October 20, 2011. The Calm Before the Storm. Movies Reviewed: Restoration, Wiebo’s War, 50/50 PLUS ImagineNATIVE
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.
There’s a term “The Calm Before the Storm”, and I’m getting the sensation that we’re there right now. Have you ever felt what it’s like before a tornado hits? It’s uncomfortably still, with a heavy weight in the pit of your stomach, and a strange feeling in the air. No wind. Weird feeling. Last weekend I stopped by the Occupy Toronto protest, where people are talking about how the middle class and poor — in countries like Canada, the US, Germany — have had their incomes go down or stay stangant over the past two decades, while a tiny percentage, that “1%”, have had the biggest increase in their wealth in a century. Our national wellbeing is not keeping up to the constant rise in GDP.
Before the march, they pointed out the medics, in case people got clubbed
or shot, and asked everyone to write down a number to call in case you’re thrown into prison. So there was that nervous sensation, not knowing how the police would react, would they be violent?, and what the potential risks were for marching, even in a democratic country. It turned out to be totally peaceful with a friendly police escort and no bad incidents whatsoever… but you never know.
So, knowing that some countries are on the brink of self-destruction, and (not that the two are comparable) knowing that next week – Hallowe’en – will be marked with deliberate mayhem and confusion, I’ve decided to talk about three movies where people face potential chaos, calamity, and collapse, and the different ways they choose to confront the coming storm.
First is a movie, which played at TIFF, about people confronting personal change and relationships, and trying to avoid a collapse.
Restoration
Dir: Joseph Madmony
Anton (Henry David), a young man and almost a drifter is looking for work in a run-down section of Tel Aviv. He stumbles into an old-school furniture-restoring shop and gets hired immediately by the grizzled and grumpy old carpenter Fidelman (Sasson Gabai). But the childless co-owner of the place dies the next day, and leaves his half not to the carpenter, but to his son.
Fidelman’s broke. And his son, a lawyer, is a bit of a douche, who is glad to be removed from his father’s life as a tradesman. He calls the place a junkyard, and wants to sell the property to build a condo, destroying his own father’s livelihood and forcing him into retirement. But musical Anton, (who has family troubles of his own) vows to learn the trade and tries to find the golden egg that will save the store. If he can only locate the missing piece of a rare antique piano, it will change from a piece of junk to a treasure worth enough money to keep the place open, and evade the impending doom. Anton becomes almost a surrogate son to the carpenter… almost. But it’s complicated when he realizes he may be falling in love with the real son’s pregnant wife.
This movie had great acting from the two main characters. On the
surface, it’s a “let’s work hard to fix the piano and save the shop!”-type story, but that’s just its superficial structure. It’s actually much more sophisticated. Though drab-looking, Restoration is a bitter-sweet examination of love, duty, families, allegiances, death and inheritance.
Next, a movie, which played at Hotdocs, about a man, his family, and his supporters who take drastic moves to confront what he thinks is a coming disaster.
Wiebo’s War
Dir: David York
Wiebo Ludwig is a devout Christian who lives in a remote, isolated colony with his fellow religious settlers in BC, near Alberta. Their lives are food and energy self-sufficient, but, in the 90’s, things began to go wrong. Goats started having frequent stillbirths, and, when a woman also miscarried, they realized their watershed had been contaminated by natural gas wells built right at the edge of their property.
He was later arrested, tried, and jailed for bombs he had set off at wells and pipelines in that energy-rich Alberta area. This movie follows filmmaker David York who was allowed to film inside their compound.
Is Wiebo a religious nut or a devoted social activist? Well, he’s certainly
religious, but he’s crazy like a fox. The movie documents some of Wiebo’s (and those of his fellow settlers’) frequent brushes with the law and the big energy companies. There are run-ins with outwardly conciliatory execs from Encana; pointless, intimidating, and relentless police raids of their homes to test things like how many ball point there are on one floor, and how many cassette tapes are on another; and their increasingly fractious relationship with the nearby town, where they have found themselves local pariahs following the unexplained shooting death of young woman on their property.
Folk hero, or deranged terrorist?
Maybe both. I left the movie even less certain than before as to who’s to blame and what actually happened. While a bit slow-moving, Wiebo’s War gives a first hand look at a legendary Canadian figure (who was sadly diagnosed with cancer just a few days ago), his family and co-religionists, and the unusual junction between Christian fundamentalism and environmental extremism. …an inside look at the calm before the storm.
50/50
Dir: Jonathan Levine
Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a shy, quiet, polite and passive guy, with a boorish and boisterous friend named Kyle, a smothering, worrying mom, and a beautiful but shallow girlfriend named Rachael. He’s in his twenties, no car, lives in a tiny red house far from the city of Seattle, and cubicle job at a beautiful public radio station (Support CIUT!) where he’s working on a story about a soon-to-erupt volcano.
But when Adam gets a pain in his belly, his doctor (a man with possibly
the worst bedside manner ever) does some tests and tells him he has a rare form of cancer, and a 50% chance of living. He’s sent to a therapist (Anne Hendrick) who’s younger than he is, and is still at the student-teacher stage.
So, how is Adam going to face his situation? How will he deal with his casual girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) who is suddenly his caregiver? His best friend (Seth Rogen) who just wants to use his cancer buddy as a wing-man chick magnet? And his intrusive worry-wort mother, who is already taking care of his Alzheimer stricken dad? Or even his bumbling but sincere therapist, Katie? What will he do? Can he accept the possibility of death? Who is really important to him?
50/50, based on a true story, is not a bad movie – it’s sweet — but,
beware, it’s not the comedy it’s billed as. It’s a drama — even a bit of a weeper — with some needed comic relief. Gordon-Levitt is perfect as Adam, as is Hendrick as Katie, while Seth Rogen – not so funny, a bit too much. But Angelica Huston as the Mother was shockingly good. I mean, she plays to stereotypes, but does it so well, I didn’t figure out it was her playing the part until the final credits!
50/50 is now playing, Wiebo’s War opens in Toronto today, check your local listings, and Restoration is playing one show only next week, on Sunday afternoon, October 30th, as part of the Chai, Tea and a Movie series. Go to tjff.com for details.
Also on right now in Toronto is the wonderful ImagineNATIVE, the world’s largest aboriginal film festival, that explores native film, art and music from Canada and abroad. Great stuff! Many events are free and they’re all open to everyone — go to ImagineNATIVE.org for details.
Next week: Hallowe’en!
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies for CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site, CulturalMining.com.
September 14, 2011. ImagineNATIVE! Movies reviewed: On the Ice, Wapos Bay, Footloose
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
Sometimes you have to wonder: News today says it turns out the Canadian Military has been covertly spying on and infiltrating Native communities for “security” reasons. Nice…
But for a much better, and more realistic view of indigenous people the always interesting ImagineNATIVE festival is opening next week and running from the 19th with five days of films, videos, art, sound-art, and live performances by stars like the hiphop group A Tribe Called Red, and the wonderful Buffy Ste Marie.
They’re showing international films from South Africa about the Khoi San people, a visually great Australian movie called Samson and Delilah, an interesting movie in French out of Quebec called Mesnak, and many other Canadian short films, documentaries and features about and by aboriginal filmmakers.
So this week, I’m going to talk about two good movies playing at ImagineNATIVE, and review a 80’s remake.
On the Ice
Dir: Andrew Okpeaha MacLean
Two high school students – Aivaaq and Qalli (Frank Qutuq Irelan and Josiah Patkotak) are best buds. They hang out, rap, play sports and go hunting together. Qalli’s the good boy with the young face, getting set for University in the Fall. He spends time with his grandmother, who only speaks Inuktitut, studies hard, stays out of trouble and doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs.
Aivaaq does. He’s taller, tougher, troubled. They live in a small Inuit
town in Alaska. But when the two of them (in their puffy white parkas) go out seal hunting on the ice along with a rival, James, things go wrong. Aivaaq and James get in a fight, and after awhile, James ends up dead. It’s an accident, not murder, but it looks bad. So Qaali and Aivaaq decide to cover it up. They drop James’s body and skidoo into an ice hole.
But people don’t just disappear. What to me looks just like the undifferentiated endless white of snow and tundra is actually a traceable crime scene. James’ girlfriend thinks it’s a suicide. The town cop thinks alcohol is the culprit. Soon the town’s in an uproar, first in a search for James, then in constant questioning and re-questioning of their stories. What about the skidoo tracks – they don’t follow the path the boys were telling them. And why was the ice brushed clean? And what are those drops of blood doing on an animal fur? Qaali wants to keep quiet, but Aivaaq can’t stop telling everyone that he was responsible. As the tension mounts, it’s not clear who, if anyone, will be blamed, and who is really at fault.
On the Ice is a good suspenseful drama about life in the far, far north. It does have an American in-your-face confrontational tone to it that you don’t get in Canadian Native and Inuit movies. Is it a fundamental national-cultural difference, or just a difference in movie styles? Either way, this is a good, icy story.
Wapos Bay: “Long Goodbyes”
Dir: Dennis Jackson
Chief Big Sky comes from Wapos Bay – a bucolic area filled with trees, mountains and streams — and is elected as the National Grand Chief for all of Canada. So he, his colleague Alphonse Merasty and their respective families will be moving away from the village. But first, Wapos Bay has to elect a new Chief.
Jacob (starring the voice of Lorne Cardinal) is the sole candidate running for Chief, but Raven (Raven Brass), a little girl, doesn’t like that. She has a new idea – she’ll manage her Dad Alphonse’s campaign while he’s away, so they’ll have to stay in Wapos Bay. She constructs the election until she becomes a little Karl Rove, complete with attack ads, questionable rumours (about uncle Jacob and a lumber multinational clear-cutting their forest) and dirty tricks. She even gives muffled speeches by telephone, since her dad almost never talks. Soon everyone wants Alphonse to win… everyone, that is, except Alphonse himself, who doesn’t even know he’s running. But Raven’s schemes escalate to such a degree they’re out of control. Raven’s created a monster! (Soon enough Jacob is running through the woods in a red headband chased by taser-happy cops…)
Meanwhile, Devon and his friends want to complete a bucket list before some of them move away, using the fortune that rich Kohkum Mary earned marketing traditional medicines. So there are trips down the rapids, parachute jumps from an airplane, bungee jumping….
Will Raven and company get Alphonse elected before he makes it back to Wapos Bay? Will the real truth about Jacob get out? And will the families adjust to their friends moving down south?
This is a cute, feature-length version of the TV comedy… and it’s animated! It’s beautiful clay stop-motion photography, with lots of quick jokes, one-liners, and some baaad sitcom gags. (And no laughtrack). It’s sort of like the Simpsons only Native, and not quite so frenetic. I’d never seen the TV show before, so I didn’t quite get it at first, but, once you fall into the rhythm, you quickly grow to like the characters. And the world premier will be closing the ImagineNATIVE festival this year.
Footloose
Dir: Craig Brewer
Orphan Ren MacCormack (Kenny Wormald) a high school senior, moves from Boston to small town Bomont down in the Land of Cotton to stay with his relatives. He likes fixin’ cars, listenin’ to loud music, talking back… as well as expressing himself through gymnastics and interpretive dancing. He figures life will be just like back home, only smaller. But he soon learns he’s landed in a town like no other. His new school teaches the three Rs: “reading, writing, and redneckery”. And because there was a car accident that killed five kids including the preacher (Dennis Quaid)’s son, the town has put all the kids under a permanent curfew, and banned music, drinking, lascivious behaviour… and even dancing. He says their children must be protected from a world filled with “evil, temptation and danger”.
But the preacher’s daughter, Ariel (Julianne Hough), is a rebel – she hangs out in the bad part of town with drag racer Chuck (or “Lug-Nuts”, as Ren calls him).
The kids get around this ban by breakdancing and making-out behind the town drive-in. You see, they’re just kids. And kids gotta dance.
So Ren decides to take the lead and challenge the anti-dancing law by getting everyone to join in and dance with him. But he faces trouble from all sides. Chuck sneers at Ren’s dancing skills, the town cop keeps harassing him, and the school threatens to expel him.
Will they convince the old fogeys to change their ways? Will Ariel
choose to go with badboy Chuck or rebel Ren? And will Ren’s new best friend and town hick Willard ever learn to dance?
A bit of context.
George Carlin wrote about the seven words you could never say on TV, which included the “F” word.
Well, Footloose (along with Fame and Flashdance) was one of the Three “F” movies of the 80’s, the sort of movie no teenage guy could ever openly admit to seeing. Too uncool. But it was part of the Reagan-era zeitgeist, so even if you hadn’t seen them, you knew what they were about. Amidst all the big city violence and change Footloose 
showed a conservative, 1950’s-style America that supposedly still existed in the 1980’s. The hero (played by Kevin Bacon in the original) was supposedly a rebel, but actually challenged nothing; he only wanted a superficial change. (And it was filled with 80’s mainstream, cheesy MTV pop hits like Holding out for a Hero, Footloose, and Let’s Hear it for the Boy – all of which are kept in the remake.)
But in 2011, it’s a retro-retro-movie, a remake of a movie about a world that never existed, a 2011 version of an 80’s version of a 50’s movie. In this reality, girls only want to dance if asked by boys, and saving one’s virginity is the most important virtue. No kissing even unless they’re in love. And to make it more confusing, it mixes covers of 80’s popnhits, mixed with current bad hip-hop and – that worst of all musical genres – New Country. The dancing spans the genres from breakdancing to line dancing and everything else, like an omnibus audition for one of those TV dance shows. A real mess.
This is a deeply conservative movie, but not unwatchable. It has some dancing, some nostalgic music, and a few fist-fights, and the actors all appear to perform their own dances. So if you like watching actors-playing-teenagers dance, go see Footloose.
Footloose starts today, and On the Ice and Wapos Bay are showing at ImagineNative next week, on the19th and the 25th – check 
imagineNATIVE.org for all listings and times. Also playing now is Circumstance, a movie I reviewed during the Inside-Out festival. It’s a great, Farsi-language film about two girls struggling to maintain a lesbian relationship within a vibrant but hidden subculture in conservative and oppressive present-day Tehran.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies for CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site, Cultural Mining . com.
Family Ties. Movies Reviewed: Boy, A Windigo Tale, Score: a Hockey Musical, Conviction plus ImagineNative festival
This week, I’m talking about four very different movies, two dramas, a comedy drama, and a comic musical, that all deal with family members and family ties: brother/sister; father/son; parents/son; mother/daughter; grandfather/grandson.
But first, let me tell you a bit about the 11th annual ImagineNative film and media arts festival that’s on right now in downtown Toronto. It’s a cultural celebration of First Nations, Inuit, and international aboriginal and indigenous artists and filmmakers, from Canada – urban, rural, and northern – Latin America, as well as Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. There are movies – short films and features, mainstream and experimental — lectures, workshops, art exhibits, installations, and multimedia events, including radio podcasts, and online new media sites. So tons of contemporary media and current issues and artforms. Lots of free exhibits going on, and films every night in the Spadina and Bloor area. You should definitely check this out – look online at http://www.ImagineNative.org
ImagineNative started with a screening of
Boy
Director/Writer: Taika Waititi
The Canadian premier of a popular, new New Zealand movie.
It’s the early 1980s, in a small town in New Zealand. Boy – that’s his name – lives there with his Nana, his little brother, Rocky, and a bunch of cousins. His mom died when he was young, and he can barely remember his dad who took off years ago with some petty hoods in a sort of a biker gang called the Crazy Horses. Boy’s waiting for his promised return to take him away from all this and to see a Michael Jackson concert in the big city. But when his grandmother leaves town for a few days to go to a funeral, who shows up but his dad – for real (played by the director, Waititi.)
He’s up to no good though, and Boy has to reconcile his hood-y pothead of a dad with the hero he had been expecting. Whenever reality gets too hard to handle, Boy retreats into his fantasies, and recasts things – in his mond – like visualizing a bar brawl as a Michael Jackson Beat It video. (His little brother Rocky, on the other hand, imagines he has super powers, and is laden with guilt thinking he’s the one who caused all the bad events in his life.)
This is sort of a sad story, but the tone is light enough, and there are enough very funny scenes that it’s not a downer of a movie at all. It reminded me a lot of a movie from a couple years ago called Son of Ranbow, but Boy’s a bit more serious, less comical. It also gives a realistic glimpse of Maori life in the 80‘s – something I’ve never seen before.
The actors, especially the two kids, (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu, and James Rolleston), and their dad (Waititi) were great. And as a special bonus, there’s even a dance scene in the final credits that’s a mash-up of a Michael Jackson video mixed with a Maori Haka war dance (looked like the Kama Te haka usually performed by the All Blacks rugby team, but his one in full 80s video regalia!)
The closing night movie is a Toronto premier called:
A Windigo Tale
Dir: Armand Garnet Ruffo.
The Windigo is a legendary being – it’s a starving, cannibalistic creature that you can turn into either while you’re alive or else after you die; it comes to eat you up and carries the spirits of the people it eats in its belly. Taking off its clothes will take it out of the body, and burning the bones will get rid of it.
In this movie, Joey is a high school drop-out who wears his hiphop gang colours. He’s communing with his grandfather (Gary Farmer) who tells him their family history and secrets in the form of a folktale.
Lily, and her white boyfriend, David, have driven up so she can talk to her mom, Doris. Lily was sent away from there 15 years before, and blames her mother for abandoning her. And at the same time there’s a reunion – of sorts — of Six Nations people who had been sent to the residential schools – the notorious Canadian religious and educational system that isolated, abused, and even killed natives for generations.
All these story lines are going on at the same time. Doris is sure the Windigo is in the air. Strange things start to happen. Can she fight the Windigo and the demons of her history she carries with her? The story goes back and forth between the serious, realistic family drama and Doris and 
Lily’s violently spiritual encounter with a Windigo. Interesting movie. It packs in a lot of stories and plotlines for a 90-minute picture, so I found it a bit confusing over what was the story, what was a flashback, and what was the story-in-the-story. But it’s a totally watchable movie with interesting characters, good acting – especially Jani Lauzon as Doris – and deals with an important, dark part of Canadian and native history that’s only coming to light very recently.
Next, a much lighter Canadian story:
Score: a Hockey Musical
Director/Writer: Michael McGowan
A hockey musical? Yup, that’s what is, no more, no less.
Farley (Noah Reid) and Eve are next door neighbours in Toronto who communicate late at night using a clothesline running between their two houses. She has a crush in him, but he’s more interested in playing a game of shinny with his hockey buds. He gets discovered by an agent who books him as the next hockey star. But, raised by hippy parents who frown upon competition and deplore hockey violence, he’s caught between two worlds. He’s a lover not a fighter. Will he be the next Sidney Crosbie? Will he learn to fight in the rink? Will he be accepted by the hard-ass team coach? And will he ever get together with his starry-eyed neighbour Eve?
It’s a cute movie, very Canadian both in the good sense and the bad, if you know what I mean. Good in that it shows real Canadian topics, national “in” jokes, tons of can-con straight out of an old “I am Canadian” beer ad, but bad in that it’s super corny and cheesy and baaaad in a lot of places, with some real groaner punchlines, and some truly lame lyrics. (Some great ones, too.) The singing’s uneven – ranging from the clear tones of Olivia Newton-John to the sort of voices that should never leave the shower. And one of the dance scenes looks artificially sped-up. But it doesn’t matter – I laughed out loud a lot, and I just took it for what it was – a 90-minute-long, all-Canadian piss in the snow. Score is not a hockey musical, it’s the hockey musical. (And one’s enough.)
And finally, another family drama,
Conviction
Dir: Tony Goldwyn
Betty Anne and Kevin are a brother and sister who grew up together in very hard circumstances with neglectful parents and a series of foster homes. But at least they had each other. Kevin (Sam Rockwell) is a high-spirited class-clown type guy, but he also is in and out of trouble with the cops, usually just for mischief. But he gets charged and later convicted of a heinous, vile rape and murder and is sent off to prison for life. His wife testifies against him, and she takes their little daughter away. Betty Anne (Hilary Swank) is sure he didn’t do it, so she makes it her life goal to set him free. She goes to law school and, twenty years later, with the help of a friend, Abra (Minnie Driver) she tries to bring his case back to court. Will she succeed and save her brother? And was he innocent or guilty?
Based on a true story, this has a movie-of-the-week feel to it. It is a tear jerker, got a couple of tears, and it’s an uplifting story, but it’s not the kinda movie I normally go to see. I should also say the acting is all great, including an almost unrecognizable Juliette Lewis as a shady trial witness – she’s fantastic.
Just to review, today I talked about Boy, and A Windigo Tale, two of the many cool movies playing at ImagineNative, which is happening now through Sunday: look online at http://www.imaginenative.org/ ; Conviction (now playing), and Score: the Hockey Musical – which opens tomorrow.
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