February 10, 2012. How Do We Communicate? Movies Reviewed: A Dangerous Method, Chronicle, Safe House
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, genre and mainstream movies, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
I watch a lot of movies, but film is only one way to communicate. How do you record the truth? Do you write it down? Do you tell it to your friends or whisper it in someone’s ear? Do you text it? Or do you save it in some more durable format?
This week, I’m looking at three movies that centre on recording or preserving information: A Dangerous Method is a historical drama, where talking is prime, and observations are recorded by hand, using pen and ink, in meticulous notes and sent by voluminous, lengthy letters; Chronicle, is a science fiction thriller, where a high school student records his life using a hand-held video camera; and Safe House is an action/thriller, where everything important has been recorded in a single tiny microchip.
Interestingly (at least in these three movies), the more advanced the medium, the shallower the plot.
Dangerous Method
Dir: David Cronenberg
A woman — at first known only as “S” — is an unusual patient admitted to a mental hospital near Zurich, Switzerland. She shrieks she groans, she writhes, and her face is strangely contorted. She plays with her food and rolls around in the mud! The doctor there, Karl Jung decides to try a new treatment – the Dangerous Method. This unheard-of cure has the doctor 
sitting behind the patient who is cured by talking… about her problems, her dreams, her thoughts and her memories. It was pioneered by Sigmund Freud in Vienna, but Jung doesn’t know if it’ll actually work. But soon the patient, Sabina Spielrein, a Russian-Jewish woman, is miraculously cured when they discover something hidden that happened to her as a girl. He puts her to work in the clinic, and she gradually changes from patient to doctor.
Then another patient, Otto Gross, who’s also a psychiatrist, arrives smoking pot, snorting coke, and drawing dirty pictures. He’s analyzed by Jung who doesn’t know what to do with him. It’s the early 20th century, not the 1960s,, but Otto’s saying just do it man, give in to your sexual desires. She says she wants you, and you want her… Uptight Jung doesn’t want to… but he also does want to. And Sabina makes it clear 
what she wants. What’s he gonna do?
This is a really good movie, an interesting historical biopic, about the dawn of psychiatry, the rivalry between Freud and Jung, and the passionate, but illicit, love affair between Jung and Sabina Spielrein. Cronenberg made a beautiful movie filled with the exquisite European gardens, antiseptic, 
white hospital beds, and steampunk clinical devices. Fassbender is great as Jung, Viggo Mortensen interesting as a new type of Freud — imagined as a big, burly, tough-guy patriarch; and Vincent Cassel is terrific as Otto the counter-culture hedonist. But the real star is Keira Knightley as Sabina, the conflicted, smart, pervy and passionate young woman. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure whether Sabina, the character, was really that crazy, or if she was just putting it on for her doctors, (and Knightley’s accent shifted from Russian to Danish-sounding and back again), but she was still amazing to watch.
Chronicle
Dir: Josh Trank
Andrew (Dave de Haan) is a high school kid in Seattle. His mother is bedridden and dying. His dad is a frustrated ex-fireman who likes smacking his only son around. Andrew’s a bit scrawny, a bit hard to talk to, not an athlete, and can’t defend himself. Instead he decides to keep a record of all the indignities and abuses he suffers with a video camera that he’ll carry around wherever he goes. He’s bullied at school, he’s bullied at home, he’s even bullied by the boys in the hood loitering on the corner. He doesn’t have any friends, and is still a virgin. But at least now he has an identity: he’s “the guy with the camera”. We – the audience — see whatever his camera sees.
He occasionally hangs out with his much richer, bigger, better-looking smarter, and more popular cousin Matt (Alex Russell) who, most important, has a car. Matt likes to quote Schopenhauer and Jung. Andrew wonders what Jung would say about glow sticks.
So one night at an outdoor rave, Steve (Michael B Jordan) — the 
quarterback with the cheerleader girlfriend and who’s running for class prez — asks him to come take some footage of something weird. It’s a strange, glowing crystal deep in a cave nearby. They spelunk down underground. There’re some clicking noises, a flash, and then they all wake up somewhere else. But they’re not the same anymore. They can move things around by telekinesis! But will they use they use the powers for good… or for evil? Or just to get laid? Well, as it turns out, all three.
The three guys make a pact to keep their new powers a secret, not to hurt anybody, and as Matt warns — to avoid hubris at all costs.
As their powers grow they find themselves tied to one another with some powerful immutable force that may be entering their brains. Can they fight it off? will they live or die? Will they go to Tibet? Will they change the world?
I liked this movie, too. Its very simple, a lot of fun, and most of it’s left unexplained, (if anything, it’s most like an unauthorized X-Men knock off, filmed in the style of Cloverfield). The mainly TV actors are engaging and new. The camera work is grainy, and jiggly and bumpy, but luckily, once Andrew can move things without touching them he lets the camera float free, making it a much more pleasant to watch. The special effects are great, culminating in the expected flaming and booming battle royale.
SPOILER ALERT
Not exactly a spoiler, since its apparent in the trailers, but I was disappointed by a trend in comic book morality. The American dream says it’s the good, smart and hardworking kid can always overcome his disadvantages. The poor, suffering underdog character overcomes obstacles and becomes the hero who uses his powers for good. The rich and powerful characters are spoiled, privileged and unfeeling, and try to take his power away for their own personal gain. But the poor kid has pluck, brains and gumption and triumphs in the end.
In this movie, the rich, popular kids are the heroes, while the poor, picked-on kid is the sort-of villain. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Safe House
Dir: Daniel Espinoza
Matt (Ryan Reynolds) is a low level CIA agent. He’s good at boxing, foreign languages, and strategic analysis. He sits around all day, stationed in a safe house – a secret, high security place where spies can do their stuff – in Cape Town, SA. He just sits around all day, like a Steve McQueen, throwing the baseball against a wall.
Then one day the notorious Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) comes in from the cold. He’s been a rogue agent, accused of selling CIA secrets for a decade for his own personal game. Frost is an expert spy and a master of disguise. He’s holding a tiny microchip loaded with important information. And he’s being chased by vaguely middle-eastern looking assassins.
But as soon as Tobin’s in Matt’s safe house, (after they warm him up a bit with some complimentary waterboarding), the assassins come barging in and kill everyone – except Matt who escapes with the handcuffed Tobin. he’s disgusted by the violence, but has to remain true to his mission — protect the captive. The rest of the movie is all fight, fight, fight and chase, chase, chase.
The chases take us from a Capetown stadium, through busy city streets, 
and into the ramshackle townships where people live in corrugated aluminum shacks lit only by a neon church crosses.
The fight scenes are extended and grueling, involving guns, bombs, knives, fists and broken glass. Who do you trust? Who are the real good guys? And is Tobin Matt’s mentor… or his enemy?
This is a fast-moving, never-stopping very violent action movie. It has a barebones plot – who does Matt trust and what’s on the microchip — 
hollow characters, and not much acting to speak of. I guess I wanted the heroes to survive, but I didn’t really care. Neither Denzel Washington nor Ryan Reynolds is very compelling.
It’s got tons of super-quick scene changes so the jagged camerawork is hard to watch. So much so that my brain couldn’t always tell who was punching or shooting whom.(For example, aguy in the assassin team, coincidentally, looks so much like Ryan Reynolds that I couldn’t keep tell if he’s getting away or shooting at himself. Stupid casting.) And because It’s so fast moving, the few slow scenes — like one with Ruben Blades — seem especially boring.
Safe House is an action movie with a good location. But that’s all.
Dangerous Method and Chronicle are playing now, and Safe House opens tonight – check your local listings. This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site CulturalMining.com.
Sept 9, 2011. TIFF it! I Am a Good Person, I Am a Bad Person, Melancholia PLUS TIFF
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, genre and mainstream movies, helping you see movies with good taste, and movies that taste good, and what the difference is.
If this is your first listen to my show from U of T, or maybe you just arrived in Toronto for the first time, or if you’re an alien that just landed from another planet, and if you saw me a couple days ago standing on a streetcar with my back stiff, one hand posed dramatically in the air, the other supporting the back of a nineteen year old women, you might wonder… what’s going on and what’s he doing on a streetcar. And that’s a good question, and one that could only be asked in a place like Toronto.
You see, each year, right about now, a strange confluence of people meet and interact in the city’s downtown for about a week, making for some very strange and wonderful combinations. Because, right now, TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, is opening its curtains and lighting up its screens and walls right across the city. So what that means is some three hundred movies from around the world – including countries like France, Japan, China, India, Russia, South Africa, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, Latin America, and The US, Australia, Canada and The UK – in a dozen different genres are being shown, both to people working in the film industry, who want to buy sell or publicize their pictures, and the general public, who want to see the films and take in some of the glamour and excitement of seeing World and North American premiers of this and next year’s best movies.
There are red carpet entrances to many of the screenings, and usually a director — and often actors, writers and production staff – stay after the fill to answer questions from the audience. What started as a place where Torontonians could watch films that had already played in Berlin, Cannes, Venice, gradually turned into a festival that eclipses most of the others as the most important one in North America, and vying for the title internationally. It also has a spanking new building where many of the films are being shown called the Tiff Bell Lightbox, (on King St between Peter and John) which is really an exciting place to be. Strangers talk to each other – something that’s not usually done in straightlaced Toronto – about movies, about what they’re seeing, about what’s good and what sucks. A couple years ago I was chatting candidly with the woman beside me, and then she got up and sat on the stage to interview filmmaker of the movie we had just seen. I won’t reveal any names, but lets just say she’s had a bit of trouble with a Broadway musical involving a superhero. Yeah, her.
Anyway, while all the people converging on the downtown around the Lightbox and the Hyatt on King St West, I was on my way there, when I saw the other group involving huge numbers arriving from around the globe – the “freshers”. First year Unoversity students at one of the city’s many universities and colleges. They’ve taken to wearing ugly coloured T-shirts with strange electro-designs and unreadable slogans (I guess they’re all in-jokes) as they shout unrecognizable chants as the rush around in huge groups following the orders of some tuff girl with a megaphone.
Then they offer to sine your shoes, or play the tuba, or just stand, dazedly staring off into space as they are surrounded by others in the Wrong Coloured T-shirt! So, there I was making my way to the TIFF press office when I was swarmed by a bunch of freshers who implored I pose pretending to be a ballet teacher (Me? Not bloody likely!) giving a lesson on a streetcar, pose for a snap, and then all of them rushing away for the next task on their scavenger hunt.
So, freshers, I implore you all – task number 379 is to stand in a rush line at one of the TIFF screenings and then tell your friends about the movie you saw. And TIFF goers? Skip one reception and attend a beer pong party instead, just for one night. See what happens…
OK, here are some of the movies I’ve seen so far, and what better way to begin TIFF than with a meta-movie about an avant-garde filmmaker taking her film on the film festival circuit.
I Am a Good Person, I Am a Bad Person
Dir: Ingrid Veninger
Ruby (Ingrid Veninger) is a Yoko Ono-style experimental artist who has made a movie called Headshots, which is basically a series of close-ups of men’s penises. She’s about to leave Toronto with her disaffected daughter Sara (played by her real daughter Hallie Switzer) to show the film at a series of European film festivals. But before she leaves, she gives her husband what is probably the most un-erotic depiction of a blowjob ever on film. Headshots indeed.
Sara ends up acting like the disapproving mother while Ruby, (with her cinched-back hair and
fake glasses) is desperately trying to get laid, be cool, and find satisfaction amongst the cold, bored audiences at the festivals. Finally, it’s too much. Sara heads off to Paris to stay with her aunt, leaving her nervous mom to face Berlin alone. Both of them carry secrets burning inside, and they have to work up the courage to face them before they meet up again.
While lacking the sweetness of young love present in her last film, Modra, I Am a Good Person… makes up for it in this meta-film satire that skewers both art films and film festivals without straying too far from Veninger’s great, hyper-realistic style. This movie’s a fine way to start up that festival feeling.
Melancholia
Dir: Lars Von Trier
Justine and Claire are Yin&Yang sisters. Blonde, beautiful and talented Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is an advertising copywriter who just got married, but managed to show up late for her own wedding party. The dark, shy, anglo-french-sounding Claire (Charloote Gainsbourg) sometimes really hates her sister, but feels a need to nurture her, heal her, to bring her back to life.
Because Justine is depressed, and feels her life Is a sham. Despite the grand wedding banquet — beside an 18 hole golf course, complete with sandtraps and, strangely, a telescope — her divorced parents are embarrassing, her boss is relentlessly bugging her for a tag line, even at the wedding, and her husband’s a naïve hick who thinks he can cure her by showing pictures of apple trees. But Justine’s life is much grander than all of this.
You see, she can feel that the errant planet Melancholia is heading for earth and may destroy everything in just a few days. Even riding horses won’t cure her. Claire’s optimism is also slipping away as the planet moves closer and closer. Will the world end? Or will Melancholia swerve away?
I dunno. After last years shocking movie Antichrist, Von Trier’s depiction of the meaningless of modern lives feels funny, but that isn’t enough. What should have been a pre-apocalyptic psycho-drama felt slow, repetative and drawn out. It’s hard to carry a 2 hour movie using a one-trick-pony.
TIFF runs for the next ten days: Tickets are still available — for more information, go to tiff.net .
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies for CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site, Cultural Mining . com.
The Space-Time Continuum. Movies Reviewed: Source Code, Repeaters, American: The Bill Hicks Story, The Tiny Ventriloquist
Everyone loves some good time travel right? Sure you do. You want to go back in time and fix something up, right a wrong, to do something you wished you had done before it was too late. So, this week, I’m looking at four movies — an action thriller, and a psycho-science fiction movie that deal directly with glitches in the time- space continuum, as well as a historical documentary/ biography about a stand up comic who was inspired by his psychedelic trips, and an art film that manipulates old images and sound, using newly created and found footage and graphic art.
Time travel movies used to be simple, you’d climb into your time machine, travel back or forward in time, until you fix whatever the problem was and come back home.
But now (possibly influenced by start-again video games and rebooted computer programs where you always have the chance to erase your mistakes and go back to point zero) we have this sub genre where scenes are repeated over and over and over again.
You are the one variable that can make a difference, but if you mess up, someone is pressing Play Again until you get it right (like in the classic Groundhog Day)
In one new movie,
Source Code
Dir: Duncan Jones
you get to see the same 8 minute episode, throughout the film, until the hero, a US military helicopter pilot In Afghanistan, tries to win his game.
So, the soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal) suddenly awakens on a Chicago commuter train, in the middle of a chat with Christina (Michelle Monaghan), a pretty woman across from him. The problem is, he doesn’t know where he is, what he’s doing, and who are all the strangers seated with him who seem to know him. And when he looks in a bathroom mirror he discovers he’s not there — he’s somehow inside another person! But even as he tries to make sense of it all, he is the victim of a huge explosion on the train whichh catapults him back to his military job.
It turns out he’s part of an experiment called source code, based on the principal that the brain can hold on to 8 minutes of short-term memory, and that after someone dies (like the man on the train) his neuro synapses remain open and retrievable if caught immediately after the heart stops.
So it’s up to him to figure out who the terrorist is, where the bomb was hidden, and then to trackdown the killer and stop a massive nuclear bomb set to go off later in downtown Chicago. he can’t change the past, but he can relive it until he finds out the truth.
Will he solve the crime, catch the bad guy, get to know Christina, and save the world? And will he ever be told why he’s In
this program, and allowed out of this hellish space-time loop?
Source Code essentially has the same format as the directors other film Moon (about a man who lives alone on a base on the moon, with only a computer voice to keep him company) — a dialogue between two detached people caught in sort of a loop created by people beyond their understanding. In this one, the ongoing conversation — on the two sides of a video screen — is between the soldier and a female officer (Vera Farmiga) who sends him his assignments.
It’s a neatly imagined science fiction action thriller, even though Gylenhaal doesn’t seem quite up to the part, he’s too opaque, and the story doesn’t exactly make sense, even according to its own plot.
A Canadian film that opens next Friday,
Repeaters
Dir: Carl Bessai
follows a similar pattern.
Three young ne’er-do-well drug addicts — Kyle, Sonia and Weeks –at an isolated rehab center, live through a god-awful day iof depression, bullying, idiocy, neglect, and frustration. The three only have each other to depend on. Pick-up truck Kyle (Dustin Milligan) is rejected by his little sister for something he did; Sonia (Amanda Crew) is unable to talk about an issue with her father who is dying in a hospital; and Weeks (Richard de Klerk) is emotionally crushed by the hate-on his furious father carries for him when he tries to visit him in a prison.
But when they wake up the next morning after a thunderstorm, it’s soon clear the world is reliving the previous day exactly
as before, and only those three are aware of it. This totally messes up their sense of destiny and morality. Is there any meaning to life at all? Even if they save a person’s life — or kill him — it all goes back to the same point of restart. (It’s one day, not 8 minutes, in this movie, so it’s not as action- packed as source code.) will they ever confront their own moral dillemmas and right the wrongs they know about?
This is a neat movie about things like where morality fits into one’s own self image, what are the psychological consequences of good and evil that has no effect, and what would you do if you could do anything? It’s also a romance, a bit science fiction, with a lot of psycho-thriller, as the three reveal their own minds to each other as the loops continue.
The next movie is only related to time travel in that the main character was known to mentally float around in a drug induced state.
American: The Bill Hicks Story
Dir: Matt Harlock and Pauk Thomas
Bill Hicks was a counter-culture standup comic in the Seventies and Eighties, known for tackling the topics that are taboo for comedians: not dick jokes, but politics, philosophy, intellectual issues, psychedelia. His jokes combined a Texas drawl, the lilt of a preacher’s revival meeting, and out-of-control, drunken and drug-filled vivid improvisational fantasies, rages and rants.
This moving documentary traces his life from his geeky teen years until his untimely death in his early thirties. Interesting technique for a documentary; there are almost no talking heads – instead the heads, people like his parents, his best friend, other comedians — turn into the movies narrators, like an oral history, with most of the movie comsisting of animated old photos, along with old concert footage.
He started as a thirteen yr old in suburban Houston, Texas. On his first try at drinking alcohol at a night club, he asks his
fellow comedians – what’s a good drink (because he’s never had a mixed drink before)? They tell him Margaritas. So he downs seven margaritas at once and then goes on stage and lets loose. He considers alcohol as a disinhibitor, to let his true emotions loose on stage, and psilocybin mushrooms the source of his psychedelic insights. He would go up to a ranch every so often with a bunch of friends to down the mushrooms and see what images they bring.
Hicks was a heavy drinker and a creative psychedelic druggie, and the movie shows some unflattering footage of low period where audience members would buy him drinks during his standup act and he would drink, snort or inhale anything that got sent up the stage. A bt disturbing — like most of his act, where unsobreity was part of his defiance.
American, the Bill Hicks Story, is a very good and interesting movie, of a largely unsung folk-hero, done in the style of a rock-star documentary. My only criticism is that it concentrates too much on the serious biography parts and not enough on his art.
The Tiny Ventriloquist
Dir: Steve Reinke
Here’s another film that played last week’s Images Festival, where experimental art meets the big screen. This movie takes a disjointed look at the director’s own self-reflections towards his art; using his own great narrated shots and photos, along with found footage – of the most surprising kind – cut up and manipulated in an unexpected way.
I’ve always liked Steve Reinke’s work because it’s art, but it’s also always interesting and funny to watch, without the overly tedious or pensive feel, that a lot of video art has. You’re allowed to enjoy it, you’re allowed to laugh or squirm.
So in the same way Steve Hicks would drag political outrage into the usually pablum, fake-shock world of stand-up comedy,
Steve Reinke, in the same way, violates the usually dry inner sanctum of art using found porn and other taboo sources (in an artistically valid way, naturally.)
So in this movie you het a combination of uneasy travel footage, spooky monochrome, costumed, home movie dancing, and old crackly recordings. Scenes of flood, water, and old rural western USA. Drunken Dutch soccer hooligans, hunters, real or imagined vaguely threatening child memories, manipulated Peanut’s cartoons, scary medical and industrial footage, and post-apocalyptic fantasies filled with dread.
The most bizarre footage is of a woman shown bear hunting in the woods, followed by a protracted explicit sex, in the form of very low-grade amateur porn, on top of the dead body of the bear. It’s funny: the dry didactic narration, while describing each scene in detail, in order to not offend the viewers it censors parts of the images by covering it with amorphous green-screen colour. Here’s the surprise: he keeps all the hard core porn images, but scribbles out the body of the poor dead bear!
Throughout the piece, vivid footage is alternated with animated simple line drawings. I liked this film, The Tiny Ventriloquist, a lot.
Source Code is now playing, American, the Bill Hicks Story starts today at the Royal Cinema in Toronto (check our local listings), Repeaters opens next Friday and The Tiny Ventriloquist was shown at the Images Festival.
Late Teens, Early Twenties. Films Reviewed: Heartbeats, Bran Nue Dae, Never Let Me Go, Catfish
There’s a surprising variety in the films about people in their teens and early twenties that played at the Toronto Film Festival. I’m looking at a few of them, plus one odd duck from outside TIFF that fits the category too. Like most coming-of-age or college movies, these have love, crushes, and passions; followed by some big revelation or shock that shakes their hopes and beliefs to their very foundations.
Each of these movies, though, has a twist that makes it just a little different from the usual teen or college movie. One has a gay element; one involves indigenous people as the main characters; one takes place in an alternate reality from the one we live in; and one is based mainly on the difficulties of using facebook – and, no, unfortunately, I’m not reviewing that Social Network movie that’s opening today – I’m reviewing the other facebook movie.
Heartbeats
Dir: Xavier Dolan
Quebecois Xavier Dolan, who directed, wrote, and starred in his great debut film, J’ai tue ma mere / I killed my mother,
(about a gay teenager and the problems he has with his mother) is back with his second triple-threat movie, called Heartbeats or Les Amours Imaginaire. In this one best friends Francis (Xavier Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri), both become infatuated with a good-looking, intelligent, rich, and personable newcomer to Montreal, Nicolas (Niels Schneider). Neither wants to admit they like him, but each of them secretly schemes how to win him over. Nicolas, in the meantime, flirts with them both — he loves being the centre of attention and adulation. The tension and competition between the two friends grows until it explodes during a trip the three of them take to a house in rural Quebec.
It’s not a bad movie — it’s a light-hearted farce, well acted, and interesting. It just felt like a bit of a let-down after his much more dramatic, entertaining, and moving first film. If only Dolan could have kept it as just the three-character story. But instead he adds very long scenes of people shopping, of long pillow conversations in dim light with their various sex partners; and periodic scenes of talking heads of unidentified montrealers giving their views on sex, relationships, and break-ups.
To me it seemed like a good 45 minute film, but with lots of filler to stretch it out into a feature film. OK maybe that’s not fair. Dolan may be 21, but he puts in as many cultural, literary, and filmic allusions as a well-established filmmaker. He’s not playing around, I assume, and there must be some reason for all the less interesting scenes. But still, the movie could have used more of the story – which was great! – and less of all that extra stuff, which was… just not very interesting. It broke up the flow, it didn’t add to it.
The characters were all fun to watch, and the acting was great by all three, plus a hilarious cameo by Anne Dorval – she’s amazing. (She was the mother in J’ai tue ma mere.) Enjoy Heartbeats as a light, pleasant comedy, and leave it at that.
Bran Nue Dae
Dir: Rachel Perkins
Another pleasant diversion is this Australian musical – yes, a musical – that played last year’s Toronto Film Festival. 50 years ago: Willie, an aboriginal kid who lives in a shack with his deeply religious mom in Broome – a small town in Western Australia — likes a cute girl with a great voice who sings in the local bar. But she’s hanging with a greaser. He gets sent to a residential school, where kids wear uniforms and learn religion. He rebels much to the dismay of a priest, Father Benedictus (Geoffrey Rush). Willie makes his way back to Broome, chased by the priest, and falls in with a hobo, who says he’s his Uncle Tadpole; but he’s a trickster, who does things like throwing himself in front of a car to get money or maybe a free ride. They encounter a tough floozie in a roadhouse, a German guy and his Aussie hippie girlfriend looking for his Dad for some reason, in a VW bus in the outback. They all set out to reach Broome. The movie traces all the characters’ adventures, punctuated by songs and dances, as Willie makes his way back home to see the girl he longs for.
It’s not bad for a low budget movie… its very distinctly Australian, cute, funny, with a cast that’s largely made up of indigenous people and pacific islanders. Some of the songs are better than others. Interestingly, the young woman with the great voice apparently won Australian Idol a couple years ago. It takes place in the past but the whole movie also has a bit of a dated feel to it – it could be because it toured the country as a play for 20 years before it was made into a movie. But if you like musical comedies, or want to learn about a very different, yet oddly similar, culture; or if you just want to a good old fashioned-type story with all the hidden identities and plot turns, and you approach this without grand expectations, you just might enjoy Bran Nue Dae.
Never Let Me Go
Dir: Mark Romanek
It’s 1983 somewhere in England. So you expect to see skinheads marauding on the streets, people in bright colours and funny haircuts listening to the latest Duran Duran album, pop culture everywhere. But no. This is a different England than the one you’re used to. Three kids at an exclusive English boarding school called Hailsham, grow up as close friends. Tommy (Andrew Garfield) gets bullied because he’s easy to tease – he’s got an anger problem. Kathy (Carey Mulligan) is kind and mature but a bit plain, while tall, beautiful black-haired Ruth (Keira Knightley) is a bit selfish.
They, and the other kids, live an isolated, sheltered existence, never really seeing the world outside the experimental school. No fighting. No bad manners. They’re raised from a young age to be Carers and Donors (wonder what that means… hmmmm…). The movie shows them realize what their purpose is in life, in their duty toward the country that takes care of them. They are there to provide medical help – their whole existence, once they graduate, is to care for the ill and elderly, who often live to be well over a hundred. But Hailsham grads are a special case, and it is said, that some can break loose from their inevitable fate. The three friends, Kathie, Ruth and Tommy decide to try.
This one is not a light diversion. It’s a depressing, demoralizing downer of a movie. It’s pretty interesting, an adaptation of the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro (the author Remains of the Day) ‘s disturbing science fiction novel. It’s a tender, moving film, showing the trade-offs a society goes through for the greater good, a sort of an alternate reality set in the past. Great acting, kinda creepy story.
Catfish
A “documentary”
Nev, a photographer in NYC discovers that a little girl, Abby, in small-town Michigan is making paintings of his photos – and sending them to him. He communicates with her, her mother, and her beautiful older sister Megan.
Nev and Megan’s long distance relationshipm via facebook, telephone and texting, takes on a sexual dimension. Although they’ve never met face to face, they feel like they’re together. But when she emails him some obviously pirated music tapes, and claimed she was the singer, Nev begins to suspect something is not right. So he and his buddies, the so-called documentary makers, drive out to Michigan to confront her.
I felt really misled by the advertising for this movie – they claimed it was a Hitchcockian thriller. Well it ain’t. It’s a not-very-good low-budget pseudo-documentary about social networking, I’d rank it slightly above “Bridezilla” (the notorious youtube forgery about a bride whose hair goes bad on her wedding day) that might work online, but feels like a rip-off on the big screen. Instead of Catfish, this movie should be called Red Herring… or maybe Shaggy Dog.
And, finally, starting this weekend and running for one week is the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. It’s playing a wide variety of films, like “The Time that Remains”, a semi-autobiographical story by the well-known director Elia Suleiman, about the fate of Palestinians who remained in Israel, from 1948 to the present; two films on the noted poet Mahmoud Darwish; and “Aisheen: Still alive in Gaza”, a documentary shot just two weeks after the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2009. There is also a panel discussion with Palestinian filmmakers, as well as a traditional Palestinian breakfast, catered by a Toronto chef. Lots going on from October 2nd to the 8th at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival – check out details, tickets, prices, and times, at tpff.ca.
Post-Cold War. Movies reviewed: Salt, I Am Love, Countdown to Zero
About 20 years ago, something impossible happened. The Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern Bloc crumbled, the iron curtain was lifted, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Almost half a century of mutually assured destruction, of the never-ending threat of nuclear war, was somehow… finished, and the world let out a collective sigh so enormous, satellite photos show it moved a sand dune in the gobi desert.
The lingering anxiety at the back of everyone’s mind — that some nut in the White House or the Kremlin, in a fit of pique or a moment of panic would press a red button and turn the world to dust, and repeat the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a global scale – that anxiety seemed to disappear. The world was safe again!
So for almost everybody, things seemed to be looking up. Except…except for the movies! How can you make spy movies without the ready-made “us and them” of the cold war, the constant thrust and parry of the two sides in the never ending intrigue of their battle for ideological dominance? Subterfuge, espionage, the arms race, and always, always the threat of nuclear destruction gave cold war movies this background that made them serious and real and scary. Now everyone’s spy movies were for nought. What to do?
This week I’m looking at three movies, each with a very different take on Russia and the post cold war period.
Salt
Dir: Phillip Noyce
“alt is an action/thriller about a CIA agent, Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), who is accused of being a double agent. A Russian spy walks into the CIA and, just like in the cold war days, says he wants to defect. He claims there was a secret school in the Soviet era, that kidnapped and trained from birth, special sleeper agents who would blend in with the Americans until the moment they are activated. And Salt was one of these agents, old-guard cold-war communist out to assassinate leaders foment nuclear warfare again, to bring things back to the bad old days. The Soviet Union will rise again!
Evelyn denies it, but she knows she has to take the law into her own hands and escape. She says three things to set up the plot:
I didn’t do it! (or did she?)
I’ve been set up! (or was she?)
I have to find my husband.
Her husband is a milquetoast German arachnologist (spider collector), and that part the plot is for sure — she has to find him. Why? I don’t really know, and I just saw the movie. I guess because she loves him.
Meanwhile she’s being pursued by two CIA agents, one, Peabody (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor – the great black British actor from”Kinky Boots” and “Inside Man“) who doesn’t trust her; the other, Ted (played by Liev Schreiber) who does, but still has to bring her in. Toss in a bunch of unsavoury Russians hanging out on the waterfront, a great cathedral scene, some impossible car chases, rooftop jumps and lots of bloody machine-gun shoot outs, and there you have it.
Is she or isn’t she? Not gonna give it away, but suffice it to say, LOTS of holes in the ridiculous plot which doesn’t really hold together. Like her English starts drifting into a Russian accent somewhere in the middle of the movie for no known reason. But never mind. It’s a cold-war redux action movie, lots of fun, but stupid.
(BTW, this movie couldn’t have picked a better time to be released, just a few weeks after that group of undercover Russian spies were discovered to be living and raising families in the States.)
“I am Love”
Dir: Luca Guadagnino
The movie starts with a banquet to honour Edoardo, the patriarch of the immensely wealthy Recchi family, a Milan industrialist who 
founded his fortune on wartime profits for his textile mills. He’s passing on the business to his heirs. The Trecchi women, all from outside the clan, are also prominent figures, but feel their existence is slightly more precarious. Emma, (wonderfully played Tilda Swinton) the wife of the second generation, flutters around nervously – she’s with the family, but not of the family. She’s actually from the former Soviet Union. Her handsome son, Edoardo, wants to carry on the family’s tradition, while her husband, Tancredo, would rather move it into a post-industrial Italy. And Emma herself feels adrift, with a new name, language, heritage, culture, family. One day, her life changes when, on a trip to San Remo, her eyes catch some Onion domes at a Kremlin-like Russian Orthodox church – and who does she see but her son’s friend, the chef Antonio. Her heart flutters as she takes a step to reclaim her real self, and her real desires.
This is terrific movie to watch. It shows the cold, sterile, but magnificent industrial Milan, the wonderful, fecund countryside nearby. The clothes, the food, the family members and the servants and the shifting relationships, power and identity of all of them. Emma and her sublimated Russian past, the rivalry between father and son for her affections, her daughter cutting herself loose, the longtime friendships with the maid, the Recchi women of three geerations… Wow! So much to take in.
And it’s so amazing looking, with lots of fooling around with camera, recreating the look of early 1970’s Italian movies, with their lush sumptuousness, the slightly smudgy camera-lens, the soft glow of light… along with tons of visual refernces to Japanese films – rain dropping on a pond, insects on a twig… And lots of nice shifts to Emma’s subconscious memories, thoughts and fantasies, but always done visually, not with echo-y voiceovers. Lots of what’s said is off camera, over heard, in the background, or never mentioned – you have to put it together.
“I Am Love” is a simple story, but told so well with great emotional heft. This is a really good movie.
“Countdown to Zero”
Dir: Lucy Walker
is a new documentary on a topic – nuclear warfare — that used to be at the front of everyone’s mnd, but is now nearly forgotten. This movie says: “uh, uh, it’s still very much there, and if you don’t do something about it, we’re all going to die!” And it does its best to scare the bejeezus out of you showing how.
The movie shows some startling old footage of atomic testing, and traces the history of nuclear proliferation. With the Cold War, mutually assured destruction meant that neither side could go ahead with it – any bomb flies, the other side sends there’s off too. But now, the movie says, things are even more precarious. More countries have the bomb, more want it, and with the former Soviet Union in disarray, there all those rich yellowcake ready to be nabbed. There’s a great prison interview with a Russian dude who wanted a Lamboghini or a DeLuxe Buick, and that’s why he was selling uranium to a potential baddy. Luclily he was caught, but all the ones who were caught were caught by chance.
Countdown to zero shows how a bomb is made, who’s after it, how it could be launched – due to stupidity, miscaculation, or madness — and what would happen if it were.
This is a very informative and interesting to watch, especially if you don’t know much about this – lot’s of surprising near misses and near disasters most people ever hear about. But the film is extremely manipulative using repeated images of terrorist attacks followed by similar shots of everyday life in a city – will the terrorists get YOU?? Basically, this is a sheep in wolf’s clothing: a sombre, PBS-style documentary dressed in a Fox News fright wig: Iran! Al Qaeda! P-P-P-Pakistan!!!. The title, Countdown to Zero, sounds like an episode of 24, but what they’re really saying is let’s countdown the number of nuclear warheads to zero instead.
This well made and well-researched documentary is made mainly of archival footage, and the biggest political talking heads there are – Gorbachev, Valery Plame, Oppenheimer, MacNamara, Tony Blair – along with some good animated scenes and a couple amazing new interviews. The thing is – I didn’t walk out of the movie scared of a nuclear holocaust. Disarmament is still a very important issue, I just wished they hadn’t used American fear and paranoia of terrorism as the main reason to support an important cause.
Kids Movies! Movies Reviewed: Toy Story 3, The Last Airbender, Despicable Me, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
This week I’m going to take a look at some of the kids’ movies and animation playing right now. So if you’re a kid, or have kids, or just like that kind of movie… stay tuned.
Kids movies, much more than a lot of crappy adult genre movies, take their stories very seriously, and I respect them for that, well, I respect the ones that have good stories. I love a good story, especially one with a bit of magic, or supernatural, or super heroes, or mythological heroic back stories. Because it doesn’t matter if they re-tell a well-known story, as long as they do it well. So let me tell you a bit about each movie’s story (I won’t give away the endings, don’t worry) and whether I think it’s worth watching.
“Toy Story 3”
Dir: Lee Unkrich
“Toy Story 3” in 3-D is a continuation of the earlier computer animated Pixar and Disney “Toy Story” movies, about a kid’s toys who, when their owner isn’t around, reveal themselves to be living beings with real emotional lives and personalities. In this version, Andy has grown up and is heading off to college, and the toys find themselves abandoned and donated to a daycare center. So they have to escape from this virtual prison run by a gang of mean toys, like Lotso, a deeply cynical “Burl Ives”-type scary, strawberry-scented care-bear, a baby doll zombie, and Ken, Barbie’s groovily-dressed, clothes-horsey kinda gay boyfriend.
It’s up to Woody, the 60’s cowboy doll, to rescue spaceman Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the gang, in a sort of a Dante-esque journey. Woody descends into this inferno to free Beatrice – or more accurately a whole bunch of Beatrices – (Beatrici?) from a virtual hell. This time the bad stuff seems a lot worse than it had in the earlier ‘Toy Story”. It’s not just a childhood fear of abandonment at work here, it’s actual, palpable danger. Sort of scary, to tell the truth.
I remember disliking the first Toy Story – it felt like a well-plotted infomercial there to sell toys, and had a distasteful whiff of nostalgia for the white suburban 1950’s where women all stayed at home and boys and girls knew their roles.
It’s kept a lot of that, but somehow seems a bit more subversive than it’s predecessors. And while keeping its nostalgic sentimentality, it is actually an emotionally wrenching movie — I laughed, I cried (OK I didn’t actually stand on my seat and cheer) and I thought it was a good movie – despite the toy-selling factor.
“The Last Airbender”
Dir: M. Night Shyamalan
“The Last Airbender” is a live action, 3-D version of the TV cartoon called Avatar – not that Avatar, another one.
In ancient times, in a sort of a made-up Sino-Tibetan-Japanese-Sumatran pan-Asian world, there were people in four kingdoms each based on one of the 4 elements – air, water, fire, and earth. There were certain people in each kingdom who could bend an element – bending means you can toss that fire or water around, and make it go “Pshew! Pshew! Pshew!”
just by gesturing with your magic fingers.
And then, there is one guy who can bend all four elements – he’s known as The Avatar. But the Fire people have taken over and are oppressing the rest of them. So they want to catch the last airbender – a little bald kid with strange facial tattoos and an arrow on his forehead pointing down, named Aung – who might be the Avatar. He was asleep in an ice bubble for a century, but now he’s back.
Most of the movie is just the royal family of fire guys chasing Aung, and the rest of the elementals trying to get Aung fit enough to fight them.
This movie got trashed by critics, more so than it deserved – it wasn’t all that bad. M Night Shyamalan is not my favourite director (he’s been coasting on his 6th Sense “I see dead people!” success for quite a while now, with a whole bunch of duds), but it’s not bad, with some cool special effects, and visually captivating with ancient ruins, and mountain-top Buddhist monasteries—great to look at, with the feel of the TV cartoon.
But the characters never really develop, you never feel for them except for the conflicted, exiled prince of fire Zuko (Dev Patel, “Slumdog Millionaire”) and maybe pudgy, pre-pubescent Aung (Noah Ringer). Too many lines like: “Faster Aung, they‘re right behind us!”, too much fighting and chasing, not enough actual story. And the 3-D effects in this movie are a waste of time.
Despicable Me
Dir: Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud
Gru, is a flat headed, low browed bad guy villain with a nose like Mr Burns. He’s a truly evil, grinch-like villain. He lives in an old house where he secretly makes nefarious weapons with the help of tiny yellow capsule-shaped minions and a diabolical scientist — like James Bond’s “Q”, except hard of hearing.
But Gru is thrown when he’s told he’s over the hill in super-villaindom. The insecurities of his childhood – his mother never supported him – hence the name “despicable me” – come back to haunt him. A new villain, Vector, has stolen the Great Pyramid. What can be bigger than that for a villain to steal? Gru Decides to 
steal the moon, once he gets a hold of a gun that can shrink things. But the only way to get it is by using three cute orphan girls – Margo, Edith and Agnes – who sell cookies door to door, as bait. So he pretends to adopt them.
The movie follows his relationship with the spunky orphan girls as a ne’er-do-well Dad, as well as his quest to capture the moon. This is a really good movie, capable computer animation, cool-looking characters, minimal product placement, and with stories not out of place with Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl or Charles Addams – but not too scary either. (Suitable for kids).
The one thing I thought was remarkable is that three of the main characters, the orphan girls, were completely absent from all the trailers, posters, and pictures before the movie came out – I guess they think boys won’t go to see movies with girls in them. Anyway, I liked this movie a lot.
Finally,
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Dir: Jon Turtletaub
Finally,
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
(starring Nicolas Cage as the wizard Balthazar and Jay Baruchel as his apprentice, Dave.) While ostensibly based on the Mickey Mouse cartoon in Fantasia, this sorcerer’s apprentice is much more compicated. Merlin, in King Arthur’s day, was the greatest sorcerer in the world. But his three protégés — Veronica, Balthazar and Horvath – fail to kill the evil Morgana. Instead, a bunch of them are turned into “grimholts” – statues that look like Russian Matryoshka dolls — that hold them captive. It’s up to Balthazar, still alive centuries later, to find a new apprentice to be the Prime Merlinian. He locates the self-conscious NYU science nerd, Dave, in New York City. Dave must help him stop the villain Morgana, and her accomplice the traitor Horvath –played by Alfred Molina — while he learns wizardry in a modern-day one-man Hogwarts, even while he pursues his childhood crush, Becky.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a fun, pseudo- Harry Potter movie. The acting’s good: Nicolas Cage shows amazing restraint (unlike most of the terrible movies he’s in); Molina is great as the villain, Horvath, and Jay Baruchel — while almost exactly like in most of his other roles — carries the part well. (He’s always great.) Still, his voice changed 15 years ago – the guy’s 28! — so he should stop playing mock-twelve year olds. I also liked the way they combined physics with magic. And I thought new-comer Teresa Palmer — as Dave’s crush, Becky — was also great. (And her character works for a community radio station… excellent!) The New York City scenes – Empire State and Chrysler building, always seen from high up among the gargoyles — is attractive too. And there are lots of fun references to older movies, including Ghost Busters, King Kong, and Toy Story. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a good – not great, but not bad – movie for people who like magic adventures, Walt Disney movies, or Jay Baruchel.
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