Crime Families? Movies Reviewed: We’re the Millers, 2 Guns, Blue Jasmine
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.
Something strange happened to me recently – apparently my downtown bank was robbed… while I was there! The thing is, I didn’t even know it had taken place. In fact, if a teller hadn’t handed me a mugshot photocopy and told me to circle a face, I still wouldn’t know. Meanwhile, the bank refused to say that they’d been robbed, just what do you remember, what did you see? (Truthful answer: nothing). All very strange. Nothing like the movies where someone in a mask always shouts Nobody move! I have a gun and it’s loaded! Don’t move and you won’t get hurt!
This week I’m looking at three new movies about how crime can affect the criminals themselves, their friends and their families. Two of the movies – one action, one comedy – focus on the lucrative drug trade across the US/Mexican border. And one’s a drama, set in San Francisco, about the ex-wife of a Bernie Madoff-type character.
We’re the Millers
Dir: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Dave (Jason Sudeikis) is loving the single’s life as a small- time pot dealer. But when street punks steal his money and his drug stash, he suddenly finds himself in debt to his drug boss, a goofy, but cruel, businessman who keeps killer whales for pets. So he’s forced to do a one-time smuggling run from Mexico in an RV. But, in order to fool government agents at the border, he must totally change his look, from stoner to suburban straight guy. So he recruits a fake family to accompany him. Rose, a bitter and angry stripper who lives in his apartment building (Jennifer Anniston) is now his “wife”. (She hates him). Naïve Kenny (Will Poulter) — another neighbour, who was abandoned by his mom – is his pretend son, and homeless Casey (Emma Roberts) is his wisecracking daughter.
Together they cross the border, evade vengeful Mexican druglords, and try to fit in with the lily-white Christian campers they meet on the road.
Meet the Millers is a cute, risqué road movie about a bunch of ne’erdowells who, in spite of themselves, gradually morph into the family roles they are given. The laughs come from the fact that we, the audience — but not the characters they meet – know that this suburban family is actually just a façade. The characters are all funny and sympatico, but Will Poulter (the wide-eyed kid in the UK comedy Son of Rambow) especially stands out as a goofy twerp forced to grow up.
2 Guns
Dir: Baltasar Kormákur
Stig and Bobby (Mark Wahlburg and Denzel Washington) are carefree partners in crime. They kibitz with a Mexican crime lord, knock over banks and blow up donut shops. And Bobby has a beautiful non-girlfriend, Deb (Paula Patton), who’s a fed. But when a simple bank job yields the boys $30 million in untraceable cash, the dynamic changes. There’s no honour among thieves. They turn against each other. Both of them turn out to be secretly working for competing groups – and everyone seems to know this except the two of them. Soon enough, they’re each being chased by the military, the CIA, another sinister and deadly agency, and the drug lords themselves – all of whom want to get their hands on the cash. If 
Bobby and Stig can’t trust each other, how will they survive this “war on drugs”?
If you like light action movies — with getaways, shoot-outs, explosions, disguises and chase scenes – this is a good one. Wahlburg is a very likeable comic actor. Washington seems to have a bit more trouble doing good comedy, but he’s got the weather-worn-persona down pat. And I love Icelandic director Kormákur’s constant use of stark, rusty-steel locations: all his trains, cars, industrial kitchens, rooftops, deserts… just beautiful to watch.
(One point: both 2 Guns and Meet the Millers are filled with dated, negative stereotypes of Mexicans… but, since the movies are also filled with negative stereotypes of Americans, I guess it evens out.)
Blue Jasmine
Dir: Woody Allen
Rich, blond and upper-class, New York socialite Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) arrives in San Francisco with just the shirt on her back (and some jewels and dresses in her Louis Vuitton luggage.) She’s losing it. Penniless, lost, disgraced. She can’t stop thinking about her ex-husband’s – a Bernie Madoff-type Wall Street investor who bilked his clients – fall from power. Now she has nowhere to go, so she’s forced to bunk with her sister. Frowsy but affable, working-class Ginger (Sally Hawkins) is her exact opposite – could they have come from the same womb? Snooty Jasmine insists they’re not biological relatives.
Ginger lets her stay in her messy but happy home, along with two kids 
and a boorish boyfriend. Jasmine holds that the only way for a woman to improve her lot in life is to marry up. Ginger should meet better boyfriends. (Unmentioned is the fact that it was Jasmine’s billionaire husband that broke up Ginger’s marriage when he squandered their nest egg on worthless stock.)
But impeccably good taste isn’t enough to feed Jasmine. A Vassar drop-out, she has no skills, no experience. She is forced to double- date with her sister. She takes work as a dental receptionist, wears a nametag, and deals with relentless customers and sexual harassment from her boss. But she still dreams of better days in the Hamptons, even as she recalls, through flashbacks, the events that led to her husband’s financial collapse. Can a widowed diplomat she meets pull her from this morass? And will Ginger follow suit with a newer, richer boyfriend?
Blue Jasmine is a moving character study of a mentally unstable woman forced to make it on her own. Cate Blanchett is great in the title role, and Sally Hawkins good as her sister. Alec Baldwin and Andrew Dice Clay as their respective ex-husbands, Hal and Augie, round out the cast quite nicely. But I thought this movie dragged. The dialogue is rarely witty, and often repetitive and tiresome. The characters keep having identical arguments, almost word for word: Jasmine say Ginger’s boyfriends are losers, Ginger still likes them, Augie blames Jasmine for his financial losses… While I remember the good parts in retrospect, the film felt slow and repetitive while I was watching it.
We’re the Millers opens on August 9th, and Blue Jasmine and 2 Guns open today. And coming next week, a rare appearance at the TIFF Bell Light Box by French director Leos Carax at a retrospective of his fantastic movies, including Holy Motors and Les Amants du Pont Neuf. Go to tiff.net for more information.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Not Safe at Home. Movies Reviewed: Home Again, Olympus Has Fallen
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.
Festival season is gearing up now, with Hot Docs, Images, and Cinefranco announcing this year’s line-up – fantastic stuff to come. But in the meantime, here are some non-festival releases. Today I’m looking at an action/thriller about one man inside a big house who wants to save the world; and a drama about three people stranded on an island who just want to survive.
Olympus Has Fallen
Dir: Antoine Fuqua
Mike Banning (played by perpetually gruff and surly Scot, Gerard Butler) was once a big man in the Secret Service. But when the First Lady is killed in an accident, he loses his status as a presidential guard. So he’s not at the White House when strange things start happening one morning. An errant gunner pilot flies a plane over the mall in Washington DC, mowing down random tourists, and knocking down 
America’s most famous penis, the Washington monument. Then, a group of tubby but ruthless terrorists manage to capture the White House, including the president and hold him captive. The American Empire is teetering on the brink…
Who are these bad guys? Al Qaeda? Al Shabab? Iraq? Iran? No! It’s the Zeppo of Bush’s “Axis of Evil” – the North Koreans!
The other Secret Service agents all look like part-time tenors in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (Boy are they white!) But only tough-as-nails Mike is qualified for disasters like this. He gets to the White House on his own and 
opens up communication with his boss (Angela Bassett) and the grumpy, southern Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman).
The chief bad guy, Kang (Rick Yune), holds all the cards. He is determined to learn the Cerberus defence code (known only to a few top officials). And he demands the DMZ be taken down and the Korean peninsula unified. With his crack team of super-shooters (inexplicably wearing silly Gilligan hats and bandanas over their faces) and computer experts, along with some American traitors, he’s unbeatable. Or is he?
It’s up to Banning to single-handedly beat all the bad guys, rescue the President (Aaron Eckhardt who is much more a Romney than an Obama), his young son, Connor, and the feisty Secretary of State (Melissa Leo). And, while he’s at it, free the White House, and save the world from an imminent disaster. He accomplishes this with old fashioned American know-how, brutal fighting skills, and brutish come-back lines. (Best line: “Kang, let’s
play a round of f*ck off — you go first.”) He improvises, like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, using things he finds on the way. Like smashing in a terrorist’s head using a marble bust of Lincoln. As a Secret Service agent Banning knows every cubbyhole, every secret passageway in the White House.
Antoine Fuqua made the very good movie Training Day, but this is absolutely nothing like that one in style or plot. None of the movie is even vaguely plausible, but it doesn’t need a deep read to understand it. It’s hilariously awful at times, but tense and exciting at others. It’s a classic action movie, complete with explosions, shoot-outs and a virtually unwatchable close-up fight scene with a hand-held camera jiggly enough to make you lose your chili nachos in the lap of the guy in the next seat.
Watch it, laugh at it, and then forget it.
Going Home
Dir: Sudz Sutherland
Due to a change of laws, the US, Canada and the UK are now in the habit of deporting people — landed immigrants who moved to these countries as small children – back to their birthplaces after being convicted even of relatively minor crimes. This drama follows the different paths the three of them take as they are unceremoniously dumped in Jamaica with just a suitcase.
Dunstan (Canadian actor Lyric Bent) is a likeable, big guy from New York. His cousin helps set him up as security at a meth lab in Greenwich Farms, (a tough part of Kingston). He’s working for The Don, a hairy-eyeball young gangster who operates like a high court judge in his neighbourhood, punishing or helping the people there, as he sees fit. Soon he meets the pretty but stand-offish Cherry C. (pop star Fefe Dobson) and likes her a lot. Wants to get to know her much better. But she wants nothing to do with a Deportee.
Everton (played by Torontonian Stephan James) is a clean-cut and naïve, upper-middle-class student from London. He arrives in Kingston like a fish just waiting to be caught. His uncle Sam, who he’s supposed to meet in Trenchtown, isn’t there. He meets up with a cute high school girl, but things just get worse and worse. He soon finds himself homeless and penniless waiting for his mother to rescue him. But she’s a continent away and he can only reach her by long distant phone calls.
And finally Marva from Toronto (Tatyana Ali) was separated from her two young children when she was deported. She can’t find work because no one will trust a deportee. Forced to live with her relatives — a cruel aunt and a skeezy uncle (very well played by Paul Campbell) — Marva feels trapped in an untenable situation. If she can somehow get her kids to join her in Jamaica things will get better.
Will Everton be able to pull himself together and return to England once his court appeal goes through? Can 
Dunston earn enough to buy a forged passport and get back to his little brother in NY? And can Marva get together again with her kids?
The three deportees have their own separate sub-plots with only minimal contact among them. But they are all set in a very real-looking, fascinating Caribbean city (it was shot in Trinidad), with its colourful scenes and dancehalls, marketplaces and homes. And the movie takes place during a growing gang war affecting all of their lives.
I thought there were enough sub plots and sub-sub plots to fill a miniseries, with dozens of different side characters and twists — too much stuff going on for one movie. But by the end it all starts to coalesce, and you really feel for the characters. Great soundtrack – reggae mixed with dance. The acting is also great – especially Tatyana Ali, but also all the small roles, and there are many — and most of the (subtitled Jamaican) dialogue was fun too. As movies go, it’s a depressing plot, one I wouldn’t normally want to rush to see, and Canadian movies are prone to the overly earnest. But this didn’t happen: I liked it! It gives you lots to think about. Home Again is a good, plot-heavy drama that never leaves you bored.
Olympus has Fallen, and Home Again both open today, as does the film Yossi: 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 .
February Blues. Movies Reviewed: Jump, Charlie Zone
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.
The slow movie months of January and February are finally over, so get ready for a blast of this year’s newest movies with the coming spring Film Festival season. This week I’m looking at some new films, opening soon in Toronto. One’s a Canadian action-drama about a native guy trying to stay alive, the other’s a screwball action-drama from Northern Ireland about a woman pondering death on New Year’s Eve.
Jump
Dir: Kieron J. Walsh
It’s New Year’s eve in Derry, Northern Ireland, so now’s the time for dressing up in strange costumes, watching fireworks, contemplating the universe and the meaning of life… and getting plastered, not necessarily in that order. So the movie starts with a young woman, Greta (Nichola Burley) with angel’s wings on her back, all forlorn, about to jump off a bridge. But there she meets the tattered-and-torn Pearce, who just got beaten up by some thugs on the same bridge, and nearly thrown to his death. Love is kindled, sparks fly, and they are drawn together. But, what neither of them quite realize yet, Greta’s father is a local crime boss, and Pearce is one of his antagonists. Mutual friends, as well as their enemies, are also tied up in this strange situation as they drive 
around town that night. Will Pearce find the missing brother he’s searching for? Will Greta discover her own family’s secrets? And what about the large bundle of cash missing from the crime boss’s safe? Who took it, who has it now, and whose fault is it anyway? How did two girlfriends, just out for a fun night, somehow end up with a possibly dead body locked in the trunk of their car? And whose body is it that turns up under the Derry Peace Bridge? There’s an ethical hitman, grungy gangsters, shady bartenders, and dismayed partiers to round out the story. Lots and lots of questions in this plot-driven, screwball action movie (if there is such a category.)
We soon find out this is a cut-up type film, with the complicated plot gradually revealed by flashbacks, and omissions. It jumps all over the place (as the title suggests), with scenes repeated two or three times until the true story is revealed.
It’s rare to see a story about young people in Northern Ireland just going out, nothing to do with “the Troubles” – I like that. But this is a very confusing, mainstream movie that drags a bit. And it’s hard to know who to sympathize with, except maybe Pearce, and a side plot with two young women — one ethical, one self-centred — caught up in this muddle. But rest assured, all of the dozens of loose ends get neatly tied up by the end.
Charlie Zone
Dir: Michael Melski
Avery (Glen Gould) is the strong silent-type, a tough Native guy who did time and never shies from a fistfight. Now he just wants to earn some good money so he takes on a sketchy job. He has to find a young woman in Montreal, abduct her, and drive her back to her parents. Easy, no?
No.
She’s an angry junkie who doesn’t trust anyone, and will do anything not to go home again – ever. Turns out, Jan (Amanda Crew) was adopted and now feels adrift – she doesn’t even know who she really is. It’s up to Avery to get her there safely. But things start to change.
There’s an extremely violent Quebec biker gang chasing the two of them, two young gangsters who think of Jan as their property, and a shady, secretive businesswoman orchestrating the whole deal by telephone for unstated reasons. And Avery is stuck in the middle of it — a thug magnet – but won’t give up on her. Are Jan and Avery enemies or allies? And will either of them ever connect with the people they really want to find?
Charlie Zone is partly an action-packed violent crime movie about the seedier side, partly a heartfelt drama about rural life, loves lost and families torn apart. Glen Gould and Amanda Crew make a good pair, (though without any sexual spark between them) and the plot-driven story keeps you guessing till the end.
Jump is the closing film next weekend at the Toronto Irish Film Festival, playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. And Charlie Zone which won this year’s Best Dramatic Feature award at ImagineNative, opens today. Check you local listings
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com .
Scary and Scarier. Movies Reviewed: Dark Skies, Act of Killing PLUS Oscar predictions
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.
Oscar is back – and I’m not talking about Pistorius the Paralympics star’s trial. This weekend, the good and the bad compete for the most important prizes in the industry.
So, once again I will make my Oscar predictions – but a warning: I’m almost always completely wrong.
I have a feeling Amour, Haneke’s devastating film about the final years of an elderly couple, will come out on top. Zero Dark Thirty – the CIA torture-fest about the hunt for Bin Laden – will be largely shut out. And Silver Linings Playbook, the bi-polar rom-com, and Argo, a light, revisionist history about the Iranian hostage crisis, will divide the rest if the spoils.
Best Movie: Amour should win, but Argo will win. Best Actor: I haven’t seen Lincoln yet, so I can’t judge Daniel Day Lewis, but of the other four, Joaquin Phoenix did the best performance. He should win. Best Actress: Emmanuel Riva should and will win. Supporting actor? Robert De Niro in Silver Linings should win, but Christopher Waltz will win. Supporting actress: I liked Amy Adams in The Master, but I think Anne Hathaway will win. I think Michael Haneke will win best director and he deserves it.
The documentaries are all fantastic. I have a feeling Looking for Sugarman will win. And the foreign language films this year – Rebelle, No, Amour, Kon Tiki (plus Royal affair, which I haven’t seen) – are all outstanding. Three of them are on my 2012 best ten list, and No would be as well, if it had been released in time. You should see them all. And finally best original and adapted screenplays: I think Amour and Silver Linings will win that.
Some of the Oscar choices are scary, and so are their song and dance numbers. Even scarier are two movies: a Spielberg-style family thriller-chiller, and an unbelievably strange documentary out of Indonesia.
Dark Skies
Dir: Scott Stewart
It’s a hot summer, and the fourth of July is a couple days away. In the best of times, the Barrets are not a perfect family. Mom and Dad (Keri Russel and Jeff Hammond) are in trouble: their mortgage payments are three months overdue. Daniel’s out of work, and Lacey’s real estate sales aren’t doing well. Then there’s their two kids, Jesse and Sam (Toronto-native Dakota Goyo and Kadan Rockett). Jesse is hanging out with an older, “bad” friend, Ratface, who introduces him to long guns, bong-smoking and vintage porn videos (Jesse’s 14.) They hang out in one of the fixer-upper houses Lacey’s trying to sell. And little Sam is having nightmares – the sandman keeps coming to him at night. Still, the family likes their nice suburban neighbourhood, with its swimming pools, American 
flags and backyard barbecues and don’t want to move. Jesse calms the waters by staying up late, talking to Sam by walkey-talkey.
But things go from bad to worse. Birds smash into the windows. The family starts having absence seizures, wetting their pants, and walking into walls. Strange bruises and marks are appearing on the kids’ bodies – is someone calling Children’s Aid? They open their mouths wide and start screaming, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They wake up in the middle of the night to find strange, little tricks left behind by a Poletrgeist-like being. And humming sounds and bright white lights appear under doors, just like in ET and Close Encounters. (Get the picture?)
Dad is perturbed, so he puts video camera in all the rooms to see of there is any Paranormal Activity at night. And sure enough, he finds something… but what are they? Can they fight off the enemy and keep together as a family unit? Or will they disappear, one by one?
I love the pseudo-retro quality of the movie as they plunder all the scary movies from 70s and 80s. The kid actors are all great, and the adults are usually good. And there are some wicked semi-psychedelic dream sequences popping up all through the movie. They almost make the whole film worthwhile. Almost.
But the story is a mess, some of the characters are lame, and the dialogue waivers between good to chokingly awful. So even though I felt like I should like this kind of film – it was really disappointing, especially the ending. It almost feels like they ran out of money before they could rewrite flubbed dialogue, and re-shoot missing scenes, and just decided to release it half edited. Too bad.
Act of Killing
Dir: Joshua Oppenhemier (and another director remains anonymous)
This is one of the weirdest documentaries I’ve ever seen, and has to be seen to be believed. Apparently, a group of former militants from Sumatra, Indonesia, decide to produce a fun, action film portraying the torture and murders it carried out in the 1960s. And they want to play themselves and their victims on the original sites where they murdered them. But they want to make it enjoyable, so they add musical numbers, dancing girls, a man in drag (one of the killers) for comic relief, and all sorts of additions to make it “entertaining”.
Historical context: In 1965-66, there were riots and mass-killings of about half a million ethnic Chinese Indonesians and Communist Party members in the mid-sixties around the fall of President Sukarno.
Those killers are still associated with a paramilitary security force and right-wing political group there which proudly 
recalls their deeds to the locals.
This is simultaneously the western filmmaker’s a first-hand record of the mass murderers unapologetically admitting their war crimes, and a film-diary of a bizarre low-budget Indonesian pop production. Jaw-dropping film.
Dark Skies opens today, check your local listings; Act of Killing is playing at the Human Rights Watch film festival in Toronto – go to tiff.net for details; and the Academy Awards are on TV this Sunday. Also opening tonight in Toronto is the very cool, experimental film Tower, directed by local Kazik Radwanski, who I interviewed last week. Check that one out.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com .
Marital Difficulties. Movies Reviewed: Side Effects, All in Good Time.
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.
After last week’s dip into low-brow genre movies, I’m back with some higher-brow dramas, suitable for viewing by grown-ups. This week I’m looking two enjoyable movies about marital difficulties. One’s a light family drama from the UK about newlyweds, and an American suspense/drama about the effect of prescription drugs on a young couple.
Side Effects
Dir: Stephen Soderbergh
Emily (Rooney Mara) is young woman married to a Wall Street broker who’s in prison for insider trading. She’s nervous but excited – Martin (Channing Tatum) is getting out: they’ll be together again after four years. But she’s getting more and more nervous. They were barely newlyweds when he was locked up and she’s worried about their relationship. Can their marriage just pick up where they left off?
So when things don’t live up to their potential (bad sex) Emily spontaneously steps on the gas in a parking garage and drives her car, full speed, into a concrete wall. In the emergency room she’s treated by a psychiatrist, Dr Banks (Jude Law).
He’s kindly and honest, but also scruffy and middle aged. He’s married to a brittle, ambitious Wall Street trader. So he’s touched by Emily’s stunning beauty, youth and neediness, and really wants to help her out. (Perhaps he even has romantic thoughts?)
So, after checking with her previous psychiatrist, the sultry Dr Siebert, (Catherine Zeta-Jones) he takes on her case and 
starts prescribing various medications – Zoloft, Abrixa — to ease depression, others to modify the side effects of the antidepressants, mood stabilizers… But they seem to just make things worse. Then a pharmacy saleswoman gets him to sign on for a lucrative, new drug-testing program – he needs the money.
But what about the side effects of all these drugs? For Emily, they lead to sleep-walking, bizarre mood changes, strange sexual response, and, eventually, to a bizarre, shocking incident. The case explodes onto the front pages, and the hapless doctor is drawn into a complicated drama. Suddenly his marriage is at risk, his career is in jeopardy and his private life is interrupted by droves of reporters. Who’s to blame? The drug company? The psychiatrist? The patient?
Full disclosure: I can’t stand most of Stephen Soderbergh’s recent movies. They’re misanthropic, bleak, drab, depressing. The people in his movies all seem obsessed with the crass problems of everyday life: things like real estate, accounting, medical problems, career advancement… as opposed to love, passion, family, art, religion or morality. They are also often incredibly drab in style – just blah. Especially lately, with terrible movies like The Girlfriend Experiment, The Informant, and Magic Mike. Never mind his five-hour snoozefest about Che Guevara.
I’m not saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing; he does. He constructs formulaic dramas in a spare style. I just don’t like them: they’re disturbing or distressing, not fun at all (not like some of his old stuff, like the terrific Out of Sight.)
But…but…but… That said, I actually really liked this movie! It has enough twists and shocks and plot turns to keep me glued to the screen. It starts as a straightforward, slow-moving drama, but becomes suspenseful, psychological drama, where even the doctor forced to question his own sanity. He also plays around with conventions, turning some on their head. The film and the camera function as unreliable narrators: what you see is not necessarily what happened.
Rooney Mara and Jude Law are great in this movie, and Channing Tatum does his usual job. But Zeta-Jones, on the other hand, stands out like a sore thumb. She’s unbelievably awful. It’s a smaller role, but still, just putting on a pair of glasses and pulling back your hair doesn’t equal “psychiatrist”. She looks and acts like a breathy soap-opera character – nothing like a doctor in a realistic drama. Is it just this movie, or is she always this terrible? Anyway, she’s not enough to ruin the movie. I really liked Side Effects.
All in Good Time
Dir: Nigel Cole
Things are great at the wedding. amid the jumble and confusion of two extended families living near Manchester, in the UK. Working-class Atul (Reese Ritchie) hangs out in a movie theatre and still lives with his parents in a council flat, while the much richer Vina (Amara Karan) is accustomed to a posher lifestyle. The newlyweds are quite in love. But, since the wedding, as his mother says, there has “been no planting in the Shalimar Gardens.” With his dad snoring and farting through the thin walls, Atul can’t get it up. And when word leaks out — via a trio of gossipy popcorn ladies at the local Bollywood show-palace — the scandal grows. He hasn’t yet shown his manhood – was the wedding just a failure?
His father, Eeshwar (Harish Patel), is a self-centred, bombastic boor, given to arm-wrestling and bad jokes. He’s 
constantly at war with his son. Things aren’t helped by a generation gap and Eeshwar’s own obsession with one-upmanship. Atul’s mother is much more understanding and pragmatic and is trying to get things back to normal. She reminds Eeshwar that their marriage also had a rocky start.
Will father and son ever see eye-to-eye? Will love keep the newlyweds together, or will stress destroy their marriage before it even starts? All In Good Time is adapted from a play by by UK playright Ayub Khan-Din, who did the fantastic East is East and its sequel West is West. 
And his was adapted from the 1960’s play All in Good Time (by Bill Naughton, who brought us Alfie), but set within a UK South Asian community. The father and son, the main characters (Patel and Richie) are just great, as are all of the female actors.
This movie is confusing and messy in the beginning, and takes a while to get into its groove, but when it does, it’s just delightful. Director Nigel Cole (known for Made in Dagenham and other small English dramas) is in fine form. All in Good Time is a very enjoyable romantic family drama.
Side Effects and All in Good Time both open today in Toronto. Also playing and worth checking out are some great documentaries, including West of Memphis, a epic documentary that tells the decades long story of three teenagers in small-town Arkansas who were arrested and charged with the satanic murder of a teenager… This is a harrowing case where the DA’s evidence consisted mainly of the fact that they wore black and listened to heavy metal bands. Check your local listings for times and screens.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com .
November 23, 2012. The Joys and the Dangers of Fantasy. Movies Reviewed: Rise of the Guardians, The Suicide Room
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.
A new American import known as “Black Fridays” is spilling over into Canada as a big shopping day. The name supposedly comes from the day in which the average US retailer reaches a positive balance on sales for the year which is usually the Friday after American Thanksgiving. But in a weird case of a snake swallowing its own tail they have turned it into a massive frenzy of shopping from consumers searching for bargains put on by retailers wanting to capitalize on a chance to pump up sales.
It also means it’s the start of Christmas shopping in earnest. So, just in time for new childhood memories to form, this week I’m talking about two movies that show the good side and the bad side of believing in fantasy.
Rise of the Guardians
Dir: Peter Ramsey
Jack Frost (Chris Pine) is a mischievous teenager in a hoodie and skinny jeans who likes snowball fights, getting kids’ tongues stuck to metal poles, and skatebording on hazardous, icy roads. When his snow lands on humans they have fun.He’s also invisible. He loves play but wishes he knew where he came from, and that other kids could see him.
Meanwhile there’s trouble up at the north pole: the bogeyman, aka Pitch, a fey, vain and evil man with an English accent (of course) is injecting nightmares into kids’ minds, and interfering with their sleep. So the Guardians who live there – Santa, the Easter Bunny, Mr Sandman, the Tooth
Fairy — summon Jack to join them in their fight against scariness.
Santa (Alec Baldwin) is a Finnish-type Father Christmas known as “North” – muscular, tough and tattooed — but with an unplaceable Eastern European accent. He carries matruschka dolls, and curses using the names of Russian composers: Rimsky Korsakov! Shostakovitch! He’s guarded by a gang of rough looking Yetis and serviced by short-bus elves. The Easter Bunny is a foul-tempered Aussie (Hugh Jackman), and the Tooth Fairy collects teeth to store the memories of children.
In their war room stands a giant globe of flickering lights – each one representing a kid who still believes in them. But with Pitch on the upswing, the lights are gradually dimming, and, like in the Peter Pan cartoon, if no one believes in fairies then tinkerbell will die! In this case they won’t die, they’ll just become invisible to the non-believers, like Jack is.
So… will Jack join up with the good guys and try to get the human kids to believe in them again? Or will he let the world fall into the clutches of the evil and scary Pitch?
Rise of the Guardians is a resolutely non-religious Christmas movie, without a cross, a church or even a glowing star to be seen. God takes the form of an all-knowing and all seeing Man in the Moon, the easter bunny is all about eggs, and they’re all on equal footing of secular figures like Sandy the Sandman. It’s a beautiful crafted movie – really nice art direction, with an interesting plot. It’s clearly aimed at the pre-teen set, but was aesthetically pleasing enough to hold my attention.(like an incredibly beautiful scenes where they all meet in a sort of a floating, rust-tiled Samarkand in their encounter with Pitch.) And it has Guillermo Del Toro’s name on it – as an executive producer, which lets you know it’s not degenerating into a comedy dissing childhood beliefs.
And it’s in 3-D.
Much grimmer, but also a partly- animated drama is
The Suicide Room
Dir: Jan Komasa
Dominik (Jakub Gierszal) is a happy, popular private school kid, a bit emo-looking but in tight with the in crowd. But there’s a guy he likes at school who may or may not be leading him on. And when he has an embarrassing frottage incident at a judo practice when he gets a bit too frisky with the guy he’s crushing on, he is mortified. All his friends seem to have turned on him and to make matters worse, they other guy put up a video of the incident on Facebook where everyone could see it. He’s cyber-bullied into hiding up in his bedroom.
His one solace is an animated world on line, a sort of Second Life ruled by a queen, Sylwia (Roma Gasiorowska), who lives in a castle. He becomes obsessed by her and seems to exist only in the form of his avatar, while his real self lives in the dark, barely eating and never going outside. From most popular kid to reclusive otaku in a matter of weeks. Sylwia strongly pressures Dom to join their suicide club and kill himself.
His parents, both rich and successful, have no idea what’s going on. Dominik may be on the verge of killing himself while the parents are more worried about how their son’s aborted sexual life might embarrass them and damage their career ambitions. They just want him on meds so he stops bothering them.
Will Dominik choose to live or to die? Will he reconnect with the outside world? Will he get to meet his cyber-love Sylwia face to face? And will his parents ever show compassion for their son?
This Polish film (which played at this year’s Ekran Polish Film Festival in Toronto) is a look at adolescent depression, cyber-bullying and Second Life, all aspects of contemporary Polish life largely unknown in North America.
Rise of the Guardians is playing now, while Suicide Club played at the EKRAN Polish Film Festival. Also look out for free Japan Foundation screenings coming up in December at the Bloor cinema featuring dramatizations of Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai’s stories; The Toronto Film Noir Syndicate showing the Coen brothers’ classic Blood Simple this weekend, and the first annual Blood in the Snow Canadian film festival showing new and classic Canadian horror movies next week at the Projection Booth on Gerrard St E. It features cool pics like Bruce MacDonald’s Pontypool and the world premier of new movies like SICK and psychological thriller the House of Flies.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com .
November 16th, 2012. Up and Down. Movies Reviewed: Floating City, Pusher
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.
We’re nearing the end of the fall festival season here in Toronto. But there are still a few you can catch.
ReelAsian shows movies by and about people in or from East and Southeast Asia. The 
festival continues this weekend with movies shown north of Toronto in Thornhill. It’s a great place to see current films from Asia that don’t normally make it to Toronto theatres. Rendezvous with Madness, which shows movies aboiut addiction and mental health is notable for it’s offbeat, rare and creative works. They’re each followed by panel discussions by the filmmakers, experts, and, here’s what’s different… psychiatrists! And I’m going to be moderating a panel of some great Canadian local films (North of Normal: A Collection of Canadian Shorts) so be sure to check that out series out this Saturday at 4 pm! SAD NEWS: ALL SCREENINGS AT RENDEZVOUS WITH MADNESS THIS WEEKEND HAVE BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO ROOF COLLAPSE.
The EU festival shows one movie from each country in the European Union chosen by representatives from each country’s diplomatic corps. Aside from the great films… it’s also completely free! It’s at the Royal Cinema on College street all week. And finally don’t miss the best named festival in Toronto: that’s Darryl’s Hard Liquor And Porn Film Festival at the Projection Booth on Gerrard St East. It;’s actually funny short films made by indie movie makers — not so much porn, but lots of funny adult topics.
This week I’m looking at two dramas about the fortunes of two ambitious but rudderless men whose fortunes rise and fall within the tides of the former British Empire.
Floating City
Dir: Ho Yim
When a desperately poor woman loses her son in childbirth she buys a newborn to replace him – a Eurasian Chinese boy with bluish eyes. She raises him as her own and guards him with her life on a little fishing junk in the fragrant harbor of Hong Kong. He grows up literally barefoot, illiterate, beaten by his father, in debt, and bullied. His light-coloured hair marks him as an outsider. And the local corruption and bribery makes it very hard for a poor person to leave the underclass.
But one day he sees one of the legendary taipans – the ruling business oligarchs of Hong Kong – and vows to join their ranks. A missionary priest teaches him to read and write. And Bo is ambitious; rather than becoming a labourer or a fisherman, he manages to join the legendary East India Company. Despite the racist bully businessman Dick, his boss, he swallows his pride, even letting Dick call him “mixed” and “halfbreed”.
This movie – based on actual people – shows the rise of Bo (Aaron Kwok) against the history of post-war Hong Kong. It stretches from the social unrest uin the 60s through the panic in the 80’s and the ultimate signing of the British colony to the People’s Republic. It also shows his eternal question – who am I? – as he tries to find love, to fit into European
society, always pondering is that all there is? And will any loss of pride to kowtowing pay-off in the end? Or will he always be considered “second class”.
I liked the story and the characters, but it seemed more plodding than moving or thrilling. And the film seems a bit dry for such a monumental topic. Still, Floating World gives a comprehensive view of Hong Kong’s history and its people and its bitter-sweet role as a loyal British colony that was never accepted by the mother country.
Pusher
Dir: Luis Prieto
Things are going well for Frank (Richard Coyle). He’s got a nice arrangement with a sleazy dry-cleaner (Danish actor Zlatko Buric) to supply him with drugs that he sells in dubstep nightclubs alongside his skinny, toothy side-kick Tony (Bronson Webb). And he is sleeping with a beautiful, ice-blond stripper (Agyness Deyn).
He decides to expand – he sends a woman to Amsterdam to pick up some coke, and — after a chance meeting with a casual acquaintance he met in the big house – he decides to go for an easy deal that will make him lots and lots of money.
But things are not what they seem. The Amsterdam deal isn’t working, his buddy seems to have turned on him, he suspects the set-up guy might be a narc, and all the money he borrowed from Milo The Dry Cleaner… has disappeared. He’s forced to accompany a violent enforcer to reclaim some of the money he is owed, knowing all the while that he might well be the next one crushed by the big time criminals.
Will he dig himself out if his hole, get back his money, avoid prison, escape the low life, and maybe find a quiet existence with his lover?
Pusher (a remake of Nicolas Refn Wilding’s film) is extremely violent, gritty, low-budget and depressing. It has some good intrigue and action, it’s fast moving and tense, but it’s not a fun movie. The acting is pretty good and you get to like the characters (even though they’re loathsome criminals)… but they’re all so beaten down by the even nastier bosses that you mentally want it all just to end already.
Pusher is playing now, Floating City is playing at reelasian.com this weekend in Thornhill; Rendezvous with Madness, Hard Liquor and Porn, and EUtorontofilmfest.ca all continue through the weekend.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com .
November 2, 2012. Migration. Films Reviewed: Flight, Midnight’s Children PLUS Dal Puri Diaspora
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.
People and populations are constantly shuttled around, from homes, cities and countries, from one airport to the next. A constant migration. At the ReelAsian film festival, starting next week, Toronto filmmaker Richard Fung wonders if the same isn’t true for food, not just people. Fung is originally from Trinidad, and goes on a 
worldwide quest to trace the origin of what he calls the Dal Puri Diaspora, the exile of that roti unique to the Caribbean. His fascinating voyage takes him from Toronto to Port of Spain, in and out of spice factories, abandoned sugar cane fields, Mauritius (a remote island near Madagascar), and finally to Bihar, a little known (to North Americans) corner of Utar Pradesh in India.
On the way, he gives a politically-informed history of indentured servitude in the British empire as well as some amazing encounters with deliciously specific foods from around the world.
This week I’m talking about two dramas about migration, one following the displacement of people after the Indian Partition, the other about a short but eventful hop by plane from Florida to Atlanta.
Midnight’s Children
Dir: Deepa Mehta
Saleem and Shiva, two of the babies born around midnight in 1947 when India and Pakistan become independent, have their name tags switched in hospital by a nurse named Mary. Wide-eyed Saleem Sinai is now part of a fabulously rich family of power brokers, while Shiva, bitter and angry, is raised by a destitute street performer known as Wee Willie Winkie. As he grows older, Saleem believes he can hear the voices of other kids from somewhere inside his nose. He thinks he can telepathically contact all of the other kids who were born that fateful midnight, and maybe bring them all together. Saleem would have them bring peace to the subcontinent, while his rival Shiva would rather form a gang of evildoers out for personal gain (sort of like a mini X-Men rivalry).
Soon, Saleem is tempest-tossed all around India and Pakistan – from Kashmir to Bombay, Rawalpindi to Karachi, his fate tied to that of India’s and Pakistan’s. He’s there for the military coups, Bangladesh’s independence, war, strife and change. The story culminates in the 1970s when Indira Ghandi declares martial law, and all of Midnight’s Children – the youth of new India – bear the suffering she inflicts.
Midnight’s Children (the screenplay is adapted by Salman Rushdie from his novel) is a 
huge epic with dozens of characters, cities, and earth-changing events. So plot turns jump quickly from one to the next, and just when you figure out you like a character, you’re already in a new setting and a new era. It felt like an entire mini-series squeezed into one picture, and I’m not sure it quite fit. The acting is pretty good – Seema Biswas as the nurse Mary, Satya Bhabha as sensitive Saleem Sinai, and Siddharth as macho Shiva – and the story beyond rich. It’s a Hollywood (or Bollywood) -sized plot, made on a limited, Canadian budget. I was a bit put off by the threadbare look of parts of the movie along with its frequent anachronisms. But I salute the director for taking on such a monumental story and carrying it through to a dramatic finish.
Flight
Dir: Robert Zemeckis
Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is a sinner. In the first scene you see him lounging, lying to his ex-wife about child support, drinking and snorting coke with a stunning naked flight attendant. Lust, anger, envy, gluttony, pride, sloth, and greed neatly summed up in 5 minutes. He’s also an amazing pilot: his dad taught him everything he knows. Soon enough, they’re up in the air, heading on a short hop to Atlanta. But the plane experiences mechanical difficulties, starts shaking, and diving into a crash. If not for his unusual flight techniques (he turns the entire plane upside-down) the whole thing would have been 
destroyed… everyone dead. As it is, he knocks the steeple off a church and sends parishoners in white blouses running for cover, the next of many implied “sins”.
Recovering in hospital, Whip hooks up with Nicole, a beautiful red-headed junkie (Kelly Reilly) there for rehab. Soon enough, his drinking and drugs start to come to light, and the impending clouds of manslaughter-charges — the people who died in the crash -– start looming over his head. He handles this with still more drinking, shunning even his junkie GF’s suggestion of joining a 12-step. Will the dreaded NTSB (the agency holding the inquiry) get him for his drinking? Or will they blame the airline or the manufacturer for what happens?
The movie Flight carries you along, with some funny parts – especially John Goodman as his hippy coke dealer — but it also has a few awful scenes. When Denzel throws a bottle across the room at a ringing telephone it feels like I’m watching a third-rate soap opera.
While it’s an interesting story with largely good acting — and I love the disaster scenes — it mainly seems to function as a sanctimonious lesson on how sin is no good for your soul – and how we all must repent and attend AA… or suffer the consequences.
This director has made lots of very famous movies. On the Zemeckis scale, I’d place this as much better than the execrable Forrest Gump or the unwatchable Polar Express, but not nearly as good as Romancing the Stone or Back to the Future.
Midnight’s Children and Flight open today in Toronto, check your local listings. Dal Puri Diaspora is playing at Toronto’s ReelAsian Film Festival, which starts next week. And don’t miss the excellent documentary We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists that opens at the Bloor on Monday.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com .
Love and Other Addictions. Movies Reviewed: Smashed, Keep the Lights On.
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, and I’m back with more movie reviews…
I’m going to briefly talk about two new movies about love and addiction.
Smashed
Dir: James Ponsoldt
Kate and Charlie (Mary Elizabeth Winstead: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and Aaron Paul: Breaking Bad) are a married couple in LA who love falling asleep drunk and waking up for some sloppy morning sex. He’s a writer with rich parents in the movie industry, while she’s a school teacher from a less privileged background. One day she shows up drunk for her public school class and ends up puking in the trash can. This starts a rumour that she’s pregnant, and she doesn’t want to tell the less dramatic truth. She lies to the weepy Principal (Meghan Mulhally)
Eventually the fit hits the shan and she has to come clean. She loses her job, and succumbs to despair. But when a fellow teacher, Vice-Principal Dave who has a crush on her, brings her to a 12 step group she begins her slow struggle to get rid of her alcoholism. Dependable but jolly sponsors like Jenny (Octavia Spenser) are there to help her recover. Will she make it and can she get her husband to join her in sobriety?
Keep The Lights On
Dir: Ira Sachs
…has a similar theme.
Erik (Thule Lindhardt: Brotherhood) is a Danish filmmaker living in Manhattan in the late 90’s. He likes art and jogging and is prone to making animal sounds when he is surprised. He also enjoys hooking up with other men by telephone for casual sex. He meets the young professional Paul, a lawyer (Zachary Booth), and despite a rocky start, they end up falling for one another. But theirs is a difficult, co-dependant relationship, fraught with trouble. As Erik rises up in the indie film world, the much richer Paul is sliding into an awful chain of crack addiction, isolation, recovery and then back again. Their relationship takes on weird dimensions involving sex
and destruction, and despite Erik’s repeated interventions and stints of rehab, Paul keeps going back to drugs. Will they end up together again? Or will Erik go with his friends’ opinions and dump the guy already?
Both of these movies explain the long slog in and out of addictions and how they can be conquered (or not). Smashed is the lighter one, with humour and more engaging characters. But it also has an earnest, lesson-learned, movie-of-the-week feel to it. Leave the Lights On is longer, darker, and harder to take. It’s also given to relentless speeches about what relationships mean and what went wrong, wringing still more lessons out of this endless spiral of trouble with drug addiction. The acting in both movies was good, especially Lindhardt in KTLO and Winstead in Smashed.
Still, I didn’t love either of these movies, possibly because I’m not a fan of the sub-genre: addictions plus relationships. I feel for the suffering people in the relationship, but I don’t want to go to a movie only to end up as the shoulder the filmmaker wants to cry on.
Ira Sach’s Keep the Lights On, (which played at Inside-out) is now playing in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox; Smashed (which played at TIFF) opens next week 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 .
September 14, 2012. “This is a BIG festival…” Movies reviewed: Spring Breakers, Kon-Tiki, Blancanieves
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.
Spring Breakers photo by Jeff Harris
TIFF is monumental, vast and confusing. Three critics I spoke to this week – onefrom NY, one from L.A. and one from Australia – all said Toronto isn’t like the other film festivals they go to – it’s a “really big one”. And all the huge-ness that goes with it.
Let me give you an example: a weird thing that happened to me. Picture a floor-to-ceiling, black-velvet curtain. At TIFF they have a photo-op area right beside the press conference area, but they’re separated by that black curtain. I was on the press side, so I could hear everything happening but not see it. Basically, when the celebs show up there’s a frenzy of rabid shouting photographers snapping pics like crazy and shouting out their names. So you can see a non-stop barrage of flashes on the ceiling above the curtain and hear what sounds like vicious digs tearing a famous actor apart and then eating him alive. Very weird. Then, one minute later, they cross to the press side, and quietly sit down at the table on the stage.
The press conference where I witnessed this was for Harmony Korine’s new movie called Spring Breakers as in SPRING BREAK FOREVAH… Bitches! (the movie’s catchphrase)
It’s an impressionistic look at a fantasy version of the annual florida bacchanalia where college students get drink, have sex, and gather in huge numbers. It’s full of the glowing neon and pastels, jiggling bodies, vespa scooters, red camaros and white baby grands. Into this fiesta are three blond university students — Candy, Cotty and Brittney (Ashley Benson, Vannessa Hudgons, Rachel Korine) who want to go wild, and their God-fearing friend Faith (Selena Gomez) who tries to stay the path to the straight and narrow. Then Candy and Brit rob a chicken shack to pay for their trip, and soon the four of them fall under the sway of Alien (James Franco) a white stoner gangsta rapper living the life of riley with his club-kid, identical twin sidekicks in his drug fueled beach-side mansion. The three bad girls take to him like honey, don matching pink balaclavas and wave their heavy-duty machine guns in the air in Pussy-Riotous triumph.
The movie is less about story than impression, with lots of improvised lines, repetition, and a constant background beat. It’s mainly about bodies in the sun and guns at night… a satirical, fantastical college collage. I love this like I love all of Harmony Korine’s movies. This is his most accessible one and feels like lying in the sand while reading a glossy fashion magazine with a great ipod mix in your ears. Spring Break…!
Anyway, there are hundreds of movies at TIFF this year, but I thought I’d tell you about a few that really struck my fancy, for very different reasons. One’s about a boat trip to the South Pacific, another about fighting bulls in Seville.
Kon-Tiki
Dir: Joachim Rønning
It’s after WWII and Thor Heyerdahl wants to test his theories about Polynesia where he had lived for a decade with his wife, Liv. The polynesians say their ancesters followed the winds and the tides from the east (South America), not from the West (Asia). So he vows to make the crossing in the same way to prove it was possible. Without funding or academic backing, he gathers together four more men — an anthropologist with a movie camera, an engineer who was a fridge salesman, a sexton operator who knows his directions, and a morse code radio operator — and they all set off from Peru.
The movie follows the adventurers across an ocean, their encounters with glowing creatures, dangerous sharks, and whales, all beneath their balsa-wood raft and moved by Tiki himself, the god’s image painted on the canvas sail. They set out in suits and ties,
but gradually pare down to saggy long underwear. These five sun-burned and blonde-bearded buddies are always growling on the verge of a fight, but without a hint of macho. It’s up to Thor to keep the faith, follow the sun god’s path and be true to Tiki. Will they all survive and can they make it all the way?
This is a really fantastic family movie, thrilling, funny, scary and exciting. It’s by the director of Max Manus, another Boy’s Own style adventure about WWII resistance fighters. Joachim Rønning is the Norwegian Spielberg and gets all the cliff-hangers, shocks, and special effects dead-on. There must be some CGIs involved but it really felt like you were out in the Pacific ocean with them battling the elements. I loved this movie, too.
Blancanieves
Dir: Pablo Berger
It’s Seville in the 1920’s, a city of long narrow alleys and whitewashed houses, black-laced flamenco dancers and massive crowds at the bullfights. But when the great Matador Antonio is felled by a satanic bull just as his wife Carmen is giving birth to their child, Carmencita, the baby, loses her parents. A sinister nurse Encana connives to take over the matador’s wealth, power and riches. When young Carmen finally moves in with her pet chicken Pepe, she is made into a Cinderella and only sees her father on the sly. He teaches her how to be a matadora from his wheelchair, careful to avoid the wrath of the evil stepmother. Will she escape from her evil clutches? Later, she is found in the woods by a handsome dwarf who takes her in with his travelling circus troupe. She has amnesia and can only remember how to raise the cape and to keep her eye on a bull. So they rename her Blancanieves — Snow White. Will she ever remember her past? Will she become a Matadora in the ring? What about Encana? Who will triumph – the innocent Snow White or the closet dominatrix? And who will 
be her handsome prince?
This is an unbelievably beautiful retelling of the Snow White story in glorious black and white. It’s done in the old style of a silent movie, with lush music and occasional cards to show dialogue. Maribel Verdu (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Pan’s Labarynth) is fantastic as always, this time with a pale face, black hair, dark lips, and the high collar of the Walt Disney Queen. Newcomer Macarena Garcia is just as beautiful and steals the screen. Even though I knew (more or less) what would happen in this dark retelling of a 
well-known fairytale in a 1920’s Seville, it didn’t matter; it left me feeling shocked, thrilled and passionately moved. It’s a magnificent-looking film.
All of these films are playing at TIFF. Log on to tiff.net at 7 am to get new tickets on sale for the day.
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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