TIFF '09 Day Quattro

Fun Fact: Corn Pops in Canada is a completely different product than Corn Pops in the states. I found this out late one night after a Midnight Madness screening. I bought one of those single-serve cereal bowls and much to my surprise found a cereal with a completely different texture and taste. The domestic version of Corn Pops is more of a air-puffed sweet nugget with a popcorn-like lightness and consistency. The Canadian version has the look and feel of a glossy sugar-coated Kix pellet. It's not bad, but I much prefer the American version. Perhaps I should submit this information to a travelogue.

But I digress. So what munificent bounty did the final day of movie-watching yield? Let's see...


The Men Who Stare At Goats – I feel as if I should have enjoyed this movie more than I did. It’s smartly written and really well-acted. Yet, I found it only intermittently funny and somewhat scattershot. Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. You couldn’t really ask for a better cast. There were a few meta-jokes involving discussions of Jedi Knights that were pretty funny.

McGregor plays a small college-town journalist (Ann Arbor!) who heads out to Iraq to experience war, find purpose and perhaps win back his ex-wife (she leaves him for his editor in a slightly amusing subplot). Instead he meets Clooney who is an ex-special operations soldier trained in "psychic warfare." At first McGregor's Bob Wilton dismisses him as a nut, but slowly he begins to buy into some of what Clooney's eccentric Lyn Cassady is selling. It's sort of a road movie as we follow the pair across the Iraqi desert on what Cassady swears is a super-secret mission. We also get flashbacks to his training under Jeff Bridges' New Age-y Bill Django who somehow gets the military to fund his bizarre operation. The film reminded me of Three Kings with its subversive take on the military. The final act ties the film to one of the most controversial political issues of the day, torture, but it doesn't really spend to much time dwelling on its revelations. It's understandable since that would have made it an entirely different film. Still it would have been nice if they would have gone deeper into that territory. Still recommended.


Valhalla Rising – The dude from Adam’s Apples (nifty film that I can’t recommend highly enough) and Casino Royale plays One-eye (most likely an incarnation of Odin; thanks to Neil Gaiman I know more than I probably should about Norse gods), a mute warrior who is really handy with a hand-axe. I was unfamiliar with the director’s work, but he’s fairly established. The film has a lot of slow-motion camerawork accompanied by ominous and portentous music, but not much really happens. It actually reminded me of Aguirre the Wrath of God, the Werner Herzog film set in the Amazon with an inimitable Klaus Kinsky performance. Man that guy was intense. Anyways, this film is all about atmosphere and it does have a haunted feel to it. I just wish there'd have been more of a narrative going on. As it stands you get an interesting depiction of Christian Vikings (does that make sense?) coming to the New World and getting their arses handed to them.


The Warrior and the Wolf – This movie should have been called The Warrior and the Rapist. The film has an odd three act structure in that none of the acts feel interrelated. We start with the story of a reluctant soldier, a gentle soul who’d rather tend to his flock than fight in a war. A general has taken a liking to him and keeps trying to convince him to join his army. The guy finally agrees and becomes an officer, I think. There are so many flashbacks and flash-forwards, it's hard to keep up.

We then shift to the reluctant military officer leading the (apparently fatally wounded) general's troops home from the front lines after a defeat at the hands of some unnamed enemy (they look like Mongols). On the way, the troops hold up for the winter in a Harran village (the Harran's are depicted as a kind of primitive tribe living in the mountains). The guy finds a Harran woman played by Maggie Q living in a secret passage in the hut. After he catches her the first time, they struggle for a bit until he sees some of her exposed leg and then pounces. And when I say pounce, I mean it. She resists, but he forces himself on her and towards the end of his transgression, she starts to relent. (You know how it is, sometimes these b!tc#es don’t know what they want ‘til you give it to ‘em. Am I right? Hunh, hunh?) The scene didn’t sit very well with me to say the least. If it had just been him taking her against her will, then okay, within the context of the time period and the circumstances it’s deplorable but realistic. My issue was that she falls in love with him after the fourth or fifth time this happens. And this scene replays itself numerous times in the same lurid fashion. I noticed several walkouts and I can only assume they had the same objections as I did.

The third act is short and somewhat surreal. The general who seemed to die at the end of the first act returns only to have some of his men killed by wolves (wolves who happen to be his old lieutenant and his raped-into-submission-lover). Then the general tries to kill the wolves and the former soldier-turned-wolf can’t fight back because it’s his old friend, but the general ends up dying anyway as the she-wolf eviscerates him when he attacks her lover. I would have been interested to talk to Maggie Q about her decision to take this role. I also would have liked to talk to the director about his choice to depict such a thoroughly repulsive love story. I wouldn’t have been surprised if these questions were raised during the Q&A, but I just didn’t have the patience to stick around once the lights went up. Not recommended.

So all in all, it was a pretty good year at TIFF. I would have liked to stay longer as there were some great films showing later in the week, but most will be out eventually so no real loss. As always, the city was beautiful and welcoming. My only complaint is that the dollar just keeps getting weaker. They were actually doing me a favor accepting U.S. currency on a 1-1 basis. Wow.

TIFF '09 Day San

The City of Life and Death – You know you’re in for a downer of a movie when one of the most sympathetic characters is a Nazi. Lu Chuan’s The City of Life and Death depicts one of the most sensitive episodes in modern Asian history, the fall of Nanking.

Americans hear very little about the Pacific Theater until our own involvement following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Prior to the film, I was vaguely familiar with Sino-Japanese relations during the early 20th century. I knew they'd fought but not the specifics of those wars. I’d heard the phrase “the rape of Nanking” on occasion and perhaps had read a brief bit on it, but not enough to prepare me for this film. The film opens with the Japanese siege of Nanking as thousands of Chinese soldiers begin to abandon the lost city. A small contingent stays behind to mount one final wave of resistance against the advancing Japanese. After a brief but valiant effort, the remaining Chinese soldiers are rounded up and summarily executed. These executions are shown in brutal detail and are all harrowing to watch. Live burnings and burials, repeated bayonetting, mowing down thousands with heavy machine gun fire, you name it. The Japanese seemed to revel in how many ways they could liquidate their captives. After the remnants of the Chinese army are disposed of, the Japanese soldiers begin indiscriminately killing civilians, mostly men, some children. Then things get really bad.


A group of international aide workers (its never really clear who they work for—the patches on their arms seemed to suggest the Red Cross) has gathered many of the city’s remaining residents in a “safe zone” under the protection of a Nazi businessman, John Rabe (historical figure). The trouble begins when Japanese soldiers begin raping young girls inside the “safe zone.” The military leaders initially apologize for the offense, but you soon realize not only are they insincere, but they have perhaps encouraged their soldiers to behave in such a way.

It only gets worse as they begin demanding women be turned over to act as “comfort women” for the Japanese soldiers. There is one Japanese serviceman with a shred of conscience whom we follow through the film, Kadokawa. He seems to be the only honorable Japanese person in the film (there's also a Japanese prostitute whom he falls in love with who is a pretty blameless if pathetic character). Even so, the director took criticism for showing any sympathetic Japanese characters. It’s like having a sympathetic Nazi in a Holocaust movie. (I don’t believe there was one in Schindler’s List). Not saying this is necessary, but it makes the movie more bearable for the viewer to at least indulge in the speculation that there were soldiers who actively disapproved of what was going on. It was also a brave choice on the director’s part.

The movie does not hold back in showing the atrocities of the Japanese army. Many of the events depicted were grounded in fact and the recollection of survivors so I don’t doubt the authenticity (interesting to note that just like Holocaust deniers, there are "Rape of Nanking"-deniers as well). It’s a lot to absorb though. It’s the kind of film that gives me doubts about humanity. Whenever I see films that depict some of the darkest moments in modern human history such as the Holocaust or Rwandan genocide, I just wonder: “how can people act this way?” It raises the uncomfortable idea that within all of us is the capacity to rape or murder or dehumanize another person almost completely. It’s really quite frightening. Other things I left the movie eager to find out about were: how did the Chinese end up revering Lenin, what caused the Sino-Japanese War and how did the Chinese lose so badly? Highly recommended.


Triage – Why isn’t Colin Farrell more appreciated as an actor? The guy is good. Really good. Triage tells the story of a couple of war photographers capturing the escalating hostilities in Kurdistan between Kurdish rebels and Iraqi forces. Farrell's Mark wants to go deeper into the front lines of the war, while his best friend and fellow photojournalist, David (Jamie Sives doing a great job communicating how war can get to even the non-combatants) is ready to bounce altogether (his wife is expecting their first child). Bad things happen, but we don't find out exactly what until much later in the film. The movie does a great job of evoking a sense of foreboding in the audience. We know this can't end well when Mark returns home without David after the two get separated in Kurdistan. In the meantime we watch as Farrell's character continues to show the debilitating effects of war on the human psyche. Enter Christopher Lee as the retired psychoanalyst who helps Farrell and us get to the bottom of the mystery and his growing misery. I also loved this film because Christopher Lee gets to remind us that a.) he’s still alive and b.) he’s a hell of an actor. I hope this film gets distribution stateside. It's not going to be many people's first choice for a night at the movies, but it's worth two hours of your time.


Survival of the Dead – I think George Romero needs to take a break from making zombie movies. I think this is his sixth one? The ideas are just getting threadbare at this point. And if I have to sit through yet another zombie movie where somebody gets infected and we have to watch while the person slowly deteriorates and has to be ‘Old Yeller'ed’, blecch. This one takes place mostly on an island as a group of military deserters turned bandits take sides in a feud between two old Irish clans. The basis of the feud not only seems irrelevant, but halfway through the film one side seems to abandon the principles that lead to the fighting to begin with. I just stopped caring after a while. I thought Diary of the Dead had its moments and was an interesting angle with the whole ‘new media’ stuff. This just feels like a lark.

TIFF '09 Day Deux

One of the little things that I always notice when I'm in Toronto is the pedestrian crossing signal. The Lite-Brite man looks so confident in his stride, no hint of the slight trepidation apparent in the posture of his American counterpart. I finally figured out why that is: universal health care! You see, the Canuck doesn't care if he gets hit by some reckless driver. There's no chance he'll lose his house or face financial ruin due to exorbitant medical costs. Of course he can walk across the street with that cocksure strut. Pinko bastard...

Ahem, back to the films, yes?

Day 2 of the festival was pretty light viewing, only two films.


The first was a Filipino film, an earnest little movie called If I Knew What You Said about a rebellious young girl who reluctantly befriends a deaf kid at a camp. The film feels competently shot most of the time. It looks like it was shot on DV which added to the somewhat amateurish feel of the production. Actually it felt like something that might play as an ABC Afterschool Special. There was an interesting part showing how the deaf kids learned to dance to music they couldn't technically hear. Also I found myself intrigued at how easily the characters went back and forth from Tagalog to English. Other than that, I couldn't really recommend it. Still glad I saw it though.

Daybreakers, the second Midnight Madness film turned out to be much better than I ever expected. I'd watched the Spierig brothers first film, Undead on the dearly departed Monsters HD. It was decent enough with a dash of quirky humor. Didn't really give any clue that they would be capable of this.


The world of Daybreakers is one where vampires outnumber the human population to the point where the vampires fear humans may go extinct. This is causing the dominant vampire society (which is practically identical to our own w/r/t social/economic structures) to become unstable. It's also causing undo stress to our protagonist, Ethan Hawke, who is working nights and pulling all-dayers in order to perfect a blood substitute. Hawke's vampire hematologist also has a conscience and refuses to taste human blood, preferring to sustain himself on animals instead. He not only wants to find a blood substitute but save humankind from being cattle. Of course, there are others who have different plans. Sam Neill gives a great turn as the corporate reptile employing Hawke who wants to preserve not only the vampire way of life but his own economic fortunes.

What so impressed me about the film was all the little details that the Spierig brothers managed to cram into the picture. Their vampire world doesn't feel so much like a fantastical concoction as the natural and plausible result of their deceptively clever scenario. I sat there never doubting the world they'd created. The film doesn't overdo it on the action, nor does it try to shoehorn in any unnecessary love interests. It just handles its business.

Oh, and I forgot to mention it has a kick-@$$ Willem Dafoe element to it.

Every time I think the vampire genre is dead, that there's no more juice in that turnip, something like Daybreakers happens. I'm not complaining. I'll probably pay to see this again.

Toronto: TIFF Day 1

Back in the USSR! (Sorry, been hearing Beatles music everywhere with the new Rock Band and everything I suppose.) I was reading this profile of Michael Ignatieff in The New Yorker and the author gave an elegant analogy that perfectly articulated the philosophy of Canada, the beliefs I have such an affinity towards: "No man is an island, and rules made for imaginary islands ignore the fragile ecology of the actual archipelago. We are people who live in communities and our sense of who we are derives from what the people around us are like." Take that Libertarianism!

Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be talking about films.

This year I have ten, maybe twelve films I plan to see. This is pretty light for me, about half of the usual. Still this should be enough to slake my cinema jones for a while. It's been a quiet movie-going year for me. The best film I've seen all year was Let The Right One In and that came out last year. So I'm looking for Toronto to be a barometer as to how '09 will end. The pre-fest buzz has been good, but we'll see how things shake out. Either way, there's always Mad Men.

Thursday began with a plane ride where I got the chance to listen to a gaggle of journalists talk shop. Film criticism seems like a nice gig if you can get it, but I can't say I found their world too enticing. I'd much rather stay on this side of the wall. Movies are a passion, but I wouldn't want to think of viewing films as work. Saps all the fun out of the entire enterprise. I will say you'd be hard-pressed to find a chef with a set of knives sharper than a film critic's.

I ended up seeing two films today. The first was Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces starring Penelope Cruz. It's only the third film I've seen by him (the other two were Volver and Talk to Her). I really enjoy the worlds Almodovar creates. You could watch his characters interact with each other for hours. They are all fairly layered; their motivations complex. Even the bad guys aren't really all that bad; they're just human.

Penelope Cruz gives a good performance as the woman who makes a deal with a devil of sorts (who you really can't blame save for one incident) and tries to renege for a chance at true love. Lluis Homar has a more challenging role which he executes with aplomb. His Mateo Blanco is the portrait of a man humbled by loss but not broken. Almodovar imbues him with a wry sense of humor that I especially enjoyed. The plot is full of more twists than a soap opera; it has melodrama entwined in its DNA. And there's nothing wrong with that. The film toys with being absurd at times, but Almodovar is very assured here. He knows exactly how to string us along. I found myself enthralled from the opening frame through to the credits.

I was also happy that the film didn't feel constrained by genre. It presents itself as a mystery--a murder mystery to be exact. But that's not what it delivers and I was actually grateful for that. Such a structure presents life as some puzzle that can be solved--event X happens because of action Y--when real life is usually far more random and more maddening. Almodovar's films all seem to capture the messiness of life--especially when it comes to love. Highly recommended.



The second film was Jennifer's Body, the second screenplay from Juno-scribe, Diablo Cody. The film stars most notably Megan Fox who gets to do more than just straddle motorcycles in demeaning sexpot poses (thanks again, Michael Bay!). If you didn't care for Juno's chock-full-of-pop-refs-and-elaborate-putdowns dialogue, then you should just avoid this film altogether. Horror junkies will not find a fix here. The scares are tepid and the gore if not exactly restrained, then unremarkable. Still I enjoyed the flick. I laughed enough at some of the so-hip-it-hurts dialogue. I like Cody's sense of humor. I mean the plot alone is genius: mediocre alt-rock band tries to sacrifice a virgin to Satan so they can be somebodies "like the lead singer from Maroon 5"; only she's impure and becomes a half-demon feasting on the high school boys.

Amanda Seyfried and Adam Brody give solid performances. Seyfried plays the mousy "Needy" who slowly learns the truth about her best friend and has to overcome her fierce loyalty to end the carnage. Brody's part is short but sweet as a wannabe rockstar, virgin-sacrificing tool. Megan Fox gives a workmanlike performance that doesn't really make me suspect any great things will come from her as an actress in the future, but doesn't make me write her off altogether either. On a side note, she's super-skinny in person, I hope she's healthy at least; I hate that this is what Hollywood puts out as the quintessence of beauty . The star of this film though is the script. It's Juno with bloodletting (minus the heart as well) which isn't a bad thing. It's about what I expected to be honest. Diablo Cody catches a lot of flack for her work, but I like her self-creation and knack for publicity. How many screenwriters are known by name in Hollywood these days? So bully for her I say.



So far, so good. Two solid films to open the festival. There is nothing like watching a movie with a festival crowd. If regular crowds were like it, I'd go to the movies a lot more often. No crying babies, no talking during the movie, no cellphones, no texting...just sitting back and enjoying the show. The way it should always be.

Until We Meet Again, Peace TO

I wish the U.S. would just adopt Toronto so I could go live there with no hassle. One day...

The above photo (click to enlarge!) gives an idea of what happens during the festival. The Elgin Theater is host to many high profile film screenings during the festival. This year I saw Persepolis opening night at the Elgin. No matter how many times I've gone, I'm always astounded by how incredible it is inside. It's such a shame that these old theaters get decommissioned and turned into condos (like the beloved Uptown...man, I miss that place something terrible). As much as I love going to places like the Arclight in L.A., nothing beats one of these old dames.


The crowd in Toronto is always vibrant and full of film geeks like myself. Only at a film festival can you strike up a conversation about the works of an obscure (to the general public) South Korean director (in this case, Ki-duk Kim) with a random person waiting in line with you. Only at the Toronto Film Festival can you line up with 1500 other diehard film fans at a quarter-to-midnight, waiting to watch the latest zombie-flick offering from George Romero...and stand up with those 1500 people two hours later to give Mr. Romero a standing ovation for a job well-f#@!ing done. I love you crazy Canucks.

My only gripes:

1. What's with the Chinese food -- who makes General Tso's Chicken with fried rice? And the sauce had the consistency of rubber cement. Not good.
2. Learn how to make a good slice of pizza -- don't know if it's the cheese or the sauce, but it just ain't right.
3. Something needs to be open after 2 a.m. besides 7-11. Seriously.

That is all.

Look how clean the freaking subway is (click to enlarge)! The tracks are cleaner than the street outside my apartment. Ridiculous. Plus, they actually wait for you to get OFF the subway before they start trying to get on...even the teenagers. Must be something in the water.

Parting Shots...

Sukiyaki Western Django – Takashi Miike. Midnight Madness. Should have been a blast, but it was just okay. The movie was too long and it tried to have it both ways as a semi-serious western and all-out Miike freak-out. So at times the movie felt oddly restrained (only one castration and it was implied but not shown). The movie is Miike’s first English-language film—and I use the term loosely because the actors all spoke as if they were reading from a language instruction manual. Apparently this is intentional but the gimmick wears thin after, I don’t know, five minutes.

The crowd reacted pretty well, but I have to say it seemed forced especially at the end when after the hero kills the final baddy in the climactic scene, we all just sat there silent for a few moments before someone let out a “yeah!!!” and then everybody sort of started cheering as if they had been waiting for the prompt. Not bad, but not great. Quentin Tarantino had an extended cameo and he didn’t suck. So I guess that’s something.


Paranoid Park – Small film from Gus Van Sant. It’s a Dostoevskian tale set in the Pacific Northwest. A skateboard kid wrestles with his conscience and hangs out with his boys, grinding around the city. I dug it. I admire Van Sant. Here’s a guy who followed up the biggest success of his career (Good Will Hunting) with a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. Sure it sucked, but just the fact that he even wanted to try it is impressive. I need to go rent Elephant now.


Across the Universe – I enjoy Julie Taymor’s work. I thought Titus Andronicus had some really potent visuals. I felt the same about Frida. Across the Universe is a musical set to Beatles songs taking place in the late sixties. If you’re not into the Beatles, I don’t know how you’ll react. I knew most of the songs and some of the new arrangements were quite inspired. Taken as a whole, I think it works for the most part. I got involved in the story despite knowing how it would turn out. I had to miss the last fifteen minutes or so, meaning I didn’t get to hear the finale which I’m guessing was “Hey, Jude.” (The main character is named Jude; his girlfriend is named Lucy; his best friend is named Max; there’s a girl named Prudence…you get the idea.) I guess I’ll go back and watch it when it comes out in the theaters. Not as bad as you might think, but didn’t grab me like Once.


Redacted – Brian De Palma’s Redacted isn’t really a good movie, but I’d recommend people watch it anyway. The acting feels amateurish which works against the gravitas of the subject. If you aren’t familiar with the story of Abeer Qassim Hamza then you should read it. It’s horrifying on every level. I understood what Mr. De Palma wanted to do here. The film is a bit experimental in that it attempts to incorporate new media such as blogs and YouTube-style sites as a means to deliver its narrative. George Romero’s Diary of the Dead does the same thing, but to much better effect.

Still, I’d say see this movie, because this story is so important. Of course it isn’t representative of the troops, but it does have something interesting to say about this war. The best parts of the film deal with the daily stress the troops endure and how debilitating it can be on a psychological level. It loses its footing once we get to the actual crime. The way the characters behave afterwards just doesn’t seem believable, particularly during their depositions/debriefings.

On a related note, a woman at the screening who said she represented an organization based here in NY that has been following the case said that these animals will most likely only see 10 years jail time. That makes me absolutely ill.

Top Five Films I Watched
1. No Country for Old Men
2. Juno
3. Rendition
4. Jihad for Love
5. Persepolis

You'll Laugh, You'll Cry...

Juno – This is the second film from Jason Reitman who did Thank You for Smoking a couple of years ago. I was lukewarm on that film. The topic and the humor felt dated to be honest. A comedy about the tobacco industry would have been better suited to the mid-to-late nineties than 2005. Even Aaron Eckhart who I usually love left me a bit cold. But I had heard a lot of good things about Juno and decided to check it out. I’ll try anything twice. The set-up is a 16-year old girl, Juno, gets knocked up by her quasi-boyfriend Beeker, played by Michael Cera. After briefly contemplating aborting the pregnancy, Juno decides to have the kid and turn the child over to a married couple (played by Jennifer Gardner and Jason Bateman). From there, the movie follows the same structure as Knocked Up as we watch Juno’s relationships with the people around her evolve as her pregnancy comes to term.

Ellen Page plays the lead character Juno and she’s got great comedic timing. The supporting cast is funny—especially Allison Janney who plays her stepmother—but Page does a great job centering the film. She reminds me of Thora Birch in Ghost World although she doesn’t play such an extreme outsider (Slight digression—how the hell did Scarlett Johansson end up with a better career than Birch? What happened to that girl?) Michael Cera in essence reprises his role from Superbad, but this isn’t a bad thing. He’s so sincere and affable; you never feel like he’s really acting. The way he delivers his lines is so perfect. I think he got the biggest laugh in the whole film just in the way he delivered one innocuous line in an exchange with Page towards the end.

Much like Superbad, the humor doesn’t come from outrageous situations or ridiculously improbable coincidences. It just arises naturally from the situations the characters find themselves in and their attempts to make sense out of their lives. At heart, it’s just a simple coming-of-age story involving really smart characters.

I won’t say Juno is as funny as Superbad or Knocked Up, but as a film it’s just as good. I can see more repeat-viewings than those other two in the future. As far as quirky teenage comedies go, it’s up there. And I don’t think it will succumb to the criticism that almost every comedy with an oddball lead character gets these days which is that it’s ripping-off Napoleon Dynamite (which I never liked). It’s a unique little film that I’ll definitely be urging people to check out.

Jihad for Love – A young gay man accompanies his friend to a boat party. Before they can board the boat, the police apprehend them and those on the boat in a raid. The young man is tried and sentenced to a year in prison. After serving this year (during which he was subsequently raped) he is tried yet again and sentenced to three additional years. Luckily he is able to flee to Europe before he can be remanded back to jail. Four Iranian men are forced to seek political asylum from the U.N. to escape being imprisoned or perhaps sentenced to death in their homeland for the crime of engaging in homosexual acts. Jihad for Love is a documentary about the persecution of gays in Muslim societies in the Eastern hemisphere.

In the most heartbreaking segment, we meet a young devout Muslim girl living in Paris named Maryam and her girlfriend Maha who still lives in Egypt. They see each other whenever they can; fortunately the penalties for lesbianism are far less severe than male homosexuality. At one point, Maha who seems much more comfortable with her sexuality, flips through an Islamic reference book that instructs Muslims what is and isn’t permissible and the punishments for breaking these laws. She tells Maryam that although it is explicitly forbidden under Sharia law, there is no real punishment for being a lesbian. This distresses Maryam. She states that she feels so guilty about her behavior and feelings that she wishes there was some punishment such as lashing or stoning—anything that might alleviate the anguish she feels.

The documentary follows the struggles of Muslim homosexuals who have decided to try and reconcile their faith with their sexuality. There are conversations about what the story of Lot really means about homosexuality and many visits to the local Imams whom these young adults turn to for guidance. The advice usually given (unsurprisingly) is for them to pray and get married. In another segment we meet an openly gay Imam in South Africa. Initially after coming out, he is subjected to death threats and basically ex-communicated from the community. Later he talks about how the community invited him back when they realized they had a huge problem in that they did not know how to deal with the emerging gay Muslim youths.

Perhaps more so than any other major religion, Islam has an issue with homosexuality. Christianity is far from perfect, but at least there are sects that not only tolerate but accept homosexuality. (Although I have to say the idea of “hate the sin, not the sinner” is utter bull$#!t—it still doesn’t alleviate the negative impact this can have on a person’s psyche when you say that what comes natural to you is evil.) Islam is younger than Christianity and has not undergone the multiple reformations that have allowed Christianity to better fit in with modernity. It is the conservative nature of Islam that has created this problem. It was good to hear during a community meeting in a South African Muslim community, a group of older women and men discussing the issue and deciding that they would not just blindly defer to the views of hardline leadership. After all, it is the families that make up the communities this most heavily affects. I would hazard to guess that the suicide rate among young gay Muslims is higher than Christian or just gay teens in general, at least in that part of the world.

I don’t think individual prejudices matter so much. I’ve never had the smallest dislike or issue with gay people. If they want to marry, let them. Adopt? Go for it. How does it affect me in the slightest? If you’re a person who thinks homosexuality is morally wrong, then bully for you. I hope you never have children. The problem stems from the institutionalization of that kind of bigotry. It’s like, hey, hate black people all you want, just don’t make laws enforcing it. Yet, that’s what we’ve done to the homosexual community in many parts of the world (including the U.S.). And if you can watch these people suffer underneath such oppressive circumstances, then what does that really say about your religion whether it be Islam or Christianity?

It bothers me that all these children are indoctrinated into a belief system that creates such destructive ambivalence, one that might never allow them to live a fulfilling life. Despite the qualms I have with these systems, I really applaud the efforts of those who are trying to change such systems from within.

At one point, Maryam and her girlfriend, Maha, discuss their regret in not being able to undertake the hajj to Mecca as a female needs her father, brother or husband to take her. Maha talks about how important such a trip is for all Muslims and how great it would be if one day they both could go. Maryam agrees, but goes on to say how good the trip would be, because it might give her the spiritual strength to eradicate the “unnatural” feelings she has.

As the director, Parvez Sharma, said, ‘jihad’ does not mean holy war; it means struggle. And indeed it will be. I hope this movie gets to the audience that needs to see it.

The TIFF Don't Stop

The Girl in the Park – Sigourney Weaver is an actress who I don’t get to see enough of. She’s up there with Meryl Streep in my book; both continue to get more interesting as they get older. The Girl in the Park is about grief and how people deal with tragedy. Weaver is a mother living an idyllic life when her young daughter is abducted from the playground. Flash forward fifteen years and Weaver’s character remains in an emotional stasis from the event. She’s divorced and working a meaningless job, living a desultory existence. Then a teenage screw-up played by Kate Bosworth (for the love of God, give this girl a sandwich—on screen and at the screening she looked like Skeletor’s sister) comes into her life. I’m sure you can figure out what happens next.

I actually liked the film for the most part, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. It reminded me of a similar movie I saw at the festival a few years ago, P.S. starring Laura Linney and Topher Grace. Both movies had the same problem in that you knew where they were headed since they were firmly planted in reality. Weaver’s work is really strong here and Bosworth redeems her Superman Returns performance, but in the end it felt like hearing a story about someone that you really would have rather not known. The director comes from theater and I think the story would probably lend itself quite well to the stage. As a film though, it will struggle to find an audience.

Vexille – Another Midnight Madness movie; this time an animated one. Typical industrial dystopian future anime flick with interesting CGI animation with what looks like traditional animation layered on top—like they rotoscoped the CGI. Looked pretty cool, and it had its moments. Not sure if it was worth staying up until 2 a.m. to watch. Reminded me of a really long cut-scene from some Xbox 360 or PS3 game. I applaud the effort, though. Animation is a b!tc#.


The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Brad Pitt was here in Toronto to promote this along with the other most photographed human in existence, Mrs. Pitt. I enjoy Mr. Pitt’s acting. Seven, Twelve Monkeys, Fight Club, Snatch, that little scene in True Romance…the guy’s pretty good. It’s a shame that his celebrity overshadows his talent, but I don’t think he or anybody else is shedding any tears.

Leaving this film, I didn’t really feel anything. I left knowing that Casey Affleck is pretty talented. Pitt does a good job as the increasingly paranoid and forlorn Jesse James. The movie is dialogue heavy which was a problem because for some reason the acoustics in the Elgin Theater are not very forgiving to dialogue spoken in low, stilted tones. It tends to echo. I missed quite a few exchanges, but I don’t think the words were really that important. The film is all about tone. It is a meditation on death and how men prepare and deal with the inevitability of it. Unforgiven did a better job of this though.

If you dig cinematography there is a lot to like about the picture. It looks beautiful. Other than that, I don’t have much to say about it. It’ll be interesting to see if Pitt can get an audience for this thing. It’s a long player. Nearly three hours. Maybe I’ll watch it again on DVD and see what the heck everybody was actually saying. Doubt it’ll change my opinion much, but you never know.

No Country for Old Men – The Coen brothers are like those kids that you used to know in school who you never had to ask what they got on a test, because it was most likely an ‘A’. These guys very rarely falter. Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Barton Fink…they’ve crafted an impressive oeuvre. (Even their last two films have admirers).

Now comes No Country for Old Men. I’d put it right up there with the aforementioned. I really loved the hell out of this movie. Tommy Lee Jones has given some really great performances these last few years. I really enjoyed him in a movie I saw two years ago at the festival called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and I hear he gives another great performance in Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah. He brings this world-weary air that lends a sense of authenticity to his characters.

Javier Bardem plays the saint of all killers. He is a psychopath in the truest sense. He operates on a completely different wavelength than anybody else in the film. Great performance and more than a little scary.

I love the way this movie plays with conventions. It follows what seems to be your typical chase-thriller narrative and then just…well you’ll see if you decide to go see it. Suffice it to say, I didn’t really expect things to play out how they did. One review I read said that mainstream audiences wouldn’t appreciate the way this movie plays out, but I don’t think the Coen brothers have ever really considered catering to that audience. They respect their audience and that’s enough for me.

The dialogue in this movie is perfect in the way Mamet movie dialogue is perfect. People don’t actually talk the way they do in the film, but you wish they did. I’ll be seeing this again when it opens wide and then again on DVD. Best movie I’ve seen all year maybe.

Real-ligious Talk with Bill Maher

Photo of Thom Powers (l.) interviewing Bill Maher and Larry Charles (r.)

Religulous – Bill Maher and Larry Charles (Seinfeld producer and Borat director) are making a movie about religious beliefs. Ostensibly the film is about finding out what people believe and why. From the clips that were shown, it seems more like an extended skit where Bill Maher goes and asks people questions about their beliefs and then makes acerbic (and funny depending on your sense of humor) comments about what the person just said. I don’t know if the guys are seriously categorizing it as a documentary, but it plays like a comedy where each person we meet just acts as a set-up for a joke or riff from Maher. This isn’t a problem if you like Bill Maher, but I’m guessing this film will appeal only to those who do. I’ll probably see it, because although I find Maher a bit too smug at times, I still think he’s funny.

Since I already don’t subscribe to any faith, I don’t expect to learn anything new. I’m squarely in the choir on this one. I think these types of films are good for young people who maybe haven’t made up their minds about religious matters. There seems to be a point where the ability to believe just becomes hard-coded into people, a point where no logical argument against a particular belief or for an alternative will be persuasive. I’ve always just been about avoiding dogma in general; it’s kept me among the faithless for as long as I can remember.

The screening was more of a dialogue with Bill Maher and Larry Charles as the film was still in production. Roughly 15 minutes of clips were shown. The audience responded very well (but then how do you not shake your head and laugh at a rabbi in Israel who describes heaven as a place where--swear this is true--pizza grows on trees). Both Maher and Charles talked about their religious upbringings and how they came to both be non-believers. Larry Charles had the most interesting story in that he was actually planning to become a rabbi (interestingly enough, he looks like an orthodox Jew with his long beard, hat and black attire). He recalls telling his father whose response was something like “Are you f@#$ing crazy? Just get bar’ mitzvah-ed and get the hell out of there!” Charles went on to say that it was the unsatisfying responses he received from the rabbis in his synagogue that caused him to give up his dream. He would ask questions about the Creation story such as “how come God had to rest on the seventh day?” The rabbis, he said, would yell at him and force him to sit in the dark in the middle of a giant empty sanctum for hours until he stopped asking his questions. Yeah, way to propagate the faith, guys.

The rest of the conversation dealt with how they put the film together and some of the locales they went to (Jerusalem, the Creation Museum, a store in the UK that sold Islamic garb, etc.). Bill of course spoke about Bush and how ridiculous/ironic it was that faith is one of the most important attributes a candidate in the U.S. must have and wear like a badge of honor in public, yet we currently have in office one of the most hardcore persons of faith in history and we see how well that’s turned out.

One thing struck me about how the various religions are portrayed on film: Muslims are always humorless. It never fails. The Christians are usually affable, smiling folks; the Jews are usually self-deprecating and really funny; the Muslims—not so much of either. Just once I’d like to see them talk to some more moderate Muslims like the people I know who are just normal people with regular personalities—and a sense of humor.

Maher says the movie might get released in the Spring, but that’s not definite. If you watch the HBO show, I’m sure he’ll be providing more details.

All TIFF, All the Time

My Kid Could Paint That – I had never heard of this kid until this movie. Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary about Marla Olmstead, her parents and the media whirlwind that engulfed their lives is fairly fascinating. What makes people like modern art? More to the point, what makes people pay seemingly obscene amounts of money for it? While the movie doesn’t answer these questions explicitly, I think you can glean some notion as to what does drive the modern art world. The movie isn’t so much about Marla. She’s just your normal 4-year old. It’s more about her parents and the controversy that emerges about the authenticity of her work. The film doesn’t outright come out to say that she isn’t solely responsible for the artwork, but the filmmaker’s position is pretty clear. In the Q&A, Mr. Bar-Lev stated that he still had an “amicable” relationship with the Olmsteads, but he noted that they weren’t happy with the final cut of the film. This film was a big hit at Sundance and you can see while. The characters are interesting in that their motives aren’t always clear (except for Marla’s art dealer, Anthony Brunelli, who has one very revealing scene that pretty much tells you exactly where he’s operating from). The film leaves you with interesting questions such as: if she didn’t paint them, should it matter; how do you manage a child’s success; does Pollock’s work suck because any schmuck with a paint brush could drip paint all over a canvas? Good stuff.

Gone with the Woman – Last year I saw a great film from Denmark called Adam’s Apples, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to gamble with another film from the region. I picked this movie over Alan Ball’s Nothing is Private. I figure the Ball film will be out soon enough, but this film from Norway might sneak in and out of indie theaters before I knew it. I think it was a good choice. The movie is a sort of absurdist romantic comedy, a stripped-down version of Amelie. It’s the simple tale of a man who meets a crazy girl, falls in love and deals with the consequences. The protagonist has no name which fits him because his girlfriend, Marianne, seems to impose herself on him in every way possible. The highlights of the film include a very self-confident Peter Stomare as the nameless man’s confidante/swimming buddy (he spends almost the entire film in Speedos) and a few very funny dialogue exchanges. I didn’t really have any complaints. The film is whimsical and feather-light, but manages to deliver some nice observations about love. I can imagine this film getting remade here starring Zach Braff and Jessica Biel (hey, I like Scrubs, okay?). The film doesn’t inspire any strong feelings; it just makes you sort of smile—which is not a bad thing at all. If anything, the movie made me want to learn French and go marry some Parisian (does every woman in France look like Audrey Tautou?). The film isn’t that substantial, but it’s worth checking out on DVD again next year.

George Romero’s Diary of the Dead – Wow, I’m shocked how much I liked this film. In the back of my head, I’m like “how many times can you go to the zombie-well, George?” Yet, somehow this movie works. It takes place on the first night the dead start coming to life; so it’s set on the same night as the original film albeit in present day. A crew of film students is in the Pennsylvanian woods making a cheapie horror-flick when radio news reports start pouring in about the dead coming to life. The student who was directing the film decides to start filming the incidents taking place as the world starts going crazy, initially to the chagrin of his fellow students who just want to get home. So the film is shot as if from the perspective of this kid who records everything in sight. It’s not the cinema verite of The Blair Witch Project, because the DPing is professional and never distracts from what’s going on on-screen. However, it does create a distinct look that adds tremendously to the atmosphere of the film. This is a movie that lets you care about the characters, so when the isht hits the fan, you actually want to see these kids survive. Score one for George Romero in showing these young’uns how it’s done. The movie is smartly written with great dialogue and many funny exchanges. It’s also got its fair share of scares and gore. George Romero was at the screening and the audience reception was unreal. You had an entire section of the audience dressed up in zombie-garb. He received a well deserved standing ovation for the film and when he came up for the Q&A, almost every seat was still full. Quite an accomplishment at two in the morning on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. Definitely a movie worth checking out if and when it hits the theaters. I'd rank this film right behind the first two, Night and Dawn of the Dead. I think that’s it for horror films this year.

TIFF '07 - What I've Been Watching

They Wait - Ghost stories are tricky. When done well, you get The Sixth Sense or The Stir of Echoes. When done poorly, you get derivative crap like The Invisible. They Wait falls somewhere in between. The film is very competent, but it feels very by-the-numbers. The arc goes just as you would expect: some haunting type event or events occur; certain characters are in-tune with the spirit world and see these things; there is a mystery to be solved so that the spirits can rest; spiritually in-tune person is reluctant, but relents and tries to solve the mystery; mystery solved and somebody’s back-story turns out to be not so clean; spirit can rest in peace; spiritually in-tune person no longer haunted.

They Wait’s angle is that it takes place in a small Asian-American community in Vancouver, so the ghosts are Asian there’s a lot of talk about Chinese mysticism. But this is just garnish. At its heart, the movie is still your typical ghost story. Jaime King plays a mother whose little boy who gets his soul kidnapped by an angry ghost. She and her husband have just come to Vancouver for her husband’s uncle’s funeral. The family stays in the old factory/apartment building her Chinese aunt-in-law lives in. Of course weird stuff begins to happen and there are some good scares along the way. The problem of course is that there were no real surprises. Jaime King does a good job as does everybody else (save for a pretty much wasted Michael Biehn—why bother with him if he only has like three minutes of screen time?). The film is competently directed and looks ready for distribution. It’s a pretty easy sell and I can imagine the pitch being like “think Sixth Sense meets Dark Water” or something to that effect. The most interesting thing about the movie for me is that I bet the writer really, really, really wishes the movie, The Bone Collector had never come out, because that title would have been absolutely perfect for this film. Damn you, Denzel.

Frontieres – I understand why they keep making these movies, but I don’t think they are cool in the slightest. This is Texas Chainsaw Massacre set in the French countryside with Neo-Nazis. It is survival horror in the same vein as Hostel 2, Captivity, The Descent (which I quite enjoyed actually) and a slew of others. I wish the movie had been something else entirely, but it was a Midnight Madness feature so I can’t say I was expecting depth. However, the film alludes to the social/political turmoil going on in France right now, specifically pertaining to the growingly disaffected Muslim youths who live in the French ghettoes called banlieues. Could you have made a smart horror movie that also served as commentary on the situation? I think so, but this movie clearly isn’t it.

What irks me about these types of films is the sheer brutality and misanthropy involved. For some reason, I can watch a woman get strangled with her own guts in Mother of Tears and kind of laugh/cringe, but here just watching a huge brute of a man wail blows onto the waif-ish protagonist played by Karina Testa feels wrong and unclean. In the former, the whole thing is so absurd like watching your little brother stumble around with spaghetti sauce on his shirt pretending he’s been shot. It’s fake and everyone knows it. In the latter, the violence strives for hyper-realism and that makes it very uncomfortable. It feels like something a sadist would get off on. There are not really any sympathetic characters in the movie either, except for maybe one, a Muslim kid named Farid, but he gets the worst of it. The movie just feels relentlessly nihilistic. I prefer my horror flicks to either be trips into absurdity or terror, sometimes a mixture of both. These types of film just seem to revel in how squeamish they can make the audience. Not my cup of tea.

Rendition – Why Does Gavin Hood Hate America? So far, this is the best movie I’ve seen at the festival. I love well-crafted thrillers. Like Syriana before it, Rendition tackles the most pressing current issue: the U.S. war against terrorism. Specifically, the movie is about the methods the U.S. uses to obtain its intelligence these days. The title as Peter Sarsgaard’s character explains comes from the U.S. policy called extraordinary rendition. It is a policy that allows the U.S. to detain and export its own citizens to places where torture is legal. Since 9/11, the policy has been used to interrogate countless U.S. citizens. When these people are detained, they are denied legal counsel or even the right to contact their families. There was a widely publicized case that came to light last year about a man named Maher Arar who was actually Canadian. Anyway, the film focuses on a man, Anwar El-Ibrahimi, who is accosted by the CIA on his way home from South Africa. He is then sent outside the U.S. to be tortured and interrogated. The narrative has a few threads, although not all equally satisfying. Reese Witherspoon plays his wife who is desperate to find any information she can about her mysteriously absent husband. She does a good job, but her story kind of fades to the back with respects to the other main stories. Those two stories are about one C.I.A. operative's (Jake Gyllenhaal) internal struggle between conscience and duty and a young Muslim girl trying to rebel against the course her father has decided her life should take. Both are handled very well and although Gyllenhaal's arc is sort of predictable, it is nonetheless satisfying. Save for a few lines towards, the end, Hood's characters never sermonize and each is developed rather nicely. Definitely worth seeing again when it's released this Fall.

Mother of Tears - Grade A Schlock

This movie screened as a part of the Midnight Madness section of the TIFF. The Midnight Madness program is one of my favorite parts of the fest. The films they select usually fall into the horror, exploitation and action genres with a few off-the-wall comedies thrown in. In the past few years, the program has screened: Saw (before it blew up), The Host, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, Borat, Hostel, Ong-Bak and a ton of other movies that have gone on to be cult faves. Mother of Tears is your quintessential Italian horror movie. I’m not exactly a connoisseur of Italian horror, but I can hold a decent conversation about it. Dario Argento is one of the godfathers of the genre along with Lucio Fulci. They are contemporaries of zombie king, George Romero (whose latest zombie flick, Diary of the Dead, I’ll also be seeing).

Mother of Tears is the final movie in a trilogy about blood-thirsty Sapphic witches. I saw the first part, Suspiria, years ago. I barely remember it, but Argento’s name was enough to get me to check this flick out. Hyper-absurd death sequences, gaping logical plot-holes, incoherent dialogue, cheesy soundtracks…these are the hallmarks of Italian horror. Mother of Tears has these things in spades. First of all, the movie looks like it was made in the 1970s. It takes place in present day Rome, but only the occasional cell phone use indicates such. Asia Argento (Dario’s daughter) plays the heroine who has some latent witch-y abilities that will allow her to defeat the eponymous head witch. The head witch apparently wants to throw the world (or at least Rome) into chaos so she can have these naked lesbian-witches-with-awful-80’s-hair-parties. The plot doesn’t make much sense, but as I said, that comes with the territory. There is a lot of insane gore including an eye-gouging, intestinal strangulation, full body impalement and other wonderfully ridiculous acts of debauchery. The dialogue is often hilarious (“I’m sorry I can’t help. I’m just a psychic.”), and it contains a few decent scares as well as a monkey--an awesome little screaming monkey. I can’t say it’s a good movie per se, but it was entertaining. These types of movies don’t seem to be made in order to be good or bad; they just exist for their own sake.

Princess of Persia

Persepolis – I had always heard good things about Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis; I just never took the time to pick it up. Now having seen the film version, I’ll probably do just that. The animated film (which Satrapi co-directs) follows the travails of a young Marjane growing up in Iran in the late seventies up through the early nineties. If you know nothing about the history of the region around that time, the movie is a real education. Not to say the film is pedantic, because it isn’t. The characters do talk politics, but they don’t feel like ideological mouthpieces. They feel like intelligent people caught up in an absurd and tragic world. We follow the characters (mainly Marjane, her mother and father, her grandmother and a few other family members) through the revolution which saw the expulsion and exile of the Shah of Iran. The initial optimism and faith that the new regime will lift the oppression that has dogged the Iranian people for so long is quickly replaced with dread and resignation once they realize the truth in the old saying that sometimes the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. The most interesting parts of the movie for me were watching the non-conforming and rambunctious Marjane try to create a normal childhood for herself in a rigid fundamentalist Islamic society. The film makes the quiet observation that fundamentalist Islam is just another word for oppressive patriarchy. Sometimes it's laugh-out-loud funny such as when a young teen Marjane goes to the black market to buy Western pop music (illegal and deemed as a symbol of Western decadence that would lead to the moral depravity of the Iranian people). Other times downright scary as you watch how something as simple as a house party (co-ed social mingling was also illegal--still is actually) become a life-or-death situation. I enjoyed it quite a bit upon reflection. Highly recommended. Next up, Dario Argento's trippy Mother of Tears splatterfest. Man, nobody does horror like the Italians.