Toronto International Film Festival

The Toronto International Film Festival starts September 4th - I’ll be there for the final weekend doing my best to figure out which films were well received and who our bright new film stars are. Actors, directors, screenwriters and such. If you have a recommendation or find yourself on the TIFF website don’t hesitate to comment, I’m more than willing to see or sleuth any film you might want to know more about.

Yes, the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading is screening, but that movie will be in theaters in about ten minutes. I'll just take a picture of Clooney instead.

Tiff Website

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

The title hints at a threesome between two girls and a country, but Woody Allen had a different idea. Using his muse Scarlett Johansen, Penelope Cruise and a simplistically romantic Javier Bardem, Allen gives us yet another version of his youthful frustration fables. An engaged Vicky (a delightful yet flat Rebecca Hall) and a newly single Christina (Johansson) travel to Barcelona for the summer only to find themselves subduly charmed by Juan Antonio, a painter who’s passion crazed wife tried to kill him. Or he tried to kill her, but it doesn’t really matter. Penelope Cruz plays the role of ex-wife Maria Elena with a confidence that outshines anyone in the film and makes Hall and Johansen seem like they’re playing house – which may have been what Allen intended all along. He likes his women young and confused. Bardem is underused and serves as an idea as opposed to a character but in giving us his wife, a headstrong know-it-all, Allen manages to make his bourgeoisie American ladies seem as humorously frustrating and cliché as ever. The movie is funny if you’re not afraid to laugh when the rest of the theater is quiet. With a stereotypical travelers guide to Gaudi and a mildly annoying narrator, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is watchable but nothing new.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona Trailer

Wanted

Someone told me that Wanted made them want to have sex. Just in general, not with anyone in particular. It made me want to by a gun and use that gun in a kickboxing class. It was better than the Indian Jones debacle and just as satisfying as Iron Man - maybe not critically (whatever that means), but in terms of how much enjoyment I got out of it or how connected to the film I was. Crazy fun and totally self aware, Wanted was a blockbuster with some pizazz accompanied by a one-two punch. For every effective and awesome scene there is an equally flabbergasting retarded one (you know, the whole good versus evil thing) but in the end it’s completely watchable and a pretty good ride. By pretty good, I mean see it in the theater.

As a warning, when I say bad, I mean it. Really bad. Not bad like that was a weak moment but wow, whoever wrote that scene really loved Smokin’ Aces. About three quarters through the film I envisioned men in a board room going, “And then let’s put them on top of a building, for the scenery and such. And then, better yet, lets have it be in the middle of an earthquake, because being an assassin alone isn’t quite dangerous enough. This will give them a chance to be calm in the face of shaky circumstances. And then, no this is perfect, we can have the building turn into a robot that moves about the city while they fight it out. Yea. That’s perfect”. My thoughts exactly.

None of that happens in the movie, but it could have. My theory is as such: If you like action, action that doesn’t take itself seriously, think Hot Fuzz or Hellboy, you’ll really get into this film. Now, this kind of lonely man of honor flick is not be confused with a Nicolas Cage explosion of hilarity, you laugh with Wanted, not at it. There is a Karate Kid feeling to it for the first half – a good old fashioned wimp to ass-kicker story that also involves a fly. And it pokes fun at complacency, Office Space owns this market, but it works and gives the audience and James McAvoy and nice boost .

Wanted is good for:

• Cheap Dates! It’s second run now (I paid three dollars to see it but would have paid ten). Make sure your lady or man likes action though. Otherwise rent The Notebook.
• Dudes. I don’t know when dudes go out with other dudes to see movies but this would work for that.
• Movie geeks. It teeters on the edge, but it’s just smart enough to be art house trash. You know, Cronenberg style.

An Old Mistress

The American title of Catherine Breillat's new film is The Last Mistress but it's direct and appropriately inferred title is An Old Mistress. I agree with most of Manohla Dargis' views, this film was her pick of the week lasting twice that title, but what Dargis doesn't admit to is one audience requirement: must like period piece.

This move is near perfect - simple yet developed story, superb acting, tightly edited and compiled and finally, as my patience is wearing thin on three hour epics, a clean 110 minutes. There is plenty of full nudity and sexual encounters (Last Mistress received an NR rating) but, sorry gentlemen, it's far from gratuitous. Mistress is a period piece and no amount of flesh can change this. And ladies, when approaching this film keep in mind that it's French. With a French story. It's more Dangerous Liasons and Madame Bovary than Jane Austin and her feminist love stories. If you enjoy a good period piece, The Last Mistress is incredibly depressive, more about the foils of monogomy that a spirited lover. Watch when in a good mood and in the company of others.

Asia Argento is outstanding, her ability to change moods in a single shot just by slightly moving her mouth and changing her gaze is unparalleled since the likes of Julietta Masina. We owe more to her than to her character Vellini and the same goes for her lover Ryno ( Fu'ad Ait Aattou). It's always nice to see classics acted out by the gorgeous considering, deep down, we know that it is far from fact.

Manohla Dargis NY Times Review
The Last Mistress Trailer

One for the Pinneapple Express

This is the first Judd Apatow project that I have been genuinely interested in, which prompted me to do a little research. It's directed by David Gorden Green who's first film George Washington is a near perfect representation of small town America. If you haven't checked it out yet - George Washington is a great date, home alone, or watch it with your parents who think The Shawshank Redemption is a work of genius movie.

I am excited to see these funny boys, Apatow and Rogen, tackle a movie that involves a plot and not just an idea. Jokes work better when they're centered around situation and although the living room can produce hilarious moments, I want to spend my ten dollars on an adventure.

All in all, this will most likely be an enjoyable film. I'm thinking The Big Lebowski meets Half Baked and the reviews I've read, based on test screenings, have been exciting. Who cares if they were written by someone called 'The Midnight Toker'. Stoners are people too you know.

George Washington
Directed by David Gordon Green

Home Videos - Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands

This is the second installment in a surprisingly fun trilogy from director Nicolas Winding Refn starring Mads Mikkelsen, a Danish heartthrob who has just recently made his way across the seas to the American Film Industry. You’ll recognize him as Le Chiffre, the man with a blood-weeping eye in Casino Royale.

These movies are about deals that go wrong because in actuality, deals usually go wrong. So many films are about the process of fixing, by superhero like gun toters, it’s refreshing to see a film about the logistics of a crime. Scratch that. This film isn’t realism. It’s an attempt at realism that takes place in a world very similar to ours, where men find themselves in situations that are completely beyond their control.

Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands, a thug movie with white people (this is Denmark), is a refreshing take on the stereotype of the gangster. The title character Tonny is unredeemable, a truly unlucky and untalented dealmaker. Mikkelsen plays him beautifully, as he does all of his roles, a tough guy with awkward undertones. Tonny is out of jail (it’s a little hazy here why he was in jail for the first place and how much time has passed since the first film) and heads to his dad’s chop shop looking for work. Throughout the film he’s trying to regain the trust and respect of his father, the lord of a small crime ring, but nothing seems to go his way.

When Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino were making stylish pictures with clogged sink narratives Nicolas Winding Refn was making something entirely his own. Only the Danes can take the underbelly of society and turn it into a subtle and suspenseful exercise in endurance. Pusher, the first in the series is by far the most adventurous in style and structure, but the second installment builds on its idea, not it’s story, which results in a sister film instead of a sequel.

The Dogma movement has passed and I doubt that filmmakers will find their way back to it, but it’s effects are alive and well in style and tone. The interaction between two characters, when done right, can be just as redeemable as a man flying through the air with guns ablaze.

Yes. You can watch this movie without seeing the original but I do recommend that you see Pusher at some point and time.

NY Times Review

James Bond Please

Anyone else excited for the new 007 Quantum of Solace? My father wasn’t a James Bond fan, so unlike a giant portion of the world, I’ve only seen the one with Christopher Walkin as a bleach blond helicopter flying villain. Casino Royale has personally, and I think for a whole new generation of film watchers, gotten me excited about a fifty-year long traditon.

Quantum of Solace

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hellboy II: The Golden Army, directed by visionary Guillermo del Toro, taught me that CGI, when not trying to make things look real (as if they belong in reality), can be positively astounding. Trying to make something look like play-dough delivers an oddly satisfying effect. The creatures in this movie not only look amazing, their small inserted histories boost their standing from flimsy effect, to essential story builders . A.O Scott is right, Hellboy II is “a big mess and, mostly, a lot of fun”.

I just want to clear this up, right away. Sci-fi Fantasy is one of my Achilles Heels. The hardest things for me to do is separate my love of unicorns and mermaids from any ability I might have to look at a film with an objective eye. That said, I still think this movie was completely watchable, finessed with an imagination that is more difficult to harness than you would think.

Like the first Hellboy, the story is kinda all over the place. The Elven Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) wants revenge on the human race for our greedy and destructive nature. He needs to reassemble the Golden Army, an innumerable force of machine man killers, which requires taking down his father, kidnapping his twin sister and reassembling a crown that makes him the Commander in Chief. Sprinkled in between this epic fairytale is love, crisis of allegiance and some seriously pulpy humor. Don’t be afraid to laugh at things are supposed to be serious. My guess is that del Toro wants us to have as much fun as he's having.

Hellboy II reminded me of a few things – The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Star Wars. When Hellboy and the troop head to the ‘Troll Market’ we get a sneak peek at the underbelly of the beast world. It’s about two doors down from the bar on Tatooeen and it’s a really fun moment in the film. We also get a new character in Hellboy II - Johann Krauss, voiced by Seth McFarlane of Family Guy fame, is a collection of vapors that get clothed in a robot like, deep sea diving suit. He can inhabit the bodies of other creatures or loan a little of himself to get some information from a dead tooth fairy. I’m sure that someone like Storm is a badass to a loyal X-Men fan, but she’s got nothing on this guy.

Maybe it’s the CGI. Maybe it’s the characters. Or maybe its just more fantasy than superhero that makes Hellboy II a refreshing romp through the summer movie season. ‘Red’, as his friends call him, is played perfectly by Ron Perlman. He’s cheesy, at ease with being cheesy, lovable and ugly all at the same time. I can’t believe that I fell for his romance with Liz Sherman (an also aptly cast Selma Blair), but I did. Just as much as I did in the first film. I credit most of this to Pearlman and for the same reason that I was touched by his performance in Jeunet’s City of Lost Children. It turns out that the Beauty and the Beast story really is timeless.

As I was leaving the theater a friend said, “That movie will be really great on TBS”. I think he’s right. Some movies you can watch forty times and they don’t get old. Hellboy II is no There Will Be Blood, but I can’t watch that movie everyday of my life.

Thank You Chad for the brilliant insight.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
A.O. Scott’s NY Times Review
Guillermo Del Toro’s Notebook

WALL-E

Many things have been said about WALL-E, the ninth installment from the Pixar Disney union and they’re all true. It’s an amazing representation of the future, bleak as it may be, fitting nicely in the pantheon of Sci-Fi. The first forty minutes are less like a cartoon, without dialogue or dance numbers from the good old days, and more like Anime than anything America has put out to date. Kids will be drawn to WALL-E’s cuteness while adults will identify with his (it’s?) geeky tendencies. WALL-E represents what people have wanted all along, not a human-like robot with features that remind us of ourselves, but a cute tin can that acts like us. He makes ‘goodness’ an evolutionary faction.

WALL-E is a robot who has been left on planet earth to do some heavy duty cleaning. He’s not the only robot, which the trailer leads you to believe, he’s merely the last functioning robot, and the movie never definitively explains why. This is an important factor in Sci-Fi, no-one can explain to us why LA looks like Tokyo’s long lost sister in Blade Runner, it just does. Allowing the viewer to come up with their own conclusions is what makes the genre interactive, a relationship which few studios are willing to entertain these days.

So WALL-E is alone with a cockroach for a buddy (who makes for some of the cutest jokes for those of you who have been confronted with their indestructibility) collecting trinkets from the mounds of trash he builds each day. When a new and flashy robot mysteriously shows up on earth he falls in love with her sleek features and laser toting abilities, putting an end to his loneliness.

When Eva goes into autopilot, WALL_E does everything he can to wake her up, but soon enough she is picked up by her chaperon rocket and taken back to a floating spaceship filled with fat people who haven’t walked in over two hundred years. (This is space remember.)

How do we know this? Because WALL-E is so taken with Eva that he grabs onto her recon vehicle and followers her, inevitably bringing enlightenment to the human race. This is where the movie disintegrates slightly. WALL-E isn’t heavy on plot and as the end approaches we begin to feel the effects, withdraws, of being away from that earth portion of the film.

These are my only two complaints. Plot and pity. Painstaking effort was made to anthropromorphise WALL-E into Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp but what we end up with is a Buster Keaton who is all pity. What was great about the Tramp was that he was an opportunist, he would steal, sneak and trick to get ahead. I felt so bad for WALL-E after twenty minutes that I never felt anything but that for the entire movie. He was almost too good natured, which in a fit of originality, is the exact opposite of what we’ve been taught to think about the evolution of the robot. I can’t blame viewers all over the world for crying for him, he’s effective.

It is highly recommended that one sees this movie in a theater. It will no doubt stand the test of time looking equally as crisp and expansive on home HD television sets, but it’s beauty shines most bright on the big screen. Like space, in it’s awesome and majestic glory, WALL-E is best experienced with a little imagination and a digital projector.

WALL-E

Battle of the Blockbuster

In my beloved New York Times, Tarsem's The Fall was given ten lines, a mere one hundred words. That's because it's completely unmarketable and subscribes only to itself. It is pure sci-fi fantasy - the story is outlandish, as fairy tales usually are, it lacks a romance and, oddly, has no climax. I loved it.

The Fall is what I always wanted Pan's Labyrinth to be. I fawned all over the child actress Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), the interaction between her and Roy (Lee Pace) is positively enchanting, I loved the concept of the 'bandits' and it was able to recapture the fun of childhood tales that you can only find in Aesop's Fables or Hans Christian Anderson. This said, if you don't have an affinity for tall tales, you might not enjoy this movie. The cinematography is magical, alone it carried me through the film, and the colors are amazing, a slap in the face to those who control the look of a film through filters and CGI (don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that there aren't tricks involved, but this is not 300 or Stardust), but The Fall is a collection of cliches. I'm the kind of person who likes these cliches, and I think that there are many film viewers who will as well, but that doesn't make a movie for most. I think that people may be disappointed with this film, but we need to step back and marvel at how this movie came to fruition and how we might look at it in ten years. David Fincher and Spike Jones, who released and presented the film, are smart guys. Guys who we should be listening to.

Here's my main problem - this movie isn't perfect, but it got one paragraph in the New York Times, when Ironman and Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull got full pages. Those movies aren't perfect either, but they have big stars and big directors. Apparently, even the NY Times has to cater to the drones. Okay, I'll be honest, I totally liked Ironman and I want to see Indiana Jones again since I feel like I missed a few things (I'll get back to you on that film later), but I don't understand how The Fall is any different than these two films besides the fact that it isn't considered a 'Blockbuster'. This means that a 'Blockbuster' isn't a type of film, it's a marketing tool. The Fall didn't get picked up because it was bad (this movie debuted in 2006), it didn't get picked up because somebody didn't think we would like it, i.e. spend money to see it. This creeps me out. This somebody is deciding that 'bad' movies shouldn't be seen (not distributing or marketing for them) while Drilbit Taylor and Made of Honor are given stamps of approval (by companies, not critics). Whatshisname reviewed The Fall in the NY Times, it never had a chance. What Happens in Vegas got a quarter of a page and was reviewed by Monohla Dargis. For Shame New York Times. Wanna see a summer blockbuster? Go see The Fall. At least it's pretty.

The Fall

Reprise

Reprise is a great date movie. It has a simple story, it's not too girly and it's just about an hour and a half. At times the subtitles don't match moving lips, in fact sometimes the dialogue doesn't match the scene at all, but this is one of the films most rewarding and cinematic attributes. Some scenes are so perfectly put together that they stand on their own as 'mini' films, a collection of moments that are romanticized on screen.

This is a story about middle class. Every critics has mentioned this, it's a major element in Reprise; the two title characters, Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik ( a dreamy Espen Klouman-Hoiner) don't have much to worry about, creating drama out of thin air, something only a rich kid can do. It follows the two through their early twenties as they make grand attempts at becoming authors. Philip, whose book is immediately published, struggles with the concept of talent while simultaneously falling in love for the first time and the effects are intense, but all of that happens in flash back. By the time the movie starts he is already recovering from this stroke of genius. By all accounts Philip should be the more interesting character, but Erik outshines him with his awkward realism. His interaction with friends and sweethearts are confused (for him, not us) and the situations he finds himself in are hopelessly and cinematically romantic. The director Joachim Trier breaks this up by giving Philip the love interest, a touching interaction between him and Kari (Viktoria Winge) and one of the better ones I've seen on screen lately. As I said, this movie is dripping with romanticism in the same way The Squid and the Whale somehow made divorce seem like art.

I had been waiting to see this movie for a long time, and although I was pleased, I was expecting something a little more stripped down, honest. Reprise is 'honest' in it's approach to art, story telling, character, creation, but it is so stylized that the simplicity of it gets shoved aside too often. At a time when studios are reforming the idea of 'Independent Cinema', I wish that Reprise was more about two film lovers, filming a story, than impressing us with their ability to recreate Truffaut, Jeunet, and Goddard. Maybe because Joachim Trier is distantly related to Lars Von Trier he decided to run as far away from avant-garde as possible. It would be nice if he looked back someday soon.

Reprise

Mister Lonely

I haven't heard much about Harmony Korine in years. He's been living on through Julien Donkey Boy, a fantastic dogma film, Kids and Gummo, but I was convinced that he had been swallowed up by the New York art scene, doomed to be a producer or worse - a snotty backstage loafer. I was wrong. Korine has a new film titled Mister Lonely, that tells the quaint little story about a commune of impersonators. It stars Diego Luna (Y Tu Mama Tambien) as Michael Jackson, Samantha Morton (Minority Report, In America) as Marilyn Monroe and Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre - Wrath of God) as a pilot working with nuns in third world countries. I about fell out of my chair when I saw the trailer. Whomever puts this stuff together (I'm positive it's not Korine) has it packaged as a feel good indie flick. Have we learned nothing from Little Miss Sunshine and Juno? Nothing against these films, but I am no longer falling for the indie ploy. Trust no one. As a fan of his work I'll watch anything that Korine puts together - if only to walk away from it disgusted, confused or manipulated. The reviews are poor for Mister Lonely, nothing new for Korine. Filmcritic.com called Julien Donkey Boy 'a nihilistic bit of crap that wants to be oh-so-cool but is really just a low-budget exploration of nothing'. I don't want anyone going to see this movie and complaining that it wasn't what they thought it would be. See something, anything, that Korine had his hands in before you open that mouth of yours. This goes for me as well.

Mister Lonely
Cinematical Review
Time Out London Review
Julien Donkey Boy
Dogme 95