Daniel Garber talks with Tracey Deer about Beans
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s the summer of 1990.
Tekehentahkhwa or “Beans” for short (Kiawentiio) is a typical,
innocent 12-year-old girl who lives near Montréal with her Dad, her ambitious mom, and her little sister. Her biggest worry is getting into a posh private school to guarantee a successful future. But her life is totally changed when the town of Oka tries to grab Mohawk burial grounds to expand a golf course. Protests erupt and her family, being Mohawk, joins in. But when it turns into a blockade and a stand off involving police and the military, it reveals acts of violence and virulent racism she has never witnessed before. Now she has to make a decision: should she 
toughen up like her dad? Or keep to the straight and narrow like her mom? And how will she emerge from these life-shattering events?
Beans is a fantastic new drama – told from an indigenous point of view – that combines the historical record with a highly personal and intimate coming-of-age story. Since it premiered at TIFF last fall, it has garnered dozens of awards for filmmaker, Tracey Deer who has created a work of personal and national importance.
I spoke with Tracey Deer via Zoom.
Beans is now playing in Toronto and all across Canada, from Victoria to Halifax.
Daniel Garber talks with Tasha Hubbard and Jade Tootoosis about Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photos by Jeff Harris.
On August 9, 2016, young Colten Boushie was shot in the back of the head, point blank, in an SUV on a Saskatchewan farm. These facts are 
undisputed. A cut and dry case.
So how come the shooter got off scott free? Every trial is different but one fact stands out: the shooter – and the jury – were white, while the victim was indigenous. This case has reverberated across the country as people try to understand what is happening.
Is justice is just a myth for some Canadians?
Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up is a new documentary that looks at the Colten Boushie trial and its aftermath, how it fits in Canada’s checkered history, and what Colten’s supporters are doing about it. It’s written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Tasha Hubbard and had its world premier at Toronto’s HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival. Jade Tootoosis, from the Red Pheasant Cree First Nation, is Colten’s sister who helped bring the issues the trial raised to national and international attention.
I spoke with Tasha Hubbard and Jade Tootoosis in studio at CIUT.
Nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up opens on May 31st in Toronto.
NAFTA movies? Films reviewed: Giant Little Ones, Sólo con Tu Pareja PLUS Sui Generis: An Alternative History of Mexican Cinema
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
If you’ve been watching movies over the past few years, you may have noticed a big change. Some of the biggest Oscars are going to directors like Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro Gonzales Iñaritu.
When did Mexico start making movies? The answer is: Mexico has been making great movies for a very long time… we just never knew about it. But there is one way to fill in that gap in our collective memories.
“Sui Generis“ refers to unique species or bodies of work. Sui Generis: An 
Alternative History of Mexican Cinema is a suprising series of films at TIFF Cinematheque. It’s programmed by Diana Sanchez and Guillermo del Toro and includes some really famous movies – like Buñuel’s Avenging Angel – and an equal number I’ve never heard of. Surprises include anti-church satires, political 
protests, bizarre fantasies and fantastical films that transcend the genres we know. There’s also a sexual frankness largely missing in Hollywood movies under the Hays Code (1930-1968), but legal in Mexico.
Aside from Buñuel’s films and a few others, I had never heard of most of these movies, but Mexican cinephiles weep over the importance and uniqueness of these selections; a staple on late-night Mexican TV but rarely seen on the big screen. This series features directors like Ripstein, Buñuel, Cuaron, del Toro and many others, from the 1930s up to recent times.
It’s quirky, eclectic and grand. I recommend this series.
This week I’m looking at movies from Canada and Mexico. There’s a Mexican sex farce about a man who bites off more than he can chew; and a Canadian coming-of-age drama about a boy forced to choke back his tears.
Giant Little Ones
Wri/Dir: Keith Behrman
It’s a middle class suburb somewhere in North America Franky (Josh Wiggins) is about to turn 17 at a big party. All his teammates from the swim team will be there, his divorced mom (Maria Bello) will be away that night, lots of alcohol and music, and his beautiful but vapid girlfriend says she’s ready 
to spend the night with him. And his best friend Ballas (Darren Mann) will be there to cheer him on. They’ve been inseparable since childhood and the two are popular and respected at school. This will be a life changing night for Franky… but not in the way he expects it.
The party ends early when his mom comes home, and his girlfriend decides not to stay. So the two drunk best friends end up crashing in 
Franky’s bed, and something happens in the dark. Ballis rushes home, and the next day everything’s different. Rumours about Franky start spreading, he’s blanked in the hallways and ghosted on instagram. People say he’s gay and did something to Ballas, who does nothing to defend his former best friend.
Only a few people stick by him. Mouse (Niamh Wilson) his out lesbian lab partner who packs a fake appendage in her jeans teaches him how to live with bullying (but I’m not gay! says Franky. Doesn’t matter says Mouse); and Natasha, Ballas’s sister (Taylor Hickson). She was once 
popular too, until she was “slut shamed” after something terrible happened to her. They turn to each other, first as pariahs and friends, but it gradually turns into something more.
Adding to the complications is Franky’s divorced gay Dad (Kyle MacLachlan). Franky hasn’t spoken to him since he moved away to live 
with his lover. He’s ready to offer advice but first Franky has to conquer his own homophobia. What really happened that night with Ballas? Will they ever be friends again? Is he in love with Natasha, or is it something else? And will things ever get better at school?
Giant Little Ones is an excellent coming-of-age drama, well acted, and based on an elegantly symmetrical script. It’s tender, funny and surprising, without leaving you depressed. I’ve seen this Canadian movie twice now, and it was just as moving the second time through.
Sólo con tu pareja (1991) (a.k.a. Love in the Time of Hysteria)
Wri/Dir: Alfonso Cuarón
Tomás Tomás (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is known for his sexual prowess and enormous ego. He sleeps with a different beautiful woman every night. He’s also fond of challenges and pranks like running naked down the stairwell to the lobby each morning to pick up the morning paper before anyone sees him. He’s handsome and fit, with a 
successful career as an advertising creative and lives in a swank apartment building in a good Mexico city neighbourhood. He lives two doors away from Dr Mateo 
Mateos (Luis de Icaza) and his wife, both good friends, who give him the keys to their apartment while they are away for the weekend.
But Tomas’s limits are challenged one night when he is faced with more than even he can handle. Mateo’s statuesque nurse Sylvia (Dobrina Cristeva) is arriving for a date, while his boss Gloria is also dropping by
LOVE IN THE TIME OF HYSTERIA, (aka SOLO CON TU PAREJA), Daniel Gimenez Cacho, 1991. ©IFC Films
to hear his advertising pitch for a brand of canned Jalapeños (and maybe a bit of spicy fun). Soon enough he’s bedding his boss in Mateo’s flat, Sylvia in his own, and is forced to inch his way naked back and forth between the bedroom windows and satisfy both women without letting either one know about 
the other. To make matters worse, he finds himself infatuated by a new tenant in the flat between
the two rooms. Clarisa is a flight attendant (Claudia Ramírez) and when he sees her robotic miming of seat belts and oxygen masks he sees through her window heid smitten. But can one man keep three women satisfied at one time? Alas, no.
He is fired from his job, and the vengeful nurse falsifies his medical tests telling him he is HIV positive, plunging him into a deep depression. Will Tomas discover the truth and change his ways? Or will he succumb to despair and throw himself off the tallest tower in Mexico City?
Sólo con Tu Pareja is a seldom seen, silly screwball comedy from the early 90s. It’s also Cuaron’s first feature film, long before his big hits like Gravity, 
Roma and Y Tu Mama Tambien. This is no masterpiece, but it is a fun and interesting look at a totally different era. It reminds me of the 1960s comedy Boeing, Boeing, starring Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis, also about a promiscuous man who juggles three flight attendant gilfriends in one Paris apartment. This one is also dated, but better than Boeing Boeing — the women in this movie have personalities, and Daniel Giménez Cacho is on fire as Tomas. And it adds a pair of Japanese businessmen, some mariachi musicians and a Montezuma lookalike to give it a more Mexican feel.
Giant Little Ones opens today in Toronto; check your local listings; and you can see Sólo con Tu Pareja just tonight at the Tiff Bell Lightbox as part of the fantastic TIFF Cinematheque Mexican film series called Sui Generis: An Alternative History of Mexican Cinema, on now.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks about the Oscars with Toronto cinephiles Jeff Harris and Jamil Fiorino-Habib
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Is Hollywood the epitome of the American dream, a place where a small town girl can be discovered at a soda fountain, or an auto mechanic can turn into a movie star overnight? Or is it where an obsolete medium recycles tired ideas, racist norms and sexual exploitation in exchange for the almighty dollar?
However you look at them, the Oscars – with their glamour, 
flash and controversy – are Hollywood’s sacred temple, where its gods show up annually to pay obeisance.
To help make sense of the Academy Awards I’ve invited two Toronto Cinephiles who really know their stuff to share their opinions on movies, Hollywood, and the Oscars.
Jamil Fiorino-Habib is a recent cinema studies and philosophy grad from UofT, hoping to pursue a Masters in Film Theory at the University of Amsterdam in the fall. He has a soft spot for international cinema, and loves to dive deep into film history and psychoanalysis.
Jeff Harris is a professional photographer with a photo arts degree from Ryerson. His photography has been featured in The Globe and Mail, Time Magazine, and culturalmining and has been nominated for many Webby Awards. He has worked as a photographer and photo editor at Maclean’s magazine and has been covering TIFF since 2002.
I spoke with Jamil and Jeff in studio at CIUT 89.5 FM.
The Academy Awards will be broadcast on February 24th, 2019.
Best Movies of 2018!
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
2018: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
I take it back – it was just the worst of times.
War, famine, with no action on Climate Change. volcanoes erupting, tsunamis, mass killings, ethnic cleansing, child refugees thrown into prisons, and incompetent but vengeful buffoons ruling more than one country. Good, safe Toronto (like many cites) suffered two mass killings by deranged nutbars, and somehow Ontario elected the brother of a man who made this city the laughing stock of the world. Yeah, it was the worst of times.
But at least a lot of people are still making great, original movies. (I’m a movie critic, not a newscaster.) This week I’m talking about the best movies of 2018. Some were made earlier but played this year, some screened at festivals and are opening in 2019, but all of them were open to the public at a movie theatre in this city at some point in 2018. There were way, way too many excellent movies to fit on any short list, so I’ve tried to find not just ones I liked, but also movies that somehow, shocked, surprised or delighted me in unexpected ways. Films that tickled the eye, pleased the ear, warmed the soul… or chilled the heart.
I’m intentionally shying away from Oscar Bait, superhero movies and sequels. And just to keep it within limits, I’m not including animated films or documentaries… but not because I don’t love them. (I do.)
There are also a bunch of movies I just haven’t seen yet, so of course I can’t include them.
So here, in no particular order, are my choices for best movies of 2018.
Let me start with some first movies or first in a long time movies, all from the US.
Hereditary is Ari Aster’s first film, and it goes so far beyond the usual cheap scare scenes I hesitate to call it a horror movie, but it is. It’s about a family – Mom’s an artist who builds doll houses exactly the one they live in; son’s a pothead, and daughter is a bit tetched in the head – who somehow conjure up an evil entity. I wish all horror movies were this 
well-made.
Leave No Trace is Debra Granik’s latest since the Winters Bone ten years ago. This is a subtlety moving film about a man raising his daughter in a nomadic life in the woods with minimal human contact… until they’re discovered by the authorities and forced to 
join civilization.
Sorry to Bother You is Boots Riley’s first film. It’s about an everyman in Oakland working as a telemarketer who discovers a secret about the company. It’s a combination political satire, science fiction, comedy drama. Not flawless, but brimming with brilliant new ideas and adventures in an old genre.
With honourable mentions to:
Jeremiah Zagar’s We The Animals
Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (a cartoon, so doesn’t qualify on my main list)
Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman
Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Robert Redford’s The Old Man and the Gun
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed
Here are four fantastic movies playing right now.
Border directed by Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi is a Swedish movie about an unusual looking border guard who discovers she may not be completely human.
The Favourite is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest and most accessible movie, a historical dark comedy about two female rivals fighting for Queen Anne’s attention.
Burning is Korean director Lee Chang-Dong’s mystery drama based on Haruki Murakami’s 
story about an intense young writer, the holly golightly woman he is obsessed with, and a slick rich guy who may have sinister motives.
Shoplifters is Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu’s family drama about a makeshift but loving family of petty criminals disrupted 
by government intervention.
And here are three more films coming in the first few months of 2019.
Cold War is Pawel Pawlikowski’s flawless romance 
about two musicians in postwar Poland, separated by the Iron Curtain.
Birds of Passage is an epic saga about how an indigenous family in Colombia is affected by the marijuana trade in the 60s and 70s.
The Good Girls is Alejandra Marquez Abella’s scathing look at the uppper class in Mexico City in the 1980s. Of course I loved Cuaron’s Roma, a visually beautiful film, but in my 
mind The Good Girls gets deeper and closer to the characters.
There are many more I really wanted to include, including Roma:
Lázsló Nemes’s Sunset (Napszállta)
Lucretia Martel’s Zama
Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
Gaspar Noe Climax
Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers
Luis Ortega’s El Angel
Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built
…but I decided to stop at 10 this year.
Once again, my favourite films of 2018:
The Good Girls
Birds of Passage
Cold War
Sorry to Bother You
Leave No Trace
Hereditary
Border
The Favourite
Burning
Shoplifters
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 Luis Ortega about El Ángel
Adult language, topics.
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photos by Jeff Harris
Its 1971 in Buenos Aires Argentina. Carlitos is an innocent-looking boy with an angelic face and blonde curls. But this teenager has a strange hobby. He enjoys 
breaking into homes undetected and taking things.
He’s an expert cat burglar, born to steal. He loves what he does, but has no one to share his triumphs with. That is until he meets Ramon. Ramon is bigger, darker, and tougher and comes from a family of 
petty gangsters. Carlitos is smitten, and soon they’re a team – one with homoerotic undertones – and together they wreak havoc across the city. And when guns enter the picture, people start to die. Is Carlitos the devil 
incarnate? Or an angel gone astray?
El Ángel is a new feature film from Argentina written and directed by Luis Ortega. This is Luis’s first film and it features an unknown actor in the title role. El Angel was featured in the Discovery series at TIFF and is opening soon in Toronto.
I spoke to Luis on site at TIFF 18.
El Ángel is Argentina’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
Golden. Films reviewed: The Old Man & the Gun, Let the Corpses Tan, The Sisters Brothers
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
This week I’m looking at three genre movies -– a heist, a western and a retro horror/thriller — about the search for gold. There’s an old bank robber lookin’ for love while stealing krugerrands, two brothers in the old west working as hitmen while searching for gold nuggets, and criminals in Corsica killing for gold bars.
The Old Man & the Gun
Dir: David Lowery
It’s the 1980s in Texas. Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford) is the consummate gentleman, always kind and charming, especially with the ladies. He meets one such woman named Jewel (Cissie Spacek) by the side of the road where her car overheated. She’s a widow with a ranch but no family or friends nearby. He gives her a ride and they share lunch at a 
roadside diner. But when he jokingly tells her what he does for a living she doesn’t believe him. Who would think such a kindly old man is a bank robber?
But a bank robber he is, and a damned good one. Working with his partners Teddy and Waller (Danny Glover, Tom Waits) they pull off a stream of successful bank heists from Dallas to St Louis, without ever firing a shot or leaving a single fingerprint behind. That is until detective Hunt (a 
moustachioed Casey Affleck) connects the dots between these seemingly unrelated crimes. (This is long before google.) Can Tucker quit bankrobbing and settle down with Jewel before Hunt tracks him down?
The movie is based on a true story about a career criminal and escape artist but it’s so much more than that. It’s a tender love story (between Tucker and Jewel), and a buddy drama (between him and his respectful rival, the cop). It’s well-acted, wonderfully directed and with a classic script of the kind I thought Hollywood had forgotten how to write. It even has some filmmaking tricks – like a clever history of his escape attempts – inserted in an unexpected place.
What a feel-good movie this one is.
Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres)
Dir: Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
It’s a sundrenched day at a cliffside bed and breakfast in Corsica. Madame Luce (Elina Löwensohn) – a sultry, middle aged woman with a pageboy haircut – is your hostess, but don’t expect a five star rating. It’s a BnB… from hell. The rooms are made of crumbling rock shelters and 
breakfast means fried eggs served with live ammo. The guests include a scheming criminal, a crooked lawyer, a young tough, and a smash-faced thug. The only paying guest, Max Bernier, is an over-the-hill novelist from Paris in a perpetual drunken stupor. What are they all there for?
A heist, of course, in the form of a Brinks truck carrying a case of solid gold bars. They carry it off — killing two cops and the driver in the 
process — but then things start to go wrong. Bernier’s beautiful young wife and kid show up unexpectedly, and a pair of motorcycle cops, dressed in black leather, stop by to take a look around. At this point, gunshots start and rarely stop till the end of the movie. Some of the bad guys realize they’ve been stabbed in the back. Soon 
everyone on the mountainside is either a hostage or hostage taker, a shooter or a victim (or a potential sex partner) in a final shootout for the gold.
But this plot description doesn’t do justice to what this film really is. It’s an over-the-top horror/thriller/heist movie, flawlessly done in the style of 1960s spaghetti westerns. It’s intense, from the saturated colour to the Morricone score. Every gun shot — and there are thousands – is followed by a mammoth splash of blood; every cigarette is lit with a whoosh of flame that fills the screen; every stabbing has a disgustingly loud squishing sound. There are extreme close ups, with a single eye or curled lip filling the entire screen. And lots of gratuitous nudity and violence, especially when the drunken novelist imagines stylized sex scenes from his own books.
See this one on a big screen.
The Sisters Brothers
Dir: Jacques Audiard
It’s the 1850s in the Oregon territory, and the country has gone gold crazy. Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix) are brothers who earn their living shooting to kill. Eli is smart and kind at heart, while Charlie takes after their dad, a drunk, mean bastard. They work for a shady robber baron known as the Commodore. Their latest job? Meet up with another man
who will provide them with their victim.
Meanwhile, in a town nearby, is the idealistic Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) a brilliant scientist who is flat broke. He has an invention that could make him a millionaire. It’s a chemical he claims will make panning for gold easy as pie. On his travels he meets an upper-class adventurer named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhall). Warm likes Morris’s polite relaxed manner and sees him as a genuinely nice 
guy. As they travel he share his secret, though not the details, with him. What he doesn’t know is Morris – like the Sisters Brothers – works for the evil Commodore, and that he plans to hand over his erstwhile friend to those killers. But things aren’t necessarily what they seem. The hunters become the hunted with posses tracking the Sisters brothers for their past crimes. The four find themselves on 
the same side, at least temporarily, but who can be trusted?
The Sisters Brothers is French director Audiard’s first English language film, and he totally pulls it off. This is an excellent western that captures the frantic expansion of the gold rush towns in the old west with entire settler towns appearing, on-screen. We watch characters discover new technology like toothbrushes and hot-water plumbing. It captures the utopian politics of the time (though completely ignoring the plight of indigenous people). Reilly and Phoenix make great shootists, but it’s Riz Ahmed who really steals the show. The Sisters Brothers (based on Canadian writer Patrick deWitt’s novel), is a wonderful, new take on the classic western.
The Old Man & the Gun, Let the Corpses Tan and The Sisters Brothers — all great movies, though for different reasons — 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.
Daniel Garber talks with filmmakers Çagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanetti about Sibel at #TIFF18
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Photos by Jeff Harris
It’s present-day Turkey. Sibel is a fiercely independent young woman who lives in an isolated mountain village near the Black Sea. Having lost her voice after a fever at age five, she communicates with her father using a traditional whistling code, still known to older villagers. She’s a keen hunter and trapper who seeks a lone wolf said to be lurking 
in the woods. But in her search she traps a different sort of wolf — a crazed and bearded man, on the run from the army. She nurses him back to health in her cabin in the woods. Can she maintain a secret life with her newfound prisoner/friend? Or will word reach the disapproving villagers below?
Sibel is a new film, a Turkish/French co-production that 
explores the classic folklore and customs of the Black Sea region. It’s also a rich and fascinating look at an independent woman living within the restrictive rules of traditional village life.
Sibel had its North American premier at Toronto International Film Festival and is playing again this Saturday. It’s jointly directed by Guillaume Giovanetti and Çagla Zencirci, French/Turkish partners, who previously made Noor and Ningen together, both of which played at TIFF.
I spoke with Çagla and Guillaume in studio at CIUT 89.5 FM, during TIFF18.
Daniel Garber talks with Alison McAlpine about her new doc CIELO
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Have you ever stared at the night sky and the stars and planets up there? What does it mean and how does it relate to our lives?
A new documentary premiering next Friday looks at the skies above the Atacama desert in
northern Chile, the scientists and astronomers who observe them, and the people born there and who live beneath them.
It explores the filmmaker’s personal impression and interactions with the people she meets. It’s an astronomical, 
spiritual, anthropological look at life in a desert beneath the vast bright stars.
The film is called Cielo, and its filmmaker is Alison McAlpine. Alison’s award-winning and critically acclaimed documentaries have played at film festivals around the world. 
I spoke to Alison McAlpine in Montreal by telephone from CIUT 89.5 FM in Toronto.
Cielo opens in Toronto on Friday, August 10.
Big plans. Films reviewed: Octavio is Dead, American Animals, Hearts Beat Loud
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
It’s Pride weekend in Toronto, so this week I’m looking at three indie movies, two of which fall somewhere with in the LGBTQ2 spectrum – can you guess which two? I’ve got four Kentucky fratboys with a secret plan; a Brooklyn daughter and dad forming a band; and a young woman in Hamilton… dressed like a man!
Octavio is Dead
Wri/Dir: Sook-yin Lee
Tyler (Sarah Gadon: Indignation) is a young woman who lives with her shrewish single mom (Rosanna Arquette) in suburban Toronto. But a knock on their door changes everything. It seems her father Octavio, a latino poet and teacher she never met has died. And he left her his condo and all his possessions. So she heads out to Hamilton to try to find out he was, exactly.
What she finds there is surprising. His flat is an Old Curiosity Shop, filled with persian rugs, oil paintings, tapestries and floor-to-ceiling shelves full of books. (She loves books.) There’s a sunroom with withering plants and eccentric neighbours all around. And strangest of all, Octavio himself, or at least his ghost, appears every so often to proffer advice. Later, she sees a young man in a hoodie who has some connection to her dad. She follows him to a burlesque club but is barred from entering: Men Only!
So she cuts off her hair, puts on one of Octavio’s suits and tries again. This time she meets the young man and he opens up to her. Apostolis (Dimitris Kitsos), is a poet who learned about art and literature at Octavio’s knee. He also knew him… intimately. Apostolis likes posing in bathtubs dressed in a toga. He also seems to like Tyler – a lot – and she likes him, too. The problem is he desires her thinking she’s Octavio’s son, while she’s attracted to him as a woman to a man. What to do?
Octavio is Dead is a quirky, indie movie by Sook-yin Lee, best known for CBC’s DNTO, Definitely Not The Opera. This film is also not an opera, but it is full of classical themes projected against a grittty, downtown Hamilton. Cross-dressing Riley feels more Shakespearean than non-binary queer, but the performances — especially laid back Kitsos and intense Gadon — are pleasing to watch.
American Animals
Wri/Dir: Bart Layton
It’s Lexington, Kentucky in 2004. Spencer (Barry Keoghan) is at university studying art, when he notices something strange at Transylvania University. No, not vampires, this is a actual place. A library there holds priceless artworks – like Audubon’s famous bird paintings – in the form of rare books. And these volumes – worth over 10 million dollars – are watched over by a single librarian (Ann Down). He tells this to a friend Warren, (Evan Peters) and a scheme begins to hatch. Warren’s at school on a sports scholarship but is bored by college life. He wants to do 
something big, something exciting.
His plan is simple: We enter the library disguised as old men, disable the librarian, open the glass case, take out the books and walk straight out the basement door without anyone knowing what we did! The perfect heist.
But they also need a driver and a lookout. So they enlist two friends they can trust: Eric (Jared Abrahamson) a contrarian 
genius; and Chas (Blake Jenner) a jock / entrepreneur whose also a great driver. Together they just might pull it off.
American Animals is a story of simple plans gone astray and their potential moral consequences. It’s a true story, and the real people involved – the four guys plus the librarian – bring a real-life element as they narrate the story, documentary-style. This stylish true crime drama has some thrilling parts, but it’s mainly good for the characters and the
LA Times: American Animals actors and real counterparts
actors that portray them. Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, Killing of a Sacred Deer) is great as a bored art student, and Canadian Jared Abrahamson (Hello Destroyer, Hollow in the Land, Sweet Virginia) who normally plays angry young men is unrecognizeable as the fuzzy-bearded smart kid. And at times the real people interviewed are even more fascinating than the actors who play them.
Hearts Beat Loud
Dir: Brett Haley
Frank (Nick Offerman) is a former musician who lives in Red Hook, a waterside Brooklyn neighbourhood, with his daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons). Frank owns a record store, while Sam is preparing for college: she leaves for UCLA in the fall. For Sam, everything’s coming up roses. She’s going to be a doctor, and 
meets a pretty young artist Rose (Sasha Lane). Is it true love?
For Frank, on the other hand, times are tough. He’s a musician who has raised his biracial daughter alone since his wife 
(and former band mate) died in an accident. Now he’s closing his record store and his eccentric lounge singer mom (Blythe Danner) has been arrested for shoplifting. And he’s getting mixed signals from his landlady/prospective girlfriend Leslie (Toni Collette) Is she just a friend… or something more?
The one thing he still has is his jam sessions with Sam. And a particularly good one yields some potential hit singles. When he posts them online, they start picking up listeners. Will the record store be saved? Can Sam take a year off to 
record and tour with her two-member band? Or will she leave the band, her family and her girlfriend to go to UCLA?
Hearts Beat Loud – which is also the name of one of their songs – is a sweet and gentle story of family and first love. Offerman is believable as a midlife crisis dad trying to hold on to his authenticity, and Kiersey Clemons is wonderful as Sam. She performs her own music, and luckily, she’s really good at it… since about a third of the movie is about people making music.
This film leaves you with a warm feeling inside.
Octavio is Dead, American Animals, and Hearts Beat Loud 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.
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