Was this one called Public Enemy Number One? (tiff) Or L’Instinct de Mort? Or Mesrine? Who knows? It was pretty good, whatever it was called. The stylized biography of a French criminal (who also spent a lot of time in Canada) named Jacques Mesrine, it rode on the estimable talent of Vincent Cassel.

Trying to squeeze a man’s life (half of it, anyway) into a two hour film always feels choppy and broad, but it was an interesting story, lots of action, funny in parts and sometimes hard to believe (difficult to say how much of it was bumped up for the big screen). Not great cinema, but highly entertaining.

B-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, public enemy number one, l’instinct de mort, mesrine[/tags]

I think I may have seen a new TIFF record tonight at the screening of Birdsong (tiff): most walkouts. Maybe not by raw number, but I counted 30 escapees from a theatre that holds 120, maybe 130 people. They weren’t shocked or offended…they were just bored. And probably a little confused.

Here’s the gist: three kings trudge through the desert and mountains to bring their gifts to Jesus. In black and white. With almost no talking, and what talking there was happened to be mainly Catalan. For a long time. There was one shot of them walking away across sand dunes and then coming back that went on for seven minutes. No dialog, no other events…just a stroll. That was it, for the whole film. Oh, and Joseph and Mary sat outside their house and played with a sheep. And Jesus.

I don’t know…some of the photography was beautiful, especially one particular underwater shot, but some of it was so dark you couldn’t even see it. Points for the shots and trying something I’d never quite seen before, but…yeesh.

C-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, birdsong[/tags]

It’s always interesting to see a repeat screening of a Midnight Madness film at noon, just because of the completely different makeup of the crowd. So it was with today’s screening of Acolytes (tiff), which was full of retirees and, presumably, Hitchcock fans. While it was likely the tamest horror flick I’ve ever seen programmed for MM, it drove a few older viewers out of the theatre early on. The lady behind us warned her friends up front that she didn’t like scary, but she was a trooper and stuck it out. I guess it helped that it wasn’t that scary.

Sure, it had a few jumpy moments, but those were mostly achieved with sudden cuts to violent scenes accompanied by screeching music. It did manage a little better on the tension scale than most horror films, and was a little longer on story. None of the characters were ridiculous, but the dialogue was often weak.

If you’re sort of a fan of horror films but like tension more than violence, this one’s probably for you.

C+

[tags]tiff, tiff08, acolytes[/tags]

Tokyo Sonata (tiff) started off quietly, built slowly through the middle, came to this crashing crescendo and then quietly wrapped up with a sonata within a sonata. By turns funny, tragic, frustrating and mundane, this film had me and lost me multiple times.

It wasn’t until I walked out of the theatre that I realized this is exactly what any sonata would do to me…grab me during the allegro or presto, lose me to boredom during the andante or adagio, gain back my interest as it picked up speed once again and then tie it all together at the close. Now that’s meta.

B-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, tokyo sonata[/tags]

To sum up Synecdoche, New York (tiff) in one word: quoi?

Look, I’m a smart guy, and I like a challenging film as much as anyone, but there are limits. In the beginning the sharp-witted script and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting were enough to keep me interested, but for the last hour of the film I felt like I was chasing the actors down a maze in Charlie Kaufman’s mind. I didn’t enjoy that, and I certainly wasn’t intrigued enough to watch it again and figure out what I’m missing.

This film’s gotten really good reviews, and it does deserve some credit for the performances and occasional humour or insight, but I have to wonder how often people are scared to give it a bad rating for fear it’ll look as if they didn’t get it. Whatever. Maybe I’m slow today. Check that: I’m definitely slow today, but I could still keep up with the likes of Being John Malkovich or Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine if I were seeing them for the first time. This was just one onion I couldn’t peel.

On the way out of the theatre the guy in front of me said, “So, that was in English and I still didn’t understand it.”

C+

[tags]tiff, tiff08, synecdoche new york[/tags]

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]