What we’ve been reading – July 8th:
Neil LaButes savage satire of how upper class professionals relate to one another never pulls its punches. It is a vile, bleak look at the human condition. Three boys, three girls (I’d use the words men and women, but that would be wrong here) looking for something, but getting lost and hurt in their own selfish and confused pursuits.
Ironically, the one character that seems to know what he wants and what he is, is actually the most creepy. Jason Patric is often known for more pretty-boy roles from Speed 2 to Narc, but here he inverts his carved good looks into a something borderline evil. He is cruel to others, and takes pleasure in the cruelty. A doctor of some sort (god forbid a gynecologist) one scene, early in the film, has him casually tossing the plastic model of an infant from a maternity model in his office while talking on the phone. The scene ends with him football-punting the child offscreen. But that little nugget of insight pales in comparison to the scene below where Patric regales the story of his best sexual encounter to his ‘buddies’ (Aaron Eckhart and Ben Stiller) while in the sauna. Silence follows. AWK-WARD!!! This is only one of many great vignettes (and I’ve left out the real punchline in the locker room after Patric’s monologue) in Your Friends & Neighbors, a film that was overshadowed in the Rated-R adult arthouse zone by Todd Solondz more visually graphic Happiness which was release in the same month. Neil Labute, lately, has been making more straight up studio pictures like Lakeview Terrace, The Wickerman remake (if that can be called ‘straight-up’ with Nic Cage’s batty performance) and Nurse Betty, but his one-two punch of yuppie awfulness directed from his own stage plays (In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors remains his most vital film work.
What we’ve been reading – July 6th through July 7th:
All the pretty new posters for Quentin Tarantino's latest. Magnificent.
Grady Hendrix gives the lowdown that folks in China like their films as big, dumb and homegrown as the good Ol' US of A.
A huge list of celebrities you can follow on Twitter. There are some worth following here.
What we’ve been reading – July 5th through July 6th:
The Toronto Star film Critic picks old and new Road Trips worth taking. One Week? Seriously?
Scientific American examines the science fiction premise behind Duncan Jones' MOON.
A fairly incoherent trailer for what looks like an otherwise pretty decent, intense zombie movie.
Alrrrrrrrrrrright. I don’t watch late night TV and I have no love or hate for Conan O’brien but when a good friend of mine told me I had to see Bruno’s appearance on “The Tonight Show”, I had to check it out. For some, this will be old news but I doubt everyone’s seen this. Or maybe they have and I’m just way behind the times. Either way, it’s pretty darn funny.
The video is embedded below but only for our American friends. Everyone else, you can check out the video here.
Bruno opens on July 10th.
Here is the launch of another niche film festival in Toronto: The Shinsedai Film Festival. Chris MaGee, a local blogger who runs the JfilmPowWow, a site dedicated to Japanese Cinema of all stripes, types and genres, has teamed up with Midnight Eye Co-Founder Jasper Sharp to showcase Indie Japanese films for a few days in the City in August.
Often in popular culture, Japanese cinema is represented by Samurai films, Large Monsters stomping Tokyo or thoroughly outlandish horror and splatter films, it looks like The Shinsedai Festival will be looking more at human beings and intimate dramas from the islands far east.
Yuya Ishii’s surreal father/ daughter comedy Girl Sparks, Touru Hano’s moody and sexy indie horror film Thunderfish (Raigyo), a retrospective of the works of Kyoto-based video artist and composer Takagi Masakatsu are just a few of the highlights which can be found in the festivals full line up.
Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Oshima, Kitano – around the world these names immediately bring to mind the best that Japanese cinema has to offer, but now that we’re at the beginning of a new century many film fans are wondering who the next generation of great filmmakers from Japan will be. Toronto’s first Shinsedai Cinema Festival tries to answer that question by bringing some of the best work by independent Japanese filmmakers to Toronto, many for the very first time.
Shinsedai – Japanese term meaning “new generation”
Curated by Jasper Sharp, author, film historian, and co-founder of Midnight Eye (http://www.midnighteye.com/), the premiere resource for new Japanese cinema online and Chris MaGee, the founder and editor of Toronto’s own J-Film Pow-Wow (http://www.jfilmpowwow.blogspot.com/), the Shinsedai Cinema Festival will celebrate the wide range of talent coming out of Japan today. For three days between August 21st and 23rd the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre will be host to everything from insightful dramas, quirky comedies, hard-hitting documentaries, experimental shorts, and beyond. The Shinsedai Cinema Festival will have something for everyone this summer.
Review aggregators. Love them or hate them, they seem to be sticking around for the long run. Personally, I’m not a big fan of these sites because they take away from the relationship one builds with critics and around these parts, the argument has often been made that the interesting films are those that sit in the middle range of the critical pact but what do critics think of these sites?
For an upcoming episode of CBC’s Spark, Nora Young spoke with New York Magazine film critic David Edelstein. The two discussed the benefits of film aggregation sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes but for the most part, the conversation turned to Edelstein sharing some thoughts on the disconnect that these types of sites cause between critics and film fans and though he doesn’t say it in so many words, I found myself wondering if these sites could have some effect on the slow and painful death of film criticism as we’ve known it to this point. It’s a double edge sword since it could also be argued that the sites allow individuals to read a cross section of criticism they may not usually even consider but who actually goes through and reads the full reviews based on the 2 sentence snippets provided? I know that for the most part, I don’t. I prefer to go directly to the source and read critics who I’ve come to know based on their writings/ravings/rants.
It’s a great interview which you can listen to the entire thing online at Spark.
Thanks to Dale for the heads up.
Once a week the folks at Atom send me a newsletter featuring some of the best short videos hosted on their site. They’re usually good for a laugh or two but with limited time, it’s hard to make the effort to check them all out. Want to catch the eye of a busy individual? Title your short Oprah Is Dead.
This five minute video is pretty darn funny and pokes fun at almost everything Oprah related but the coup has to be the closing shot of Oprah riding a bomb which is hurdling down to earth; a moment caught in black and white. I’m sure you can make out the reference. If that doesn’t do it for you, how about Oprah as a zombie? Oh yeah, it’s all in here.
It has some great moments, particularly if you’re familiar with any of the mini-scandals (James Frey anyone?) not to mention that the production value is much better than most of the stuff on You Tube.
Without further ado, I share with you Team Tiger Awesome’s Oprah is Dead:
Film is slowly dying. I don’t mean that the industry is dying (though there are arguments both in support and refuting that fact) I mean that the screening of film seems to be a dying thing. I must admit that my eye can often not discern the difference between film and digital projection but after a very recent encounter with screenings of the original Star Wars trilogy on the big screen (a huge achievement for the organizers of SPARK 2009 considering that the prints were dug up from the Lucasfilm vaults; we can all imagine what a feat that was. And yes, it was awesome. More awesome than you can even imagine), I must admit I have a new appreciation for the ever elusive film print. It seems that the festival organizers at Berlinale feel the same way.
It was recently announced that the festival will feature a special showcase titled “70mm — Bigger Than Life!” featuring, as you may be able to guess from the title, a line-up of 70mm films. The 22 film line-up is made up of some classics and a wide range of little known (and seen) films, many hailing from the old U.S.S.R.. The line-up includes Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey. What I wouldn’t give to see Kubrick’s masterpiece in 70mm.
If you’re not attending the festival fear not, there may be an opportunity to see the showcase. Curator Rainer Rother has already fielded calls of interest from institutions looking to screen the retrospective. I wonder if there’s a place in Vancouver even capable of screening 70mm film…
For the most part, the major players have already listed their top tens of 2008 but a few, including ourselves, are waiting a little longer to post theirs (look for ours next week). Though some lists carry more weight than others, one list that should be taken into consideration is Cahiers du cinéma‘s. Arguably one of the best film criticism magazines out there, they’re often ahead of the curve when it comes to championing misunderstood and/or little seen films and their list of best films of the year gave me a little pause, if only because it featured a few surprise titles.
Though I’d been avoiding it due to the poor critical reception, I may have to break down and finally see their number one film.
Please note that in a few instances, I’ve translated the titles:
1. Redacted – Brian De Palma
2. Colossal Youth – Pedro Costa
3. Cloverfield – Mat Reeves
4.
5. Two Lovers – James Gray
6. Waltz with Bashir – Ari Folman
7. Dernier maquis – Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche
8. Hunger – Steeve McQueen
9. A Short Film About the Indio Nacional – Raya Martin
10. On War – Bertrand Bonello
The magazine also listed their top directors of the year. Again, some titles have been translated:
1. The Silence of Lorna – Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne
2. No Country for Old Men – Joel & Ethan Coen
3. Waltz with Bashir- Ari Folman
4. A Christmas Tale – Arnaud Desplechin
5. There Will Be Blood – Paul Thomas Anderson
6. Two Lovers – James Gray
7. Vicky Christina Barcelona – Woody Allen
8. Hunger – Steeve McQueen
9. La Vie moderne – Raymond Depardon
10. The Class – Laurent Cantet
It hasn’t come up too often around these parts but in the past I’ve had discussions with people about product placement in films. It’s funny because the films that don’t need any more money are the ones that “sell out” to product placement while the small, independent films who could probably use the extra bucks stick to their artistic integrity guns and wave Coke and Pepsi away. But leave it to My Favourite French Dude to come along and create and entirely new approach to advertising in films.
Luc Besson and advertising executive Christophe Lambert have launched a production company called “Blue” which will focus on creating “Advertainment.” The company will “produce clips, films, TV series and talk shows co-produced and financed by consumer brands.” Yes folks, in the future we may get entire films funded by brands. Hope you don’t hate that Coke commercial because the movie is probably around the corner!
On the one hand I think this is sad and a move into an even more commercialized world (I didn’t think it was possible but there it is. The “Jennifer Government” type of future seems that much closer) and on the other, I can’t help but think that this could be a good thing as well. I can think of a handful of shorts (Wong Kar Wai’s Phillips commercial “There’s Only One Sun“, Spike Jonze’s Adidas ad, and the BMW shorts) which go beyond advertising and into “art.” I’m hopeful that Blue will provide more of the same.
After the sprawling Cinecast going through the variety of Toronto International Film Festival films we took in, there are several folks that are probably TIFF’ed out. And that is without even attending the festival. Indulge us a little in getting the fading lights and flickering images out of our skulls with a big round-up of titles we saw. Rowthree hit the ground running for major festival coverage (Expect more from VIFF and Toronto After Dark) and we hope there is at least a little insight as to what smaller great films are out there on the horizon. As a closer for the gargantuan Toronto International Film Festival, John Allison, Mike Rot and myself compiled everything we took in and dropped a sentence or two of text along with a loosey-goosey rating out of 5. You can get an idea of what appealed to us.
First off, it was a ‘discovery’ type of film festival this year. While there were sprawling entries from Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh and even Kevin Smith, there were some significant absences, in particular John Hillcoat’s The Road, Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling, and Gus Van Sant’s Milk were surprisingly not programmed, and I was mildly surprised that Defiance, Tropa de Elite, Choke and the compilation film Tokyo! were missing as well. Even the Midnight Madness section was light on Asian side with no films from Johnnie To, Takashi Miike or Ryuhei Kitamura.
But there was a lot of known quantities at the festival including Darren Aronofsky, Richard Linklater, The Coen Brothers, Olivier Assayas and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. These directors turned in much quieter films than they usually do, and this approach seemed to be quite successful.
Outside of the mondo film screenings and scrambling for time on the laptop to review them, it was a pleasure to get together with the Toronto bloggers (The Duke of York pub should be an annual tradition, being as successful as it was), various Film Festival Programmers from around the world, and find the occasional party between screenings offering free beer (Thanks Colin and the MM crew!), even one of the ladies from the local Pillowfight League (who can Haiku as good as Colleeny).
Capsule Reviews (ranked Best 4 to 5 out of 5, Rest 2 to 4 out of 5, and Worst 0 to 2 out of 5) are all tucked under the seat.
