Daniel Garber talks with filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones about Fire Song having its World Premier at #TIFF15
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Shane lives on an isolated First Nations reserve in northwestern Ontario. He’s polite, smart, good-looking, hardworking and respectful – everything a teenage boy 
should be. He even has a pretty girlfriend, Tara. Shane’s moving to Toronto in the fall to start his first year at University. Everything seems perfect… but it’s not. His mother has been severely depressed since his sister’s suicide. And his family has money 
problems: they’re deeply in debt. Can he even afford to move to Toronto? And then there’s his relationship with another boy named David that he keeps on the down low. Sometimes Shane wishes it would all just go away.
I’m talking about Fire Song, a new film having its world premier at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival. The powerful drama is written and directed by filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones, and this is his debut feature. I spoke to him at
CIUT. Adam talked about his background, hopelessness, suicide, coming out, the lives of gay youth in an isolated community, Native Child and Family Services, two-spirited people, traditional ideas, Christianity, life on a reserve vs. life in a city, talking circles, healing, his future work… and more!
UPDATE: Adam Garnet Jones’ Fire Song is the winner of imagineNATIVE’s 2015 Air Canada Audience Choice Award.
Ordinary People. Movies Reviewed: Survivor, Big Muddy, Fourth Man Out
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Where is cinema going? I went to the Parkdale Film Festival — it features short documentaries, dramas and animation. So what’s special about it? The films were all made by high school students. This means independent, ordinary people — with access to the technology — can make real movies.
This week, I’m looking at ordinary people and where they’re going. There’s a small town mechanic coming out, a single mom in Saskatchewan hiding out, and a passport clerk in London heading out… to catch the bad guys.
Survivor
Dir: James McTeigue
The smart and beautiful Kate Abbot (Milla Jovovich) likes her job at the US embassy in London where she handles passport and visas. She a rising star who speaks a half dozen languages and has extensive training in intelligence. So when her boss Sam (Dylan McDermott) says they should be on the lookout for potential terrorists, she takes it very seriously. She and her coworkers start scrutinizing passports, and she flags a suspicious-looking Romanian scientist. Maybe he has access to Weapons of Mass Destruction! Good work says the Ambassador (Angela Bassett). But Kate is dressed down by a high-ranked UK agent Paul (James D’Arcy). He tells her to stop all her meddling – the man she flagged is associated with higher-ups. Those snooty Englishmen – why are they always stopping freedom-loving Americans from doing what they have to do?
Kate is sure there’s a secret cabal of terrorists dying to set foot in America so they can kill everybody. Only she – and her coworkers — can stop them from getting those coveted visas.
But when disaster strikes London, she’s left alone. Worse than that, she’s caught holding a smoking gun beside a dying man! Now everyone thinks she’s the terrorist not the hero. Says the ambassador, shoot her now before more people die. Only a few people still believe in her. And when she sees an expert hitman known only as The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan) setting off a bomb, he makes it his personal goal to see her dead, since she’s the only one who knows what he looks like. But can she stop the terrorists before they blow up America?
Survivor is a fun, fast-moving action/thriller with a great star. It’s also ridiculous, ludicrous, unbelievable and politically out to lunch view of terrorism. It’s full of plot holes: when she’s caught on celphones at the scene of a crime by a dozen onlookers, her image goes viral. But when the real killer shows up mere seconds later and steals an ID from the victim – the cameras have all been turned off, and his identity is kept secret. And when Kate is on the run, she doesn’t even bother wearing dark glasses or a baseball cap, she just forges on ahead, . One part of my brain says Nooo… I can’t take any more of this deeply stupid movie! But the other part says duh… I like stupid movies.
Big Muddy
Wri/Dir: Jefferson Moneo
Martha (Nadia Litz) is a single mother in modern-day, rural Saskatchewan. She’s had a few men in her past and, boy, she sure knows how to pick ’em. One’s a very sketchy horse trader Buford (James Le
Gros) who’s made it big, the other a sweetheart (David La Haye) who ran afoul with the law. Now she’s going three for the win, a real lowlife named Tommy (Rossif Sutherland). The two of them make a living as a hold-up team. Her innocent teenaged son Andy (Justin Kelly) 
is the only good things she’s managed to hold on to.
Then some things happen. A man escapes from a Qu’Appelle Valley prison, and shoots a cop. Then Buford shows up at the racetrack, Andy gets hold of a gun, and Boom! everything falls apart. Mom and boy hightail it out to Big Muddy in the 
badlands, the desolate home she thought she was finally through with. But outsiders and former locals are all converging on the same spot. Can Martha survive this mess and will Andy discover his unknown past and who is his real father?
This movie has a good cast and an interesting plot. My only problem is with the pacing. Is it a crime drama or a family story? Whenever the tension is building, the danger spiraling, the movie is heading for a big showdown… it weirdly segues back into a slow-moving family drama, destroying the excitement. Even so, Big Muddy is a rare thing: a genuine Canadian western, complete with outlaws, horses, sheriffs, blackhats, shootouts and hideaways.
Fourth Man Out
Dir: Andrew Nackman
Adam (Evan Todd) is a small-town auto mechanic in his twenties. He likes beer, steak and sports, and can take an engine apart (and put it back together again) with his own two hands. He’s a man’s man. After work he spends time with his three best buds, handsome Chris, goofy Ortu and hipster-ish Nick (Parker Young, Jon Gabrus, Chord Overstreet). They usually sit in a basement watching TV, smoking pot or going out for a drink. But when they go to pick-up bars, why is it that Adam always ends up the wingman for Chris’s attempts to meet women? The answer is simple but unexpected. He’s gay and his life-long best friends don’t know it.
So he decides enough is enough, it’s time to spill the beans. They can’t believe him at first (…but he 
eats steak!), but then a strange tone creeps into their friendship. It’s up to the four of them to smooth out the tension and restore the feeling they used to have. Can the four friends find a suitable boyfriend for the inexperienced Adam? Easier said than done. And can they help Chris get together with Tracy (Jennifer Damiano) a real girlfriend, instead of the casual pickups he usually ends with? And will they get it all done in time for the annual 4th of July barbecue?
Fourth Man Out is a cute, gentle buddy-comedy / male rom-com. Nothing too challenging or shocking in this mainstream movie, no gross-outs, no “weird” stuff, just likeable, white, working class guys adjusting to one of them coming out.
Survivor and Muddy Bottom open today, check your local listings; Fourth Man Out premiered at Inside-Out LGBT film fest. The festival continues through Sunday. Go to insideout.ca for times.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
LGBT Movies. Films Reviewed: Grandma, The New Girlfriend, Saint Laurent PLUS Inside-Out
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Inside Out is Toronto’s LGBT international film festival, and it’s on now, for the next ten days, with comedies, dramas, experimental films and documentaries. Major stars and directors will be appearing at their films and there are even free screenings. This week I’m looking at LGBT dramas from the US and France. There’s a biopic about a man who draws dresses, a comedy about a man who is drawn to dresses, and a grandmother who fought hard for the right to wear pants.
Grandma
Wri/Dir: Paul Weitz
Elle (Lily Tomlin) is a radical lesbian feminist poet in California. She’s retired from her position as writer-in-residence at a UC campus, and hasn’t written a word since Vi, her partner of 36 years, died. Once a celebrated activist and public intellectual, another Adrienne Rich, now she’s just a bitter old cuss. But just as she is unceremoniously giving her current lover the boot, there’s a knock on the door. It’s her granddaughter asking for help. Sage (Julia Garner) is a pretty, young high school student with a problem: an unwanted pregnancy. She needs 600 bucks for an abortion. But that’s easier said than done. Grandma’s broke! So the two of them climb into her ancient jalopy and drive off to find the cash.
They are generations apart:
Grandma: Oh for the days of Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique.
Granddaughter: Mystique? Like, the blue-skinned villain in X-Men?
Can they ever see eye to eye? Can Sage get her abortion? And will Elle come to terms with the ghosts from her past? Grandma is a delightful, road-trip comedy. It has a great script, cute story with a social conscience, and the acting is good all around. A lot of fun.
The New Girlfriend (Une Nouvelle Amie)
Dir: François Ozon (based on the novel by the late Ruth Rendell)
Rich Laura and middle-class Claire take a blood oath when they’re just girls: they swear to be fast friends forever. Young and beautiful, they stay close. Claire Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) marries clean-cut Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz: Quai d’Orsay), while Laura chooses the more sensitive David (Romain Duris). But after the birth of her first child, Laura breaks the pact… by dying! Claire is crushed. How can she live without her best friend? She begins to see her everywhere; across the street, just around a corner. David meanwhile has fallen into a deep funk. She goes 
to visit him, but is shocked when she sees a woman at his home taking care of the baby. Is it Laura? No… It’s David, in a dress. I miss Claire, he explains, and it helps comfort the baby. Just don’t tell anyone, especially not his mother-in-law.
Initially shocked, Claire gradually adjusts to David’s cross-dressing. But to allay potential suspicions, she tells her husband she has found a new girlfriend – “Virginia”. Their bonds begin to grow… as do the suspicions of her husband and his mother in law. But are they ready to meet Virginia?
This is an always-surprising social comedy about changes in identity, friendship and family, sexuality and gender.
Saint Laurent
Dir: Bertrand Bonello
Yves St Laurent (Gaspard Ulliel) is a successful fashion designer in Paris. He’s slim and impeccably dressed known for his trademark black-framed glasses. He launched the celebrated Mondrian dress in 1965, and turns out new haut couture collections twice a year. The operation is divided into three parts. He’s the creative side. He personally draws every garment design by hand. Behind the scenes, a dedicated army in white lab coats rush to cut the cloth, drape it, stitch it, and get it onto the backs of runway models’ in time. And in the 
boardroom, his lover Pierre Bergé (Jérémie Renier) handles all the business deals. YSL, the fashion house, is a profitable, well-oiled machine.
While the streets of Paris are seething with revolution, Yves is ensconced, oblivious, in his presentation rooms, dressing privileged women. 
Then there’s his personal life. He and Pierre collect priceless tchotchkes from around the world to display in their home. Yves also collects people; he has an entourage of models, and muses like Loulou de la Falaise (Léa Seydoux). He spends his time at Parisian discotheques, or at his retreat in Marrakesh.
But in the early ‘seventies, things start to collapse. He falls under the sway of an aristocratic socialite. Jacques (Louis Garrel) is handsome, rich and decadent, and never seems to work. His days are spent posing on modern furniture. His nights are filled with acid trips and gin-soaked gay orgies. Yves
is infatuated with him, but the constant pill-popping is dragging him down. Can Pierre rescue Yves and turn him back into a profitable name? Or will he succumb to Jacques’ lotus-eating lifestyle? And will Yves’s audacious new collection be the talk of Paris or booed off the stage?
Saint Laurent is a captivating, challenging, movie. It’s way too long – 2 ½ hours long! – and, at first glance, seems superficial and pointless. But it’s not. 
It’s visually stunning. Every scene is perfectly composed like turning a page of Vogue magazine. The director tries some surprising techniques, some of which work, some don’t. A long business meeting is conducted in French and English with simultaneous interpreting. Is that necessary? But a Mondrian-like split screen with 9 separate panels, and an amazing sequence with a dozen miniature black-and-white dogs scampering down the hallway for a pet audition, more than make up for the jarring parts. And the acting — especially Ulliel as the fragile, opaque and zen-like Yves Saint Laurent — is fantastically perverse.
Grandma and The New Girlfriend are both playing at Inside Out LGBT film
fest this week: go to insideout.ca for details. And Saint Laurent opens commercially today in Toronto; check your local listings. I liked all three of these movies. But if violent, post-apocalyptic road movies are more to your taste, I strongly recommend Mad Max: Fury Road., now playing. Don’t miss it!
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Art House Dramas. Films Reviewed: We are the Best, Things the Way They Are, Eastern Boys
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 spring comes blockbusters, superheroes and giant atomic lizards. But it’s also spring festival season. Inside out, Toronto’s LGBT festival runs through the weekend, and coming soon are NXNE, with some great movies, spectacular Luminato, the Italian Contemporary Film Fest, and NIFF, a new, integrated festival in Niagara Falls combining movies, food and wine. This week, I’m looking at great festival-type movies: realistic, low-budget, art-house dramas. There are punk girls in Stockholm, a culture clash in Santiago; and, from Paris, a gang of eastern European boys.
We Are the Best! (Vi är bäst!)
Dir: Lukas Moodysson (Based on the graphic novel by Coco Moodysson)
It’s Stockholm, Sweden in 1982. Bobo and Klara (Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin) are two young girls who are mad at the world. Grown-ups are idiots without a clue. Other kids are into aerobics and spandex, or long hair, metal, and prog-rock. So they chop off their hair, make it into spikes or a Mohawk and declare themselves punk. Punk not dead! They embrace punk ideology, clothes and politics, not just the music – everything from questioning authority to garbage picking. They are firmly against nukes, organized religion, and consumerism.
Conformist kids pick on them, and they miss out on school sports and clubs. 
So they start off on their own, spontaneously, with a band. Without any music skill. Soon, it’s Bobo on drums and Klara on bass. They’re awful. At the fall talent show, they see Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), the school pariah and a fundamentalist Christian. Because she plays classical guitar and dresses conservatively she gets booed off the stage. But Bobo and Klara can see she really knows music. So they make her a deal: she teaches them how to play and they’ll be her friend and let her join their band. Though labeled a “girl band” these punks set out to prove they are the best.
This is great movie that captures the early 80s dead-on. The best part? These girls are 10-13 year olds, yet they play the punks flawlessly and carry-off the movie.
Things the Way They Are (Los Cosas Como Son)
Dir: Fernando Lavanderos
Jeronimo (Cristobal Palma) is an ordinary guy who quietly lives in a huge crumbling house in Santiago, Chile. He makes his money renting rooms to foreigners, and spends all day painting, plastering, and trying to bring the place into livable condition. Jeronimo has a helluva black beard, looking like a cross between an urban hipster and a 19th century anarchist. But his politics are anything but. He wants things to stay exactly the way they are.
Into his life comes the beautiful, young Sanna, a blonde woman from Norway. She’s there to teach drama classes to kids in a poor part of town. But Jeronimo can’t understand why. What does she get out of it? What’s in it for her? And he’s baffled by Scandinavian attitudes toward sex. Women have sex with whomever they want? In Chile, we call them prostitutes.
Sanna’s for openness, trust, change, being free. Jeronimo is suspicious, 
class-conscious, homebound. Still, there’s something happening between them. Will love follow? But when Jeronimo, who likes snooping around his tenants rooms, discovers a surprise under Sanna’s bed, that totally changes their situation.
I liked this movie. It’s attractive to watch, though not exciting. It’s more about contrasting characters, cultures and personal philosophies, giving an intimate slice of life in contemporary Santiago.
Eastern Boys
Wri/Dir: Robin Campillo
Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) is a blank- faced businessman who regularly passes through the Gare du Nord in Paris. He meets a handsome young prostitute there named Marek (Kirill Emelyanov) and gives him his address for an upcoming tryst. What he doesn’t realize is that Marek is part of a closely-knit gang of guys from Eastern Europe who practically live at the station. They’re hustlers, thieves, pickpockets, conmen, and prostitutes. And the next day, to his horror, they show up, en masse, at his condo door for a “party”. Their leader, known only as “Boss” (Daniil Vorobyov), is the sinister but seductive alpha dog. He puts on music, pulls off his shirt and starts dancing in front of the businessman. Daniel’s non-plussed, but eventually just says to hell with it. 
He dances with thieves wearing a paper crown, while they strip his apartment bare. His art, his computer, his TV… everything is loaded onto a white van.
C’est la vie, right? No. Who shows up the next day at his empty apartment but Marek, the sex worker who started it all. He says it wasn’t his fault, and he’s still willing to do what he was hired for. Sex is cold and perfunctory, but he begins to show up regularly, on the sly. He’s emphatic that Boss can’t know. Marek spends his weekends at a remote suburban refugee hotel with the gang, where they hold his passport. Daniel’s life is opaque. But we slowly find out more about Marek. He’s from a war zone and still hears the bombers, gunshots and explosions in the distance. Cold Daniel starts to show some backbone and compassion. Gradually they change from buyer/seller, to lovers, to roommates, to friends… to something very different and unexpected. Can Marek escape Boss’s control and leave the gang for a future in France?
This is a disconcerting and disturbing film, but quite good. What’s remarkable though is the ensemble of Eastern European actors, working perfectly together like Oliver Twist performed by Cirque de Soleil. Though moralistic at times, it works both as a crime thriller (with minimal violence), and as a social drama.
Eastern Boys played at Inside-Out, We Are the Best and Things the Way They Are both open today in Toronto: check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Sex vs Love. Movies Reviewed: The Past, Stranger by the Lake, C*cksucker Blues
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Can there be love without sex… and sex without love? These movies say yes. This week I’m looking at a French drama about love tempered by divorce; another French drama about lust tinged with death; and a rarely-seen American doc about sex and drugs and rock and roll.
The Past (Le Passe)
Dir: Asghar Farhadi
Ahmad (Ali Mossafa) is an extremely gentle, middle-aged guy – a French-speaking Iranian. He has an intellectual beard and wears a jaunty scarf around his neck. Ahmad is met at the airport in Paris by his beautiful French wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo). She’s in a foul mood. She asked him back to Paris to finalize their divorce. They’ve been living in two different countries since Ahmad moved back to Iran years ago.
Their relationship is finished… or is it? For some reason, she wants him to stay in her home, despite his request for a hotel room. He’s glad to see 
their two girls again. But then she makes him sleep in a kid’s bunk bed along with a bratty boy he’s never seen before. Hmmm…
That’s when the little boy’s father enters the picture. Samir (Tahar Rahim) is a smaller, less mature version of Ahmed. He’s a successful, bearded, small-businessman who owns a dry cleaner. His wife recently died and it looks like Marie and Samir now want to get married. But Marie’s older daughter is going through a crisis, Samir’s son is upset about something else, and there’s big trouble at work. And Ahmad and Samir have to work together with Marie holding all the cards.
This movie tells its story in a fascinating way. At first you think it’s about Ahmad – but it’s not. The point of view shifts from scene to scene, character to character, as the past is gradually revealed. Whose kids are whose? Why did Samir’s wife die? And what are all these unspoken secrets?
The Past is a fantastically subtle movie. It’s low-key, yet powerful (if that makes sense). It doesn’t shove the big revelations in your face; it lets them out slowly, gradually, over the course of a conversation. The three stars are all great – you may have seen Bejo in the French silent movie The Artist, and Rahim in the prison drama A Prophet (both of which won Best Foreign Film Oscars). I’m less familiar with Mossafa, but he’s also outstanding. (And director Farhadi also won for A Separation). The Past is a family drama well worth seeing.
Stranger by the Lake
Dir: Alain Guiraudie
Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a young guy who hangs out at a gay nude beach. It’s a rocky lake surrounded by trees where men go for sex breaks. He makes friends with a shy, potato-faced man named Henri. Henri is confused about the whole place. He’s sure all the men there are cheating on their wives. He’s never heard of the concept of “full-time gays”. They chat about the sea monsters in the water and the guys on the beach. Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao) can tell Franck is attracted to a particular fit man with a Marlboro mustache – the stranger by the lake. And maybe that attraction is mutual. 
But Franck knows Marlboro Man is taken – he has a beach buddy.
But one night Franck sees the two of them frolicking out in the lake. The beach buddy goes down under water… and doesn’t come back up again. Is he dead? Did Marlboro man kill him?
Franck starts hanging with Marlboro Man – who he discovered is named Michel (Christof Paou). They tan together, have sex together… but only by the lake. At night Michel drives to somewhere mysterious – and he won’t say where.
When a body is found, a police inspector (Jérôme Chappatte) starts snooping around the beach. (He looks like Lt Colombo dying of cancer.) Franck is caught between lust and fear: is his mysterious lover also a serial killer?
This is a weird, eerie, almost surreal movie about casual sex, death and (in what might be an unspoken reference to HIV) the connection between the two. It’s sexually explicit but not always erotic. Stranger by the Lake is an excellent French art film.
Cocksucker Blues (1972)
Dir: Robert Frank
Robert Frank is a documentary photographer who was commissioned by the Rolling Stones to do a behind the scenes real-life documentary of their tour in 1972. He came up with this – a record of everything that happened – using small, hand-held cameras. You get to travel on board their private plane where everyone’s having sex, rolling around in the aisles. You get to see the hippy soundman giving Frank the hairy-eyeball every time he turns the camera toward him. Later you see the same guy shooting heroin.
You follow the entire entourage it takes to put on a show. Mick and Keith hunt for authenticity in the South. Groupies, hangers-on, bouncers, the make-up guy, the hair guy, the costume guy holding a single red rose. And the baby boomer fans are in clover and everywhere. The band bounces around the stage singing duets with Stevie Wonder. This is early behind-the-scenes celebrity culture, before it even had a name. Mick Jagger squeezing into his performance pantsuits. Andy Warhol and Truman Capote partying. Tina Turner showing off her voice. The unbelievably beautiful Bianca Jagger throwing shade at the camera…
In the end, the film was banned — the Stones thought the raw sex and drugs interfered with their rock star image – but it’s playing in Toronto, just once, as part of a Robert Frank retrospective called Hold Still.
Stranger by the Lake opens today, Cocksucker Blues has a free screening on the Free Screen tonight (but you have to pick up a ticket: go to tiff.net for details) and The Past opens next Friday (Jan 24).
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Survivors. Movies Reviewed: Ender’s Game, Dallas Buyers Club, The Disappeared PLUS Last Vegas
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 Movember… time to grow those mustaches, ladies! And keep your eyes open to all the film festivals opening in Toronto this month. Look for: Reel Asian, Rendezvous with Madness, Ekran, Planet in Focus, and the EU Film Festival and Regent Park Film Fest – the last two of which are completely free!
This week I’m looking at three movies about people facing impossible odds. There’s a space drama about small children trying to save the universe; a biopic about a Texan trying to survive the HIV virus; and a Canadian drama about a lifeboat full of fisherman trying to find their way back home.
Ender’s Game
Dir: Gavin Hood
It’s the future. Ant-like aliens have attacked the planet. Little Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) is a smart but bullied school kid. Like his classmates, he has a metal knob attached to his head so the military can read his mind. But when he fights back against a much bigger kid, he’s suddenly pulled from school. Is he in trouble? No, he’s been chosen to join an elite military academy in outer space.
Ender is a smart kid. They choose him both for his analytical thoughts and assertive nature, but also for his compassion. Two military brass (Harrison Ford as hawkish warmonger Colonel Graff and Viola Davis as a compassionate psychologist Major Anderson) are closely studying him. They use Ender as a test case for the perfect soldier, possibly the one who can beat the ant-people in their endless war. Only children, they believe, can absorb and apply complicated digital info fast enough to beat the bad guys. Ender is the perfect leader. He follows orders but also questions authority if things aren’t going right.
He makes friends – Bean, Alai and Petra () – with his fellow child-soldiers at the academy as they train for various battle simulations. These games are like 3-D computer simulations, except they fight physically, in immense arenas without gravity. They learn new strategies, play new games, fight new battles and form 
new teams. And Ender is always there, taking it all in and devising new battle plans.
But he also pines for his family back on earth: his genius parents, his sadistic older brother Peter, and his loving sister Valentine (Abigail Breslin). Just like the two military officers, the brother and sister are fighting to influence Ender toward cruelty or compassion. Which one influenced him the most?
Can the earthlings ever defeat the ant people? Will ender provide the solution? And in the process, will he turn into a baby Hitler? Or a mini-Gandhi?
This movie is based on the popular cold-war science fiction novel. It’s pretty close to the original. I’ve read the book, so it was really fun to actually see it on the big screen. And it handles the good vs bad and all its permutations well – Peter vs Valentine, Col Graff vs Maj Anderson, Earthlings vs Formic beings. Asa Butterfield is good, though a bit wooden or robot like, but that suits the role. It’s a enjoyable sci-fi pic, with an unexpected ending. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s still smarter than most. It’s also darker than a Star Wars or a Star Trek, and it’s not a straightforward, “feel-good” superhero movie.
Dallas Buyers Club
Dir Jean-Marc Vallee
It’s 1985 in Dallas, Texas. Ron’s a rootin’-tootin’ redneck in a cowboy hat. He’s an electrician at the oil fields, and in his spare time he picks up girls, snorts coke, guzzles alcohol straight from the mickey, and goes to strip bars. His hobby? The rodeo: he likes to ride bulls (not bareback, I hope.)
Anyway, Ron (Matthew McConaughey) also prone to fainting and hallucinating, and he’s looking rather thin these days. He’s clearly illing. While 
he’s in hospital, he meets Rayon (Jared Leto) a trans woman in the next bed. It’s hate at first sight. Homophobic Ron calls her pansy, buttercup, tinkerbell – and that’s when he’s being nice. And she wants nothing to do with him.
When they test Ron’s blood, turns out he’s HIV-positive, his T-cell count is down to eight, and he has 30 days left to live. The FDA refuses to release experimental drugs, even though AIDS patients are dropping like flies. They’re testing AZT at that very hospital, but only as double blind tests, with placebos for half the patients, and lethally high AZT doses for the rest.
Basically, Ron’s dead.
Then an orderly tells him about a doc, down Mexico way, who can get him what he needs. Sure ‘nuff. He doesn’t die. So he starts smuggling the meds, the vitamins and dietary supplements across the border. And Rayon becomes his business partner. The two of them setting up a quasi-legal centre – that’s the Dallas Buyers Club of the title — where members can get access to treatment the mainstream medical profession is denying them. With the help of a sympathetic doctor (Jennifer Garner channelling Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich) they just might beat the system ( the FDA, the hospitals, Big Pharma) that’s trying to shut them down. But can they fight their own illnesses, too?
This biopic works well as a drama. It’s moving, good story, good acting. This is Quebec director Jean Marc Vallee’s first English language film, and he totally pulls it off. (C.R.A.Z.Y. was a huge hit in Canada a few years ago.) Matt McConaughey lost tons of weight for his role, and Jared Leto dressed as a woman (although it’s unclear whether he’s playing an extremely effeminate, cross-dressing gay man, or a transsexual) Maybe I’m totally cynical, but I just get the nagging suspicion that they’re out there performing “big” mainly so they can win some Oscars. In any case, they are good and convincing in their roles, as is Steve Zahn as Ron’s buddy a local cop. All in all, a moving and interesting biopic.
The Disappeared
Dir: Shandi Mitchell
Ever been to sea, Billy?
No, Captain Highliner…
Well, these guys sure have. There are six of them drifting around in a lifeboat in the Atlantic, somewhere off Nova Scotia. There’s the Skipper (Brian Downie) a god-fearing type, and then there are the various sailors, played by Billy Campbell, Ryan Doucette, and others. The mean sailor, the young sailor, the experienced sailor, the bearded sailor, the other bearded sailor… And you can tell their names because they do a role call every morning to see if they’re all still there. (Mannie here, Pete here, Merv here…)
When they’re not rowing the boats (Heave! Ho!) to somewhere, they’re singing 
ribald sea shanties, eating their rations, whittling wood, drinking rum… you know, behaving like fishermen do. Will they spot land? Or will they get rescued? Or will they be like the Flying Dutchman, forever floating on the seven seas?
Have you noticed there are a lot of movies about Men in Boats recently? Book of Pi, Kon Tiki, All is Lost, Captain Phillips, La Pirogue… Well, this is another one. Some of these are great adventures; this one’s more of a character study. I get the impression that the sailors in The Disappeared are all waiting for some ship called the SS Godot to arrive, but in the meantime they’ll sing a few more sea shanties and call it a day.
The Disappeared, Ender’s Game and Dallas Buyers Club all open today in Toronto (check your local listings). Also opening is the so-called comedy Last Vegas, a real groaner about four retired guys (starring great actors like Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline) meeting up in Las Vegas for a final, wild bachelor party before Michael Douglas marries a beautiful young woman. She’s not that young… she’s 35! Douglas says. I have a hemorrhoid older than 35, says the Kevin Kline character. Ugh. Nuff said about this tired, unfunny geriatric version of The Hangover.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
Odd Jobs. Movies reviewed: Pieta, C.O.G., Now You See Me PLUS Inside-Out
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’ve all had some pretty strange if short-lived jobs. I’ve worked as a newly-hatched chick crate stacker (horrifying… they kept on dying) and handing out government information pamphlets dressed as the letter “i”, with an enormous round, foam ball over my head (as the dot).
Well today I’m talking about three movies where the main characters have very unusual jobs. There’s a violent sort of insurance adjuster in Korea; a stuck-up Ivy League grad student who decides to be a migrant fruit-picker; and a group of magicians who try to rob banks.
Pieta
Dir: Kim Kiduk
Kang-do is a tall, baby-faced man in his thirties who lives in a rusty, dusty industrial district of Seoul. Most of the factories there are tiny shops with zero employees outside the owners. Maybe there’s one machine punching out metal parts. So it’s a constant scramble for cash. It’s a poor area, and only Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) seems to be doing well. He sells the one thing everyone needs: money.
He’s just an ordinary a loan shark. But he collects his payments in an extraordinary way. He makes them sign up for insurance, and then pay back their debt according to what the insurance form pays: a broken leg, an injured hand, the loss of a finger. He casually pushes people off abandoned buildings, but only from the second floor. He’s selfish, cruel and emotionless, without even a shred of conscience – the devil incarnate. He has no one to answer to except his boss – no pesky extended family to hold him back: his mother abandoned him when he was a child.
But who shows up at his door one day, offering to cook and clean, but a stranger (Jo Min-soo) — 
an older woman – who says she’s his mother! She sings him his childhood lullaby. She wants to make up for abandoning him. He is still bitter and untrusting but she won’t give up. She even helps him in his cruel debt collection – since it’s all her fault for not teaching him right from wrong. It’s up to Kang-do to learn to trust, change his ways and open his heart to the only one who cares for him. Is the strange woman really his mother? Why did she choose to come back after all these years? And will the introduction of love – and a conscience? — upset his equilibrium and his job?
Pieta, like most of Kim Kiduk’s movies, has a neatly symmetrical storyline with a twist, coupled with extreme violence, and largely unsympathetic, over-the-top people. The ending is very good, the quirky, extreme characters are played well, and I love the gorgeous industrial look of the film, but it’s so grim, so relentless, so nnngggrrhhh that it’s just not a lot of fun to watch, except perhaps for its schadenfreude. It’s disturbing. I appreciate the way the story plays out, but I can’t say I loved this movie.
C.O.G
Dir: Kyle Patrick Alvarez
Sam (Jonathon Groff) has just finished his MA at Yale but doesn’t want to live with his estranged mother. So he decides to earn some money communing with The People – apple pickers on a farm out west. Unfortunately, he studied Japanese in University, not Spanish. He expects to meet up with a classmate but he soon finds himself abandoned without friends. He’s soon brought down to size. The entitled, intelligent and successful rich kid soon learns the reality of real work, alienation, low wages, and unfair bosses. Next he’s working in the factory sorting fancy apples. A sympathetic employee, Curly (Corey Stall) offers him a promotion, but the benefits come with unstated duties, chez Curly. Finally he is driven to stay with an evangelical jade carver Jon (Dennis O’Hare) who is preparing for the county fair. Can a gay, cynical intellectual accept Jesus into his heart?
This is a really funny – not laugh out loud, but a grim humour – movie about the calamities hapless Samuel lands in, and the hard-to-take people he encounters. He’s made fun of as much as the people he meets. It’s based on a story by David Sedaris, and is just as funny but the movie exists, perfectly, outside of his book, as its own entity. Groff is great as an understated Sam, and Corey Stall (as Curly) has perfected the affable but skeezy guy – similar to his role as Russo on the TV show House of Cards. This is a very good movie.
Now You See Me
Dir: Louis Leterrier
Four people, entertainers all, receive tarot-card invitations from a mysterious source. There’s a conjurer (Jesse Eisenberg), a hypnotist / conman (Woody Harrelson) an escape artist (Isla Fisher) and a spoon-bender and pickpocket (Dave Franco). They meet up in New York City where they are dubbed the Four Horseman (not “of the apocalypse” – it’s just a name) and trained as a new act. Their gimmick? They can rob banks halfway around the world and give the loot to a screaming audience.
Their act is a huge media success.
As good magicians, they understand the point of a long-range trick, or a years-long setup, so 
they follow their directions perfectly. Soon they are being financed by a millionaire (Michael Caine), chased by an FBI detective who swears he’ll catch them (Mark Ruffalo), and also pursued by a man who earns his living debunking magicians as frauds (Morgan Freeman). And everyone wants to find out who is the fifth horseman? Is he one of the magicicians themselves? An unknown rival? A member of an illuminati-style cult? And what will the magicians’ final revelation bring?
OK. Some of the lines in this movie are pure cornball, the CGIs are often distracting, the actors are much better than the roles they’re playing, and there are a few too many twists to the plot. But never mind all that… I thought Now You See Me was a completely enjoyable, big-budget popcorn movie. A lot of fun.
Now You See Me opens today, and Pieta will be at the TIFF Bell Lightbox starting today. C.O.G played at Inside-Out Film Fest which continues through Sunday. Ghost in the Machine – a documentary about another strange job also opens today. Directed by Liz Marshall and beautifully shot, it follows an animal rights activist who, instead of freeing caged animals, takes their photos and shows their suffering to the world. And Lore, the amazing Australian movie about young German woman, a displaced person trying to find her way home right after WWII, also opens today, at the TIFF Bell Light Box.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com .
Yes and No. Films Reviewed: Yossi, No.
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.
This week I look at two foreign-language films, both dramas about men in their thirties with a tragic past but who may be able to find a better future. Both are dramas, one from Israel, the other from Chile.
Yossi
Dir: Eytan Fox
Yossi (Ohad Knoller) is a guy in his mid-thirties trying to deal with his buried past. When he served his compulsory duty in the Israeli army he had had a secret relationship with another soldier. His lover, Jagger, died in his arms, and he’s been living with that for the past decade.(This movie is a sequel to Fox’s Yossi and Jagger, which I haven’t seen yet.)
Now he’s a doctor, a cardiologist. He’s still in love with a dead man but is surrounded by sex, everywhere he looks. A pretty nurse he works with lets him now she’s ready to sleep with him. An aggressive and popular doctor he works with, Moti (Lior Ashkenazi), is determined to get him laid. Yossi is gay but in the closet, and fights off all the advances at work. But when he tries his hand at on-line pickups he finds gay life even more alienating and cruel than the false front he puts on at the hospital. He is crushed when a potential date rudely rejects him for putting up 3-year-old photos on his dating profile (which makes him even more self-conscious for having let himself gain a bit of weight).
When an older woman appears at his hospital, he recognizes her as his lover’s mother. But his attempt at closure — letting Jagger’s parents know the truth about his relationship with their dead son – doesn’t work out quite like he’d hoped. His work begins to suffer, his life feels meaningless, the world seems pointless and superficial. And when he flubs up an operation, he’s sent off for a paid vacation to “get better” from his depression.
He drives away. On the road, he meets a group of young soldiers, who remind him of his own friends a decade earlier. As a fellow veteran (possibly from the same company) he gives them a lift to a beach resort. And, since he enjoys their company, especially the well-groomed and witty Tom (Oz Zehavi), he decides to stay on.
Like the gay character in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, he spends his days staring longingly at the young men, especially the openly gay Tom splashing around in the swimming pool and on the beach. He sends off subtle hints of his “gayness”: he carries the book, Death in Venice, to the beach and listens to Mahler in public.
But when Tom, never one for subtlety, hits on him, Yossi refuses to pick up on it or even acknowledge it. He won’t take off his shirt at the beach, and, in his blue funk, he can’t imagine anyone actually wanting or desiring him. Will Yossi ever come out of his shell?
This is a slow-moving, subtle, tender, (and somewhat depressing) follow-up to the director’s earlier drama Yossi and Jagger. It picks up where that film left off, but 10 years later. Not having seen that film, it’s hard for me to judge Yossi’s backstory, but for much of this movie, he seems so blah, so closed-to-the-world and flat and uninteresting that I wonder why all the other characters in the movie seem to be so sexually entranced by him, throwing themselves at him, left and right.
That’s not fair — he is actually a charming, modest and soft-spoken character, and by the end you do feel for him. Yossi is really two movies; the first is a troubling look at a depressed man facing his past. The second his possible start on a new course. The second half is much easier to take.
No!
Dir: Pablo Larrain
Augusto Pinochet was the notorious right-wing dictator of Chile since he toppled their government. The coup happened in 1973, when the military overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende. Backed by Operation Condor his government killed thousands of people, arrested 80,000, dropped lots of out of helicopters, torture, 
arrest, forced disappearances…lost more things like that. Nice guy…
OK flash-forward 15 years to 1988. Things have calmed down, Chicago-School neo-liberal trade laws are taking off, and exports are thriving. Pinochet feels he is secure in his office, (he is fully in control) so, to polish up his international image he decides to have a referendum: Yes means he will continue; No means they will have a national, democratic election, the first since the coup.
This is where the movie begins.
As part of the plebescite, he offers 15 minutes of TV-time a day for the opposition (the NO side) to have their say. What this means is his government has (in addition to their own allotted 15 minutes for YES) another 11 hours and 45 minutes a day, since the military government and its corporate cronies have almost blanket control of the media. Except those 15 minutes. So official broadcasts are full of “happy patriotic Chileans” standing military-style outside the factories and fishing boats, waving to the Great Leader.
The No side needs to find someone to lead their campaign. But who would want to stick their neck out when it’s so easy to get your head chopped off? Instead, they go for a talented, apolitical, mainstream ad exec named Rene (Gael Garcia Bernal). Rene has his Chilean street creds – his parents were leftists who fled to Mexico after the coup – but here’s Rene back in Chile, living comfortably, with no chip on his soldier. He’s a skateboard riding Mexicano with a rattail in his hair (it’s the ’80’s).
The hardliners on the No side want to remind everyone of Pinochet’s crimes, the death, the killing, the persecution, the oppression, the disappeared. But Rene’s an ad-man at heart. Grief won’t sell. Sadness won’t sell. Death is anything but sexy.
He has to come up with something fun, satirical, humorous, hip. Despite the anger of the 
persecuted who hired him, Rene wants a successful advertising campaign, above all. We need a jingle, he says.
It’s only once he’s deeper into the campaign, that he experiences, first hand, some of the frightening tactics of the dictator. His son is at risk, and he sees his (ex-)wife beaten at a public demonstration. And he’s especially vulnerable when he discovers his own boss, Lucho (Francisco Castro) at the ad agency, is actually leading the pro-Pinochet’s campaign. It becomes a personal competition not just a political one.
This is a fantastic movie that follows a historically important political event as it happens, but as seen through the eye of the TV commercials and their makers. The film itself is done in period 80’s style, complete with flaring video tape, blurry shots and a rectangular, TV-screen shape.
I saw No at TIFF last year, and found myself at the Chilean film reception. I remember casually asking an official there, part of the Chilean film industry, whether people in Chile prefer to say “Pino-shay”, like Canadians do, or “Pino-tchett”? Actually, she replied, most Chileans prefer to say that man’s name… as little as possible. (Gulp!).
No starts today, and Yossi opens next Friday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox – check your local listings. Also on now is the Toronto Irish Film Festival, and, starting next week, March 21-24 is the first ever water film festival – running documentaries about the crucial issue of H2O!. Go to Ecologos.ca for more details.
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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