Every big city has its (admittedly shrinking) share of repertory houses, but only Toronto has Mamo! to succinctly and knowledgeably outline the programming of said theatres. Here Matt and Matt discuss the 2012 Winter Season at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox for The Substream.
And what delightfully eclectic programming they have his season. I’ll save the surprises for those who watch the video below.
Elizabeth Olsen turned a lot of heads in last years Sundance hit, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and she looks ready to take Sundance again this year with a single-take, single location horror film (from the directors of Open Water, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau) called Silent House (Not to be confused with Dream House or Silent Hill). The trailer is marvelously edited with its use of freeze-frame shots evoking crime scene photography, cuts to black, and a well realized ramping up of claustrophobic tension. Give it some points for working Arvo Pärt’s haunting and sparse “Spiegel im Spiegel” into the mix as an ironical musical background – even if they kind of waste its power by chopping it up.
I am certainly damn curious to see how good this film is, and thank goodness it is not a found footage horror movie.
Full trailer is tucked under the seat.
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Nobody is more surprised than myself for putting an Oliver Stone movie in here. However, this is a great image that captures a lot of the tone and mystery of his four hour film opus that ‘prints the legend’ on John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
[With Canada's Top 10 screening in a few major cities in Canada in the coming weeks, the time is ripe to re-visit some of the titles we've seen throughout the last year and Jason Eisener's expansion of the much loved fake trailer is a heck of a great selection. In addition to this review, we also have Matt Brown's review and Colleen's 3 x 5.]
Welcome to Scumtown. The graffiti runs riotous along the buildings and storefronts, and the crime even moreso. Living up to its title, it features Rutger Hauer riding the rails into town as the eponymous Hobo looking for stray cigarettes and some spare change to buy a lawnmower to make his way as a landscaping entrepreneur. The irony being that there is no grass to be seen in town. After witnessing a wanton act of violence, more a brutally bloody carnival side-show, by the local crimeboss his two identically dressed sons, he instead invests nickels and dimes on a pump-action Remington. The hobo goes to war against drug-dealers, pedophiles, dirty cops and a full assortment of colourful psychotics in the name of making Abby, a young hooker with the heart of gold, undergo a career change from prostitute to school teacher. Dartmouth, Nova Scotia was never particularly high on any tourists list of destinations, Jason Eisener’s nightmare vision of the city as an endless concrete gutter teeming with violent freaks and shuffling terrorized victims is unlikely to drum up future visitors. The brightest flowers the film can ever summon up (as a symbol of hope?) are a few rotting dandilions. Yellow weeds are as bright as it gets in this town.
Hobo with a Shotgun feels like a lost and ultraviolent product of the Canadian Tax Shelter films , the cycle of delightfully demented horror films from the 1970s and 1980s that resulted from an excess of government cash put in to stimulate a flailing Canadian movie industry. In fact, the film is indeed set somewhere in the early 1980s judging by the look of the currency being occasionally tossed around as well as a boxy gull wing car and a few choice boom boxes. While the film may have started its life as faux trailer entry in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, its graduation to a full-length feature easily eclipses Rodriguez’s own trailer-turned-movie, Machete. It draws its DNA not from the naughty drive-in and inner-city trash-palace fair of the 60s and 70s, but the ultraviolence of George Miller’s Mad Max films as well as the splatstick of Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead cycle, although if your ears are peeled at the beginning of the film you might just hear echoes of the Cannibal Holocaust theme.
OK, maybe a bit risque (although, remember that Human Centipede 2 poster?) and likely not appearing in a lit lobby case at the multiplex, but it is attention grabbing C’est Non?
Paz de la Huerta certainly isn’t shy with her body, considering her turns in Enter the Void and her introduction in Martin Scorcese’s Boardwalk Empire pilot (sex with Steve Buscemi). She is also playing a porn star in the upcoming Linda Lovelace biopic.
[With Canada's Top 10 screening in a few major cities in Canada this week, it is perhaps time to revisit a film we love to boost in these parts. You can find Bob Turnbull's (who considers the film the best one of 2011) TIFF review here; also, you can find Bob, Mike and My own lengthy 'conversational' post about the film here.]
In an annual New Years tradition of merriment and bonding, the patriarch of a decidedly secular family asks for God’s blessing in the coming year. It is a contradictory detail such as this – a combination the pragmatic and the spiritual – in which Café De Flore asks (in a round about way) what is probably the most difficult question put to a person, at least someone in privileged first-world society: “Are you happy?”
The latest film from Québécois wunderkind Jean Marc-Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y.) is a film of moments – intense emotional moments – offered up in a loose, free-wheeling montage (requiring the aid of voice-over) before settling into something deeper. The film further mines two of the more interesting themes that have been slowly emerging in my world-cinema filmgoing this year: The first pertains to raising children, and how connected our choices and beliefs (and anxieties) are to how the kids eventually turn out. I have seen this tackled in a variety of 2011 films ranging from guilt (We Need to Talk About Kevin) to paranoia (Take Shelter, Kotoko) to self-reflection (Tree of Life.) The second is the relation of the universe (or spiritual) to the individuals’ state of mind (Melancholia, Another Earth, and yes, again, Tree of Life.) Taking a dual narrative approach, Café De Flore divides its attention between a pair of story-lines which are connected at first glance only by the titular coffee-house tune (which is used here in many different musical forms) but other connective images and ideas slowly emerge before climatically aligning both timelines in a way that is both daring and profoundly satisfying.
Character actor, chameleon, often playing villains and grotesques (but the occasional hero as well), it is no coincidence that I chose the image from Ridley Scott’s detestable Silence of the Lambs sequel, Hannibal for the purposes of illustration of Mr. Gary Oldman. Here is an actor who has played Ludwig van Beethoven, Lee Harvey Oswald, Pontius Pilate and Sid Vicious in biopics, and in pure fiction, the gamut from Dracula to Drexl Spivey (the Pimp) to Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg (Space Dictator), to Officer Stansfield (The cocaine snorting corrupt cop in The Professional) to Shelly Runyon (the ugliest Republican senator ever put on screen), Milton Glenn (evil warden of Alcatraz), Sirius Black (The Prisoner of Azkaban), Rosencrantz (or was is Guildenstern?) and Lt. Jim Gordon (in the most recent incarnation of Batman universe.) Of course there are many more performances, because Oldman never seems to stop working in either Hollywood, Indie, or foreign productions (underrated Spanish thriller: The Back Woods.) He even directed one of the more nihilistic dramas out there, Nil By Mouth. Of course, all of these performances add up to his recent highly nuanced, but very restrained performance of career spook, George Smiley, in Thomas Alfredson’s recent incarnation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Put Smiley in a room with the The Driver, and you just know that Oldman likes his Gosling served cold and raw.
Personally, I’m partial to his performance in The Contender which is so lizard-like and vile it is the black cherry on the top of his career. But even in a few quite mediocre films (Lost in Space), outright terrible (Red Riding Hood) or even the truly WTF-how-did-this-get-made (Tiptoes), Oldman is interesting, even excellent amongst the detritus of bad cinema.
My top 5 is tucked under the seat.
Happy New Year from Row Three and a big hearty welcome to the end of times and bad blockbuster CGI (as per the Aztecs and Mr. Emmerich, respectively), 2012!
Just a curious poll to start this year (reply in the comment section). What was the last film you watched in 2011?
This not too taxing poll idea comes about via one of my Toronto movie friends. Sasha James, aka FinalGirlProject, has had the tradition of watching Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige as the last film of the year, every year since its release date. Since that film is one of the best of the previous decade (and also about stealing ideas), I decided to take up this tradition myself, hence the above image.
Instead of issuing birth control pills or contraceptives, one needs only to show Lynne Ramsay’s superb new film to high school classes as a deterrent to early pregnancy. For the eponymous child is a distillation of the collective fears and anxieties of the challenges of new parents: How to balance unconditional love with discipline and a healthy morality? These big questions are the unspoken crux of the relationship between two smart, educated parents that are born with the little boy from hell. The film itself seems to reside in hades, I suppose Tilda Swinton’s headspace after giving birth, and is in equal measure, soaked tomato juice, ink and bodily fluids and bathed in harsh red filters. There hasn’t been this much red in a film in some time and there is enough compulsive scrubbing on display to make Lady MacBeth blush.
Oh. My. Gosh!
Hobbits?
Already forgotten.
Crank up the volume
(BRAAAAAAAAHHHHMMM!)
The Prometheus trailer is tucked under the seat and well worth a click-thru.
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