Warning: spoilers ahead.

Well, you can’t win ’em all. Deadgirl (tiff), our first foray into the 2008 Midnight Madness programme, wasn’t very good. The plot: two teenagers find a dead girl in an abandoned mental hospital. Well, almost dead. More of a zombie. They then proceed to…abuse her. A lot. Over many days. What sounded in the synopsis like a tense struggle between urges to do the right and wrong things quickly turned into gang rape with some cheap (but effective) scares thrown in. Nellie almost left. We both just kept throwing each other incredulous looks.

True, these films are meant to be shocking and violent and scary and, in my cases, awful. The film wasn’t badly executed…it just wasn’t a good film. I know it’s hard to compare MM films to the mainstream ones we see, and it has to be evaluated in part on how well it keeps the tension built and the adrenaline up, but that was all it did. I could never recommend this film to anyone…even if they were horror genre fans, I don’t think it was a great example of how to do it.

Q&As weren’t terribly insightful either.

C-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, deadgirl[/tags]

Ah, Bill Maher: caustic, hilarious and blunt. That’s why I love him. Last night there were protesters (though Nellie thinks they may have been a sideshow arranged for the movie) outside the screening of the new Larry Charles documentary Religulous (tiff), in which he starred. Here’s the premise: travel around America and the world challenging people to produce a logical argument for their religion. Hilarity ensues. The end.

High art this was not. To be fair, it was a smart man picking on people who might not have finished at the head of their respective classes, but to Maher’s point, non-believers are too quiet and passive by nature, so he was trying to stir things up a bit. Would almost certainly infuriate religious viewers, but that’s not his target market. He said clearly in the film he wanted to provoke the 16% of American voters who are non-believers that they should have a louder voice.

The introductions and Q&As were very funny. Maher’s best line of the night was when he started vamping on Palin: “5 kids…Jesus, don’t Republicans know how to pull out of anything?”

B-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, religulous, bill maher, larry charles[/tags]

After a brief respite it was back to the Ryerson for three films in a row. We got there plenty early for the first one, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (tiff), knowing it would be popular. And it was, with the director and pretty much the entire cast (including Michael Cera and my girlfriend du jour Kat Dennings).

I thought going into it this one would be funny and cute and entertaining, and it was all of those things. Funnier than I expected, smarter dialogue than you’d expect in a teen-targeted movie (but not without some very funny toilet humour), charming leads and entertaining side stories. Completely enjoyable, highly recommended.

Q&As were a little light, but that was to be expected with that kind of film. I can pretty much guarantee that nobody went away hating it, and many of us walked away humming songs from the (asskicking) soundtrack. To quote Bishop Allen: “alright.”

B+

[tags]tiff, tiff08, nick and norah’s infinite playlist, michael cera, kat dennings[/tags]

Ever wonder what would happen if you put a talky, introspective story about guilt and redemption in a burlap sack with a horror movie and threw it in a river? You’d get Sauna (tiff), which we saw this afternoon. I wouldn’t say it was bad, but I can’t say I loved it either. Bonus points for smashing together two genres, and doing it without seeming ridiculous, but I’m not sure the end result was particularly enlightening, scary or even entertaining.

C+

[tags]tiff, tiff08, sauna[/tags]

Walking out of the Ryerson, I got right back into the line for the next screening: It Might Get Loud (tiff). I went from a crowd of teenage girls shrieking over Zac Efron to a crowd of middle-aged men bowing and scraping to Jimmy Page. Actually, that’s not fair. There were people of all age excited to see Jimmy Page, not to mention The Edge and Jack White.

The documentary was made by Davis Guggenheim, the same man who made An Inconvenient Truth and who, we found out last night, is married to Elisabeth Shue. Anyway, when the three guitarists entered the theatre there was a long standing ovation (the first of three on the night) with the exultations mainly centered on Jimmy, or Led Zeppelin in general*. It was a documentary about the electric guitar, and a very well-made one at that, centered around the three of them gathering on a sound stage to jam, but if you weren’t a rock and roll fan, there probably wasn’t much there for you. If you care about the history of these men and their careers it was very interesting, and if you like rock music it was an asskicking moment to see the three of them play nearly all of Zeppelin’s “In My Time Of Dying”, or to see Jack White make a guitar out of wood scraps and baling wire, or to see White and The Edge look on like little kids as Page played the intro to “Whole Lotta Love”, but make no mistake it was 97 minutes of hero-worship. If you like these guys and their music, and especially the guitar, you’ll like this documentary. If you don’t then you’ll likely find it, as Now Magazine put it, “just three guys sitting around stroking their precious phallic objects.”

B, but I’m a big Zeppelin and White Stripes fan

* Actually, I think that the first mention of John Bonham got a bigger cheer than The Edge did.

[tags]tiff, tiff08, it might get loud, jimmy page, jack white, the edge[/tags]

When the line for Me And Orson Welles (tiff) started to move into the theatre and abruptly stopped for ten minutes, I knew what was happening: the stars had arrived. At the Ryerson the line crosses the red carpet, so when the limos pull up they stop the line and let the celebrity masturbation start.

I was well back in the line and didn’t see the arrival or star-walk down the media phalanx, but as I got closer I could hear it. I didn’t stop to see who it was all the teenage-girl shrieking was for, and I couldn’t remember who was in this movie except for Claire Danes, so it wasn’t until I got into a seat and checked the cast list that I realized who it was.

Zac Efron. Of High School Musical fame. Oh, splendid.

Right after I figured this out two girls in their late teens — maybe even early twenties — sit behind me and start gushing. “Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod…he is, like, SO famous!!!” And so on. I’m thankful that there were more film fans than Efron fans in the theatre, since when director Richard Linklater was introduced, he got the biggest round of applause of the day (followed by Mr. Efron when he took the stage). Finally the film began.

The film was really quite good. It was set in New York in the 30s, and the first time on the big screen for the actor playing Welles, who did a great job. I actually felt a little bit sorry for Efron, since he just couldn’t keep up with the actors around him, but it didn’t ruin the film. I had to give Linklater credit for taking on a project like this, working from a book that seems awfully far from his usual work.

The Q&A afterward was an embarrassing string of questions to Efron from swooning girls (like the 12-year-old in front of me who pouted and practically beat her mother bruised when neither of them could get their camera working well enough to capture Zac’s dreaminess) and someone even asked Claire Danes about My So Called Life? Tragic. I left the theatre hoping to escape the swooning. Clearly I’d forgotten what I was seeing next.

B-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, me and orson welles, richard linklater, zac efron[/tags]

I was worried that we’d joined the line for Rocknrolla (tiff) too late. We were half an hour ahead of the screening, but the line at the Ryerson still stretched all the way down to Gould Street and wrapped around nearly to Victoria by the time we got in it. I was a little concerned about seats, since I was with two other people and we wanted to sit together, but we made it in and got seats with no problems. These friends were amused by the cries of “Yarrr!” when the anti-piracy message went up.

Since the film had made its big debut the night before at the Elgin, and the screening was before noon, we figured we’d get no glimpse of the cast or crew, but it turns out Guy Ritchie dragged himself out of his hotel room long enough to come down and introduce it for us. Nice of him.

I must say, I was pleased with the film. Arthouse cinema this was not. It was precisely what I’ve liked about Guy Ritchie films in the past: fast-paced, fast-talking, hard, violent, funny, gritty and sexy. I thought of it as a logical arc from Lock Stock to Snatch and then to here. Highly enjoyable, if you liked either of those films.

B-

Oh, and on the way out of the theatre HBO stopped my friend’s wife and asked if we’d liked to be interviewed. I wanted no part of it; she hemmed and hawed for a while but eventually decided no. I don’t like the fawning celebrity worship that’s (predictably and understandably) become part of the TIFF, but this was only to be my first little taste of it at the Ryerson that day.

[tags]tiff, tiff08, rocknrolla, guy ritchie[/tags]

-HBO

My first festival film of 2008 was Waltz With Bashir (tiff) at the Ryerson. It was a beautifully animated story about the director’s attempts to remember everything about his experiences in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Conversations with friends, army colleagues and war footage were all transformed into this amazingly expressive animated world, and you were never entirely sure whether what you were seeing was meant to be real, or part of director Ari Folman’s imagination. Throughout the film, as he uncovered what was real, we were taken right along with him, right up to the jarring final scenes.

After the screening Folman was asked why he chose animation as the medium for this story. He said he could imagine it no other way, as it was a pastiche of memories both real and imagined, and anyway so little footage of that time existed. I couldn’t help but wonder what Air India 182 would have been like had they chosen this route? I think films like Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis prove that emotion can be conveyed in animation; it should be used more to describe this space between fact and imagination.

A-

[tags]tiff, tiff08, waltz with bashir[/tags]