A scant six hours after returning home from Martyrs we were back in line for a 9AM screening of Fifty Dead Men Walking (tiff) at the Ryerson. No, it wasn’t another horror flick. Basically it was a story about an informant inside the IRA in the late 80s and early 90s.

It wasn’t great, and it wasn’t really anything we hadn’t seen before, though it was based on a true story. And while I like Ben Kingsley most of the time, for some reason Jim Sturgess bugs the shit out of me. I can’t explain it. Just don’t like the guy.

Anyway, it’s a decent enough film, but I’m surprised it was a Gala (last night, in fact) given the fairly standard story. I guess being made by a Canadian director and having a Canadian connection — the real-life character played by Sturgess, on the run and in hiding, was shot and nearly killed somewhere in Canada in 1999 — was enough to put it on the red carpet.

C+

[tags]tiff, tiff08, fifty dead men walking[/tags]

Well, this isn’t going to be easy. Nellie and I willingly signed up for a film that most people would consider horrific and/or loathsome, and I couldn’t really disagree with them. The “torture porn” genre that’s emerged is embarrassing at best and troubling at worst, and we saw it mixed with the new wave of extremely violent French horror to create Martyrs (tiff) last night at Midnight Madness. I picked this one because it appeared, like Hostel, to have something more to it than just a slasher gore fetish.

It started off as promised, both scary and savagely violent. The crowd, sick bastards that they are at these screenings, cheered some of the more extreme violence, but I think less out of sadism than out of astonishment that the director actually did it, and managed to make it look so realistic. However, the film then turned to the torture aspect, and the final stages — though explained so as to appear to be not just for torture’s sake — were so extreme that it shocked even the jaded Midnight Madness crowd. More than that, it had physiological effects: Nellie came very close to passing out, and at least one person threw up and fled the theatre.

Make no mistake, this film was goddamn effective: it scared the crap out of me in parts, it was frighteningly violent (as opposed to the way that some films try to make it seem sexy or stylish), and it made my skin crawl, but it all happened within the confines of the story as it emerged. That doesn’t make it a good thing. It just makes for an effective example of a genre that we probably shouldn’t be as enthusiastic about as we seem to be. Matt Price Brown? put it very well in his BlogTO review this morning:

There will always be something useful in cinematic horror, the film world’s amped-up psychodrama which lets the audience confront, and hopefully purge, its deepest and least-accessible neuroses. Torture porn, on the other hand, is little more than an exercise in human cruelty dressed up in a game of one-upsmanship of “who can come up with the grossest gag.” Martyrs falls shamefully into the T.P. camp, a mean-spirited, wholly unlikeable plane crash of a movie whose only lingering aftertaste is shame.

While I feel I have to give Martyrs a B for how effectively it did what it did (which is to say, freak me right the hell out), I feel I should also point out that Nellie and I have decided not to watch films of this kind anymore. So maybe it was even more effective than it intended to be.

[tags]tiff, tiff08, martyrs[/tags]

A few years ago we hit upon a surprise find at the TIFF, a film called Day Night Day Night. It came out of nowhere and blew us away with an outstanding performance by a single actress who was on camera for nearly every second of every shot. Last night I experienced that again.

Lion’s Den (tiff) was the story of a pregnant Argentine woman who ends up in prison, in a special section for mothers and young children. It covers the next few years of her life, how she adjusts to life in prison and to life as a mother, how she copes with her (long-delayed) trial, and adjusts to stay sane. Most of all it’s the story of how she loves her son. It doesn’t sound like much, but you have to see this ferocious performance of Martina Gusman in the role of Julia to know what so impressed me.

The director was there and spoke about the film, saying that it created a lot of controversy and debate in Argentina, and some laws about keeping children with their mothers would ultimately be changed as a result of the film.

I don’t know if this one will ever have a wide release, but keep it on your radar.

A-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, lion’s den, leonara[/tags]

I’m almost two-thirds of the way through my 2008 films and finally have a few hours to string together between films. Some general thoughts about the film festival so far:

• I am pretty much sick of the Ryerson. 12 of my first 13 films — including eight in a row, and even four back-to-back-to-back-to-back screenings in one day — have been there. It’s convenient, and huge, and a decent venue all around…I just want to go somewhere else for a change. I’ve been there 15 times since Thursday night and I have four more screenings before it all wraps up Saturday night. Enough already. At least I know where the secret bathroom is…
• I’m not sure I’ll ever get tired of the pirate noises. For those of you who don’t attend TIFF screenings, I’ll explain: last year, in an effort to be all tough on people filming festival films, they tell people in the introductions not to film anything and that night-vision scanning will be used. They also put a big full-screen warning up before every screening saying something about piracy being punishable by blah blah blah. Well, last year the mention of piracy prompted people — Matt Brown claims to be the first — to yell “Arrrrh!!!” at the screen. It caught on last year, and continued into this year; the first few screenings prompted lusty pirate-calls from the upper Ryerson reaches. Even in small theatres one or two people (like yours truly) while give a quiet “Yar!” before the film starts. Among the more unruly audiences it’s even begun to happen while the festival staffer is saying their bit about piracy, to the point where the more clever ones like Colin Geddes have just shortened it to “Don’t, you know, steal the movie.” rather than be shouted down. I tell you why I like this though: it’s such a classic example of a polite and clever Canadian response to annoyance at being treated like punks. Surely the smart people at TIFF know that most film leaks happens from inside the industry, and that people who shell out hundreds of dollars for film packages aren’t terribly likely to be the ones stealing films, but they persist with these heavy-handed warnings and goons bearing night vision goggles. I just like that the Toronto audiences cheerfully mock them every time, and then happily settle in for the film.
• Still with the preamble: I hate the Motorola clip, I don’t mind the Cadillac ones (only because there’re three or four and they mix it up so we don’t get too sick of them) and I like that the staff no longer stop at asking people to turn off their cell phones…they also ask them to leave them off and not text throughout the movie. This warning started a few days ago, and has earned applause ’cause that light is fucking annoying.
• The lineup situation at the Yonge & Dundas AMC theatre needs to be fixed for next year. If this theatre is the new workhorse of the festival, you can’t have chaos — and that’s what it is — every time you send people in for their screening. A single outside line for all films, no cordon to keep festival-goers and pedestrians separate, crossing a lobby perpetually bisected by a Starbucks line and three escalators to the top makes for some issues. The line is more of an unruly herd of sheep by the time they reach the summit. Get it sorted out, kids.
• While home for lunch yesterday I watched a movie (’cause, you know, I haven’t seen many lately) from the PVR: Shoot ‘Em Up. It might well have been the worst piece of shit I have ever seen. How, HOW do Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti and Monica Belucci make that cancerous turd? Ugh. Makes me appreciate the festival films even more.
• Speaking of cancerous turds, I’m glad to see the Paris Hilton documentary — and all the accompanying press manipulation — is getting trashed. Quoth the AV Club:

“I’ll admit to being intrigued by the idea of unauthorized Hilton documentary, given the wealth of dismal footage that does meet with her approval, and I had hoped that Petty would capture the raw machinations of Hilton Inc. No such luck, alas. All one could do before, after, and during the screening was just stare at Paris and contemplate the void. The one thing the documentary suggests, inadvertently I’d guess, is that Hilton seems to have no inner life whatsoever. And that’s the difference between her and Marilyn Monroe, the icon who’s fun-and-flirty image she’s trying to replicate: People gawked at Monroe because she was bubbly and sexy and flirtatious; people gawk at Hilton because her eyes reflect the blank, pitiless implacability of death.”

[tags]tiff, tiff08[/tags]

This year’s festival didn’t see the raft of Iraq war films that the previous years have. The Hurt Locker (tiff) was one of this year’s entries. There’s little about that invasion to explore, though this at least was seen from a different angle: bomb removal specialists. The screenplay came from a reporter who’d been embedded with such a unit and the first 2/3 were quite good, showing the mix of discipline and recklessness needed for that job, and the overall savagery of bomb attacks in an urban setting. However, toward the end it lapsed into some cliches (the John Wayne factor) and hurried through the psychological implications when it should have paused, and that left a sour taste in my mouth.

One slightly odd thing: Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, David Morse and Evangeline Lilly were all in this film, but barely. They were on camera for less than a minute in most cases…too long to be called a cameo (such as  the camera panning past Joseph Gordon-Levitt near the beginning of The Brothers Bloom) but too short to be called a real role. The director Kathryn Bigelow (who was there, along with the screenwriter and lead actor) explained this [mild spoiler alert] by saying it was to let us know that no one is safe in Iraq, and that anyone could die at any time, even big movie stars. [/spoilers]

Started off strong, but veered back into the predictable lane at crunch time. Too bad.

C+

[tags]tiff, tiff08, the hurt locker[/tags]

I have to admit, I was worried coming into this one. I loved Rian Johnson’s debt film Brick a lot, so I was excited about his latest release The Brothers Bloom (tiff), but the early reviews were mixed. Still, when a director like that has a cast like Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz to work with, expectations are high.

Well, chalk another one up for Johnson: I really liked this film. He once again managed to blend styles and eras — the brothers looked as if they’d walked out of the 1930s and into an era of Lamborghinis and cell phones — and traded noir for quirk. The first half of the film was extremely funny and charming. The second half less so, but he was busy moving the plot forward. I think it lost much of its early energy, but still finished reasonably strong. All three lead actors were great in their parts, and Rinko Kikuchi was hilarious as the silent sidekick.

Part of the reason I (and everyone else) loved Brick was because it took us all by surprise. This time Johnson had all eyes on him and he delivered anyway. Maybe I missed something technical about the film that critics didn’t like, or maybe they all just wanted Brick II. All I know is, it was one of my favourites so far in this festival.

B+

[tags]tiff, tiff08, the brothers bloom, rian johnson[/tags]

Halfway between documentary and feature film, 24 City (tiff) was a microcosmic look at China itself: former workers lamenting the demise of the communist-era factory in favor of new condominiums, children who’ve spent their entire lives in the factory complex, security guards reminiscing about the opening of the plant, all melded with scripted parts by actresses. The documentary device was hard to stay with when an actress as recognizable as Joan Chen was on the screen, but they even made a sly little joke to explain that away and keep you in the moment.

I liked the film a lot, but I found I had to work at it a bit, and it took some time to get into it. Some (including Blue Rodeo‘s Jim Cuddy) never seemed to, and left early. The director (who wasn’t present; this was the third screening) did well to show Chengdu, and China in general, in the middle of a growth spurt, growing pains and all.

B

[tags]tiff, tiff08, 24 city, jim cuddy[/tags]

According to the producer (who introduced this morning’s screening) if Frank Capra were still alive he might have made a film like Flash of Genius (tiff). I suppose that might be true. It was the kind of standard “man stands up for what’s right” film that I associate with Capra, and not something I’d ever see in a theatre in standard release, but for 9AM on day six, it wasn’t a bad little break. Greg Kinnear and a based-on-reality script managed to keep it north of formulaic, but just barely.

C

[tags]tiff, tiff08, flash of genius[/tags]

While signing up for a 2.5 hour talky French family tale can sometimes be fraught with peril, the early reviews of Un Conte de Noël (tiff) gave me hope. It turns out the hope was well justified. I really liked this film, though I’m not sure I could put my finger on exactly why I liked it. It was, as I said, a very talky family drama, but the characters were entertaining while remaining real, and that was enough to make me care about what happened. It never felt quite as long as the running time, but I think they could cut a sideline love triangle story from the film to make it a little tighter. I didn’t feel like that storyline added anything to the film, and it could probably benefit from a bit of chopping. Still, a quintessentially festival film.

B

[tags]tiff, tiff08, un conte de noel[/tags]

Hoo boy. If you’re sleep deprived and just had a big, carb-ridden lunch, watching a slow, bleak Dutch film in a theatre with reclining chairs is not, I repeat not, a good idea. And I wasn’t kidding when I said that Katia’s Sister (tiff08) was slow and bleak. Very Dogme 95: no music, no effects, and, one could argue, no plot. Very little in the way of interesting dialogue too. Katia’s sister was a 13 year old struggling to keep a semblance of order and calm in her life despite the chaos around her, but I found that I didn’t care enough about any of these characters to worry or wonder. I wasn’t into it at all. Nellie fell asleep. It wasn’t bad, but goddamn you’d better be in the mood for a dreary, slow-paced foreign film if you sit down to this one.

C-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, katia’s sister[/tags]