Film Freak Central

School for Scoundrels (2006) + The Guardian (2006)

SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS
ZERO STARS/****
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Heder, Jacinda Barrett, Luis Guzman
screenplay by Todd Phillips & Scot Armstrong
directed by Todd Phillips

THE GUARDIAN
*½/****
starring Kevin Costner, Ashton Kutcher, Neal McDonough, Melissa Sagemiller
screenplay by Ron L. Brinkerhoff
directed by Andrew Davis

by Walter Chaw What the woefully, dreadfully, desperately unfunny School of Scoundrels has going for it is the casting of fetching Jacinda Barrett as the leading lady; what it squanders is the opportunity to present anything resembling intelligence or wit in favour of achingly uninsightful jabs at the gender rift and the presentation of idiot Jon Heder in exhibit, oh, about 'E' or 'F' by now, of how he has no known function. Billy Bob Thornton continues his blue W.C. Fields bit (next up, Mr. Woodcock), here as "Dr. P," the head of the titular finishing school that specializes in molding the losers and milquetoasts of the world into sunglasses-wearing assholes fond of comparing themselves to lions. His prize student is meter maid Roger (Heder), who, because the script demands it, transforms himself from a doofus into a doofus in a suit, finally mustering up the courage to ask out neighbour Amanda (Barrett). Inexplicably, she has all along been pining for this hermetic, feminized, saccharine troll--after all, what beautiful, smart, funny woman doesn't want to be dating someone with the looks of Napoleon Dynamite and the personality of a serial-killing child molester? Sarah Silverman is wasted (though given her track record, it could very well be that there's nothing left to waste) as Amanda's evil roommate, written with snarky commentary you'd think a perfect fit for her.

Smokey and the Bandit (1977) [Special Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image B Sound B+ (DD)/A (DTS) Extras B
starring Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, Jackie Gleason
screenplay by James Lee Barrett and Charles Shyer & Alan Mandel
directed by Hal Needham

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover One thing is inescapably true: Smokey and the Bandit was not aimed at people like me. Only the most casual, least demanding filmgoer need apply to this good-ol'-boy version of Vanishing Point--people with as much beer in them as possible, ready to laugh at cheap jokes and root for a speed demon. They are welcome to the movie, but the fact remains that anyone with even a scintilla of interest in film as art is pretty much left out in the cold. As I can hear a mountain of e-mail forming denouncing me for my perceived elitism, let me be perfectly clear: anyone in the market for Burt Reynolds driving fast and making Jackie Gleason apoplectic will find this the sort of thing that they like.

The Science of Sleep (2006) + Jet Li's Fearless (2006)

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP
*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alain Chabat, Miou-Miou
written and directed by Michel Gondry

Fearless
**/****
starring Jet Li, Nakamura Shidou, Sun Li, Dong Yong
screenplay by Chris Chow, Christine To
directed by Ronny Yu

by Walter Chaw A cacophony of cascading whimsy, Michel Gondry's exercise in Freudian bric-a-brac The Science of Sleep plays like a movie based on a thrift store specializing in Harlequin novels--French Harlequin novels. It adheres to the music-video director's maxim of maximum images per second, and it casts Gael García Bernal as Stéphane, a useless lug endlessly working on a calendar of calamitous events and pining after his across-hall neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom he is too smitten to confess that his mother is her landlord. His dreams take the form of a one-man variety show, while Gondry revels in scenes where he inflates his hero's hands and has him ride an animated patchwork horse. But The Science of Sleep is more exhausting than illuminating--more a loud masturbation than any kind of intercourse with the audience. The difference between the Gondry of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Gondry of The Science of Sleep, it seems obvious to say, is the difference between a film scripted by Charlie Kaufman and one not, though it's more complicated than that in that the Kaufman of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an artist who finally struck a balance between affectation and a much finer connective tissue. Gondry is still just engaged in the twist.

Three... Extremes (2005) + Hellbent (2005) - DVDs

THREE... EXTREMES
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C+
DUMPLINGS-The Hong Kong Extreme: starring Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling
screenplay by Lilian Lee
directed by Fruit Chan
CUT-The Korean Extreme: starring Lee Byung-Hun, Lim Won-Hee
written and directed by Park Chanwook
BOX-The Japan Extreme: starring Kyoko Hasegawa,Atsuro Watabe
screenplay by Haruko Fukushima
directed by Takashi Miike

HELLBENT
***½/**** Image C- Sound B+ Extras C
starring Dylan Fergus, Bryan Kirkwood, Hank Harris, Andrew Levitas
written and directed by Paul Etheredge-Ouzts

by Walter Chaw My favourite working cinematographer is Harris Savides. His collaborations with Gus Van Sant and his contribution to Jonathan Glazer's Birth demonstrate to me an agility with aspect ratio and rhythm that's particularly pleasing to my own ways of seeing. A close second, though, is Christopher Doyle, the great Australian cinematographer who teams almost exclusively with Asian directors (most notably on the bulk of Wong Kar Wai's visually arresting filmography, Zhang Yimou's Hero, and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe)--his stuff indicative of a kind of lyrical, ritualistic devouring that matches the best of the Asian sensibility in pace and narrative. Doyle joins an elite crowd (Greg Toland, James Wong Howe, Raoul Coutard, Sven Nykvist, Vilmos Zsigmond, Conrad Hall, and a select few others) of cinematographers worthy of the auteur label: a certain mood, a certain style, haunts every frame on which he works with a distinct, unmistakable bouquet. He's an interesting choice, then, as the only constant of an anthology film, Three... Extremes, a sequel in structure to an Asian portmanteau from a couple years back, featuring, again, three different frontline Asian directors, each enlisted to provide a horror-based short film.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) [Widescreen] - DVD

½*/**** Image N/A Sound A Extras C+
starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellen, Famke Janssen
screenplay by Simon Kinberg & Zak Penn
directed by Brett Ratner

by Walter Chaw As an example of what can happen when a homophobic, misogynistic, misanthropic moron wildly overcompensates in a franchise that had as its primary claim to eternity that it was sensitive to the plight of homosexuals, Brett Ratner's painfully queer X-Men: The Last Stand (hereafter "X3") manages to present its series of melodramatic vignettes in such a way as to completely negate any sense of peril, individuality, or struggle for the characters. Without a sense of weight, the references in the piece to genocide and The Holocaust ("Ink shall never again touch my skin!" says Ian McKellen's Magneto) become pure, laggard exploitation in the service of a sub-par superhero action film that shows its true colours time and again in its hatred of women ("Hell hath no fury!") and loathing of female sexuality, as well as in its flat-eyed regard of children trying to hasp off their wings while their fathers attempt to break down the bathroom door. It's Michael Bay's Schindler's List: a reptilian populist, at ease with the slick and facile, has been asked to take the reins of a project that, for whatever its crimes of pacing and exposition, had in its Bryan Singer-helmed episodes the good sense not to kick over ant piles it wasn't prepared to contain.

TIFF '06: Black Book

Zwartboek
**/****
starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn
screenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The word on Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (Zwartboek) around the TIFF was that it's "Showgirls meets Schindler's List," which is a cute bit of shorthand but decidedly misleading, not that I can begin to imagine what that movie would be like. All it really means is that we're never going to let Verhoeven live Showgirls down, so who can blame him for going back to Holland, where he's still an object of veneration? Alas, you can take Verhoeven out of Hollywood but you can't take Hollywood out of Verhoeven; Black Book is not so much a return to form--by which I mean a throwback to his subversive early work--as it is a supplement to his American output, the kind of Oscar-baiting wartime saga you just know he'd been aching to make with studio resources but only had the guts to execute in his native tongue. (In the press notes for the film, Verhoeven confesses that he stuck with genre in the U.S. because it better disguised his loose grasp of the English language.) The admittedly well-paced picture follows one Dutch Jewish woman's transformation from Anne Frank into Mata Hari as Rachel-cum-Ellis (Carice van Houten, for whom big things lie ahead) takes a Gestapo general (Jeroen Krabbé doppelgänger Sebastian Koch) for a lover as well as a job at his office, hoping it will all lead to the release of some fellow resistance fighters. Intended as a corrective of sorts to the implicitly anti-Semitic Soldier of Orange, Black Book is no less a sticky wicket in that it distils espionage tropes from the Nazi atrocities; when Rachel's entire family is gunned down on a barge along with other Jewish fugitives, it's a mere catalyst, lacking much in the way of sincerity or historical resonance. With its increasingly glib machinations (at least one late-film contrivance would embarrass the writers of "Three's Company"), the screenplay by Verhoeven and long-time collaborator Gerard Soeteman could, in fact, have just as easily served as the template for a Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin turkey. Verhoeven the Auteur dutifully mimics Hitchcock here and there (and even Hitchcock heir Brian De Palma in a flagrant Carrie homage), though he's most evident in van Houten's multiple disrobings--which, despite being at odds with Black Book's commercial aspirations, give the film its strongest whiff of artistic integrity by shutting the door to the middlebrow-friendly PG-13 rating. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

All the King's Men (2006)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini
screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren
directed by Steven Zaillian

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ask most wags and they'll tell you that Sean Penn is the best actor of his generation; for a performance or two (consider that in Dead Man Walking, he goes the distance without the use of his hands), I'd be inclined to agree, but look at the way writer-director Steven Zaillian and, especially, composer James Horner, treat Penn in the long-delayed All the King's Men--and marvel at how little they think of their leading man. The second adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a populist-leaning stump-thumper modeled after Huey Long, the film garnered attention first for its sterling cast and Tiffany pedigree, then for its sudden disappearance from last year's Oscar slate, only to appear now, without fanfare (save a gala screening at last week's TIFF), in the middle of what's traditionally a dumping ground for dead weight. And every time Penn delivers an allegedly rousing speech to a gaggle of hicks, proposing to nail the entrenched fat cats in the Big Easy's beleaguered senate to a rail, Horner's tiresome score endeavours to drown him out in a flood of sugared plastic emotion. Still, at least this sloppy brass orgy has a pulse, as opposed to Horner's "mournful theme," i.e., the one that accompanies the retarded voiceover narration of journalist Jack Burden (Jude Law), which sounds a lot like the piano exit music from the old "Incredible Hulk" TV show. If you believe your actors are capable of conveying emotion and nuance, you don't shoot them in sexy angles and luxury car commercial colour schemes while trying to drown them out in spasmodic torrents of empty, manipulative noise.

TIFF '06: Everything's Gone Green

*/****
starring Paulo Costanzo, Steph Song, JR Bourne, Gordon Michael Woovett
screenplay by Douglas Coupland
directed by Paul Fox

by Bill Chambers After popularizing the term "Generation X" with the title of his debut novel, Douglas Coupland staked a claim in the chick-lit-for-guys genre, his publishers no doubt hoping that zeitgeist lightning would strike twice. If anything, Everything's Gone Green, Coupland's first foray into screenwriting, makes him seem like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, still courting the teenage and twentysomething idealists because even though he gets older, they stay the same receptive age. Here we learn that Vancouver has sold out to its Hollywood North image, that the slow metabolism of the cubicle world discourages office drones from trying to climb the corporate ladder, and that money is poison--messages, all, that are at best disingenuous and at worst unseemly coming from a famous author now plying his trade in the film industry. The movie doesn't empathize with slackers--who'll be drawn to it like moths to a flame--so much as it offers them the seductive illusion of empathy, televangelist-style. (There's a pot subplot for good measure.) Leads Paulo Costanzo (late of TV's "Joey") and Steph Song are charming enough, but they're treading water; at the very least, Coupland would need the luxury of prose to vindicate this material. PROGRAMME: Canada First!

TIFF '06: Fay Grim

**/****
starring Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, James Urbaniak, Saffron Burrows
written and directed by Hal Hartley

by Bill Chambers Those hoping this unexpected sequel to the terrific Henry Fool will be a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. I think the problem is not that Parker Posey can't carry a picture (Posey's more of a movie star than she is a character actor, after all, so inflexible is her neurotic persona), but that her Fay Grim can't carry a picture. In that sense, Fay Grim is a little bit like a highbrow Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, with virtually everyone from Henry Fool returning to lend satellite support to a spastic cipher who was at best a beard for the subsumed homoeroticism at that film's epicentre. Reinventing Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan, limited to a powerhouse cameo) as an international man of mystery (thereby re-inflating his punctured ego, which maddeningly annuls Henry Fool), the movie jets single-mother Fay all over the globe in search of her estranged husband, whose once-derided memoir--sought after by the publishing world now that Henry has become a fugitive, natch--might actually be an encrypted document that poses a threat to National Security. Timely where the first film was timeless (THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's Michael Rechtshaffen succinctly called it "a seriocomic Syriana"), Fay Grim is a constant, fatiguing toggle between obnoxious quirk and Al-Jazeera. Put simply, everybody's trying too hard--or should that be not hard enough? PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

TIFF '06: The Last Winter

***/****
starring Ron Perlman, James Le Gros, Connie Britton, Zachary Gilford
screenplay by Larry Fessenden & Robert Leaver
directed by Larry Fessenden

by Bill Chambers Larry Fessenden has always been an artist and a consummate professional, but there's a newfound commercial glaze to The Last Winter--however ironic its use of widescreen--that makes one feel somehow less inclined to coddle it. An ambiguous statement, I know; I guess what I'm saying is that if I have any reservations about the piece (and I had fewer about Wendigo and Habit), I don't really fear seeming anti-intellectual in voicing them. Fessenden's own private The Thing, The Last Winter unfurls at an Alaskan outpost, where the blustery Pollack (Ron Perlman, delivering another perfectly-metered performance) has docked hoping to kick-start stalled plans to drill for oil. He's pitted against environmental scientist Hoffman (James Le Gros), with whom his former girlfriend, Abby (the lovely Connie Britton), has fallen into bed, giving Fessenden ample opportunity to exploit the alpha-male subtext of many a red state/blue state conflict. In fact, the Bush/Gore allegory is so compelling in and of itself that, while I wouldn't begrudge the picture its horror elements (Fessenden is the genre fan's salvation, after all), with supernatural as opposed to psychological forces taking out the team, The Last Winter builds to an apocalypse whose nihilism suggests equivocation. Too, the picture is kind of perched, teeter-totter-like, on a shocking Blair Witch set-piece, never to reach its lofty heights again. Still and all, an elegiac piece of filmmaking that transcends cheap thrills in each of its onscreen casualties; I'd love to see Fessenden try his hand at a war movie. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

Eaten Alive (1977) [Special Edition] - DVD

a.k.a.  Death Trap, Legend of the Bayou, Murder on the Bayou, Starlight Slaughter, Horror Hotel, Horror Hotel Massacre
**½/**** Image C+* Sound B Extras B+
starring Neville Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Marilyn Burns
screenplay by Alvin L. Fast, Kim Henkel and Mardi Rustam
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Alex Jackson The disparity between the reputation of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and that of everything he made thereafter had been eating away at me ever since I polished off his 1977 follow-up, Eaten Alive. You see, Eaten Alive seemed to me to be very much the same movie as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, only instead of a maniac with a chainsaw and a sledgehammer, it had a maniac with a sickle and a man-eating crocodile. Why exactly is it that critics and audiences alike consider The Texas Chain Saw Massacre canonical, a masterpiece of the genre, while Eaten Alive floundered in relative obscurity until being referenced in a Quentin Tarantino film?

Hollywoodland (2006); The Black Dahlia (2006); Factotum (2006)

HOLLYWOODLAND
*/****
starring Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Ben Affleck, Bob Hoskins
screenplay by Paul Bernbaum
directed by Allen Coulter

THE BLACK DAHLIA
**½/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank
screenplay by Josh Friedman, based on the novel by James Ellroy
directed by Brian De Palma

FACTOTUM
**½/****
starring Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei, Didier Flamand
screenplay by Bent Hamer and Jim Stark, based on the novel by Charles Bukowski
directed by Bent Hamer

by Walter Chaw Deadening, dull, sepia-drenched faux-noir period hokum of a suddenly popular stripe, Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland casts lantern-jawed, wooden-countenanced Ben Affleck as his way-back literal and metaphorical doppelgänger George Reeves. An apparent suicide that has fostered a small measure of conspiracy theories, Reeves, television's original Superman, is shot in the head, naked in bed, on a summer night in 1959, briefly throwing a generation of kids into minor existential turmoil. But casting Reeves's death into suspicion is a far stickier wicket: Even with the introduction of a woefully-underwritten fictional gumshoe (Adrien Brody) with his own crew-cut, wayward boy, and ice queen ex (Molly Parker) to match, the suggestion that someone in the portly statue's coterie (including his wife-of-a-studio-bigwig-mistress, played by the ageless Diane Lane) might have had a motive for slaying him is given a quick spin and then stabled without a whimper. What's left is the typical and unsurprising Hollywood fable of the high price of fame and the dreadful cost of its pursuit. The central irony that drives Hollywoodland is that, in its desperate attempt to make a mystery of Reeves's death, the only thing it succeeds in doing is cataloguing the myriad reasons Reeves had to justifiably cap himself.

The TIFFing Point

originally published September 14, 2006
Two more days until I turn back into a pumpkin (or something like that), probably for the good of not only my health, but also that of FILM FREAK CENTRAL. Anyway, some more stopgap coverage for you...

FAY GRIM (d. Hal Hartley)
As far as this unlikely sequel to the brilliant Henry Fool is concerned, those hoping for a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. The movie feels like it came out of Hartley sideways (or, conversely, all too painlessly), and it never really catches fire until Thomas Jay Ryan makes his long-delayed cameo as Henry Fool. By then, it's too little too late. **/****

The Protector (2005) + The Covenant (2006)

Tom yum goong
***/****
starring Tony Jaa, Petchtai Wongkamlao, Bongkoj Khongmalai, Xing Jing
screenplay by Kongdej Jaturanrasamee & Napalee & Piyaros Thongdee and Joe Wannapin
directed by Prachya Pinkaew

THE COVENANT
½*/****
starring Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Taylor Kitsch
screenplay by J.S. Cardone
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Tony Jaa is a bad motherfucker. There's a moment in his latest export The Protector where it appears as though he's killed someone with his penis (lo, how I would love to avoid that epitaph), and in the meantime, he dispatches foes with the heedless joy of obvious predecessor Jackie Chan (who has a cameo in the film shot so ineptly that it suggests a Jackie Chan impersonator smeared with Vaseline). Alas, there's a plot (something about the kidnapping of two elephants, one of which is turned into a gaudy tchotcke in an evil dragon lady's den of inequity), too, told through a lot of howlingly incompetent narrative chunks you could seemingly rearrange in any order with no tangible disruption of sense. (The Butchers Weinstein may of course be partly to blame.) The film is easily the funniest, most exhilaratingly ridiculous picture in a year in which Snakes on a Plane aspired to the same camp/cult heights, and it does it the only way that you can: by being deadly serious.

TIFF '06: The Pleasure of Your Company

½*/****
starring Jason Biggs, Isla Fisher, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Weston, Edward Herrmann
written and directed by Michael Ian Black

by Bill Chambers To paraphrase comedian Andy Kindler talking about The Three Stooges, I finally figured out why I don't like sketch comic Michael Ian Black: he's not funny. Until The Pleasure of Your Company, Black's hyphenate debut, I thought maybe it was a/n natural/irrational aversion to his countenance--he looks bizarrely like a member of Our Gang, one who just keeps getting taller. But that ferret face is only the most appropriate avatar for Black's hipster snottiness. Around these parts, we often talk about movies that hate movies; The Pleasure of Your Company is by and for people who hate movies. There were a lot of laughs at my press screening, and I can't help but think it's because we'd reached the halfway mark of the Festival: the audience was bloated on cinema and thus up for anything that facilitated schadenfreude towards it. The plot essentially finds perfect strangers Anderson (Jason Biggs, informally reprising his American Pie character) and Katie (Isla Fisher) getting engaged on a whim and then making bad first impressions on each other's friends and future in-laws; The Pleasure of Your Company is all sarcastic contrivance and convention and you're supposed to laugh at it (and at rom-coms in general by proxy), but a snake can't subsist on its own tail for very long. (Less than ninety minutes, it turns out.) Putting quotation marks around contemporary junk cinema--even the edgy jokes are "edgy"--is just more of the same hollow irony Black practises as VH1's resident Mike Nelson. The man's neither a satirist nor a postmodernist--he's a parasite. If you're wondering how the movie managed a half-star, it's because I'm an ape and Fisher looks awfully good in black lingerie. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

TIFF '06: Citizen Duane

*/****
starring Douglas Smith, Donal Logue, Vivica A. Fox, Alberta Watson
screenplay by Jonathan Sobol and Robert DeLeskie
directed by Michael Mabbott

by Bill Chambers This Canuck Rushmore really got on my nerves. The movie makes a crucial miscalculation in the early going by introducing its puny teenaged hero, Duane Balfour (Douglas Smith), in revenge mode: Given that we already know Duane's girlfriend (Jane McGregor) is way out of his league, he would seem to have pre-emptively settled any scores he could possibly have with the Most Popular Kid in School (porcine Nicholas Carella, as miscast as Haylie Duff was as the distaff equivalent in Napoleon Dynamite), and so this retribution without an onscreen context looks petty. Hoping to redeem the family name (his father, a prophet of doom, was killed in a Ruby Ridge scenario), Duane eventually decides to run for mayor, but he's a Quixote surrounded by pragmatists; when Duane finally throws in the towel, his entire support system--family, friends, teachers--breathes a sigh of relief. (Anything less would be frankly unCanadian.) Small problem: director Michael Mabbott isn't media-savvy (while guesting on a radio show, Duane doesn't wear headphones; an asshole news reporter's microphone is never plugged into anything; etc.). Big problem: Citizen Duane is an underdog/coming-of-age comedy that's neither funny nor poignant nor ingratiating. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

TIFF '06: The Host

Gue-mool
***½/****
starring Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Bae Doo-na, Ko Ah-sung
screenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Hah Joon-won, Baek Chul-hyun
directed by Bong Joon-ho

by Bill Chambers I knew I would love The Host as soon as I realized that the man in the surgical scrubs was none other than national treasure Scott Wilson, who, in his most heinous role since In Cold Blood (or maybe Shiloh), observes dust on the jars of formaldehyde in the morgue of a South Korean military base and bullies a reluctant attendant into disposing of them by dumping their contents down the sink. It's not merely that I enjoyed watching a post-Monster/Junebug Wilson complete a hat-trick, but also that, because he's an actor of such gravitas, he manages to distil all the atomic terror of Rubber Suit cinema into a single barb of Western arrogance. This is a movie that makes its points succinctly (after we've just seen dozens of Koreans devoured by a beautifully-realized giant fish monster from the Han River, the local news reports on the lone American casualty), and if The Host doesn't have very nice things to say about the U.S. influence on Eastern culture, it offers a life-affirming portrait of the Everyman, with our unlikely hero, shiftless widower Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), reminding of a moving passage from Pauline Kael's Nashville review in which she notes that the outwardly-misanthropic Haven Hamilton is the only character who acts selflessly following the climactic assassination attempt. At the risk of downplaying how funny the picture is, allow me to single out its cinematic fluency; comparisons to Spielberg's Jaws, Jurassic Park, and especially War of the Worlds are inevitable, but the homage that resonated with me is a close-up of Gang-du's young daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung), her face vertically streaked with dirt in a way that uncannily evokes Kwaidan's Hoichi the Earless. Foreshadowing in retrospect, it feels like director Bong Joon-ho's reassurance that he won't, unlike Spielberg of late, cop out. PROGRAMME: Midnight Madness

My TIFF So Far

originally published September 9, 2006
Seems we're all a little constipated right now but rest assured reviews are on the way; here's a quick rundown of TIFFpix screened thus far by yours truly.

BABEL (d. Alejandro González Iñárritu)
It coheres better than 21 Grams, but Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga are really spinning their wheels at this point. A few funny extratextual lessons are imparted: never take a Fanning to Mexico (Elle has almost as harrowing an adventure there as sister Dakota does in Man on Fire); and never trust a director who includes a post-script dedication to his children. As with 21 Grams, though, Babel doesn't make room for any intentional levity, eventually desensitizing you to all the calculated anguish. *½/****

Strangers with Candy: The Complete Series (1999-2000) - DVD

Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
"Old Habits, New Beginnings," "A Burden's Burden," "Dreams on the Rocks," "Who Wants Cake?," "Bogie Nights," "Let Freedom Ring," "Feather in the Storm," "Jerri Is Only Skin Deep," "The Trip Back," "The Virgin Jerri," "Behind Blank Eyes," "Yes, You Can't," "The Goodbye Guy," "The Blank Page," "Hit and Run," "To Love, Honor & Pretend," "Blank Stare, Part 1," "Blank Stare, Part 2," "A Price Too High for Riches," "Jerri's Burning Issue," "Is Freedom Free?," "Trail of Tears," "Invisible Love," "Is My Daddy Crazy?," "Blank Relay," "Ask Jerri," "There Once Was a Blank from Nantucket," "Bully," "The Last Temptation of Blank"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "Strangers with Candy" is at once extremely clever and not quite clever enough. On the one hand, its gleeful shredding of After School Specials is fanatically faithful to its target, turning the form's mealy-mouthed platitudes into the kind of dispiriting cruelty that is part and parcel of actual high school. On the other hand, the show's total devotion to that bit of satire means it doesn't hit any other targets. Though its heroine--Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), a 46-year-old former "boozer, user and loser" attempting to turn her life around by going back to secondary school--receives a constant stream of parent/teacher figures and learns negative life lessons as a result of her own corruption, the whole thing is fanciful to the point where you can shrug it off as one more naughty bit of college humour. Authority here isn't based on any real-life examples: they're just cartoons dishing out arbitrary meanness; the show's spirited inhumanity often drew a blank face out of me.

TIFF '06: Torn Apart

La Coupure
½*/****
starring Valérie Cantin, Marc Marans, Marie-Christine Perreault, Manon Brunelle
written and directed by Jean Châteauvert

by Bill Chambers As much as I'd love to jump on the C.R.A.Z.Y. bandwagon, I found its characters repellent and its soundtrack selections laughably pedestrian. (The picture's recycling of FM staples like "Space Oddity" and "Sympathy for the Devil" doesn't achieve suture so much as it makes the director, an alleged vinylphile, look like a philistine with an awfully small record collection.) Still, I can't deny that it marks a sort of progress for Canadian film in that it at least gropes for joy, has relatively healthy attitudes about sex, and isn't without peripheral vision. While it's still too soon to determine if C.R.A.Z.Y. will go down as a trailblazer or an anomaly, Torn Apart (La Coupure), which hails from the same province (Québec), nevertheless feels like a giant step backwards. The movie opens with soccer mom Christine (Valérie Cantin) doing the horizontal mambo with her lover Christophe (Marc Marans) in an apartment with the shades incriminatingly drawn. When she returns home, her mother (Marie-Christine Perreault) says something to the effect of, "How was your visit with your brother Christophe?" Mom seems to know that their relationship is incestuous, as do Christine's adolescent children--son and daughter effigies of Christophe and Christine--and the cuckold, Mario (Michael Kelly), but why should they seek catharsis when they can torture themselves with this intel? A suffocatingly insular Moebius strip of masochism, Torn Apart (the French title's literal translation is "The Cut") exists solely to maintain the cinematic status quo. It doesn't look like much, either. PROGRAMME: Canada First!

Lucky Number Slevin (2006) [Widescreen Edition] - DVD

***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Sir Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu
screenplay by Jason Smilovic
directed by Paul McGuigan

by Walter Chaw I wonder if it's not ultimately a little too pat for its own good, but Paul McGuigan's Lucky Number Slevin is another slick, Guy Ritchie crime-manqué to pair with the director's breakthrough Gangster No. 1. It stars his muse Josh Hartnett (great in McGuigan's underestimated Hitchcock shrine Wicker Park) as the handsome Roger O. Thornhill/Wrong Man archetype--and it finds for Lucy Liu the first role that didn't make me sort of want to punch her mother. But the real star of a film that finds supporting roles for Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Stanley Tucci, and Sir Ben Kingsley is McGuigan's restless camerawork: an intricate lattice of matching shots and glittering surfaces that becomes almost an impressionistic projection of the mad, labyrinthine interiority of a mind bent on vengeance. Flashbacks and CGI-aided swoops and zooms are woven into the picture's visual tapestry, so that Lucky Number Slevin is read best as a lurid, comic-book send-up of a genre--every scene is played with a good-natured nudge, and when it overstays its welcome with a round-up that verges on sickly, its only real crime is that it's less a grotesque than a screwball romance. Hitchcock did it like that sometimes, too.

TIFF '06: The Page Turner

La Tourneuse de pages
***/****
starring Catherine Frot, Déborah François, Pascal Greggory, Julie Richalet
screenplay by Denis Dercourt, Jacques Sotty
directed by Denis Dercourt

by Bill Chambers I question whether Denis Dercourt's Chabrolian The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages)--which more than earns its presumptuous double entendre of a title--actually has anything of consequence to say, but I sure got a charge out of it. Mélanie, a butcher's daughter, blows her shot at getting into a music conservatory by becoming flustered when one of the entrance exam's administrators, famed concert pianist Mme. Fouchécourt (Catherine Frot), interrupts her audition to sign an autograph. Some years later, the grown-up Mélanie (L'Enfant's Déborah François, who cleans up good) worms her way into Fouchécourt's life and proceeds to demonstrate that Hell indeed hath no fury. What's refreshing about The Page Turner is that Mélanie's revenge scheme, such as it is, is predicated on serendipity: Although the picture sets itself up as a shell game, Mélanie isn't a sooper-genius out to prove the screenwriter's flair for reversals of expectation; she just repeatedly dangles herself on a hook and hopes for a bite. (Given that François looks like the love child of Anna Paquin and Julie Delpy, it's never a long wait.) Cold-blooded in that delectable way we associate with Patricia Highsmith, the film plays a little like a Sapphic Leave Her to Heaven (in particular with regards to Mélanie's sadistic treatment of the Fouchécourts' young son, Tristan (Antoine Martynciow)) while simultaneously harking back to All About Eve, though it blessedly lacks the latter's attendant piousness. Fans of Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle may find Pascal Greggory's final scene as M. Fouchécourt especially witty. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

TIFF '06: After the Wedding

Efter brylluppet
**½/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Rolf Lassgård, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Stine Fischer Christensen
screenplay by Susanne Bier & Anders Thomas Jensen
directed by Susanne Bier

by Bill Chambers Online critic N.P. Thompson recalls a colleague lamenting the absence of cell phones in Ingmar Bergman's recent swan song Saraband, and in many ways, Susanne Bier's overwrought but not ineffectual After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) is Bergman for these manic times. A fashionable strain of Western self-loathing courses through this tale of a fat cat, Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård), who summons Jacob (once and future Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen), the Danish head of a Bombay orphanage, to his office in Denmark, ostensibly to size up another potential almsman. In actuality, Jørgen is in the advanced stages of a terminal illness and wants to groom Jacob--his wife's ex-lover, as well as the biological father of his daughter--to replace him, if more at the dinner table than in the boardroom. Swapping the iris filter of her Brothers (Brødre) for a no-less-mannered eye motif (at various intervals, After the Wedding inappropriately resembles either a spaghetti western or a Lucio Fulci movie), Bier seems to dread directorial anonymity now that she's untethered from the Dogme95 movement. Still, the performances manage to weather these hyperactive cutaways, with Lassgård proving in his wrenching final scene that you can drop the Big Daddy façade without dishonouring the archetypal dying patriarch of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations