The titles are starting to, slowly but surely, roll out. Most recently, VIFF programmers announced the line-up for the Ecologies of Mind program which turns its eye to films with an environmental slant.

This year’s selections range from the poetic with Michael Madsen’s Hot Docs selected Into Eternity which looks at Finland’s nuclear waste facility Onkalo to the truly Canadian with Ron Mann’s In the Wake of the Flood which features Margaret Atwood and her dedication to the preservation of bid life. Other interesting titles on the list include Kevin Tomlinson’s Back to the Garden, Flower Power Comes Full Circle which revisits a group of hippies, 40 years after Woodstock, Jens Schanze’s Plug & Pray with its look at AI and religion and the 3D science documentary The Eye 3D – Life and Science on Cerro Paranal which, even for a 3D boycotter like myself, sounds fascinating.

All of our VIFF coverage, including previously announced titles, can be found here. If you’re looking for up to the minute VIFF updates, follow me and the festival on twitter!

Full line-up of films with trailers tucked under the seats.

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Autumn Sonata, playing on Friday on TCM.

A few new ones this week, with some nice star-based themes going on at TCM. They’re doing Julie Christie on Monday, Steve McQueen on Tuesday, and Ingrid Bergman on Friday – I haven’t listed all of the films for each, so if you’re a fan of any of them, check out TCM’s calendar for any I may have skipped over. I did actually include most of the Bergman films. She made good movies, most of which I happen to have seen, what can I say? Also look for the Sundance debut of stop-motion feature Mary and Max on Thursday.

Monday, August 2

8:00am – IFC – Bananas
Woody Allen in full-on zany mode in one of his earlier films, as the wonderfully named Fielding Mellish. In an attempt to impress a politically-minded girl, Mellish runs off to a Latin American country and takes it over.
1971 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalbán.
(repeats at 12:40pm and 5:15pm)

1:30pm – TCM – Doctor Zhivago
Idealistic Zhivago experiences the Bolshevik Revolution while also dealing with his conflicting feelings for his wife Tonya and young nurse Lara. There are a few things about the romance side of the story that bother me, mostly the fact that I liked Tonya way more than Lara, but I have to admit Lean knows how to make epic films, and Maurice Jarre’s score is unforgettable.
1965 UK/USA. Director: David Lean. Starring: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Alec Guinness.

9:45pm – TCM – Darling
Julie Christie won an Oscar for this role, in a film I haven’t seen. But I’ve always been impressed with Christie in most everything (only excepting possibly Doctor Zhivago, interestingly), so I may give this one a shot. TCM is actually running a bunch of Christie movies this afternoon and tonight (Monday), so check out the rest of the lineup if you’re a fan.
1965 UK. Director: John Schlesinger. Starring: Julie Christie, Laurence Harvey, Dirk Bogarde.
Newly Featured!

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Here comes the 35th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, and the line-up thus far of Galas and Special Presentations (that is code for High Profile Films) is looking quite stellar. You want new films from Stephen Frears, Mark Romanek, Darren Aronfosky, François Ozon, Kim Ji-Woon, Michael Winterbottom, Mike Leigh, Guillaume Canet, Andrew Lau, John Cameron Mitchell, Woody Allen, Sylvain Chomet, Tran Anh Hung, Danis Tanovic, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Julian Schnabel and Im Sang-Soo. Yes you do. No signs of Terrence Malick yet, but fingers crossed!

Full Press release is tucked under the seat.

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(3.5/5)

There are ways to do tonal shifts in movies that work, but the way in which hipster mystery drama Cold Weather tries to do it doesn’t work quite as well as one would hope. The film is really two films in one – firstly, a straight drama/relationship story with the slight twist that the main relationship is a sibling one rather than a romantic one, and secondly, a mildly comedic mystery hinging on the main character’s background in forensic pathology and latent desire to be a detective.

Doug and his sister Gail have recently begun sharing an apartment, both hoping to get their lives back on track after drifting a bit after college. Doug takes a job at an ice factory, becomes friends with Carlos, another guy who works there, and the three of them do random hangout-y things for about forty-five minutes of the film. At some point, Doug’s ex-girlfriend Rachel comes back into the picture, not really in a romantic way, but just in a hangout-y kind of way. Until she maybe disappears, finally kicking off the mystery portion of the film.

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(4/5)

Tthere are a few plot devices that are almost guaranteed to make me like a movie. One is time travel. This film doesn’t have that. However, it does have the second one, which is a story that focuses on the power of storytelling itself, or on the use of storytelling to either accomplish a major goal or deal with some emotional trauma, especially if there are some suitably fantastical visuals to go along with it. Thus, Bibliothèque Pascal joins The Fall and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus among a group of films that I enjoyed more than they probably deserve, simply because they tapped all my enjoyment buttons. Though in some ways, Bibliothèque Pascal actually manages to hold the third act together a little better than some of those films do. (I’d include Pan’s Labyrinth in this group as well, except I think it deserves every bit of love I have for it.) Note: There are perhaps some spoilers as I discuss a contrast of styles and an homage near the end of the film, but like most stories about storytelling, the journey is what matters, not the end.

In Bibliothèque Pascal‘s drably realistic framing story, Mona is in a social worker’s office, trying to convince him to restore custody of her young daughter to her. To explain the situation that led to her losing custody, she launches into a highly surreal, colorful, beautiful, and horrific story of her odyssey through the underbelly of Europe (starting in her home country of Hungary) and into a British brothel themed around literary fantasies. This story is what we see for the majority of the film, and it is pretty dazzling and imaginative, everything heightened into Fellini or Almodovar-esque flamboyance, yet with a disturbing edge that hints at the real story underneath.

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(4.5/5)

Sometimes it’s the films you expect the least from that end up impressing you the most – Parade was the last film I added to my LAFF schedule, after going back and forth on it and for the most part deciding that its story of four twenty-somethings sharing an apartment in Tokyo sounded a little on the routine side. It worked out the best for my schedule, though, so I settled into my seat, ready to sit it out and hope I’d find some enjoyment in it. It ended up being easily one of the best films I saw at the festival.

The premise is still routine, sounding more like the set-up for a tired sitcom than a gripping film, but the things writer/director Isao Yukisada does within that setting with the help of a very gifted cast is pretty special. The film starts of very comedic, making the most of snappy dialogue and the actors’ comic timing and easy banter as they tease one roommate for her crush on a TV soap star, and another ponders the possibility that the apartment next door is actually a brothel, and other antics.

But the superficial camaraderie of the apartment begins to break down firstly due to the arrival of a fifth tenant who simply shows up one morning – none of the other residents can account for his presence, but after very little discussion, they decide to let him stay anyway – and secondly because of the increasingly close-to-home series of neighborhood murders that fill up the television airwaves. There’s a fairly severe tonal shift in the film from comedic to very serious, but it’s handled as well or better than almost any other similar tonal shift I’ve ever seen. It happens so gradually and so organically as the film unfolds, as you and the other characters find out more about each person’s inner life and backstory that you don’t really realize it’s happening until you pull out from the film for a second and think “whoa, this shit just got serious.”

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(4/5)

People often tell me that one reason science fiction is tough to do is because it’s so much more expensive than other genres that require fewer special effects, and there’s something to that, I know. But then along come filmmakers like Gareth Edwards with Monsters (and Jamin Winans with Ink and to some degree, Vincenzo Natali with Splice, and many others) and remind us that science fiction doesn’t have to be about huge amounts of CGI or extensive modeling and practical effects, even, but can – and often should – be just as much about people and ideas.

The monsters in Monsters are the result of a crashed space probe carrying alien samples; when the creatures grow to an enormous size and begin destroying cities in northern Mexico, the entire area is quarantined off as the Infected Zone. Our story hones in on two people, a photojournalist trying to document the creatures and their effect on the surrounding areas and his publisher’s daughter, whom he’s been sent to pick up in Mexico and escort safely back to the United States. The film essentially follows these two on their odyssey, which of course meets obstacles at every turn, eventually forcing them to traverse the Infected Zone on foot.

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(4/5)

I find myself endlessly fascinated by underground Iranian film and literature that promise to show what life in Iran (often specifically Tehran) is like without the usually omnipresent government filter. I quite enjoyed No One Knows About Persian Cats (review), another film in this vein, but I thought it wasn’t as strong or cohesive as it could’ve been. Dog Sweat basically has all the things I liked about Persian Cats, and none of the weaknesses.

Dog Sweat follows several interconnected young people trying to navigate the universal perils of youth and relationships with the added pressure that comes with being young in Tehran. Mahsa wants to be a singer, but it’s forbidden for women to be solo singers, so she’s recording secretly with a couple of friends (who may or may not be trustworthy). Two men who are best friends and perhaps more are being pushed by their families into meeting women, even though they find fulfillment in each other. Relatively outspoken feminist Katie winds up having an affair with her cousin’s husband, while her brother Dawood enters a shy romance with her friend Katherine. Finally, a man dealing with the grief of his mother’s death in an auto accident attacks a group of fundamentalists.

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(4.5/5)

To give a plot summary of Brett Haley’s The New Year is almost a disservice to the film, not because it would spoil important plot developments (there’s really nothing to spoil in the film), but because it makes the film sound mundane and uninteresting, and it’s anything but. Sunny Elliot dropped out of college in her junior year two years ago to care for her father in Pensacola, Florida, after he was diagnosed with cancer. During that time she’s also been working at a bowling alley, dating a nice but fairly bland guy she met at the bowling alley, and hanging out with a few other friends. Then Isaac Briggs, a high school friend and rival who left for New York to become a stand-up comic, returns to Pensacola for the Christmas holidays, and Sunny starts thinking about all the things she wanted to do with her life and hasn’t been able to. See what I mean? Nothing particularly new or innovative there.

Yet as I watched, I found myself more and more drawn in and connected to Sunny. Part of this is because except for the relationship specifics, Sunny is me at age 25 – this is one of the best and most genuine portrayals of the quarterlife crisis I’ve seen on screen. It matters not at all that very little actually happens in the film beyond a series of scenes following Sunny and her friends and her dad at the bowling center, the bar, her home, the hospital, etc. The moments of emotional weight are subtle ones, a hug here, a touch of the hand there, a glance or a half-smile. Though everything plays well from a cinematic perspective (nothing feels awkward or uncomfortably improvised the way off-the-cuff indie realism sometimes can), it feels absolutely un-manufactured.

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(4/5)

There may be something to be said for a film that clocks in at over three hours long and upon finishing it, you’re still not sure what to think or say about it. Of course, I don’t know what that something would be, but I’ll give it a go. Café Noir is a behemoth of a film in more ways than one – amorphously structured, comprehensively referential, languidly paced, dazzlingly beautiful, maddeningly detached, obsessively repetitive, crushingly mesmerizing, and most definitely indulgent. It is the first film from Korean film critic Jung Sung-Il, and has drawn comparisons to Jean-Luc Godard both because of Jung’s background as a critic and the style of the film, though I’d clarify that the style is more akin to Contempt‘s anxious disquiet and lush crisis of love than Godard’s breezy debut Breathless.

The story, such as it is, concerns a school teacher consumed with unfulfilled love for the mother of one of his students – at the beginning of the film, she tells him it can’t go on like this, and her husband returns from an otherwise undiscussed absence. He considers going away, but can’t force himself to leave her completely; then he considers killing the husband (a segment which allows for an Oldboy reference, one of several references to Korean cinema of which I’m sure I caught very few). But this whole section, which plays out like a Sirk melodrama filtered through a Godardian or Antonionian cinema of distanciation, largely finishes in at least a narrative sense about 90 minutes into the film, to the point that an entire credit sequence runs. But this is not the end of our teacher’s Goethe/Dostoyevsky-inspired wanderings.

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Various factors have prevented me from getting to most festivals this year once again, but gorram it if I’m not going to take advantage of the ones in Los Angeles. The LA Film Festival is fairly good sized and attracts a good bit of star power for roundtable and conversation sidebars, but tends to be a little less premiere-heavy and buzz-worthy than you might expect. But once I delved into the schedule, I found more than enough to whet my interest – mostly down in the competition and international sections – and I’m pretty excited to dive into long days and sleepless nights next week.

Here’s a selection of what the festival has in store this year. Synopsis text courtesy of LA Film Fest. Anything I’m planning to see will have “Review Coming Soon” listed underneath it. If we’ve already got a review for a film from a different festival, I’ll link to that (many of the documentaries, for example, played at Hot Docs a few weeks ago as well). I’ve left out a few sidebars and hosted screenings; check out the LA Film Fest website at the link above for the full details.

Opening Night Film

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (USA)
Lisa Cholodenko; Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson

Lisa Cholodenko combines classic Hollywood craftsmanship with a generous indie spirit in this irresistible exploration of an unconventional family. Devoted partners, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, parents of two teenage kids, are going through a rough patch in their relationship when big time complications arrive in the form of the kids’ sexy, motorcycle-riding biological father (Mark Ruffalo).

Closing Night Film

DESPICABLE ME (USA)
Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud; Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand, Will Arnett, Kristen Wiig, Danny McBride, Miranda Cosgrove, Jack McBrayer, Mindy Kaling, Jermaine Clement, Julie Andrews

One of the world’s greatest super-villains, Gru – voiced by Steve Carell – is planning the biggest heist in the history of the world: to steal the moon. Armed with his arsenal of shrink rays, freeze rays and battle-ready vehicles, Gru vanquishes all who stand in his way. Until the day he encounters three little girls who look at him and see something that no on else has: a potential Dad. World premiere.

Galas

ANIMAL KINGDOM (Australia)
David Michod; Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Luke Ford, Jacki Weaver, Sullivan Stapleton, James Frecheville

An orphaned 17 year old is taken in by his relatives—a volatile clan of criminals engaged in a trigger-happy war with the Melbourne police—and must learn the rules of the jungle in this intense, high style Australian crime movie.

CYRUS (USA)
Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass ; John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, Catherine Keener, Matt Walsh

In this twisted romantic comedy, a lonely guy meets the woman of his dreams, but she comes with big baggage—her live-in 21-year-old son Cyrus, who likes Mom all to himself. Kurt’s Review + Cinecast

MAHLER ON THE COUCH (Austria/Germany)
Percy Adlon; Barbara Romaner, Johannes Silberschneider, Karl Markovics, Friedrich Mücke, Eva Mattes, Lena Stolze, Nina Berten, Karl Fischer, Mathias Franz Stein, Max Mayer

When the great composer Gustav Mahler discovers his young wife is having an affair, he consults Sigmund Freud and, in scenes both humorous and heartbreaking, pours out the story of their passionate, tumultuous, and doomed marriage.

REVOLUCIÓN (Mexico)
Rodrigo Pla, Diego Luna, Rodrigo Garcia, Gael Garcia Bernal, Gerardo Naranjo, Mariana Chenillo, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Patricia Riggen, Carlos Reygadas

For the centenary celebration of the Mexican revolution, ten cutting edge Mexican directors offer snapshots of their homeland—pointed, poignant, subversive, and bursting with life.

WAITING FOR “SUPERMAN” (USA)
Davis Guggenheim; Geoffrey Canada, Michelle Rhee

Oscar-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim explores and exposes our failing public education system in this moving, hard-hitting—and hopeful—look at our schools and the kids whose futures depend on them.

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A well-appointed man lands in Paris and stops off in the restroom. He notes a security camera in the corner, innocuously capturing his movements. As he steps back from the sink, it seems as though the camera follows him. Paranoia? Or is he merely one of a million people being silently monitored in our increasingly surveillance-ridden society? As he goes on his way, he becomes more and more aware of pervasive cameras everywhere, unescapable. But are they really singling him out? And if so, for what purpose?

This is the premise of the new web series Urban Wolf, which started playing on Crackle.com a few days ago. I was able to see a screening of the entire series recently, and it’s quite worth your time. Though the premise sounds like a lot of other paranoia thrillers, this is done tightly and stylishly, with much higher production values than commonly found in web series. It feels very cinematic, and yet director Laurent Touil-Tartour embraces the particular needs of web video, splitting the series up into fifteen segments, each three to four minutes long and all written with that length in mind.

In an effective artistic choice, there’s essentially no dialogue in the series; rather, everything plays out visually, carried out through a dynamic central performance by Vincent Sze. Touil-Tartour has a nice flair for composition and a good sense of visual storytelling. He also knows how to do good twists and suggest things rather than spell them out, something I really appreciated. I know he’s hoping this series gets him noticed by the film and television industry (getting the series on Sony-owned Crackle.com is probably a nice start), but I’m also glad to see ambitious series like this on the web. Web video is starting to come of age a little, and as much as I love geeky comedy series like The Guild and The Legend of Neil, it’s nice to see some different genres and styles in the mix.

Urban Wolf screened to good reactions and awards at the ITV Festival, AFI Digifest, and ComicCon over the past year. I’ve embedded the first episode of the series under the seats, and the first six episodes are already available on Crackle. They’re releasing one a day, looks like, which means you won’t have to wait long in between each cliff-hanger.

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