2010 April - Row Three

30 Apr

Category

Ron Howard to take on The Dark Tower

10

Here is some unexpected news. Ron Howard may direct a feature film adaptation of the first novel in Stephen King’s magnum opus The Dark Tower from a screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, the writer behind the likes of Batman & Robin, Lost in Space, I Robot, and The Da Vinci Code (oh right, and he won an Oscar for penning A Beautiful Mind, but whatever… BATMAN & ROBIN!). The deal gets stranger though. According to THR, after releasing a feature film, they will finish off the story of Roland and his ka-tet in a television series, produced by Imagine’s small-screen division.

I have been hesitant about this for quite some time – starting with the involvement of JJ Abrams back in ’08 – and when I finished reading the series last summer, I became convinced that it was unadaptable. Still, if they are going to go through with it, I would like to see them do it right and Howard is such a strange choice, especially considering how unsentimental the series of books are at times.

I guess that all I can do is shrug and put this news to the back of my mind for now. This adaptation has gone through so many transformations and fallen into so many hands, I probably should not take any news about it – official or not – too seriously anyway.

Thoughts? Hopes? Dreams? Concerns?

30 Apr

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Review: Eat The Kimono

0

Hanayagi Genshu certainly is an interesting woman. She’s a dancer, singer, storyteller, political activist, feminist and even a former inmate. She travels throughout Japan to perform her convention bending dances and make speeches to stir up those she feels have been wronged or held back. “The world will get a little bit better if the oppressed speak out. You musn’t be silent”. Throughout the hour long Eat The Kimono (another film in the Hot Docs 2010 retrospective series of Kim Longinotto’s career), the controversial Genshu’s voice is at the centre of every scene. Other people chime in occasionally, but the filmmakers focus exclusively on Genshu and what she has to say. The result allows her message to be heard unfiltered, but also allows the viewer to make up their own minds about Genshu herself.

She’s not immediately likeable. Our introduction to her is through old news footage of her arrest (for stabbing a dance teacher). As she is being led off by police officers, she shows a strong disregard for what she has done by telling the camera that she will be alright and flashing a peace sign – an odd choice after committing a violent crime. She tends to dominate conversations and, even when dealing with her causes, usually brings the topic around to herself. She never hesitates to mention her struggles growing up as the child of travelling performers, how poor they were and how she was bullied and called names. This led to her current fights against prejudice, discrimination and the pyramid system (ie. class structures) and she uses these stories of her childhood in many of her songs and dances. It’s also the reason why she served those 8 months in prison for knifing the dance teacher. Looking back on the incident, she relates that the instructor was talentless but held the position because of her level on the pyramid. She stabbed her because “We have suffered, I want you to know our pain”. She also claims that the police made a much bigger deal over the situation than was warranted: “I just cut her neck a little bit”.

» Read the rest of the entry..

30 Apr

Posted by
John Allison

Category

Screen Shot Quiz

Screen Shot Quiz #200

0

wednesday’s quiz was from the Hammer film The Brides of Dracula. I am continuing on with Hammer Horror Films for today and since I was tied up yesterday and wasn’t able to post a quiz I have two shots today from two different Hammer films.

I will post the answer to the quiz on Monday along with the next quiz. Please feel free to discuss the movie once you have made your guess. Even if you are wrong we’d love to discuss you guess. I also encourage you to put down your thoughts or opinion on the movie that you believe it to be. The quizzes are fun but the discussion that could come out of them is even more fun.

Quiz 200a

Quiz 200b

29 Apr

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Review: Shinjuku Boys

0

It’s 7AM and as the streets of Tokyo start to come alive, a group of Onnabes leave the New Marilyn Club to head back home. After a long night of entertaining customers at the club and singing Karaoke, they’re pretty tired, but their suits are still sharp as ever (if a little baggy) and their hair looks freshly coiffed. Apart from the fact it’s early morning, they don’t look much different than any other style conscious young man looking to make an impression – except for the fact that they are all women. After all, the term Onnabe refers to a woman who lives as a man and dates other women. Shinjuku Boys, a documentary from 1995 by Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, not only introduces us to three of them, but provides three very intimate portraits.

This year’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival has, as one of its many programs, an Outstanding Achievement retrospective on filmmaker Longinotto. She’s won numerous awards for a variety of documentaries (such as Rough Aunties, Divorce Iranian Style and Sisters In Law) and many of them focus on women in extraordinary circumstances and provide some understanding as to how they survive. Given that and a quick reading of the topic of Shinjuku Boys, one might be led to think these women are reacting to a very patriarchal society and looking for their own roles within it. That’s not the case. These women (or “boys” as they tend to be referred to – even by each other) have far more personal reasons for choosing to adopt these more masculine roles.

» Read the rest of the entry..

29 Apr

Posted by
Bob Turnbull

Category

Hot Docs Review: Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers

0

It’s beyond comprehension.

80% of the Lord’s Resistance Army – a Ugandan rebel group – is made up of children. 30000 children (over the last 20 years) have been abducted from their homes and villages and forced into roles as front line soldiers fighting a battle they know and care nothing about. A full 30% of these children are girls – sometimes as young as 7 or 8 when they are stolen away – and they are additionally forced into marriage with the very men who kidnapped them. While sharing their “husbands” with other girls (one man had 29 wives), they are ordered to attack villages, kill the residents and burn the structures to the ground. If need be, they will do all this while carrying their youngest child on their backs.

Remarkably, some of these girls survive and make it back to their villages and families, but their hell is usually not over at this point. Typically, they are shunned upon their return. They were rebel soldiers, so how can they possibly be trusted now? The children of the “returnees” are often thought to have evil spirits within them and they too are isolated from what was once a caring and loving community. Some even consider returning to the LRA. It’s truly unfathomable.

The National Film Board of Canada’s “Grace, Milly, Lucy…Child Soldiers” gives us an opportunity to meet three women who have gone to hell and back, lived to tell about it and are fiercely determined to not only help those who have been through the same experience, but to also stop it from occurring at all. They belong to an organization called Empowering Hands that attempts to reintegrate former child soldiers back into their families and a social milieu. Grace spent 7 months as a soldier before escaping and now eloquently speaks for those who can’t. She does it in a very soft-spoken way, but still manages to exude strength as she describes the sad realities of some:

» Read the rest of the entry..

29 Apr

Posted by
Kurt Halfyard

Category

Hot Docs Review: Space Tourists

1

If there is one thing I can accuse of acclaimed director Christian Frei (War Photographer), it is that he somehow made a boring documentary about space exploration. This is not an insult to him or his film, it is kind of the raison d’etre, because humanity has somehow taken the majesty and the glory of the Soviet and American Space Race, and turned it into a mundane commodity for the rich and surprisingly the poor as well. From Neil Armstrong’s famous words from the moon, to a Pizza Hut logo on one of the space shuttle rocket boosters, we’ve come a long way from that starry eyed ideals of the final frontier. And the beleaguered Russian space program, gutted at the collapse of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago, relies on selling the ‘third seat’ on its Soyuz rockets to various rich software engineers or the founder of Cirque du Soleil for about $20 Million. It’s just business.

» Read the rest of the entry..

29 Apr

Posted by
Kurt Halfyard

Category

Hot Docs Review: Life With Murder

1

Anyone who is a parent will walk a fine line between empathy and judgment for the Jenkins family of Chatham, Ontario (Canada) while watching this documentary whodunit. When their 18-year-old Jennifer is brutally murdered in 1998 and their 20 year old son is the prime suspect, well, there are certainly some difficult loyalties to be sorted out. Especially when she was shot multiple times and dragged around the house a bit before passing on. Despite the lurid nature of the crime, the fact that it appears to be done within a family, and in a small town that probably has only a few murders a decade, director John Kastner (Rage Against the Darkness) manages to lay out the facts of the narrative with a look a the small details, both during the case, and of course, the difficult aftermath. This does indeed generate quite a bit of empathy for the parents, Brian and Leslie, although there is not much left in the tank for their incarcerated son, Mason, who is clearly an idiot. But nevertheless is still their son.

» Read the rest of the entry..

29 Apr

Posted by
Mike Rot

Category

Reviews

Review: Passenger Side

8

(4/5)

[REPOST: You can soon catch this slacker comedy starting Friday, April 30th, in the following locations: AMC Yonge Dundas, TORONTO, ON; Cinemark Tinseltown, VANCOUVER, BC; AMC Forum, MONTREAL, QC). Also check out the trailer at the end of this post. For regulars, I am convinced Adam Scott is Jay Cheel's onscreen alter ego, or could at least play him if Film Junk: The Movie ever takes off.]

Sadly, I missed Matt Bissonnette’s independent comedy, Passenger Side, at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival due to scheduling conflicts, but was able to catch it as part of this month’s Top Ten Canadian films of 2009, sponsored by TIFF, playing at the Cinematheque Ontario. Set in the greater Los Angeles area, in style and tone reminiscent of American independent greats like Two Lane Blacktop and Slackers, and with nary a Tragically Hip song to be heard, Passenger Side is a curious ‘Canadian’ film indeed. It is not until the name Theodore is dropped near the end of the movie (context momentarily withheld) that a knowing nod is made as to our heroes’ expatriate status. Though slight, there is something quintessentially Canadian in their absurdly deadpan views of each other and the world around them; as the title would suggest, they coast as passengers, lives and places kept at arms length from them.

THEY are brothers, Tobey and Michael, and this is a road movie, though more accurately, a slacker road movie, the distance travelled more circular than directional, more detours than destinations (a kind of West Coast Waiting For Godot). Their relationship, too, goes in fits and starts, bickering with a level of wit rarely encountered outside of a Tarantino screenplay, Olympic-grade verbal fencing at its finest. At times the clever quotient overburdens the narrative, but mostly its so damn funny that the indulgences are warranted. In between barbs, a crisis of sibling communication brews. You feel the history of the brothers in the very first ‘fuck off’ phone call. Tobey is the black sheep of the family, and yet the least hostile, as Michael, a noted Luddite and wallflower, plays offensive to a prior rift that makes this daytrip all the more awkward. The purpose of the trip is slowly revealed and the payoff at the end is both unexpected and fulfilling. » Read the rest of the entry..

28 Apr

Posted by
Kurt Halfyard

Category

A second trailer for Vincenzo Natali’s SPLICE

1

While none of the distributions houses has been putting posters out (there are a few sparse festival one-sheets, but they are not very elaborate, here comes a second trailer for Canadian genetic engineering genre-mash Splice.

Much better than the first trailer (here) this one forgoes the jump scares and gets more into the relationship, implications of letting loose a new species which is a collection of a lot of different spare parts. Frankenstein’s monster anyone? Well this is the 21st century version. And she is both more deadly and more cute.

Splice drops into wide release (!) in June.

BONUS: the release version is apparently uncensored version from the one I caught last September (My Review) .

The new trailer is tucked under the seat.

» Read the rest of the entry..

28 Apr

Posted by
John Allison

Category

Screen Shot Quiz

Screen Shot Quiz #199

1

Tuesday’s quiz was from the Hammer film The Abominable Snowman. I am continuing on with Hammer Horror Films for the rest of the week. We had a last minute guess this morning and they were correct.

I will post the answer to the quiz on Thursday along with the next quiz. Please feel free to discuss the movie once you have made your guess. Even if you are wrong we’d love to discuss you guess. I also encourage you to put down your thoughts or opinion on the movie that you believe it to be. The quizzes are fun but the discussion that could come out of them is even more fun.

27 Apr

Posted by
Jandy Hardesty

Category

TCM Film Festival: Playtime (1967)

4

(4.5/5)

Recently I’ve ripped a bit on filmmakers for relying too much on editing and shallow focus rather than composition, lighting, movement within the frame, and sound design to create meaning and guide attention. Probably not quite as much here as I have on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, but it’s something I find increasingly annoying lately. Not that I’m totally against the use of shallow focus and editing, and obviously they’re the right choice in some circumstances, but it seems like most current films use them far more than any other possible techniques, and a lot of the time it feels lazy and tends to destroy the sense of cinematic space. When I talk about how great it is when a film uses deep focus and large-scale, long-shot composition (long in both distance and time), it’s films like Playtime that I’m talking about. I’ve been ambivalent on Jacques Tati films in the past, but I need to go back and revisit them, because Playtime is utterly charming from start to finish, and I would’ve been perfectly content if it had lasted all day. It’s shot in 70mm, but with a surprising 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which means that instead of composing shots wide, Tati tends to compose them deep.

Tati took his cue from silent comedies, especially those of Buster Keaton, with a largely implacable character who gets pulled into various comical situations through no fault of his own and deals with them as they come, sort of just going along with whatever happens around him and trying to adapt to it without causing a fuss. His films tend to unfold around a specific location and explore what humor could come out of that location – humor not centered only on Tati’s character (M. Hulot), but on everyone in the area. His films are largely plotless, based around recurring characters, sight gags, and themes. And they’re essentially silent in so far as there is rarely any dialogue that matters (French is not subtitled into English; a lot of Playtime is actually in English, but it wouldn’t matter if it weren’t), though he does make use of sound gags that true silent comedy could not.

» Read the rest of the entry..

27 Apr

Posted by
Andrew James

Category

Cinecast Episode 164 – Flaming Tap Water

2

As we ride out the spring doldrums at the multiplex, we have to be flexible and bend with limited release schedules. But sometimes, things work out as both Aussie noir, The Square, and Polish ultra-high-concept-crime-drama, Zero, happened to be playing at the Minneapolis Film Festival and available in Toronto. Both films, high on technique, plotting (and visual storytelling) generated some discussion and hearty recommendations, especially the former. On the eve of North America’s largest documentary film festival, Hot Docs, Kurt walks us through a few titles in detail and it sounds like a great lineup for the Toronto Festival this year. Plus Soderbergh and Lynch. Finally, early summers preemptive strike against the A-Team, The Losers is also discussed by Kurt and Matt as much as empty calories can be. That being said, they both seemed to like it, particularly the films irreverent tone and the overall game cast.

No major spoilers this week so all are welcome to join in the conversation. We’ve got some more local film makers to talk about as well as the higher profile DVDs being wide released this week. All in all a fun show. Grab a seat in the third row and, as always, feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comment section below.

Thanks for listening!