World premieres at #TIFF24. Films reviewed: Relay, We Live In Time, Hard Truths
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
TIFF is on its final weekend, but there are still many movies left to watch, including free screenings on Sunday of all the the Peoples Choice winners. So this week, I’m only talking about movies that had their World Premieres at TIFF. There’s an overly angry woman, a secret agent for hire, and a love affair that turns serious.
Relay
Dir: David Mackenzie (Review: Starred Up)
Ash (Riz Ahmed) runs an unusual business in New York City. It’s for whistle blowers who are afraid for their lives and their family’s and want to make peace with their previous employer and return the incriminating evidence. The genius of Ash’s work is that neither side — the whistle blower and the corporation — know who he is… and both sides pay him. A win-win situation, at least for him. He relays information using an intermediary phone service connected to an ASL keyboard for the deaf that can’t be traced. And he always keeps one copy of the evidence just in case the employer ever reneges on the deal.
His latest client is a biologist named Sarah (Lily James), a would be whistle-blower who has proof of malfeasance by a big agro conglomerate she worked for. But now she wants out, because she’s afraid a gang of thugs working for the company (Sam Worthington, and three others) are going to kill her. Problem is Ash — who never lets his guard down — is smitten by the beautiful and sympathetic Sarah, who he goes out of his way to protect. Can Ash keep her safe from unknown forces? And is there something deeper going on between them?
Relay is an ingenious action film that doubles as a corporate spy flick. It’s full of complex schemes involving the postoffice, telephone services and communication devices. As well as lethal fights. Riz Ahmed is one of those actors who is so good that you can just go and see anything he’s in. Luckily, Relay is a super-taut thriller, with constant suspense, near-misses and clever chase scenes. Beware: you’ll be his with an enormous twist near the end (no spoilers) that will totally blindside you. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s plausible ir not, but either way, this is a great thriller.
We Live In Time
Dir: John Crowley (Reviews: The Goldfinch, Brooklyn)
Almut (Florence Pugh) is a chef in London whose restaurant is taking off. She had a long-term relationship with a woman, but eventually separated. Tobias (Andrew Garfield) works for Weetabix — yes the breakfast cereal — and has been living with his dad since his first wife divorced him. The two meet with a bang. Literally. She runs him over with her car. But this is no hit and run. She sticks around until he gets out of hospital, and invites him for dinner at her restaurant. Sparks fly and their relationship begins. But certain obstacles lie in their path. Is there any point to marriage? Should they have kids? And what happens when she is diagnosed with cancer?
We Live In Time is a surprisingly good romance. Most romances veer either toward slapstick comedy or treacly cornball. This one does neither. The time in th entitle is reflected in it’s narrative, which hope back and forth between different stages of their lives. And it’s full of evocative details, like when Almut — the chef — teaches Tobias the best way to crack an egg (on a flat surface, she says) While it’s clearly Oscar bait (what with the cancer and baby details artfully placed), it’s also a fully enjoyable and moving film to watch. Irish director John Crowley knows what he’s doing; he brought us movies the classic Brooklyn. Frances Pugh does Almut as tough but lovable while Andrew plays it goofy and sweet.
This is good one.
Hard Truths
Co-Wri/Dir: Mike Leigh (Reviews: Peterloo, Mr Turner)
Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a middle-aged woman who lives with her family in a quiet London suburb. Her husband Curtley (David Webber), a plumbing contractor, is away most of the day, while their son Moses (Tuwaine Barrett) in his twenties locks himself in his room with his ear phones on playing video games. Perhaps because Pansy is so hard to deal with. When Moses goes for a walk, she yells at him to stay away from police or he’ll be arrested for walking while black. And when Courtley is home she subjects him to a non-stop abusive barrage of complaints and insults about his work, the neighbours, a baby down the street, animals, germs and being disrespected.
Meanwhile, Pansy’s sister Chantal (Michele Austin) lives with her two successful daughters. Chantal is kind and amiable, listening to problems and gossip as she does her clients’ hair. And she — like everyone else — wonders why her sister Pansy is so angry bitter and paranoid all the time. And can she get her to visit the cemetery on Mother’s Day?
The topics — kinship, loss, mental illness — seem ordinary but the movie is anything but. Hard Truths is a searing comedy-drama about two black families in London. By comedy-drama I mean you will be laughing uproariously through the first half and then crying through the second. It’s just fantastic. The character development, the dialogue, and the acting are dead on. Marianne Jean-Baptist is so funny and so real and so moving, she’s a phenomenon to behold. If she doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for this, I will be shocked. She co-starred with Brenda Blethyn in another Mike Leigh movie, Secrets and Lies, thirty years ago, and this one is even better.
I would call Hard Truths a perfect movie.
Relay, We Live in Time, Hard Truths, all had their world premieres at TIFF .
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
Everything. Films Reviewed: 12 Years a Slave, The Motherload, Starred up.
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.
Welcome to an icy cold 2014! People tend to think in big terms with the New Year. They hope everything will improve. So, this week I’m looking at an historical drama about a man who loses everything, a documentary about women who want everything, and a prison drama about a guy with nothing to lose.
12 Years a Slave
Dir: Steve McQueen
Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a nice, middle-class guy in mid-nineteenth century America. He’s a professional (plays the violin) owns a home, is married with children and is an upstanding member of his community in New York state. And he’s black.
So when he’s offered a well-paying gig in Washington DC, he can’t resist and follows the recruiters south. But soon after, he finds himself kidnapped, thrown into a bare cell and beaten. His captors strip him of his fine clothes, his family, his dignity, his status, and even his name. Based solely on the colour of his skin, he’s sold as a slave. A slave!
He’s no longer considered a human being, now he’s just chattel.
And so begins his nightmare. The movie follows the next twelve years (it’s based on Northup’s own memoirs) as he is sold to various southern plantation owners. Some are relatively kind and humane, some monstrously cruel, but none consider that it is fundamentally wrong for one man to own another. He sees slaves being beaten, tortured, raped or even murdered at their owner’s whim. None of this is against the law. They have no rights, no legal standing, no recourse to justice.
On the way, he acquires a violin (from a kindly slave owner). But far from lightening his burden, music is shown as part of the whole slave system. Slaves driven to sing to a pounding drum as they pick cotton. And in one of the most painful scenes in the movie, he has to play ditties on his fiddle as the others are forced to perform grotesque high-stepping cake-walks to entertainer the planters.
Work is a constant danger. If he politely corrects an error or suggests a more efficient alternative he risks being beaten or lynched.
At a cotton plantation he meets a pretty young woman named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). She is the fastest worker in the cotton fields (most of the rest got flogged each day for not picking enough). She’s also a “favourite” of Epps, a cruel plantation owner (Michael Fassbender) and a captive to his wishes. But Patsey has to fear equally Epp’s, wife who has it in for her. Solomon observes it all.
Gradually they grind down his pride until he too walks hunched over, never looking a white man in the eyes. Will Solomon ever escape from this hell? And if so, how? And can he grant Patsey request to save her from her hopeless existence?
This is a great film, and you should definitely see it if you haven’t already. It’s painful, shocking, realistic and explicit. It gives a new visual meaning to slavery in most people’s minds. It’s also a tense but satisfying thriller about rescue and escape. Ejiofor and N’yongo are both amazing, as is director McQueen’s usual leading man Fassbender. It won the TIFF People’s Choice award and hopefully many others.
The Motherload
Dir: Cornelia Principe
Some recent books and articles ask “why can’t women have it all?” The “all” being a top job combined with raising kids. Anne-Marie Slaughter (policy advisor to Hillary Clinton) and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook, COO) both wondered if woman can achieve both of these goals. Why aren’t women allowed the same opportunities to succeed as men?
These works received a lot of criticism. Is evening-out the playing field in the top 1% really the goal of feminism? And why should success be viewed in an acquisitive context of greed and possessiveness?
This documentary avoids some of these problems by looking at a broader range of subjects. In addition to the super-rich and powerful, it also shows middle-class women and one single mother with two jobs. It points out that paternity leave (in Canada, it’s routine only in Quebec) would help even out the discrepancies in the division of work by sex. And it shows how some 
families are thinking about redistributing roles.
The Motherload is an interesting doc dealing with a broad topic in less than an hour. And director Principe, who also produced the fantastic doc The World Before Her, clearly knows her stuff. Still, I’m a bit surprised that it never even touches on the issue of public daycare. While perhaps not an issue for CEOs, isn’t affordable daycare the crucial step in allowing mothers to work and raise children simultaneously?
And finally, I want to mention a fantastic movie — a sleeper that played at TIFF13 – that I really hope will open later this year in Canada. It’s called
Starred Up
Dir: David MacKenzie
Eric (Jack O’Connell) is an 18 year old who’s been “starred up”. That means he’s sent direct from juvie to a real, live adult prison. He seems at first like a vulnerable kid who’s going to die on his first day there. But things aren’t what they seem. His street smarts and prison savvy keep him safe but his high 
threshold for brutal violence and volatile temper could prove to be his undoing. So he joins a special therapy group within the prison walls to help him handle his anger. But he keeps running into trouble with an older, “head” prisoner called Neville (played by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn). Neville keeps taking charge, instead of discussing and compromising. And here’s the twist – Neville is Eric’s real-live father serving a life sentence! O’Connell and Mendelsohn give unbelievably dynamic performances as the fractious father and son. This is a fantastic movie – look out for it.
12 Years a Slave is now playing in Toronto, The Motherload will air on CBC TV’s Doc Zone next Thursday, and Starred Up should open in 2014. Check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com
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