Movies with Kids vs Kids’ Movies. Films Reviewed: Oculus, Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans), Anina
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Lots of movies use kids. Some try for a young audience, others have young characters. And the two types don’t necessarily overlap. This week I’m looking at three movies: a chiller-thriller about two kids and a haunted mirror they can’t escape; an art film with kids reenacting the Algerian War; and an animated film from Uruguay about a girl with an envelope she can’t open.
Oculus
Dir: Mike Flanagan
Kaylie and Tim (Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites) are sister and brother. Kaylie is a decisive, take-charge kind of girl with long red hair like her mother. Tim is brown haired like his dad. A decade earlier, something violent and terrible happened in their home. And by the time it was over, they were orphans. They locked up 10-year-old Tim in a mental hospital. Now, they declare, he’s all cured. No more of that childish nonsense he used to spout – about voices and mind-control and a demon who lives inside a mirror. He’s a responsible adult now, ready to live in the real world. (Like a babe in the woods.)
Except… what’s the first thing big sister Kaylie does? She drags him back to the 
house where it all happened, and says – we’re gonna get that demon – the one in the mirror – and kill her!
Apparently that antique mirror has been spawning grisly murders for centuries. It possesses all it encounters and muddles their thoughts until they can’t tell illusion from reality. So Kaylie has rigged up a complicated system, involving cameras, computer 
screens, alarm clocks, and a lethal-looking blade that’s always poised to smash the mirror.
The return home triggers strong memories in Tim’s mind – he begins to relive the old days alongside the recent events. Are Tim and Kaylie strong enough to resist the demon’s illusions?
This is a good, scary movie with the two stories – now and flashbacks – unfolding side-by-side, and occasionally overlapping. Parts feel hackneyed, but the two sets of actors (in their teens and twenties) are totally convincing.
Suitable for children? Only if they can handle extreme violence, gore and nightmarish horror.
Loubia Hamra (Bloody Beans)
Dir: Narimane Mari
It’s Algeria. Boys dressed in stylish shorts and silk neckties are playing on the beach. They swim in the ocean, float on beached tires and lie in the sun. Until one of them farts.
You fart like an Frenchman! they shout. It’s those bloody beans — loubia make you fart. So they raid the picnic basket the girls brought. The girls warn them there are soldiers on the streets: war is coming.
(Context: Algeria is a north African country, once colonized by its neighbour across the Mediterranean. France annexed it and hundreds of thousands of Europeans settled there. A War of Independence broke out in the 1950s. The Algerian War was notorious for the violence, torture, and cruelty used by both the French military and the FLN revolutionaries. A third group, the OAS – French extremist-nationalists who refused to leave Algeria – terrorized both the French and the Algerians.)
So the revolutionary boys and girls who want more than just beans to eat set out along the beach, just as the sun sets. 
They don wigs, scarves, masks and capes. They paint their faces and bodies with drawings and fake beards. At a French monastery they gaze at the statues, fillagries and icons. They fight an evil man in a pigs mask, and make friends with a French soldier who was drafted to serve. And they project their shadows against a white washed building, making animal noises.
Bloody Beans is a beautiful and strange reenactment, 50 years after the end of the Algerian war. It includes lots of subtle details: women fighting alongside men, the colonial division between the French haves and the Algerian have-nots, and the violence and torture on both sides. It ends with a floating recitation in the ocean, with the boys and girls repeatedly asking: is it better to be than to obey? (Vaut-il mieux etre que d’obeir?).
This complex film is a work of art that uses video as the canvas, kids as the paint.
Anina
Dir: Alfredo Soderguit (Uruguay)
Anina Yatay Salas is a girl with wild, red hair and a triple-barreled name. Her dad loves the symmetry of her palindromes, words where the head matches the tail. And each day Anina looks at her bus ticket to see if its number is a palindrome like her.
One day, on the school playground she bumps into blonde Yisel, sending her sandwich flying through the air and down a drain. This starts a big fight. Anina calls Yisel, a big girl, “the elephant”.
Yisel makes fun of Anina’s palindromic names.
Their punishment? The principal gives them both mysterious black envelopes, closed with red sealing wax. They have to keep it safe and unopened for a week. Will this strange punishment teach them a lesson?
Anina is a very simple film, but it looks amazing. It’s an animated cartoon in a dusty and smudgy, retro style. It’s filled with fascinating details that shout Uruguay: eggs wrapped in paper, strange fried foods, kids wearing white smocks to school. At the same time, its buses, classrooms, and playgrounds look just like here.
But the movie is at its best when Anina’s imagination takes over: her bus turns into a riverboat, she gets lost in an imaginary hedge maze. And there’s a fantastic nightmare sequence where the Principal and a mean teacher morph into a ghostly judge and jury – ready to punish her for what she did to her black envelope.
Anina is clearly a kids’ movie but everyone can appreciate its amazing look.
Oculus opens today in Toronto, check your local listings; Anina is part of the TIFF Kids film festival, on now (tiff.net), and Bloody Beans is playing April 14th at Toronto’s Images festival of moving art (imagesfestival.com).
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com
Daniel Garber talks to stars Mark Rendall and Nicholas Campbell about their new film ALGONQUIN
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Jake is an unhappy schoolteacher and wannabe writer in small town Ontario. But his life is turned upside down when his troublesome, absentee dad Leif suddenly 
re-appears in his life. He wants Jake to drop everything and follow him up to a cabin in the woods. Why? There’s a project to complete, secrets to reveal, and loose ends to tie up. The cottage is located in Algonquin Park – and Algonquin is the name of the new Canadian film opening today in Toronto.
The father and son are played by TV and film stars Nicholas Campbell (Da Vinci Inquest) and Mark Rendall (Child Star). I speak to them 
about parks, cottages, hucksters, wimps, quests, coming-of-age dramas, the Group of Seven… and a big blue heron!
Where have I seen this? Movies reviewed: Angelique, Bethlehem
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Do you ever see a new movie that rings a bell in the back of your mind? And wonder why?
This week I’m investigating two such movies. One’s a political thriller from Israel, the other’s a swashbuckler from France.
Angelique
Dir: Ariel Zeitoun
It’s the 1600s in France. Louis XIV – the future Sun King – is heir to the throne. In a remote convent, beautiful Angelique (Nora Arnezeder: Safe House) is busy being educated by nuns. But just when she thinks she’s off to marry a minor noble she’s pushed into an arranged marriage. Le comte de Peyrac is a rich powerful noble but is much older and has a badly scarred and disfigured face.
His rival, the archbishop of Toulouse, says the count is into witchcraft and alchemy. He holds perverse orgies in his dungeon, worships the devil and turns sand into gold! So Angelique decides to make a run for it with her best friend Nicolas (Matthieu Kassovitz: Amelie, La Haine). But she is discovered
and sent to marry him. But before she leaves, she confesses to a priest about a letter she’s held since childhood. The letter reveals who was responsible for a plot to murder the crown prince.
Angelique is fiery and tempestuous with a mind of her own. She refuses to sleep with him. To her surprise he doesn’t force her. Instead, he defends her honour. Will he change her mind? Or will she leave him? Hmmm…
So Angelique goes to live with the Count and gradually discovers the truth. Peyrac (Gerard Lanvin: Mesrine) is actually a modern man. His witchcraft? 
Understanding that the earth goes around the sun. His alchemy? It’s just a gold refinery. And his sex orgies? (Well, that part seems to be true.)
So the local archbishop wants Peyrac burned at the stake; this is still the era of the inquisition. The future king Louis XIV (German actor David Kross: Krabat, The Reader) is interested in the count’s gold mine. And Angelique still holds that secret letter.
The movie follows their plight. When Peyrac is thrown into the Bastille, she is forced to darken her hair, disguise herself as a poor woman, and go undercover in the streets of Paris to rescue her husband. There are sword 
fights, a huge trial, a lawyer with a mastiff, a lusty cousin (hints of incest?), assassinations, secret identities, Church corruption and palace intrigue. And in movies with castles you always get torch-lit chase scenes down hidden staircases and through underground tunnels.
At first I thought it was a new version of the Three Musketeers, told from a woman’s perspective. But I was totally wrong. Apparently it’s based on a French movie from 
1964, which in turn was based on the Angelique series of French novels, bestselling potboilers in the 1950s. Anyway, Angelique is a fun and fascinating film that breathes new life into a genre I thought was long dead and buried. Swashbucklers – what the hell’s a swash? …And how do you buckle it? No idea, but I liked this movie. (Can’t wait for Part 2.)
Bethlehem
Dir: Yuval Adler, Wri: Yuval Adler, Ali Wakad
Young Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i) lives in Bethlehem in the West Bank. His older brother Ibrahim is a member of Al Aqsa, the militant wing of Fatah. Al Aqsa and their rival Hamas – based in Gaza – are battling for influence in Bethlehem.
Sanfur hangs with his friends, daring each other to prove who is the toughest. Like putting on a bullet proof vest and shooting each other at close range… what are they thinking?! Sanfur’s tough, but he also has a secret: he’s an informant for the Israeli secret service. They want to keep track of his secretive brother because something big is about to happen.
Then a bomb goes off at the King George Hotel in Jerusalem, killing many. 
Who did it – Hamas or Al Aqsa? And was Ibrahim involved?
Razi (Tsahi Halevi), Sanfur’s Arabic-speaking Israeli “handler”, wants to find out. His superiors expect him to catch Sanfur who regularly passes money to his brother. But Razi pulls a fast one: he gets him to disappear for a few days. That way they can catch who they want without Sanfur being killed. But that means Razi has to lie, both to the secret service and to Sanfur.
This is a good spy thriller about the dual allegiances of the numerous Palestinian informants in the West Bank and their Israeli handlers. 
Apparently, it was written by a Palestinian and an Israeli, to tell the two sides of the story.
But it may ring a bell: I talked a few weeks ago about another, very similar movie called Omar. Omar is also about a young Palestinian man who is an informant for the Israeli Secret Service. The plot is amazingly similar, but subtly different in crucial ways.
In Omar, the young men shoot an Israeli soldier. In Bethlehem, someone bombs a Jerusalem hotel killing dozens of civilians.
In Omar, the Arabic-speaking Israeli handler is devious and not to be 
trusted. In Bethlehem, he’s kind and sympathetic, and lies only to save lives.
In Omar, Israeli police cruelly harass an innocent man. In Bethlehem, The police bulldoze a hole into a killer’s house.
In Omar, Palestinian militants are driven by feelings of anger, vengeance, and loyalty. In Bethlehem, they seem more concerned with money — getting paid what they’re owed.
Omar (the character) is a handsome and noble hero in love with a beautiful woman. Sanfur (which means Smurf) is a troubled and confused teenager, driven to tears and easily influenced. His only “love affair” is the father/son relationship he has with his Israeli handler.
Omar is a straightforward romantic thriller, while Bethlehem is more ambiguous and troubling, less black and white. Which one’s better? They are
both good movies.
Angelique played at CineFranco, Toronto’s French language film festival, which continues to show great movies all weekend. And Bethlehem opens in Toronto today: check your local listings. And, coming soon: imagesfestival.com with great art films and moving images, and TIFF Kids film festival, at tiff.net .
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
A French Connection? Movies reviewed: Finding Vivian Maier, L’autre vie de Richard Kemp, Triptyque
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-
brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
With Quebec elections coming up, this week I’m looking at movies with a “French connection” (francophone, that is.) These movies all share a dark, mysterious and introspective mood.
There’s a doc about an artist who never showed her art, a Quebec drama about two sisters – one loses her voice, the other writing; and a French thriller about a detective thwarted from catching a serial killer… by himself!
Finding Vivian Maier
Dir: John Maloof and Charlie Siskel
When John, a third generation Flea Marketeer, buys a box of negatives at an auction, he doesn’t realize at first what he has. It’s a vast collection of never-printed negatives taken by an unknown photographer named Vivian Maier. She plied the streets of Chicago for decades documenting street life. Her shots are beautiful, poignant, the black and white photos aesthetically astute.
But who was she? Where did she come from? And why is she unknown to the
world?
Turns out the photographer, Vivian Maier, died recently. She left behind over 100,000 photos, plus audio tapes and some super-8 reels. But none of the photos had ever been professionally printed, and almost no one had seen them but the photographer herself. Maier was a very tall woman with a mannish haircut and a vaguely French accent. She wore heavy boots, old-fashioned hats, and always carried a rolleiflex camera. An eccentric, she was given to hording any items she found. Most surprising is how she earned her living… as a nanny and a maid.
This is a fascinating and intriguing documentary that pieces together parts of her life – though most is left unknown – while showing lots of her incredible photographs. We hear from her former bosses, the grown-up kids she had nannied, even a few Alpine relatives.
Her story is similar to the case of Henry Darger, another eccentric artist (who worked as a janitor) who hoarded his own intricate drawings that were only discovered after death. And, as in that case, the filmmakers are tied to the one who owns all the art. There’s an ulterior motive: to get rich from the work of a previously unknown artist.
Still, this doesn’t detract from the beauty and mystery of her story or of the appeal of the street photos themselves. It does make you wonder, though. Is a photographer who never selects which photos to show and who never successfully prints the pictures she took – an artist? Or is the posthumous curator the real artist here? Either way, Finding Vivian Maier is a great story.
L’autre vie de Richard Kemp (Back in Crime)
Dir: Germinal Alvarez
Helene, (Mélanie Thierry), an elegant psychologist out for a morning run, finds a dead body washed up on shore. She’s questioned by a scruffy police detective named Richard Kemp. She is cold and dismissive. Kemp (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is troubled because it shares the M.O. with a case, never solved, from early in his career. An unknown killer – known only as the earwig — kidnaps his victims, punctures their ears, and throws them 
into the ocean. Was the killer back again?
Though their first meeting is frosty, eventually Helene and Richard hit it off. (She’s a widow with a son, he’s divorced.) But while investigating the case on a bridge, he is struck from behind and thrown into the water. When he climbs out things have changed. The streetcar driver won’t accept his Euros: they’re “foreign” money. At home he sees a stranger 
with a key to his modernistic apartment. He soon discovers the truth: it’s 25 years earlier, and the man he saw – is himself!
He rents a room in a highrise across from the curvy building his younger self rents. Maybe young Richard will do it right this time. But he makes the same mistakes again. So he decides to follow the earwig’s trail himself – he knows the MO, maybe he’ll catch him or at least save the 
victims. But he ends up as a suspect being chased by his younger self.
So he turns to the only one he can trust: Helene. Can he win her to his side, convince her his plight is true, and will they rekindle their future romance? This is a neat, dark detective story with a bit of a time travel twist. I like this one.
Triptyque
Dir: Robert Lepage
Marie and Michelle Lavallee are two Montreal sisters, the crème de la crème of Quebec culture. Marie (Frédérike Bédard) is an internationally-known singer. Michelle (Lise Castonguay) is a noted poet and author. But fame does not shield them from tragedy. Marie discovers she has a brain tumour. She seeks the help of Austrian brain surgeon Thomas (Hans Piesbergen) who, secretly, suffers from a hand tremor.
Michelle, diagnosed with schizophrenia, is committed to a mental hospital 
and kept on medication. Once released, she seeks solace in a Montreal bookstore. No coffee, no WiFi, just actual books by Quebecois artists and intellectuals. But, inhibited by her medication, she finds herself unable to write.
After her surgery, Marie is left with aphasia – she can’t recall words. She can 
sing the notes but not the lyrics. And her memory is faulty: she can’t remember her own father’s voice. But she has found love. All three characters in Triptique have to work through their losses, fill the gaps, and right the wrongs.
This film is an abbreviated version of part of Lepage’s epic stage drama Lipsynch which played in Toronto two years ago. It trades the intricate stage design for which he’s so famous, for an intimacy and closeness you can’t get on a stage. And it captures Montreal’s bitterly elegant winter cityscapes as only a movie can.
Triptyque and Lepage’s other films are now playing in a retrospective at TIFF; for details, go to tiff.net; l’Autre Vie de Richard Kemp (a.k.a. Back in Crime) is having its North American premier and is one of many great pics at CineFranco, Toronto’s francophone film fest (go to cinefranco.com for tickets); and Finding Vivian Maier opens 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
Mind Twisters. Movies reviewed: A Field in England, Divergent, Nymph()maniac (Parts 1 and 2)
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Brain teasers, mind-bogglers. This week I’m bringing you some real brain-twisting films. There’s a sci-fi-action-romance about a young woman caught in a futuristic caste-system determined by personality; a Euro comedy/drama about sex; And an absurdist British period piece about … I’m not quite sure what.
A Field in England
Ben Wheatley
It’s 17th Century England in a field near Norwich. The civil war is raging. Three scruffy wanderers end up travelling together. They are heading toward a legendary alehouse where all their problems will be solved, all their differences will disappear. But things get complicated when O’Neal, a tall, sinister man, appears — seemingly out of nowhere — with a nasty henchman. The necromancer’s servant (one of the three travellers), tries to arrest O’Neal. But a warrant without a musket to back it up isn’t worth much in an English field. Instead, O’Neal press gangs the three men to dig for treasure. At least I think that’s the plot, but I’m not exactly sure.
People in this movie appear, disappear, die, un-die, turn into wooden posts, and drop magic mushrooms into unwatched soup pots.
Shot in beautiful black and white, with excellent contemporary experimental music, it leaves me scratching my head. Is it all just an acid trip by men wearing three-cornered hats in an historic battle reenactment? I cannot say. But it definitely belongs in the movie file labeled “WTF”.
Divergent
Dir: Neil Burger
It’s Chicago a hundred years in the future. Society is divided into five castes, each with its own rules. Erudite is for the intelligent professionals who wear Wall Street suits. Abnegation is where the sympathetic and selfless helpers go — they control the government. And Dauntless is for the paramilitary – brave and aggressive.
Young Tris’s family (Shailene Woodley) is Abnegation. They wear beige, meditate, and eat whole grains. Tris only looks in the mirror for a few seconds each day. But when she attains age of majority and takes the annual test — to determine personality and faction – something strange happens. The test doesn’t work on her – it can’t assign her to a particular faction. This could mean she’s “Divergent” — someone who displays a personality that transcend a single type. And if the authorities find out, they’ll kill her.
To everyone’s surprise, she ends up joining Dauntless, trading beige burlap 
for black leather. She eats her first hamburger. She and the other Dauntless newbies are thrust into a world of violent, brutal competition, runaway L-trains and parkour jumping. She answers to a sadistic trainer Eric (Jai Courtney). Only her new best friends like Chris (Zoe Kravitz) help her hang on. But when she meets a Dauntless named Four (Theo James) is it love at first sight?
In order to stay in the faction she has to pass a series of tests that subject her to her worst phobias — her mind is read and recorded by a computer. Tris has to keep reminding herself: it’s not real.Will her secret be revealed? Is Erudite, headed by Jeanine (Kate Winslet) plotting against the Abnegation faction? Is Four on her side? And will he ever understand how much Tris loves him?
Although Divergent occasionally veers into Twilight territory, with a few too many dewy-eyed moments, it mainly sticks to plot, action and great special effects. I liked it: a simple but neat concept, great special effects, and Shailene Woodley and Theo James are good as a team of romantic fighters.
Nymphomaniac
Dir: Lars von Trier
Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is lying half dead in a dark alley, when an elderly intellectual (Stellan Skarsgard) finds her. He takes her into his home and nurses her back to health. She says she’s a nymphomaniac. And she proceeds to tell him the story of her life; specifically, the sexual parts.
The stories she tells are based on the pictures she sees on the wall of his room. Is 
she an unreliable narrator? Maybe, but her stories are fun to watch.
Her first orgasm makes her levitate and leads to a visit by the Virgin Mary. (The Whore of Babylon, says Seligman.)
Later, she intentionally loses her virginity to a man named Jerome (Shia LeBoeuf). She describes it like this: first I lay on my back and he thrust three times. Then he turned me over and thrust five times. And here’s how Seligman responds: Three, then Five? Why that’s part of the Fibonacci number sequence!
Joe is unadulterated sex. Seligman (an asexual virgin) represents pure reason.
As a young woman, she and a friend compete to see who can pick up – and have sex with — the most men, sequentially, on a train. The winner gets a bag of candy. Seligman: Why that’s like fly fishing – you send out the lure and try to reel it in at just the right moment!
Joe describes how she dates many nameless men simultaneously, avoiding all emotional entanglement. She actually rolls dice before calling a boyfriend to decide whether to be nice, pouty, or to drop him altogether. But she discovers her game affects many people besides just the men she has sex with.
Love rears its ugly head. Jerome is back, and she falls for him hook, line and 
sinker. But are they sexually compatible?
She describes encounters with anonymous men, a long relationship with a BDSM master (Jamie Bell), her try at a 12-step program, and finding a protege (Mia Goth) to take her place.
This movie is much too long to describe in a short review. It’s full of cinematic quotes from Von Triers’ earlier films – his own movie scenes reenacted. He 
insults critics, pundits, himself… and occasionally the audience. For example, a scene about Joe and two (supposedly) African men dredges up hoary racial stereotypes — it’s intentionally offensive. But it’s followed by an equally long scene with Joe and Seligman debating “political correctness”. The ridiculous sex scene is 
really just a straw man to make way for a long discussion.
It’s also a movie full of explicit sex and nudity: at one point there are a hundred consecutive penis pics, but mostly it’s vagina, vagina, vagina. This movie could be subtitled The Vagina 
Dialogues. The symbols are everywhere: tunnels, alleys, window curtains, sliding doors, and holes in walls. It’s a woman’s sexuality filtered through the eyes of a male director.
There is also some repulsive, graphic violence, especially in Part 2. But above all, the movie’s a comedy. And I liked it – all four and a half hours.
A Field in England is now playing, and Nymphomaniac (Parts 1 and 2 — separate tickets), and Divergent both open today in Toronto – check your local listings. The Pasolini retrospective continues at TIFF (tiff.net) and Cinefranco, Toronto’s francophone film festival, starts next week: details at cinefranco.com.
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 Kelly McCormack and Alec Toller about their new film PLAY: THE FILM
OK folks, listen closely: there’s a new movie, called Play: the Film starring “play” actors who play actors in a play.
director (Alec Toller). And the play’s director rewrites the script because he wants to turn it into a TV movie. So an actor takes revenge.Pier Paolo Pasolini: the Poet of Contamination. Movies Reviewed: The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Arabian Nights
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: You may have heard his name, but not know why. He was an Italian novelist, poet, artist and director, born in Bologna. He got his start in movies writing screenplays (including Fellini’s La Dolce Vita) before directing his own films. His films – he directed movies from the 1960s until the mid 70s, when he was murdered – celebrate the poor, 
the outcasts, the people in the margins. They dig at the complacent middle-class, and the oppressive and corrupt church and nobilitiy. He cast non-professionals in his films for their looks and attitude – he wanted his actors natural not contrived. Naturalism was all-important.
Pasolini was in the Italian Communist Party but was kicked out for his criminal activity. His crime? Being gay. So Pasolini embraced his status as sexual outlaw.
All of these elements – politics and sexuality shown in literature and art – come together in his movies: beautiful to watch, full of laughter, but with a rough and tragic streak running through them.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: the Poet of Contamination is a retrospective of his films now playing at TIFF. This week, I’m going to tell you about three of his movies, often called a trilogy, all based on Medieval stories. They are extraordinarily beautiful films and you should see them on the big screen while you can. There’s an English romp, an Italian comedy, and tales of middle-eastern magic.
Canterbury Tales (1972)
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is the classic collection of stories told by religious pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Set in 14thcentury England, it’s filled with monastic robes, pious nuns, Oxford students, religious pilgrims. But it’s also a world full of shouting and drunkenness, farts and belches. The old are missing teeth, fat and ugly, and prone to violence. The young, though still beautiful, are selfish and arrogant. And everyone’s apt to break into raucous, unscripted laughter as they do medieval things like milling corn or polishing eggs.
But what do they all desire? Sex (and money). They come up with complex schemes to cheat on their husbands and wives. This movie is very bawdy.
But it has a dark side too. One of the earliest scenes shows a man being burned to death in the market 
square: he was caught having sex with another man, but was too poor to bribe the police.
Religion and the supernatural are omnipresent. Angels, devils and wood spirits are as likely as a passing neighbour to appear outside a window. A widow wears out a succession of husbands by being too good in bed. An arrogant student fools his mentor into thinking a great flood is coming. Three brothers go from cavorting in a brothel to plotting dangerous and murderous schemes. And a bright red devil shoots the black-clothed sinners of hell out of his ass!
Most of all, it’s a place where large-breasted women and plain-faced men stand around staring… naturally, naked.
The Decameron (1971)
Based on 14th century writer Boccacio’s sexual comedy, these piqaresque stories centre on Naples and other medieval Italian cities. Women are tricksters who fool hapless travelers, while sinners look for sex. It’s a comedy about sex, thumbing its nose at church-mandated restrictions.
Here’s a typical story. A nunnery is off limits to all men but the elderly. A young guy, sensing opportunity, pulls his hat down low – like Bob and Doug McKenzie — and pretends to be a deaf-mute simpleton. He gets hired as a gardner. Soon enough, all the nuns are sneaking out to the shed for their daily roll in the hay. But what happens when the mother superior gets her turn? He tells her he’s had enough. He can 
speak! It’s a miracle!
This is an amazing movie (I liked it even better than Canterbury Tales) shot around ancient castles and down narrow alleys.
Arabian Nights (1974)
The 1001 Nights is the famous collection of intertwined stories-within-stories across the Arab world. Pasolini skips the tale of the Persian Scheherazade as the storyteller, and instead uses a loving 
relationship between a wise and beautiful slave-girl named Zummarud, and her young master. She’s smarter than all the men she encounters, and somehow manages to snub potential buyers at her own auction — rich old men who won’t satisfy her sexually – in favour of love at first site. But she is kidnapped by a spurned buyer. This launches a series of journeys as she outsmarts the men she meets and eventually – disguised as a man – rises to the level of king. And all the way her lover, Nur ed-Din tries to find her.
She’s played by Ines Pellegrini, an Italian woman of Eritrean background, and he’s Franco Merli, a 
teenaged boy Pasolini apparently spotted pumping gas.
Pasolini skips the most famous stories – the Ali Babas, Alladins, and Sinbads – and instead adapts less-well-known ones. Especially the sexy parts.
Like Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, The Arabian Nights was rated “X” when it first came out. Though it includes a lot of nudity, it’s very tame, sweet and almost naïve, by present-day standards. Some of the same actors show up in all of these films. Franco Citti (usually with bright red hair) plays the devil in Canterbury, an unrepentant sinner and homosexual in Decameron and a magical demon in Arabian Nights. Ninneto Davoli (Pasolini’s former lover), is the toothy, curly-haired clown who bursts into tears or laughter, or else stares, dumbfounded, at new things he encounters. Pasolini himself also appears in small — but central — roles 
in his own movies — as Chaucer in Canterbury Tales, or as a master painter in The Decameron, who says his art is never as good as what appears in his dreams.
Arabian Nights was shot in Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran and Nepal, and to say the locations are breathtakingly beautiful doesn’t do them justice. It’s mind-boggling, ranging from lunar landscapes and strange curved mud homes, to cavernous, white-and-blue tiled cathedrals, and ancient wooden Nepali shrines. And the faces of the local actors and extras add still more beauty and authenticity to the locations. (A collection of still photos from this film by Roberto Villa is on display now at the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto.)
Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poet of Contamination is playing now at the TIFF Bell Lightbox; details on tiff.net. Beginning next Thursday is the CFF a festival of low-budget and independent Canadian films at the Royal: go to canfilmfest.ca for more information. And cult favourite The Room is playing at the Carlton starting tonight.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Daniel Garber interviews Kore-eda Hirokazu about his new film Like Father, Like Son (そして父になる)
Hi, This is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM
What would you do if your discovered you’re not the father of your child? Not adopted father, not step-father, not foster-father… What if you discovered the actual child your wife gave birth to isn’t the one you’re raising?
A new movie called Like Father, Like Son (そして父になる) looks at a married couple in Tokyo who discover their six-year-old son, Keita, was switched at birth in a rural hospital with another 
baby named Ryusei.
Noted director and festival favourite Kore-eda Hirokazu has won countless awards for his poignant, realistic social dramas. His subtle new drama deals with issues of blood, patrimony, family, children, class, names and identity. Like Father, Like Son opens today in Toronto.
I spoke with him at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 2013.
Pop Culture Icons. Movies reviewed: Need For Speed, Bettie Page Reveals All, Alan Partridge
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
They say as long as there’s a familiar name in a movie title people will go. Is that true? This week I’m looking at three diverse movies all based on pop-culture references. There’s an action movie based on a videogame about car racing, a documentary about a 50s pinup model, and a comedy about a (fictional) TV and radio talk show host.
Need for Speed
Dir: Scott Waugh
Tobey (Aaron Paul: Breaking Bad) is a car lover in tiny Mt Kisco. He runs a repair garage with his mechanic buds and races his beauties on the street. He rebuilds cars for rich collectors. But then his nemesis Dino (Dominic Cooper) who stole his high school sweetheart, comes to town with a proposition: big bucks if he can beat him in a secret, three-car race. Someone ends up dying, and Tobey takes the fall and goes to jail.
Two years later, he’s free again, with the chance to enter a cross country race to 
California sponsored by an elusive dot-com mogul (Michael Keaton). But he needs help. His old enemy Dino sics the police on him, so he’s racing and being chased. His pals from the garage agree to help him out; they use helicopters, race cars for back-up support, and attempt on-highway tune-ups and gas tank refills. Tobey can’t stop driving, no matter what.
Julia (Imogen Poots), a mythical dream date for race-car-bros, volunteers to help him win. She’s a blonde and beautiful millionairess , who’s also fast-witted and an expert driver who’s not interested in commitment.
Will Tobey’s honest small town ingenuity beat that bag-of-dicks Dino and his dirty tricks? Can he get vengeance for past crimes? And can he 
avoid all the feds on his tail?
This movie is based on a video game, and it’s filled with overt product placement. There’s a baffling five minute ad in the middle of the movie for Ford Mustangs! And it’s loaded with car porn, the camera caressing glowing fuselages and 
sparkling pistons. The characters toss out lines like “Bro – whoa, look at that red Lambo!” Personally, car brands, street racing, or the video game it was based on, do nothing for me. But I enjoyed it anyway. It’s dumb with a senseless, simplistic plot, but I could still appreciate the excellent race scenes, special effects, blow ups, air-shots and wipeouts, leading to an ultimate finish line.
Bettie Page Reveals All
Dir: Mark Mori
Bettie Page was a 1950s pinup model from Tennessee. An underground star, she was known for her hairstyle — black with bangs — her body, her smiling good looks. Her images shout sex is nothing to be afraid of. She appears in bikinis on Florida beaches, topless in studio, dancing on a stage, holding a whip, in full bondage, and occasionally alongside wild animals. She made 16 mm films with suggestive titles like Teaserama, directed by someone actually named 
Irving Klaw! And she always appeared to be having a good time.
Then, suddenly, she quits, never to pose again and completely disappears from the public eye.
Flash forward to the 90s – and she shifts from subculture star to pop culture icon. People begin to dress like her, imitate her, or use her image in comic books, T-shirts and tattoos. She’s virtually ubiquitous, and everyone knows who she is. Porn stars, Roller Derby players, even pop stars — like Katie Perry — dress like her, imitate her, and on Halloween, many women (and some men) attempt to become her.
This documentary reveals all. The filmmakers manage to track down Bettie Page (that’s her real name, by the way). She never appears on the screen but her voice tells about what really happened during and after her brush with fame. She’s born again, loses her marbles, gets married three times. And for much of this period she had no idea she was idolized by millions. Through it all she remains open, unapologetic and fascinated by sex. This is an amazing story of the rise, fall and rise again of a pop icon.
Alan Partridge
Dir: Declan Lowney
Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) is an obnoxious, small-town radio personality in Norwich, UK. He’s self-centred and aggressive, but also insecure, obtuse and vengeful. He has an unmistakable fake smile that’s as irritating as it is hilarious.
This character has been on British TV and radio for decades now, as a mock sportscaster, DJ and talk show host. And like any celebrity worth his salt he can talk endlessly about nothing in particular, in a way sure to make a guest squirm.
In this, his first movie, he’s back as an awful radio show host. His station gets taken over by corporate raiders who decide they need a “younger” image. He manages to hold onto his show, but his co-host Pat (Colm 
Meaney) gets the boot (which is partly Alan Partridge’s fault.) So what happens? Suddenly, the whole station is in lockdown and they’re all Pat’s hostages – except Alan Partridge. The police and special-ops swarm in and they decide, for some reason, that only Alan can negotiate Pat’s surrender. Hilarity ensues.
The plot isn’t really that important – just a format to let Alan Partridge be himself. And that’s all it needs. He is so, so funny. Self-unaware, attention-
starved, socially inept and excruciatingly unhip, he has just enough of that radio voice and vapid attitude to make it all seem plausible. You can see his old stuff on youtube, but it’s great to see him featured in a feature length feature. This is a silly, goofy, and really funny movie… especially if you like British TV comedy. Steve Coogan at his best, showing Alan Partridge at his worst.
Betty Page Reveals All and Alan Partridge both open today in Toronto, and Need for Speed opens next Friday; check your local listings. Also on is the great Japanese drama Like Father, Like Son. And the Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective: The Poet of Contamination plays through March. Go to tiff.net for more info.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Oscar Time! Movies reviewed: Omar, The Great Beauty
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, documentary, genre and mainstream films, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
It’s time for my Oscar picks. Warning – I’m almost always wrong.
Best Actor. Should win: Matt McConoughey. Will win: Chiwetel Ejiofor.
WINNER: Matt McConoughey X
Best Actress. Should win: Judy Dench. Will win: Cate Blanchett.
WINNER: Cate Blanchett
Best Supporting Actor. (No idea… Jared Leto?)
WINNER: Jared Leto
Best Supporting Actress. Should win: Lupita Lyongo. Will win: Jennifer Lawrence.
WINNER: Lupita Lyongo X
Best Documentary. Should win: Act of Killing. Will win: 20 Feet from Stardom.
WINNER: 20 Feet from Stardom
Best Director. Should win — Steve McQueen. Will win: Russell or Cuaron
WINNER: Alfonso Cuaron
Best Picture. 12 Years a Slave (Should win and will win.)
WINNER: 12 Years a Slave
Best Movie in a Foreign Language. Should win: The Hunt. Will win: The Great Beauty.
WINNER: The Great Beauty
Sunday, March 2, 2014 , midnight. Oscars Results: My predictions weren’t bad this year — I got 6 or 7 out of 9 correct. The two I got wrong were winners I labeled “should win” not “will win”: Lupita Lyongo, and Matthew McConoughey. And I gave myself two “will win” options for best director (Russell or Cuaron).
So, in keeping with this theme, this week I’m looking at two movies nominated for best foreign language picture. One’s a dramatic thriller from the Palestinian Territories about a young man caught between a rock and a hard place; the other is a nostalgic look at contemporary Rome.
Omar
Dir: Hany Abu-Assad
Omar (Adam Bakri) is a young Palestinian who works in a one-man pita bakery. He’s a clean-scrubbed guy with an indefatigable spirit. Nimble on his feet, Omar can climb a three-storey wall — and back again — in a few seconds. And climb he does, over the Separation Wall that runs along the long border between Israel and the Occupied Territories. Because walls mean nothing to Omar — the border is porous, an arbitrary line.
Why does he cross the wall? Ostensibly to visit Tarek – serious, stern (Iyad Hoorani) and Amjad, a teller of jokes (Samar Bisharat).
But his real motivation is Nadia (Leem Lubany) Tarek’s younger sister, who lives on the other side of the wall. Omar is as tall dark and handsome as Nadia is kind, witty and beautiful with tousled black hair. 
One day he’s stopped by a particularly cruel unit of the border patrol. The Israelis are about his age, but they beat him up and publically humiliate him. A shift in Omar’s thinking?
So he joins Tarek and Amjad for a planned action. They are all prospective members of the militant Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade. Their initiation? A shooting. Omar doesn’t personally kill anyone but he’s the one arrested.
In prison, he’s tortured and interrogated. Finally he’s approached by a member of Al Aqsa. He warns Omar that spies are everywhere – they’ll pretend to make friends with him to get him to confess. The only way out is to collaborate with the Israelis – and any collaboration will last forever. His words are prophetic.
Soon enough, he’s out again, working to marry his love, trying to find the traitor who gave up his name, and, meanwhile, regularly speaking from a phone booth with his Israeli contact Rami (Waleed F. Zuaiter) an Arabic-speaking agent.
Whose side is he on? Which side does he really support? Can he even trust his friends, his love, his fellow militants?
Omar is a dramatic thriller about the Israel/Palestine conflict told decidedly from the Palestinian point of view. As a drama, it shows the psychologically draining toll non-stop surveillance takes on the lives of 
Palestinians. The movie’s done like a chess game: each side makes a move, countered by his opponent. But you soon see there are multiple chessboards, operating simultaneously, with countless players, alliances and betrayals until it’s hard to figure out who is black and who is white.
The acting is great, especially Adam Bakri and Leem Lubany as the young lovers, and Waleed F. Zuaiter as Omar’s handler. While not perfect, this is a thoughtful, informative and disturbing film, one that makes you think… and then rethink.
A Great Beauty
Wri/Dir: Paolo Sorrentino
Jep (Toni Servillo) is a bon vivant living in the floating world of contemporary Rome. It’s still the Dolce Vita. Ostensibly, he’s a novelist, but hasn’t done anything great in decades. He coasts along, living off his reputation, and partying with faded royalty, vapid models and the ultra-rich. He is a camera, experiencing and recording all of this in mind.
His Rome is one filled with gilded palaces, rococo night clubs and 
velveteen Vatican chambers. His editor at a popular magazine, Dadina (Giovanna Vignola), is a little person, given to wearing electric-blue dresses. As his 65th birthday approaches he confides in her: he needs to find something or someone important, genuine – the “great beauty” of the movie’s title.
Slowly, the movie chugs along, heading toward his dinner party, with an elusive guest. Will he be touched by God? Or will it all prove as superficial as the rest of his life?
The Great Beauty is a nostalgic look at Rome’s faded glory, the cool elegance of old Fellini movies. Wonderfully acted, carefully shot. But does it add up to anything new?
I found this movie hollow at the core.
And, aside from a few minutes of genuine beauty, it’s not attractive at all. It’s drenched in a 1970s aesthetic of awful opulence, far from the coolness of 50s and 60s Italian cinema. And both its story and its look exists more as a tribute (or a rehash) of older Italian movies than as a new one all its own.
The Great Beauty is now playing and Omar opens 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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