording of Mahler’s fifth symphony, the only one she hasn’t yet tackled — to complete her legacy. Lydia enjoys jetting around the world in a private plane, always accompanied by her assistant. Francesca (Noémie Merlant) is a doe- eyed young woman who worships the ground Lydia walks on, making sure her complex life is run smoothly. There is no husband in the picture — she calls herself a U-Haul lesbian — but she does have a family life. In Berlin, she lives with her partner Sharon 
(Nina Hoss) and their young daughter. She sees Sharon at home and at work — she’s First Violin, who holds a special bond with a conductor without which a symphony can’t operate.
But things start to go wrong when Lydia becomes infatuated with a new cellist in the orchestra. Olga (Sophie Kauer) is a 25-year-old Russian with a fiery temperament and dark hair; she’s a passionate player. She wears green suede boots and Lydia can’t stop staring at her. She wants to get to know her better. But Lydia is a conductor with all eyes on her, all the time; Francesca, Sharon, and even the entire orchestra can clearly see what’s going on. Ghosts from her past misdeeds start to appear again. A former protege commits suicide. A music student she insulted at a Julliard master class accuses her of racism. Is Lydia’s carefully-constructed image and career just a house of cards waiting to collapse?
Tár is a stunning movie that explore the labyrinthine world of classical music and the people who inhabit it. Cate Blanchett gives a nuanced portrayal of a character that walks the fine line between confidence and arrogance, creativity and uncontrolled behaviour.
Is she a free thinker or a sexual predator? A natural-born leader or an authoritarian dictator? And would she be in hot water if she were a man? The supporting actors — Merlant, Hoss, and Kauer, as well as Mark Strong and Zethphan Smith-Gneist — all portray characters as deeply developed as Blanchett’s. Tár is an uncomfortable movie but a fascinating one to watch.
TAR and Halloween Ends both open in theatres this weekend; 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.
Love and Death. Films reviewed: Riders of Justice, Trigger Point, Undine
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 — two action/thrillers, one from Canada and another from Denmark; and a love story from Germany. There’s death on a commuter train, shoot-outs in a small town, and eternal love… deep underwater.
Riders of Justice
Wri/Dir: Anders Thomas Jensen
Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) is a hard-ass officer in the Danish army, happily married with a teenaged daughter named Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg). But his job keeps him apart from his family for months at a time. So when he hears his wife has been killed in a rare commuter train accident, he rushes home. He has to take care of Mathilde now, but summarily refuses all offers of counsellors or psychologists — he doesn’t believe in that mumbo-jumbo. But he clearly has a lot of anger inside — he punches Mathilde’s blue-haired boyfriend, Sirius, in the face the first time he meets him. (He’s been away so long he doesn’t even know she has a boyfriend.)
But their lives are further disrupted by an unexpected knock on the door. Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is a number-crunching computer nerd. He was on the same train, and says it can’t be a coincidence that a key witness in an upcoming trial of a criminal biker gang — called Riders of Justice — was also killed in that explosion. And the police clearly don’t care. Can we punish them ourselves? Otto enlists his two frenemies: Emmenthaler, an enormous man with a man bun who is also a facial-recognition expert (he has a terrible temper from a lifetime of being bullied); and Lennaert, a hacker without any social skills whatsoever (he’s been in therapy for 25 years.) This motley crew sets up camp 
inside Markus’s barn to prove the biker gang is to to blame. And Markus, after a lifetime of military training, knows how to fight back. But is their conspiracy theory correct? Can they catch the villains and avenge the deaths? Can one soldier and three untrained, anti-social intellectuals beat a heavily-armed criminal gang? And can Markus ever learn to communicate with his only daughter?
Riders of Justice is a brilliantly funny, satirical look at self-proclaimed vigilantes. It deals with probability, death, and retribution all wrapped up in the language of psychology, technology, sexuality and social networks. It does have a Christmas theme — which is odd to watch in a late-spring movie – but that hardly detracts from the main story. It’s also quite violent, with a lot of blood, pain and death. What’s great about it is all the well-rounded portrayals of disparate, odd-ball characters who learn to live together in a make-shift, highly dysfunctional family.
This is a fantastic movie.
Trigger Point
Dir: Brad Turner
Lewis (Barry Pepper) is a nice guy. Ask everyone in the small town where he lives. He found a kitten for Janice (Nazneen Contractor) a waitress at the local diner, and he fixed the electric tea kettle — no charge! — at Irene (Jayne Eastwood) ’s bookstore using just a paper clip. That guy can fix anything, he’s a regular MacGyver! He lives alone on the outskirts of town in a huge wooden farmhouse. But when outsiders with big city ways come to town snooping around, things start to change.
Dwight (Carlo Rota) says he wants to talk with him. Elias (Colm Feore), his former boss, has a job for him to do: track down and free Elias’ kidnapped daughter Monica (Eve Harlow). You see, Lewis used to be a top agent at The Corporation (aka the CIA), but went underground when a mysterious assassin — known only as “Quentin” — started knocking off everyone else on his team. And lots of people think Lewis is the actual killer. Now he has to follow the trail, question the suspects, and uncover the evidence before he becomes Quentin’s next target. But who can be trusted and who’s a turncoat?
Trigger Point is a good, traditional shoot-em-up action movie. It’s an apolitical look at the spy trade, concentrating instead on 
corruption and greed. Shot in small-town Ontario, it’s full of open fields, greenhouses and some stunning lakeshore landscapes, with lots of famous Canadian faces popping up. And it keeps up the pace. Sadly, it has a weird, unfinished quality to it, as if the final 30 pages of the script blew away, so they decided to end it early. What’s going on? Why did they introduce new characters in the last few minutes? Why don’t they bother capturing the villain? Is this actually just a pilot for an unproduced TV series?
Whatever. If you don’t mind turning off your brain, you’ll enjoy this fast-moving action/thriller.
Undine
Wri/Dir: Christian Petzold
Undine (Paula Beer) is a young woman in a Berlin cafe. She’s crushed because her true love Johannes has just revealed he’s married to another woman. She says, if you leave me, I will have to kill you! But their conversation is cut short because her unusual job at the museum across the street starts in five minutes. She works as a guide to an enormous 3-D physical model of the city’s map. When she returns to the cafe after her shift, Johannes is gone. But a strange voice calls to her, from behind a decorative fish tank. It’s Christoph (Franz Rogowski) a boyish and clumsy man. The two collide, breaking the tank, and sending shards of glass and a flood of water on top of the two of them. And as Christoph pulls broken glass from Undine’s body, it’s love at first accident. He works out of town in a scenic lake as an engineer, repairing broken machinery and welding it back together… underwater! Undine follows him to the lake and joins him in scuba gear. They spend all their time together, making love on land and in the 
water. But, although they share a psychic bond, the elements seem to pull them apart. And when Johannes reappears, Undine’s relationship with Christoph seems to be at risk.
Undine is an incredibly beautiful romance, wonderfully acted and elegantly shot. Like in all of Petzold’s films, while the story seems simple, its characters and ideas are intense. His style is spare. Every scene in the movie — a spilled glass of wine, a glance at a passerby — is there for a reason, essential to the story. Nothing wasted. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but Undine shares her name with a classical figure — a water nymph, from the Greek Myths — and leaves open the suggestion that this Undine is also supernatural. The film plays with the themes of eternal love, destiny, tragedy and life both underwater and on land, sort of an adult mermaid story. Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski also played star-crossed lovers in Petzold’s last movie, Transit, and they ‘re back again sharing the same tension and electricity.
I strongly recommend this amazing love story.
Trigger Point is now playing, Riders of Justice starts today, and don’t miss Undine opening in two weeks.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
The Aussie connection. Reviewed: Stateless, Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto used to be movie city, a place with countless films in production at any one time, competing for access to location shots and studio space. Dozens of screens showing the latest releases and over a hundred film festivals showcasing upcoming hits… but that was pre-Pandemic. Now the city is so dead you can almost hear a pin drop.
But don’t panic, movies are still being shown. The Lavazza Drive-in Film Fest continues at Ontario Place, showing everything from Bollywood comedies to Italian dramas to crowd pleasers from Brazil, the US and China. Go to ICFF.ca for tickets. And if you want to stay home this weekend, don’t miss the Toronto Arab Film Festival, premiering features and short films online from Canada and around the world, today through Sunday. Films are all free or PWYC. For more information, go to arabfilm.ca.
This week I’m looking at two new productions, a glamorous documentary and a human TV drama, both with an Australian connection. There’s an Australian who wants to be deported to Germany, and a German fashion photographer who finds refuge in Australia.
Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
Dir: Gero von Boehm
Are the high-fashion photographs you see in Vogue magazine revolutionary and sexually subversive looks at our culture? Or are they violent, misogynistic views of women? A new documentary asks these questions about the pictures of renowned photographer Helmut Newton and the story of his life. He isborn in 1920 in Weimar Berlin. His father owns a factory that makes buttons and buckles. By the time he’s a teenager the Nazis are in power. He’s both repelled by and attracted to the fascist imagery of photographers like Leni Riefenstahl – he’s German-
Jewish, immersed in the culture all around him but also highly restricted and persecuted by government laws.
He works as an apprentice for a woman named Yva, one of the first to use photographs within the fashion industry. In 1938 he boards a ship with a ticket to Shanghai, but disembarks in Singapore, and from there to Australia, where he spends two years in an internment camp, joins the army, and eventually 
becomes a fashion photographer. And he marries his life and work partner, June, AKA Alice Springs.
His photos become a smash hit in Europe, where they change the whole look of fashion photgraphy. By the 1960s he’s the first to use nude models in fashion spreads. His images are filled with fear, embarssment and the threat of violence. They often include statuesque women with domineering expressions, chiseled features, athletic bodies and large breasts. Many verge on soft core porn, with images of women dominating men. There are also photos of women as victims of violence, swallowed whole by aligators, missing limbs or brandishing knives.
And, surprisingly, a series of photos showing the erotic violence of roast chickens.
Newton settled into the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood where he died in a car accident, aged 83.
This film takes an unusual tactic. Rather than the narrator intruding into the film, we hear instead from all the women, the actors and models, he worked with: Grace Jones, Isabella Rosselini, Catherine Deneuve, Hannah Schygulla, Claudia Schiffer, Marianne Faithfull, Anna Wintour and many more. They talk about whether they felt liberated or exploited by posing in the nude; what it was like to work with him, and how the final images are often very different from 
the shooting itself. Many mention how he treated models like puppets, dolls or manequins that convey Newton’s ideas not the models – that’s undeniable. But most say they loved working with him and also liked the shocking and subversive images they played a part in. This film mirrors Newton’s gaze of women and turns it around by reversing the POV to that of those women examining Newton and his work. Very clever.
If you like the aesthetic of glamorous images, high fashion, and stark, nude women’s bodies — that also gives a subjective voice to the women Newton used as objects — you will love this doc.
Stateless
Created by Tony Ayres, Cate Blanchett, Elise McCredie
It’s the 2000s in a remote detention centre somewhere in Australia. High fences stop inmates from escaping, while visitors must line up to pass through security inspections. It’s just another day in the life prisoners in the carceral system. The problem is this isn’t a prison at all and the inmates have committed no crimes. They’re actually asylum seekers, refugees from around the world, who arrive there by boat.
One such inmate is Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi) who is 
separated from his wife and kids. The family fled the Taiban in Afghanistan only to find themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous refugee brokers who steal their savings and set them adrift in leaky boats. Ameer manages to reach Australia on his own, but now he’s locked up in the detention centre and can’t find his beloved family.
Another inmate is Eva (Yvonne Strahovski). Unlike most of the detainees, she’s not a refugee from the developing world; she’s European and just wants to leave Australia for Germany. But she has no papers to prove who she is. That’s because she’s actually an Australian flight attendant on the run from a creepy personality cult.
The inmates are guarded by people like Cam (Jai Courtney) a likeable newlywed from a nearby town. With the decent salary he can afford a new house with a swimming pool. But after a few months of working in the toxic prison-like atmosphere he finds himself 
morphing from ordinary guy to sadistic torturer.
Then there’s Claire (Asher Keddie) an ambitious federal civil servant. She’s sent there to clean the place up, keep journalists at bay and restore the centre’s reputation. But she arrives to find news helicopters filming despondent Sri Lankan Tamil refugees camped out on rooftop, with others driven to suicide by the horrible and hopeless conditions there. What will happen to the refugees? Will Ameer ever find his family? Why is a mentally ill Australian woman locked up in a concentration camp? And for that matter why are asylum seekers there at all?
Stateless is a six-part drama, based on a true story about actually refugees imprisoned in Australian detention camps, as well as the case of an Australian woman who ended up in one of the camps. It’s a heart-wrenching TV series with powerful acting and compelling characters played out against an extremely bleak setting. I found it really interesting – I wanted to find it what happens and binged-watched it in two sittings. It’s a bit strange though that – except for Ameer – the asylum seekers are all peripheral characters while the three Australian characters all have backstories, histories, neuroses and sex lives. I guess that’s the point – it’s not about asylum seekers, per se, it’s about how poorly the Australian government treats them, and how passionately other Australians fight for their rights.
Stateless is streaming on Netflix, Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful is playing now on VOD.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
Solving problems. Films reviewed: Sometimes Always Never, The Laundromat, Chiko
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto’s Fall Festival Season is in full swing this October. Look out for Toronto After Dark – scary and fantastic films; Rendezvous with Madness – films on addiction and mental health; Planet in Focus focussing on environmental films for its 20th anniversary; ImagineNative with movies by and about indigenous peoples around the world… and many more.
But this week I’m looking at three movies, from Germany, the U.K. and the US. There’s a gangster who turns to drugs to find success, a grandpa who turns to word games to find his missing son, and an older woman who turns to amateur sluething to find the bad guys.
Sometimes Always Never
Dir: Carl Hunter
Alan (Bill Nighy) is a dapper businessman in small town England. He likes Marmite, tea and scrabble. He’s meeting his estranged, adult son Peter (Sam Riley) to view a body at a remote village morgue. Alan’s other son ran away decades ago, disappearing without a trace. Could this be him? When the body turns out be the son of another couple, Margaret and Arthur (Jenny Agutter, Tim McInnerney), Alan follows Peter home. It’s an excuse to finally meet his daughter-in-law Sue (Alice Lowe) and grandson Jack (Louis Healy). Won’t you stay for dinner? The evening turns into an extended visit as 
Alan insinuates himself into their homelife, sharing a bunk bed in Jack’s room. The teenager is a shy introvert who spends all his time gaming online. To change his life, his grandfather gets him a haircut and a custom-made suit. He’s a tailor, you see. The movie’s title refers to which buttons to button on a three-button suit. Top to bottom: sometimes, always, never.
Alan’s obsession with Scrabble has a lot to do with his missing son, who ran away in the middle of a game. It’s what separates 
him from his son – but will it bring them back together? – and influences his relations with Margaret and Arthur, the couple he met at the bed & breakfast. But can a board game bring his missing son home again?
Sometimes Always Never is a clever, funny and touching look at family life in small-town, northern England. Lots of twists in the plot, and enough wordplay to make the whole script feel like an ongoing Scrabble game. It does walk the fine line between charming and twee. The movie, though set in the present day, is drenched in sets, props, costumes, and style from an earlier era. But Bill Nighy, Alice Lowe and the rest are so good you can excuse a bit of excess quirky cuteness.
I like this movie.
The Laundromat
Dir: Steven Soderbergh
Mossack and Fonseca (Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas) are a pair of rich lawyers who operate out of Panama. They like flashy tuxedos, palm trees and vodka martinis. Why are they so rich? Their firm holds the secrets of dictators, billionaires, drug dealers, corporations, celebrities and politicians the world over. Through the use of off-shore banking, shell corporations and absolute secrecy, they launder untold billions.
Enter Ellen (Meryl Streep), an everywoman who loses her husband in a freak accident on their wedding anniversary. Turns out the accident insurance on the boat tour they took (it sank) was bogus. Later the condo she 
buys in Las Vegas with her husband’s life insurance is snatched away by some Russian oligarchs. So she begins to investigate. All these companies – real estate, insurance, banking – seem to operate out of offices in the Caribbean. But when she goes to confront the CEO of the company giving her the runaround, she discovers it’s just a series of post office boxes. Can she follow their trail to Panama? And will the villains ever pay?
The Laundromat is a series of fables to explain the money laundering and tax evasion brought to light by the Panama Papers, a mammoth data haul leaked to the press by an anonymous whistleblower. Mossack and Fonseca themselves tell the story in episodic form, regularly turning toward the camera to look right at you. At the beginning of the movie I was giggling at its audacity and unexpected form – I couldn’t wait to see Soderbergh’s next trick. The trouble is, that were no other gimmicks. He flogs the same dead horse – this is just a movie, they’re all actors, that’s a green screen behind them – for the whole 90 minutes! Just when you start caring a bit, Soderbergh makes sure to remind you it’s not real, it’s just a game. I admit there’s one surprising twist near the end.… but it’s immediately followed by a slice of earnest Americana so cringe-worthy it would make a nine-year-old squirm in embarrassment.
The Laudromat just doesn’t work.
Chiko
Wri/Dir: Özgür Yildirim
Chiko (Denis Moschitto) is a young Berliner trying to get ahead. His parents came to Germany from Turkey as Gastarbeiters in the 60s, and he still hangs with other Turkish Germans. Especially his two best friend, Tibet (Volkan Özcan) and Curly. Together they beat up and rob a local cannabis dealer. But instead of running away, Chiko asks to meet his boss.
Brownie (Moritz Bleibtreu — he’s in Bye Bye Germany, The Fifth Estate, My Best Enemy) is a crime boss living a comfortable middle-class life. He ends up hiring the scrappy Chiko on a trial run, moving ten keys of cannabis. Chiko exalts in his new wealth and woos the Turkish-German prostitite Meryam (Reyhan 
Sahin) in the apartment next door. Is it true love or just a financial transaction?
Meanwhile, Tibet, trying to save money for his mom’s kidney operation, short-changes customers. Brownie’s thugs arrive to punish him… by hammering a nail through his foot! This leads to a series of escalating events. Chiko graduates to coke dealing, and buys a white Mercedes with gold hubcaps to match his new image. As Chiko rises to the top 
like Scarface, Tibet’s falls into a downward spiral, his seething anger getting worse and worse. Finally Chiko has to choose: kingpin Brownie or his former best friend Tibet? Which commands his loyalty – friendship or business?
Chiko is a cool and violent crime drama set in urban Germany. It’s a melodrama in the best sense. Moschitto is terrific as Chiko: the criminal, the lover, the anti-hero. I liked this film and found it very moving, both the acting and the realistic, almost documentary-like peek inside the mosques, corner-stores and restaurants of Berlin. Of course it also has what you expect from a good crime drama: chase scenes, shootouts, and fights. And it’s playing as part of the Goethe Film’s Stronger than Blood, a series of crime dramas.
Sometimes Always Never opens today in Toronto; check your local listings. The Laundromat starts today, with Chiko playing one night only, October 8th, also at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow. Films reviewed: The Hustle, Tolkien, Be My Star
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Some people mistake upper-class and working-class characters with highbrow and lowbrow films. This week I’m looking at three movies with upper-class and working class-characters. There’s a middlebrow biopic about an orphan at a private school, an arthouse drama about working-class kids in Berlin, and a lowbrow comedy about a boorish con artist at an elite resort.
The Hustle
Dir: Chris Addison
Josephine (Anne Hathaway) is a British aristocrat who lives in a cliffside mansion in Beaumont-sur-mer, a casino resort on the French riviera. Fluent in many languages, the high-stakes gambler and 
seductress knows all the shakers and movers on the Côte d’Azur. But her life of luxury is disrupted by a hefty and boorish Aussie named Penny Rust (Rebel Wilson) who is passing through town. Penny 
is a small-time con artist whose M.O. involves catfishing men online using stock photos, then tricking them out of more money when they meet face to face. Penny is arrested mid-scam, tossed into prison and kicked out of town. What she doesn’t know is
she’s been played– the policewoman who arrested her worked actually for another con artist, none other than Josephine! When she discovers the truth, Penny and Josephine agree on a competition: whoever succeeds in scamming a random man out of half a million dollars can 
stay in the resort, and the other one must leave. Their victim is an innocent, Mark Zuckerberg look-alike (Alex Sharp). Which of them will win over the tech millionaire?
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because The Hustle is a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels but with Anne Hathaway in Michael Caine’s role and Rebel Wilson replacing Steve Martin. Recasting successful comedies with women in formerly male roles is popular these days, but doesn’t always work. But in this case it sure does. The Hustle is better, funnier and more subversive than Scoundrels. Hathaway is clever as the multilingual aristocrat, but it’s Rebel Wilson who steals every scene with her physical humour, facial contortions and bawdy language. She is brilliant. Maybe the concept of con artists on the Riviera is a bit dated, but it still had me laughing loudly during most of the movie.
I rarely endorse comedies, but I found this one hilarious.
Tolkien
Dir: Dome Karukoski
It’s the early 20th century in Birmingham, England. Young J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult: The Favourite, Warm Bodies) is an orphan who finds himself in impecunious circumstances. Luckily, a wealthy Catholic priest, Father 
Francis (Colm Meaney) takes him under his wing and sponsors him to study at a prestigious school called King Edward’s. He was home schooled by his mother before she died, leaving his head filled with stories of 
mythical dragons and elves. He may be the poor kid, but he immediately impresses everybody with his knowledge of Latin, Old English and mythical languages he creates just for himself.
After initial misgivings, he falls in with three other boys: 
Christopher, Geoffrey and Robert. Together they form the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, a four-man group that hangs out in tea shops discussing art, music and poetry as well as concepts of bravery, fellowship and loyalty. He meets a beautiful 
young woman named Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), also an orphan, who lives in his boarding house. His friendship with the boys grows, even as his love for the piano-playing Edith deepens.
He is eventually accepted to Oxford on a scholarship, but is separated from Edith and some of his friends. And his
world is torn apart by WWI, when they are all sent off to the trenches, where he witnesses carnage and total destruction. Who will live and who will die? And will he ever see Edith again?
Tolkien is about the boyhood and youth of JRR Tolkien, long before he 
wrote the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. The movie flashes back and forth between memories of his growing up, and the film’s “present day” when he is stuck in the trenches of The Battle of the Somme in WWI. And it gives a a few hints at his future as a writer of the famous fantasy books. He imagines fire breathing dragons on the 
battle front, with the scenery like Mordor. The four friends are like Frodo, Sam and the gang in The Fellowship of the Ring. It also touches on Wagner’s Ring Cycle’s influence on Tolkien’s Ring trilogy. So it’s kind of interesting to watch if you’re into his books. And I liked the period costumes, scenery and good acting.
But the movie never seems to go anywhere. It falls into the category of biopics about revered subjects where you can’t show passion, adventure or sex, at the risk of tarnishing his pristine image. (Ironically, Tolkien’s heirs still refused to endorse the film.) No sparks in this hagiography, just a few kisses and some unrequited, longing glances.
Be My Star (Mein Stern) 2001
Wri/Dir: Valeska Grisebach
Nicole (Nicole Gläser) is 14-year-old girl who lives in Berlin with her two sisters, Monique and Janine. She’s at a turning point in her life. It’s the age when you try out a job (she chooses to intern at a bakery because she likes the way it smells). She’s also becoming sexually aware. First she dates any guy who asks her, but later becomes more discerning. She approaches Schöps (Christopher Schöps) a soccer-playing teen to give it a go. He’s interning as a plumber and gets his own apartment. They have cigarettes, alcohol and privacy to share, but they don’t 
quite know what to do. Is this love, and are they a real couple? Or just a couple of kids?
Be My Star is a very sweet and beautiful coming-of-age story made 20 years ago. It’s acted by kids using their real names, in a verité style and setting, 
but it’s clearly a drama not a documentary. It’s also an excellent example of the Berlin School of filmmaking. This tender and intimate examination of first love (and first break up) is realistic and moving. Its showing as part of Past Forward: German Directors Before Cannes, a series of seminal works by German directors who later became famous.
I really liked this one.
Tolkien and The Hustle both open today in Toronto. Check your local listings. And Goethe Films is showing Be My Star one time only at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on May 14th at 6:30.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Back from the Dead. Films reviewed: Pet Sematary, The Invisibles, Amazing Grace
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
We all know people are born and they die, things come and go. But every once in a while things and people we believe are long gone seem to come back to life. This week I’m looking at three very different movies about coming back from the dead. There’s Aretha’s gospel concert buried since 1972; a documentary about young German Jews who hide in Nazi Berlin till 1945; and a horror movie about pets who come back from their graves in small town Maine.
Pet Sematary
Dir: Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer
(Based on the novel by Stephen King)
Louis (Jason Clarke) is a Boston doctor suffering from ER burnout. He’s overworked, overstressed, and overtired. So to relax and spend more time with his family he takes and easy job in the quaint small town of Ludlow, Maine. He’s there with his nervous, religious wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz), and their two kids, little Gage, and his pride and joy Ellie. Ellie (Jeté Laurence) is an eight year old who loves ballet dancing and her furry cat Church 
(short for Winston Churchill). Their old wooden house is on a sprawling estate in a small forest with a high speed highway running through it. But their quiet lives are disrupted by some strange events. First, when a young patient of Louis dies in his care after a car accident, the dead boy seems to return, over and over to talk to him in his dreams.
Then Ellie sees kids from town in spooky animal masks burying dead pets on their property. It’s an ancient custom, explains kindly old Jud (John Lithgow) their nearest neighbour. He’s lived there all his life and understands the local lore. So when Ellie is despondent when her beloved cat is run over Jud tells Louis a secret. There’s powerful magic up on the mountain beyond the pet cemetery. Bury the cat under a cairn and he will come back to you from the dead. Sure enough, Jud is right. But it isn’t cute and loveable 
anymore. When you play with the the forces of good and evil, of life and death, bad things will surely happen.
Pet Sematary – a remake of the movie based on the Stephen King novel – is suitably scary. The small, excellent cast nicely contained in a single location give it a good cabin-in-the-woods quality, but it’s scariness is less adventurous. It uses the age-old techniques – spooky dreams, little “boo!” moments, even twists on the overused images of the mirror in medicine cabinet, and the dark room in the basement. And then it degenerates from scariness into outright, Bride-of-Chucky kitsch. I enjoyed Pet Sematary as a good, old-skool horror movie, just don’t expect anything new.
The Invisibles
Dir: Claus Räfle
It’s 1943, in Nazi Berlin, and Joseph Goebels has officially declares his Germany’s capital judenfrei – free of Jews. But he doesn’t realize that 7,000 Jewish Germans still lived their hidden in plain view. This docudrama tells four true stories about young people who 
survived the Holocause while living in Berlin. They don’t hide in an attic like Anne Frank’s family; instead they continue their lives right in the middle of everything. Cioma (Max Mauff) sells all his possessions and poses as someone whose house was bombed in Köln, moving to new vacant rooms each day. He finds work for a high placed civil 
servant forging ID papers. Hanni (Alice Dwyer) bleaches her hair, calls herself Hannelore and hangs out in dark movie theatres in the Kurfürstendamm. Ruth (Ruby O. Fee) and a friend find jobs as maid and nanny for the kids of Nazi officers. And Eugen (Aaron 
Altaras) is placed with former colleagues of his dad, a doctor, dressing in a Hitler Youth uniform. But there are informants and Gestapo agents everywhere, searching for people like them. Who will survive?
The Invisibles is a fascinating retelling of largely unknown stories. It’s part documentary – the film regularly cuts to interviews in German with the actual people it happened to – and part drama with the thrilling stories replayed by well-known young actors.
Fascinating and thrilling stories, well told.
Amazing Grace
Dir: Sydney Pollack, Alan Elliott
Its 1972 at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Watts, LA.
Reverend James Cleveland is leading a very special service for his devout parishioners. None other than the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin herself will be performing, alongside the Southern California Community Choir. The congregation is urged to feel the spirit, clap their hands, and get up 
from their seats and dance. But wait a minute — since when has pop sensation Aretha Franklin beena gospel singer? The answer is: all her life. Her father is the famous Detroit Baptist preacher C.L. Franklin, and she was touring churches with her amazing voice since the age of six.
This concert became a huge hit album – many people say it’s Aretha’s best recordings – and the movie includes her back-up musicians, the choir, and the audience, including some very 
famous people, like Mick Jagger, gospel singer Clara Ward and lots of others I couldn’t quite recognize. A beautiful, intensely moving concert and church service. Interestingly, it’s been sitting in film cans, unscreened until now. For some reason, Aretha blocked its 
release her whole life, perhaps because it is so personal to her, perhaps because the sound and images were never synchronized. That’s all fixed now.
It’s a grainy hyper-realistic verité-style film that shows everything: retakes, the cameramen, the soundboard, the director running around pointing, and Aretha in a sparkling white gown, sweating under the hot lights. If you’re a fan of Aretha Franklin, and want to experience those two days of 1972, you must see Amazing Grace.
Pet Sematary and The Invisibles both open today in Toronto; check your local listings, and you can see Amazing Grace beginning next Friday.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Women, Desire. Films Reviewed: The Misandrists, The Feelings are Facts: the Films of Nazlı Dinçel
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
This week I’m looking at avant-garde, sexual films. There are lesbian terrorists in Germany disrupting the patriarchy, and a filmmaker in Wisconsin disrupting the traditional documentary.
The Misandrists
Wri/Dir: Bruce LaBruce
It’s 1999 in a forest near Berlin.
In a stately manor, uniformed schoolgirls study biology, philosophy, and politics, taught by stern nuns with severe habits. The school’s symbol? A cross on an orb. The girls share their meals with the nuns at a candle-lit table. But this is no ordinary girls’ school. The students are all adults, former petty thieves, runaways 
and sex workers. Their teachers are radical feminist separatists. The habits they wear are just costumes they put on to fool outsiders. Their prayers celebrate the fact they were born as women not men, and they worship the vagina, ova, reproduction, and lesbian sex. (And the cross and the orb is actually an inverted women’s symbol!)
Big Mother (Susanne Sachsse) sleeps beneath giant mugshots of Emma Goldman. She tells the students to practice sex with each other – but avoid monogamy. Some 
of them watch explicit gay porn for helpful tips. Their ultimate goal is to destroy the patriarchy and create a world without men… by any means necessary. Their first terrorist action as the FLA (The Female Liberation Army) will be to force Berliners to watch the all-women porn film they plan to create. All the students are happily engaged in sex, except one: Isolde 
(Kita Updike). For some reason she feels excluded. But this isolated world is disrupted by an unexpected arrival: a wounded revolutionary named Volker (Til Schindler) fleeing the police. Isolde hides him in the basement. What will happen if the man is discovered? Will the FLA’s action be a success? And is there a traitor in their midsts?
The Misandrists is Toronto’s homocore punk pioneer Bruce LaBruce’s latest film And his first with a nearly all-female cast. (It’s a follow up to The Raspberry Reich, also about German radical activists, and is strongly influenced by The 
Beguiling.) It stays true to Blab’s earliest super8 films, combining satire, humour, queer topics with explicit sex, radical politics, and a distinctly non-Hollywood feel. The cinematography (James Carman), costumes and makeup go way beyond his early films, but the intentionally shocking and disruptive style is true to form.
Does it all make sense? Kind of. Does a slow-motion pillow 
fight with scantily-clad young women make fun of 1970s softcore porn… or is it just gratuitous titillation? I’m not sure why there are extended scenes of women necking with a hard boiled egg, and some of the extended political screeds recited in flat monotones test any viewer’s patience… but again deliberately, revisiting German expressionism.
Agitprop as lesbian porn.
But it really hits home with its sex-positive attitude combined with clever challenges to preconceptions about gender, sex and genitalia (ie “what makes a woman a woman?”).
It’s funny, surprising and ultimately satisfying. Just don’t expect a traditional, mainstream movie.
The Feelings are Facts: the Films of Nazlı Dinçel
Nazlı Dinçel is an American filmmaker in Wisconsin, who immigrated from Ankara, Turkey as a teenager. Her work documents her sex life on 16 mm film, in an often abstract and disjointed manner. Her embrace of the tactile nature of her topics translates into a handmade, hands-on style of filmmaking. A typical short film will alternate between over-exposed film stock or a black screen and explicit footage. A large part of her films is the text, recited dispasionately by the narrator and accompanied by the same words scratched or burned into the film stock itself… often one word (or part of a word) at a time.
Her images vary from disjointed body parts – vaginas, penises, buttocks, mouths – and the omnipresent hands and feet, painted with glittery nailpolish. Her forms include shots of nature and ancient ruins, as well as more intimate bedroom shots. Images are framed by lens irises, reflected in mirrors, bookended between black, silent screens. Sound consists of voices, pop music, and a constant ticking and scratching sound (is that the sound of the 16mm camera itself?)
Her stories come from her own sexual experiences, retold. Her early days of solitary experimentation as a teenager hidden in a washroom where she lost her virginity, she tells us, to a carrot. And her later relationships and sexual encounters. It also deals with her own cross-cultural alienation, with Turkish folklore and Islamic prayer clashing and combining with her changes in adolescence and as a woman.
In Her Silent Seaming (2014), she shares the bedside murmurs of some of the men she has slept with. As the narration progresses it gets more and more repetitious with the words scratched into film eventually reaching a disturbingly frantic peak. Images vary from blurred 
footage of sex organs to the artist herself in a Marilyn Monroe wig kissing a mirror with her lipsticked mouth.
Solitary Acts (4,5,6) (2015) consists of three films of thoughts and memories of sexual experimentation, culminiatng in explicit, extreme close up footage of a woman, presumably the filmmaker, pleasuring herself, andlater doing the same to an unidentified man.
Shape of a Surface (2017)
…takes us to ancient Roman ruins in Turkey, with a call to prayer in the background as she observes headless Roman statues, and later orally worships a living man.
Between Relating and Use (2018)
…is the most cerebral of all the films, a semiotic examination of fetishes, in both the anthropolical and sexual sense of the word. But of course it also includes her trademark sparkle-nailed foot paired with a man’s genitals.
Instructions on How to Make a Film (2018) introduces beginner filmmakers to the joys of film, a medium she 
admits is nearly obsolete.
These are beautiful, thoughtful, deliberately disjointed, and highly personal films. As they progress so do the images, with written words becoming less and less reliable, until in some of her later films they cease to match their meaning.
I have only seen a digital version of these films on my computer, but you can see the original short films in all their 16mm glory at the AGO Jackman Hall on February 12 as part of the monthly Vertical Documentary series.
Nazlı Dinçel will be present at the screening. And you can see The Misandrists at the TIFF Bell Lightbox tonight with Bruce LaBruce in person for the Q&A.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Post-Halloween movies. Films reviewed: Suspiria, Boy Erased, Burning
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Yeah, I know Hallowe’en was two days ago, but there’s still lots to be scared about. (Don’t you watch the news?) So this week I’m looking at three new movies that involve horror, thrills or just bad things happening to good people. There’s a dance troup in Berlin that reeks of brimstone, a gay conversion clinic in Arkansas that exudes homophobia, and a young writer in Korea who thinks he smells death.
Suspiria
Dir: Luca Guadagnino
It’s 1977 in Berlin with the Cold War raging, the wall dividing the city in two, and RAF bombs exploding in Kreuzburg. Into this world walks Susie (Dakota Johnson) a naïve Mennonite girl from Ohio, with pale skin and a long red braid. She’s there to dance, if a prestigious, all-women’s dance school will have her.
Have her they will.
So she moves into their huge headquarters the next day. It’s a grand 
old building, right beside the Berlin Wall, with mirrored rooms, a dormitory and a theatre. It’s owned and run by a group of older women, headed by their choreographer and former prima donna Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), known for her long black hair and floor-length dresses. They are preparing for a relaunch of their masterwork, a primitivist, flamenco-style piece called Volk. And since their lead dancer, Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), has mysterously disappeared, Susie is ready to take her place.
But behind the scenes, something wicked this way comes. Susie keeps having terrifying dreams. There’s a power struggle between Madame Blanc and “Mother Markus” — the school’s founder. And strangest of all, the house itself – with its secret passageways and intricate pentagrams etched into the floor – seems to transform the dancers’ violent moves into lethal weapons… with terrifying results. And Doktor Klemperer, an enigmatic psychiatrist with a secret past, is attempting to bring police – men! – into this inner sanctum of womanhood. Is this dance
troupe actually a coven of witches? And will Susie be their next victim
Suspiria (based on Dario Argento’s classic horror pic) is a visually stunning film, an unusual combination of modern dance and the occult. There are so many scenes in this two-and-a-half hour movie of dance rehearsals — including an amazing performance near the end — that you almost forget it’s a horror movie. But the twisted limbs, breaking bones and endless flow of blood, blood, blood, brings you back. Luca Guadagnino (he directed Call me by your Name, A Bigger Splash, and I Am Love) is back with another aesthetically overwhelming film, recreating 1970s Berlin, and starring, once again, the fantastic Tilda Swinton in many, hidden roles. Though not that scary, this arthouse horror is always fascinating.
Boy Erased
Dir: Joel Edgerton
Jared (Lucas Hedges) is a 19 year old in Arkansas. He’s on the basketball team, has a steady girlfriend and works parttime in his dad (Russell Crowe)’s car dealership. He also goes to church: his dad’s a Baptist minister and his mom (Nicole Kidman) an active member. Everything’s hunky dory… until he gets outed as gay by an anonymous caller. Word spreads, church elders 
come knocking at the door, and Jared is sent off for a heavy dose of brainwashing.
Love In Action is a “gay conversion therapy” centre, with very little love. It’s headed by Victor (Joel Edgerton) a self-taught therapist full of vapid platitudes and pseudo-freudian pop psychology. He’s backed up by 
a violent ex-con (Flea) who hurls abuse at the patients in an attempt to scare them straight. The other patients/prisoners include the military-like Jon (Xavier Dolan, playing against type), the bullied Cameron (Britton Sear), and others who tell him to “fake it” – just repeat what they tell you until you’re out of there. But if he does, will they erase his 
very being? And can Jared ever get out of this godforsaken place?
Based on a true story, Boy Erased is a realistic look at one young man’s experiences in a gay conversion clinic. It’s well-acted and I found it moving (though predictable) in parts. But it’s also an incredibly uptight, desiccated, visually-starved, anti-sex movie that seems made for Sunday school church groups. No nudity — everyone’s buttoned to the top. In this movie, any “sex” is relegated to a rape scene. It’s one thing to have uptight characters, but does the film itself have to be so repressed?
This may be an important topic, but it’s a dreadful movie.
Burning
Dir: Lee Chang-dong
Present-day Korea. Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) is an aspiring writer in his twenties who lives on his dad’s dairy farm near the Demilitarized Zone. On a trip to Seoul he runs into a woman he barely recognizes. Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-Seo) is a former highschool classmate who – post plastic surgery – works as a glamour girl spinning the prize wheel at a department store. And Haemi likes Jong-su. She lives in a small apartment that only gets
sunlight for a few mites each day. Haemi is an flakey extrovert into mime. Jongsu is reserved, quiet and introspective. Soon enough, they’re lovers, but then Haemi says she’s going on a trip to the Kalahari desert to experience “The Great Hunger”.
And she comes back wth a new friend, named Ben (Steven Yeun) she met at the airport flying home. Ben is Korean, but rich, privileged and vaguely foreign. He’s one of those Gangnam-style guys, with a 
fancy apartment and a pricey car. He’s smooth, slick and ultra-blase – like Andy Warhol — but in a weirdly creepy way. And now he’s dating Haemi. They visit Jongsu at his farm, get drunk and smoke some pot. And Ben confesses his secret – he gets off on burning down greenhouses. And never gets caught. And soon after, Haemi disappears without a trace. Ben acts as if nothing is wrong but 
Jongsu is not so sure.. Is Ben a psychopath? Or is Jongsu losing touch with reality? And what about Haemi?
Burning, based on a story by Murakami Haruki, is a tense, creepy psychological thriller. The three main actors are all great in their roles: Steve Yeun — that nice guy in The Walking Dead — is perfect as the possible serial killer, and Yoo Ah-in is amazing as the shy boy seething wth inner tension.
Fantastic.
Suspiria, Boy Erased, and Burning all 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.
Unrequited Lust. Films reviewed: On Chesil Beach, Hurley, M/M
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com.
Inside out, Toronto’s LGBT film fest is on now, premiering movies from around the world, from Thailand to South Africa and showcasing innovative short films by new directors.
Unrequited love is a common theme, but what about unrequited lust? This week I’m looking at three movies — two dramas and a doc. There’s a honeymoon couple whose marital bliss isn’t; a racing car driver with a need for speed, and a guy in Berlin who lusts after a lookalike… in a coma.
On Chesil Beach
Dir: Dominic Cooke, based on Ian McEwan’s novel
It’s England in 1962. Florence (Saorise Ronan) is a confident musician who leads a string quintet in Oxford. She comes from an uptight, stuck up, and upper class Tory family. Edward (Billie Howle) is a country bumpkin from a rural home a bus ride away. He’s emotionally raw and quick to anger. He can’t tell a baguette from a croissant but can identify a bird just from its call.
He comes from an eccentric family, with pre-raphaelite twin sisters, a kindly father, and an artist mother suffering 
from a brain injury. She can’t remember new names and takes off her clothes in public. Florence and Edward meet at random at a nuclear disarmament meeting (CND) and it’s love at first sight. She loves his realness and disdain for money and social conventions. And he is stricken by her beauty, her musical skills, and most of all her kindness – she can even pull his mother out of her shell. They marry.
But the honeymoon at a second rate hotel on a pebble-strewn beach starts bad and gets worse. The closer they get to the marital bed, the farther they get from sex. And after a disastrous attempt, they flee the bedroom for the rocky beach. Can true love rescue an awful honeymoon? Or will this be the end?
On Chesil Beach is a moving look at relationships, and a bit of a tear jerker, too. Though the beach scenes are at its centre, the film flashes back in time to reveal crucial secrets — and into a possible future — as the two lovers have it out. While not a perfect movie, I’ve seen it twice now and I liked it better the second time… which is a good sign.
Hurley
Wri/Dir Derek Dodge
Daytona, Florida is the site of a renowned race car competition, where teams speed along a circuit keeping their cars running for 24 hours without stopping. The drivers too have to continue functioning at high speeds negotiating perilous turns while fighting 
exhaustion. Even a momentary break in concentration could lead to a crash.
Machismo rules, and winners flaunt their masculinity and sense of cool. It’s a world filled with photo-ops beside bikini-clad penthouse models, aboard expansive yachts. It’s also a big-money professional sport, whose champions land lucrative endorsements, prize money, sponsorships and cushy positions at car dealerships. Image is everything.
The kings of Daytona have long been the Brumos Porsche team, who drove to victory in the 1970s under Peter Gregg. He was arrogant and successful. He was later joined by Hurley Haywood, a shy but highly skilled racer. Together they were known as Batman and Robin. Eventually Haywood headed the team himself in Daytona and La Mans, chalking up countless wins. This new documentary chronicals Haywood’s career and his personal life.
So why is a movie about race cars playing at Inside Out?
SPOILER ALERT!
Because Hurley Haywood is the first race car champ to publicly come out as gay… which makes this film a historic record.
Hurley is a squeaky-clean documentary about the famous race car driver, and is mainly of interest to fans of that sport, whom, I am told, are legion. I’m not one of them, but could still appreciate the cool cars and vintage pics. I felt like I was playing with hot wheels again.
M/M
Wri/Dir: Drew Lint
Matthieu (Antoine Lahaie) is a Montrealer living in a small apartment in Berlin. During the day he works as a lifeguard at a local swimming pool (or does he?). At night he’s clubbing to flashing lights and dark shadows. And then 
there are his dreams – realistic visions of interactions with stone statues and human flesh. (He rarely meets living people.)
One day he encounter Matthias (Nicolas Maxim Endlicher) online and follows him into the swimming pool showers. Matthias has a thin moustache, a buzz cut and a perfectly 
symmetrical body and face. The words Sodom and Gomorrah are tattooed on his torso. He works as a fashion model and poses for a digital sculpture created using a 3-D printer. Matthieu is infatuated with Matthias, mimics his style, and stalks him to his apartment window. It’s a minimalist palace of white walls, blown-up black and white photos and a chin-up bar. Matthieu longs to meet him, but there’s no real connection. But when Matthias falls into a coma after a crash, Matthieu — like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley — moves into his home and takes over his life. Soon he has a parade of sex 
partners visiting him who thinks he’s the other guy. But what will happen to Matthew when Matthias comes home? And how far will one M go to duplicate, or replace, the other M?
M/M is a highly stylized, dreamlike and surreal look at superficial relationships and the dangers they pose. This Berlin is inhabited only by gay fashion plates in their twenties, posing against shiny white surfaces or pausing for sexual release in washrooms or saunas. Most dialogue is disjointed telephone conversations 
or short texts sent on gay dating sites; and the sex scenes fall somewhere between MMA and interpretive dance.
The story is intentionally ambiguous, so you never know if you’re seeing dreams, fantasies or actual events, nor even which M is dreaming what. Still, this dazzling art-house fest of image and music manages to hold together.
This is the best movie I’ve seen at Inside Out, but if you miss it there, it opens commercially on June 1.
On Chesil Beach opens today in Toronto; check your local listings. Hurley and M/M are both playing at the Inside Out Film Fest.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
culturalmining.com 
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