Film Freak Central

The Collection (2012) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick, Lee Tergesen, Christopher McDonald
screenplay by Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan
directed by Marcus Dunstan

by Walter Chaw A cheap, loose remake of Aliens that substitutes rampaging hordes of xenomorphs with a gimp-masked kung-fu master, Marcus Dunstan's stupid sequel to his stupid The Collector at least, this time around, doesn't function as a lame, who-cares-if-it's-intentional echo of Home Alone. No, this one vaguely recalls turn-of-the-century serial ghoul (and hotel owner) H.H. Holmes, who built a giant hotel for the express purpose of culling his guests for, among other things, medical skeletons and simple shits and giggles. Oh, who'm I kidding--the only thing The Collection reminds me of is that I have other things I should probably be doing...oh, and that Steve Beck's Ghost Ship opens with a bunch of people getting bisected by a runaway cable. The Collection, incidentally, opens with everyone getting chewed up by a combine attached to a runaway cable at a nightclub. This leaves Elena (Emma Fitzpatrick, of interest for the short For Your Consideration, in which she absolutely nails Anne Hathaway's Les Misérables performance) to be packed into a steamer trunk, because for all the things our bogey The Collector (Randall Archer) is, he's also a Jazz-era ocean-liner passenger. The Collector promptly spirits her away to his horror hotel, the one he's set up with boobytraps and galleries of pickled people parts (and tarantulas, of course, in case he needs to set them free to gross out girls and stuff), making it a terrible place to stay but still better than most Motel 6s. BAM! Take that, Motel 6.

Watermark (2013)

***/****
directed by Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky

by Angelo Muredda Although it's the first of her films to be co-directed (by Manufactured Landscapes subject and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky), Watermark is less a departure for Jennifer Baichwal than it is the apotheosis of her style. Since 1988's Let it Come Down, Baichwal has been the most formally adventurous documentarian of the artistic process, not just profiling the work of makers as disparate as Paul Bowles and Shelby Lee Adams, but attempting to recreate their singular visions as well. In her previous film, Payback, that meant converting Margaret Atwood's lecture series of the same name into an evocative position paper about debt in all its global permutations, from blood feuds to legal restitution. In Manufactured Landscapes, it consisted of finding a way to translate Burtynsky's large-scale images of factories and pock-marked terrains into cinematic tableaux, with collaborator Nick de Pencier's cinematography of Burtynsky's stomping grounds effectively adding a sense of duration and movement to the print-bound stasis of the originals. Watermark might be the most radical variation on this approach, an abstract consideration of the interaction between water and human-made structures, carried out largely through wordless aerial photography of streams bisecting grotesque landscapes rather than the usual talking-head exposition.

Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (2013) + The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)

MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE
**½/****
directed by Jim Bruce

THE TRIALS OF MUHAMMAD ALI
***/****
directed by Bill Siegel

by Walter Chaw It's difficult to review Jim Bruce's incendiary, scholarly Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve (hereafter Money), because even as I was understanding the role of the Federal Reserve Bank for the first time in my adult life (how its adjustments of interest actually drive the economy of not merely this nation, but every industrialized nation in our rapidly-shrinking world), I found myself comparing the film to one of those informational videos that play on endless loops in Natural History museums. It's immensely educational...and dry as a soda cracker. What I find to be problematic about it is the same thing I found problematic about Al Gore's PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth: it's not really art, is it? Not to open that can of worms, but for me, as a personal demarcation, art inspires something like Kierkegaardian fear and loathing--existential trembling, yes: a mirror held to nature in all the myriad, alien, surprising, often terrifying forms that nature assumes. What Money does, and does admirably, is explain what the hell happened to the United States' financial institutions right around 1998 or so and continuing on into now--explain what the bailout was and how/why it affects the average American. Most fascinatingly, it explains how far in estimation the once god-like Alan Greenspan has fallen in the eyes of those who worshipped him. But while these are noble achievements, they're not enough.

Day of the Dead (1985) [Divimax] - DVD|[Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

****/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras A
BD - Image A Sound B Extras A
starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
written and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Far from the weak sister that critics and fanboys have branded George Romero's conclusion to his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead is at once the most hopeful and the most melancholy of the trio while falling short of the stark satirical perfection of the first (Night of the Living Dead) and the bloated satirical imperfections of the perhaps over-celebrated second (Dawn of the Dead). In fact, I find Day to be the equal of Dawn in almost every way and to exceed it in terms of its alacrity--its relative tightness in the development of its ideas about the nature of man unfolding against the backdrop of a rise of a new society. The obvious precursor to the zombie mythos is the Christian faith, with its saviour a zombie installing a new order (covenant) with its key ritual dedicated to a celebration the eating of the saviour's flesh and blood: a literal consumption of the Host that incorporates into its rite terms of infection and contagion. In fact, Day of the Dead, of the three, seems the most serious in exploring that spiritual/thaumaturgical connection with the introduction of what is essentially a demigod--an offspring of thought and body in the same way that Christ was meant to be God made flesh in all its weakness--in the form of the much-reviled Bub (Howard Sherman).

Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet Combo Pack

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor
screenplay by Darren Lemke and Christopher McQuarrie and Dan Studney
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There's an interesting moment early on in Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Slayer, but don't get used to it. It's a cross-cut sequence wherein peasant Jack (Nicholas Hoult) and princess Isabelle (absolutely adorable Eleanor Tomlinson) reveal they're both products of neglect and the devastation of a parent lost too young. This unites them in strife and turmoil (in the way that wasn't properly addressed by the Mako/Raleigh team-up in Pacific Rim) to (likewise) battle monsters of the theoretical Id (Oedipus is the first guess, Electra the second), here literal giants in a cloud-shrouded kingdom, accessed by a priapic growth sprouting in the dead of night. It's the only time the film identifiably belongs to Bryan Singer, a maker of large films nonetheless invested in personal, intimate deconstructions. People in my world are neatly divided between the ones who didn't like Singer's Superman Returns and the ones who are right. I want to believe that movie is the reason why Stanley Tucci, Ewan McGregor, and Ian McShane said "yes" to Jack the Giant Slayer, and not because Tucci, McGregor, and McShane are already just filthy impulses cashing paychecks à la 1980s Michael Caine.

World War Z (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Matthew Fox
screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Drew Goddard & Damon Lindelof, based on the novel by Max Brooks
directed by Marc Forster

by Walter Chaw Marc Forster's World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks's cause célèbre novel (think Stephen Ambrose on the zombie apocalypse) that had a production so troubled the real surprise is Terry Gilliam had nothing to do with it, lands as half an idea, handsomely mounted in a really expensive crater. With almost no relationship to the book beyond honouring its concept of a conflagration told in vignettes, it feels almost exactly like James L. Brooks's I'll Do Anything, which began life as a musical and ended up, after extensive reshoots and careening budget overages, song-free, yet whole somehow despite the trauma. That sense of a sudden change in direction, in genre, is all over World War Z--something in its almost apologetic reserve, something in its unmistakable indecision. Indeed, it serves as a fitting metaphor for a zombie as a corpse similarly brought to shambling half-life, but frankly, it could've been a lot worse. It works for what it is in the same way that Steven Soderbergh's Contagion works, and with the same limitations, ambivalence, anticlimax, and handsome mounting. If, at the end, its Damon Lindelof-penned solution* (the twelfth-hour salvation of a freight train jumped its tracks) is as stupid as you would expect something Lindelof to pen, at least the journey there is interesting, even occasionally (if only very occasionally) arresting. A shame that Forster hasn't gotten any better at directing action since Quantum of Solace.

TIFF '13 Wrap-Up

by Bill Chambers The cause célèbre at this year's TIFF was critic Alex Billington's 9-1-1 call. For those living under a rock, what happened was that Billington entreated Festival volunteers to do...something...about the guy using his light-emitting cell phone at a P&I (press and industry) screening of Ti West's The Sacrament. When they declined, Billington dialled emergency services, live-tweeting the whole sorry affair as a gift to the gods of schadenfreude. This is indeed absolutely childish and cowardly behaviour, yet a similarly insufferable sanctimony deluged the incident in think pieces and @ replies, some of them from yours truly. Yes, crying wolf to 9-1-1 is irresponsible, though I imagine Billington's wasn't the first or even second false alarm Toronto EMS received that morning. Yes, P&I screenings are free, throwing Billington's sense of entitlement into relief, although they do come with the Faustian obligation to write about them at some point. (Something that isn't made easier by a viewing filled with peripheral distractions.) And, sure, industry folk need to be able to conduct business in a darkened theatre if it comes to that, because TIFF is a buyer's market ultimately supported by the wheeling-and-dealing that happens over a ten-day period.

TIFF '13: Almost Human

ZERO STARS/****
written and directed by Joe Begos

by Bill Chambers The picture's opening titles are in John Carpenter's familiar white-on-black Albertus font, and intercut with fragments of exposition like the intro to Prince of Darkness while some neo-Alan Howarth works the minor keys on a synthesizer. But as the makers of Almost Human have already given the game away in an endless, stilted prologue, what may sound like loving homage feels in context like a desperate play for credibility, a dog whistle meant to reassure the horror geeks they're in good hands. They're not. Set in the late-'80s, because nothing good's happened since then, the film is about an archetypal fat-guy/hot-girl couple (Josh Ethier and Vanessa Leigh) and third wheel Seth (Graham Skipper) getting torn asunder when the husband, Mark, is rudely abducted by aliens. Two years later, Seth remains shattered but Jen has settled down again with the poster boy for modern douchiness, one of those guys who shaves his beard into a thin strip along the jawline. So much for period detail; so much for Jen's taste in men improving. Anyway, Mark is returned to Earth, but not in the same placid condition--maybe the aliens broke him and this is nothing more than their version of tossing a toy out the window on a highway. As Mark begins a psychotic rampage that inches him ever closer to Jen, Seth's spidey sense starts tingling and he goes to warn her in one of many scenes that peg this for next-gen Ed Wood, because writer-director Joe Begos couldn't conceive of a more efficient, less torturous way to put Jen and Seth in a room together than to have him show up at her diner, politely ask the lady at the counter to retrieve her, then twiddle his thumbs (and ours) waiting for her to materialize. Some decent splatter--Mark uses a greatest-hits of horror implements against his victims--makes up the shortfall before going a bridge too far into tentacle rape and a recreation of the Irreversible head-bash but with a woman. I don't think the filmmakers are world-class misogynists or anything, I just think they're kind of stupid. Be sure to stay through the closing credits for a tag--not that it's worth it, but I was the only one at my screening who did, and misery loves company.

TIFF '13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things, elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge double-bill of Bastards and Prisoners, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson's La última película and Sion Sono's Why Don't You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line, commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards Alex Ross Perry's self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono's by turns delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming for one of the mobster's jailed wives.

TIFF '13: Mission Congo

**½/****
directed by Lara Zizic and David Turner

by Bill Chambers Too satisfied with being--and too short to be anything but--a hatchet job, Mission Congo is nevertheless a worthwhile reminder that televangelists are crooks, something that's all too easy to forget in this age of video-on-demand. (Out of sight, out of mind.) The film is a documentary account of the opportunism that sprang up around the Rwandan genocide, specifically "The 700 Club" host Pat Robertson's "Operation Blessing," which was ostensibly established to fly medical supplies, water, and, of course, missionaries to a bordertown refugee camp in crisis from a cholera outbreak. Initially, it seems like Robertson has merely sent people to proselytize, with no tangible aid forthcoming (except tons of discount Tylenol nobody needs), but an even more sinister truth emerges: Robertson has used Operation Blessing to gain entrance into Africa so he can start mining diamonds--which he's subsidizing with the viewer contributions flowing into "The 700 Club" in support of Operation Blessing. Worse still, Robertson's allies are the very architects of the genocide, with whom he hobnobs--either cluelessly or hubristically--in vainglorious footage taped for his program. The bug up the ass of co-directors Lara Zizic and David Turner, who freely admit to getting sidetracked from a larger portrait of disaster relief, is not just that Robertson got away with it, thanks to his considerable political clout as the leader of the religious right, but also that he erected another façade in the form of a little community for which the Operation Blessing website continues to request donations. Its residents never see a dime, and have lived in abject poverty ever since Robertson unceremoniously abandoned them. Though Mission Congo solidly demonstrates the Kuleshov effect in a droll cut from Robertson soliciting money for a good cause to a gaggle of diamonds, it's less a movie than a public service announcement. The most memorable segments feature grizzled fraud investigator Ole Anthony, who admits to a dwindling sense of schadenfreude towards people taken in by faith healers; more of this shading, please.

TIFF '13: Enemy

***/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Javier Gullón, based on the novel The Double by José Saramago
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda If the interviews floating around online in the wake of his appearance at TIFF are any indication, Denis Villeneuve spent much of his time with press managing expectations about Enemy. Though it's technically his English-language debut, as well as the first of two collaborations with Jake Gyllenhaal in a year's time, Enemy isn't slated to come out until sometime next spring, long after its bigger-budgeted, higher-pedigreed younger sibling, Prisoners. Judging from its deferred release and Villeneuve's own comments that the film is an experimental project, a one-off to help him transition from the high-toned tragedy of Incendies to more classical Hollywood filmmaking, you'd think it was a dog, but in truth it's probably the best thing he's ever made--a modest little psycho-thriller based on José Saramago's novel The Double, set in a jaundiced Toronto no one would want to hold a festival in.

TIFF '13: Bad Words

½*/****
directed by Jason Bateman

by Bill Chambers While the concept of an "open source" film franchise, one to which any Joe Schmo can contribute, is not a new one, it's more common in Europe and Asia, where intellectual property laws are considerably more relaxed. The homegrown "bad" series--much to Harvey Weinstein's chagrin, no doubt--has somehow transcended that, spinning off from Bad Santa's core desire to milk the shock value of giving an absolute cretin some measure of responsibility for the welfare of a beatific child. A mild disappointment at the time, Bad Santa looks more sophisticated through the prism of imitators Bad Teacher and now Jason Bateman's directorial debut, Bad Words: for one thing, the kid in it is a total weirdo, not just the personification of innocence waiting to be defiled; for another, when showcasing appalling behaviour, it remembers to be funny. Bateman also stars in Bad Words as ornery fortysomething Guy, an eighth-grade dropout who uses that fact as a loophole to enter a children's spelling bee and quickly advances to the nationals. Kathryn Hahn is outlandishly adorable as his involuntary sidekick, a reporter who becomes his Girl Friday and, in dissonant scenes that play like off-brand Apatow, fuck buddy. And sweet-faced Rohan Chand is Chaitanya, a lonely, bobbleheaded overachiever whose proposed corruption by Guy feels mostly tragic. Mischievousness is only so elastic, and Bateman's character--exempt from reproach as if he's Bugs Bunny (making superfluous his obligatory appeals to redemption)--repeatedly takes things too far, sabotaging his fellow contestants in ways that are evil and, it turns out, sociopathic. When he's not even thrown by words hand-picked to trip him up, like "floccinaucinihilipilification," it's clear that he doesn't face any legitimate competition from these kids. Why, then, knock a little girl out of the running by tricking her into thinking she's had her period on television? Giving the film an autumnal burnish that probably seemed mockingly scholastic but is instead antithetical to laughter, Bateman's formidable comic instincts really fail him here. Nice to see his old cohort from "The Hogan Family" Steve Witting in the role of the bee's proctor, though.

Swamp Thing (1982) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

click any image to enlarge

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau, Ray Wise, Dick Durock
written and directed by Wes Craven

by Bryant Frazer Do you find monster movies that revolve around damsels, décolletage, and men in phony rubber suits pathetic or endearing? If the latter, you may well find room in your heart for Swamp Thing, an old-fashioned creature feature that already seemed anachronous when it hoisted itself up out of the mud of early-1980s genre cinema. As movies like Alien, Altered States, and Scanners put a grim, often grotesque spin on ideas about biological transformation, Wes Craven--surely one of the grimmest of horror directors in the 1970s--embarked on a PG-rated fairytale about a gentle scientist whose own experimental chemicals turn him into a super-powered hulk made entirely of plant matter. As Craven's contemporaries busied themselves with tales of human bodies rent asunder by sex, drugs, and the military-industrial complex, the director of Last House on the Left was making a story of tender love in the wilds of South Carolina, where a wound to the breast can be healed by a clump of swamp moss and a beast's severed limb can regenerate through the judicious application of sunlight.

Telluride '13 Wrap-Up

by Walter Chaw The drive home always feels faster. I didn't think it would this time, but it did.

TIFF '13: The Strange Little Cat

Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
****/****
directed by Ramon Zürcher

by Angelo Muredda In his essay on the origins of the uncanny, Freud looks into German etymology to find that heimlich is one of those words that means a given thing as well as its opposite--that which is, on the one hand, familiar, and also that which is kept out of sight. The unheimlich, or uncanny, is by that token always latent within the ordinary--it's the thing that should have stayed hidden away but has instead come to light. People in Ramon Zürcher's marvellous debut are always calling the familiar things around them uncanny, and no wonder, given the alien eye with which Zürcher observes them. Set in a bustling Berlin apartment that houses a reserved matriarch, her visiting twentysomething children, her adolescent daughter, her ailing mother, and a pair of pets (including the ever-roving orange tabby that supplies the title), The Strange Little Cat has the ingredients of a multi-generational melodrama about a family coming together and splitting apart in an uneasily-shared space--an August: Osage County for the arthouse set. But Zürcher happily forgoes such narrative dead ends in pursuit of something more playful and unsettled, working with the weird formal properties of the objects that fill this domestic space, from a child's misspelled grocery list to a glass bottle that spins around a bowl in the sink as if propelled by its own volition.

TIFF '13: August: Osage County

*/****
directed by John Wells

by Bill Chambers "Don't go all Carson McCullers on me!" a character admonishes in August: Osage County, John Wells's film version of Tracy Letts's Pulitzer-winning play. I think the line is meant to be ironic, because Letts, author of demented southern gothics like Bug and Killer Joe, is an obvious heir apparent to McCullers. In the context of this timid adaptation, however, it sounds like a studio note. August recently made headlines because the ending may change from what audiences saw at TIFF, and that would be for the better--I somehow doubt that reassuring viewers of Julia Roberts's indomitable spirit ever crossed Letts's mind as one of his goals for the piece--but it wouldn't be enough to take the Garry Marshall tang out of the film. Chewing scenery with her mouth open, Meryl Streep is Violet, the gargoyle matriarch of an Oklahoma dynasty, hooked on pills because of mouth cancer and, let's face it, in obeisance to a certain theatrical tradition. Violet's sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and daughters Barbara (Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), and Karen (Juliette Lewis) have gathered together along with their own families to mourn the passing of Violet's husband and confront some awful truths laid bare by Violet's condition and drug-fuelled compulsion to spill secrets and push buttons. Casting like a kid in a candy store (what in God's name is Benedict Cumberbatch doing here--as the holy fool, no less) and shooting in a functional non-style that 'opens up' the play by going in for the kinds of close-ups you couldn't get without opera glasses, Wells is a producer-turned-director through and through. About his ability to marshal big egos there can be little doubt, but his camera bobs all over the axis of action like a first-year film student, and he shows almost no command of tone, reducing the material's vaguely satirical detours into perversion (incest! statutory rape!) to schematic twists both eye-rolling and curiously palatable. But it's finally the casting of 500-pound gorilla Roberts that kills this thing, throwing its centre of gravity so off-balance that August: Osage County feels not much different from a tailor-made ego trip like Something to Talk About, even before that contentious epilogue.

Telluride '13: FFC Interviews "Under the Skin" Director Jonathan Glazer

On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride's free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola's gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that--she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I'd last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can't imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.

Telluride '13: "On Death Row" - Conversation with James Barnes + Portrait of Robert Fratta

"On Death Row" Conversation with James Barnes
***/****
directed by Werner Herzog

"On Death Row" Portrait of Robert Fratta
**/****
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw Two shot-for-television documentaries, running about 50 minutes apiece, serve as Werner Herzog's epilogue to 2011's Into the Abyss, each profiling a single inmate in the inimitable Herzog style that has evolved over the years into something that doesn't punish its subjects (as it once did) so much as it punishes the audience. Looking back to the way he shot coroner Franc G. Fallico in Grizzly Man, allowing him to twist a few beats too long, reveals that Fallico was perhaps a little too eager for the camera. That strategy--delightful then--is a bludgeon now, as the extra beats have become interminable and, I'm afraid, useless. Of the two docs screened at this year's Telluride Film Festival, the first, "Conversation with James Barnes", is the better, as Herzog gives time to one of Barnes's cousins, who declares The Exorcist to be a documentary because, among other things, anyone who twisted her head around like Linda Blair does in that movie would have died. No, it's true, the logic doesn't work. It's less Herzog finding the equivalent of his bingo-playing chicken in these inbred huckleberries than it is Herzog getting the money shot by telling the poor, dumb thing that no, he's never seen The Exorcist. It's brilliant. And it's cruel. "Portrait of Robert Fratta", on the other hand, profiles narcissistic Death Row pretty boy Fratta in a way that reveals almost nothing except what it looks like when Herzog riffs too long on the same theme. In the post-film Q&A, moderated by an obsequious Ken Burns, Herzog promised that he's done now with these Death Row interviews--it's almost like he understands that he might have picked at this one 'til it bled, and his consistent disclaimer that he wants to humanize these interview subjects because, as a German, he's seen the evil of capital punishment carried out by a monolithic State, has become brittle and, fatally, ironic.

TIFF '13: The Sacrament

*/****
written and directed by Ti West

by Bill Chambers Surrendering once again to V/H/S found-footage mode, writer-director Ti West brazenly co-opts the particulars of the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, abandoning only the names and most expensive details (two planes become one helicopter, for instance, while the late-'70s become the present). The result is a counterfeit film without the element of surprise that also denies the viewer the lurid satisfaction of a true-crime thriller. AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, and Kentucker Audley--Austin's answer to the Brat Pack (or the Three Stooges)--play VICE journalists doing a story on Eden Parrish, a hippie utopia/cult compound in NotGuyana. They're guests of Audley's sister (Amy Seimetz, who doesn't, ultimately to her credit, do deluded well), an ambassador of sorts to the commune's snake-oil leader, an ersatz Jim Jones who goes by Father (Gene Jones--no relation, I hope). Playing the role as part Strother Martin, part game-show host, Jones--Gene Jones, that is--hits a home run in his big scene with the comically-outmatched Bowen; if anything comes out of this movie, I expect it will be the career rebirth of Jones, whose handful of memorable appearances prior to this include the gas-station attendant in No Country for Old Men. (West, too, does a pretty good job of transcribing Jones's--Jim Jones's, that is--televangelist rhetoric.) But Jones's starmaking entrance may as well be his exit, as no sooner have the VICE boys landed on Eden Parrish than are they running for their lives, so beholden is the film to the chronology of the Peoples Temple's accelerated downfall. It's West's weakness here that he can't seem to tell a story that doesn't take place over a matter of hours or days, and The Sacrament depicts a tragedy ascribed meaning only by the landmark PBS documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, which turns out to be an essential primer denied due credit. The poached gravity of the closing title card--"167 people died at Eden Parrish"--is especially galling: no one died at "Eden Parrish," though more than 900 perished in Jonestown's Kool-Aid apocalypse. I can't wait until West makes a movie about the Shworld Shtrade Shenter.

Telluride '13: The Invisible Woman

***/****
directed by Ralph Fiennes

by Walter Chaw It opens with an almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), it has about it a delicious gravity, a weight of inevitability driven by long shots of Nelly pounding across a beach as waves crash behind, the crunch of her footfalls foretelling a coming storm. With his second feature, Fiennes establishes himself as midway between the traditionalism of Merchant/Ivory and the carnality of Kenneth Branagh--the marriage of the two styles in bright relief during a climactic train-crash sequence that, initially muted, pulls out into something wilder. Though it arguably breaks no new ground save successfully portraying Dickens as the asshat he was, credit is due for a very fine, studiously-detailed performance from Jones that allows Nelly to avoid the clichés attendant to the young mistress role. Hers is a completely rounded, imminently human journey through childhood to self-actualization, joining the growing list of strong roles for women this year despite the film seeming doomed to be shunted to the side. It deserves more than that. If short of great, The Invisible Woman is strong enough (note all the rumblings on the soundtrack, the lines warning of storms rhyming with minor apocalypses in the picture proper) to establish Fiennes as perhaps the same kind of director as he is an actor: alive somewhere between the meat and the mind.

TIFF '13: Prisoners

**½/****
starring starring Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, Paul Dano
screenplay by Aaron Guzikowski
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Angelo Muredda Denis Villeneuve comes to America with Prisoners, an alternately strange and gripping but finally self-immolating crime picture that earns the right to its austere silver Warner Bros. logo before it devolves into a Scooby-Doo mystery for sadists. Last seen beckoned to the heavens by a pre-Oscar-anointed Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman plunges right back into the shit here as Keller Dover, a suburban dad and mild-mannered carpenter who goes berserk when his daughter and her friend (the child of perennially underused Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) vanish after Thanksgiving dinner. The first suspect is Alex (Paul Dano), a creepy, developmentally delayed young man who roams through the neighbourhood in his RV. Though he's arrested by crack detective Loki (nicely played by Jake Gyllenhaal, despite his character's name and distressingly shoddy police work) and released when the investigators find nothing to pin him on, Alex is promptly recaptured by a raging Dover, who turns out to have his own torture venue for this very occasion, complete with room enough for a black box whose construction will put Dover's woodworking skills to good use.

TIFF '13: When Jews Were Funny

**½/****
directed by Alan Zweig

by Bill Chambers Canadian documentarian Alan Zweig's best movies begin with a specific question--why do people collect records? Why are there good people who can't find love?--he needs to answer for the sake of his personal development, like a player desperate to advance to the next level in a videogame. Zweig's latest, a kind of companion piece/spiritual sequel to his 2004 I, Curmudgeon, finds the filmmaker struggling to articulate a thesis statement, so much so that a number of his interview subjects call him out on it. Consequently, it lacks urgency, though truth be told Zweig's work has become less personal ever since he stopped putting himself in front of the camera, having apparently been cured of his most confessional impulses after finding love in a real-life postscript to his masterpiece, Lovable. Indeed, When Jews Were Funny feels and often plays like clumsy pretext for engaging with some of the brightest lights in the comedy world, including Marc Maron, Andy Kindler, and Bob Einstein (Albert Brooks's brother), who insists that his alter ego Super Dave is a quintessentially, if unlikely, Jewish character. Gilbert Gottfried similarly remarks that the Gentiles of "Seinfeld" and "The Golden Girls" are Jews by any other name--that's why they're funny. The title is provocative but misleading: Zweig is more or less just homesick or nostalgic for the soup-slurping Old World kvetching of his grandparents' generation and wondering if they were a dying breed; clearly, Jews are still funny. Maron believes that Zweig is blind to the beginnings of his own metamorphosis into an "old Jew," echoing others' sentiments that the essential Jewish character never changes even as the Yiddish accent phases out, while Shelley Berman, after tetchily resisting the label of "Jewish comedian," admits with palpable sadness that his daughter will never be that "old Jew" Zweig's talking about, for reasons best left to the viewer to extrapolate. Still, the highlight may be comedienne Cory Kahaney suggesting that making this documentary is merely Zweig's attempt to absolve himself of religious guilt for not bringing his daughter up Jewish. If only he'd really wrestled with this accusation, like the old Zweig would have, although he couldn't defer to a more insightful batch of interviewees.

TIFF '13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 3

Candy **/****
9 mins., d. Cassandra Cronenberg
Der Untermensch **/****
9 mins., d. Kays Mejri
In Guns We Trust **½/****
12 mins., d. Nicolas Lévesque
Jimbo **½/****
23 mins., d. Ryan Flowers
Method ***/****
8 mins., d. Gregory Smith
Portrait as a Random Act of Violence ***/****
4 mins., d. Randall Lloyd Okita
We Wanted More ***½/****
16 mins., d. Stephen Dunn

by Bill Chambers Unfortunately for Candy, a non-judgmental, veritable time-lapse look at one night in the life of a prostitute that occasionally branches out to linger with her spent, oddball clientele, "Breaking Bad" got there first with an indelible montage set to The Association's "Windy" that opened season three's "Half Measures." Kudos to director Cassandra Cronenberg, however, for not making a straight-up horror and risking the same comparisons to her father that plagued brother Brandon's Antiviral.

Telluride '13: Under the Skin

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer's astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber's strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it's the best film I've seen this year and among the best films I've ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it's a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour's gone by that I haven't thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.

TIFF '13: All Cheerleaders Die

*½/****
written and directed by Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson

by Bill Chambers I suppose they've both been campy at times, but I think Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson might be too grim for something like All Cheerleaders Die (or as the closing title card ominously puts it, "All Cheerleaders Die, Part One")--a title that at the least augurs fun schlock tinged with the alarmism of '50s hygiene cinema. After capturing the dubious--but funny--death of the head cheerleader on tape, standoffish Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) remodels herself as a Heather and earns a spot on the squad, much to the dismay of goth outcast and secret admirer Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee, who looks exactly like brother Kodi). Maddy has a hidden agenda, though: to bring down Terry (Drake-ish Tom Williamson), the vicious, womanizing captain of the football team, from within that incestuous megaclique. When Terry runs the cheerleaders fatally off the road, Leena manages to resurrect them using Wiccan crystals, but not without transforming them into superhuman zombies with vampiric appetites and psychically linking them all like E.T. and Elliott. (Cue the gratuitous collective orgasm, an interminable gag saved by the better joke of a disabled kid fuming over the handicap washroom being used for nookie. I feel you, brother.) Eventually the rules and internal logic governing the movie's magic become disengagingly random, and a lot of the goodwill generated by the likable cast--"the best thing about McKee is the women he surrounds himself with," our own Bryant Frazer once wrote, and that's as true as ever--gets washed away in a tsunami of nihilism. As is often the best advice, rent Heathers instead.

Telluride '13: Nebraska

***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It's easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.

TIFF '13: Don Jon

**½/****
written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

by Bill Chambers Formerly Don Jon's Addiction, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's feature writing and directing debut is a cheerier, lower-stakes Saturday Night Fever. Simultaneously lampooning and humanizing The Situation in the title role, Gordon-Levitt plays a Jersey boy who has no trouble getting laid but never finds the real thing as satisfying as jerking off to Internet porn. (In a very funny opening voiceover, he admits to getting insta-wood, Pavlov-style, at the startup sound of his laptop.) When he begins dating Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson, having a good year), he hears the swoony music of '50s romances--but old habits die hard, and Barbara has decidedly little tolerance for porn. (She acts like it's a moral stand, but it's clear that her titanic ego can't take the competition.) What separates Don Jon from, say, Steve McQueen's Shame, and what made dropping "addiction" from the title a wise idea, is that other than Jon's masturbation frequency going up, his porn habit doesn't really escalate--this isn't the kind of movie that makes a point about desensitization, until he's fapping it to horses. No, Jon's problem is rather more conventional: he just hasn't experienced love yet and, ergo, has been deprived of good sex. Yawn. It's somewhat hypocritical that the movie has it in for romcoms, then (Gordon-Levitt calls in some big favours to spoof the genre), but what are you gonna do? What's good is a moment where Jon, in a heated argument, suggests that romcoms are also porn, which they totally are, and I liked Johansson's character revealing their true incompatibility when she berates Jon for trying to buy Swiffer refills in front of her, embarrassed that a man would even consider cleaning up after himself, let alone take a sort of pride in housework. Though such attitudes may be unfashionable, they seem culturally specific and part and parcel of confident filmmaking that anchors itself with motifs (road rage, church confessions) that deepen as the movie wears on. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Tony Danza's electric, if boxed-in, performance as Jon's profane, sleazy father.

Riddick (2013)

**½/****
starring Vin Diesel, Jordi Mollà, Matt Nable, Katee Sackhoff
written and directed by David Twohy

by Walter Chaw Maybe it was the anticipation, maybe it's because it's too much like the first film, Pitch Black, but David Twohy's Riddick is merely fine for what it is, lacking the kind of loopy, operatic invention of the franchise's middle course and contenting itself with being a bug hunt in the James Cameron sense of the word instead of exploring more of this universe. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but I wanted to love this movie with all my heart, having declared to everyone's exhaustion that of all the prestige movies prepping down the pike, this was the one I was waiting for. Turns out, the best science-fiction film of the last quarter of this year is Jonathan Glazer's unbelievably good Under the Skin--not Gravity and, alas, not Riddick, either. To be fair, of the three, Glazer's is the only one to deal with science-fiction as existentialism rather than as background and circus. More's the pity, because Chronicles of Riddick, with its elementals and fringe religions, its funky spiritualism and its sense of fairy-tale hyperbole, is one of the genuinely great cult films of the last decade. If not for an ending to Riddick that promises Twohy's ready for another swing at the plate if another ball is lobbed at him, I wouldn't be in a very good mood at all.

TIFF '13: MANAKAMANA

***½/****
directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez

by Angelo Muredda The most spectacular sequence in Leviathan, the last major film to come out of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, captured a horrifying seagull raid from the perspective of the birds' prey, the camera appended to a boat and darting through the water alongside a school of anxious fish. MANAKAMANA, co-directed by the lab's recent graduates Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, doesn't quite have the money shot of its predecessor, but its very existence as a finished product feels like the fulfillment of a delicate magic trick. Forgoing the dozens of lightweight cameras that made Leviathan such a visceral experience, Spray and Velez fix their single camera on a cable car as it travels over the valleys of Trisuli in Nepal, carrying all manner of local pilgrims and tourists to the titular temple. We follow the car as it goes up and down over the valley eleven times, alternately watching the restless, contended, and excited passengers register every bump and dip of the trip and feeling swept along ourselves, thanks to a transparent glass window that overlooks the hills. (As Dennis Lim pointed out in the LA TIMES, each ride's duration of about twelve minutes neatly lines up with the length of a roll of 16mm film.)

Telluride '13: Gravity

**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón's eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity--a title that doesn't reference the Ray Bradbury story "Kaleidoscope," to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name "Stone"), or any real meat at the heart of the story. It's not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt, after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men, to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific Rim--if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with the best sound. It's possibly the first film since Avatar that actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It's an effect that no doubt had everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company running around before the show, tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice the "acceptable" volume.

Telluride '13: 12 Years a Slave

**½/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano
screenplay by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northrup
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw With performances this good, with a director this astonishing, the only thing that could make it less than transcendent, I'm afraid, is source material so well-respected, so revered truth be known, that it limits the places the cast and director might otherwise go. What I'm saying is that the prospect of Steve McQueen making a slave narrative is one to savour, celebrate, induce chills in the hearts of every serious scholar of cinema as experiential philosophy--and the prospect of Steve McQueen adapting Solomon Northrup's (as related to white lawyer David Wilson) 12 Years a Slave is one to inspire some level of inevitable disappointment. What I expected was to be blown away by Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor's performances--and I was. What I didn't expect was to be disturbed by a few instances of manipulation of the document that seem driven by something other than good faith. Why, for instance, would one portray the death of a black conspirator on a slaver ship bound for Louisiana at the hand of a white crewman about to rape a sympathetic figure, when the document reveals this conspirator was taken by smallpox? For the sake of drama? Were the roles reversed, this kind of narrative manipulation would take on a decidedly different hue.

TIFF '13: The Past

**/****
directed by Asghar Farhadi

by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi's A Separation but arrives at the finish line with little to show for itself. Like Farhadi's previous film, we start with a divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion Cotillard's more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim). That Samir has his own troubled past with a woman in a coma for reasons as-yet unknown doesn't surprise us as much as Farhadi seems to hope it will, since A Separation also culled its dramatic tension from a pair of mirrored couples, and made similar symbolic hay of offscreen characters in extreme states. (There an unborn child and an unspeaking parent with dementia.) Those who went along with that instrumental use of characters and rigorous structural doubling did so because the situations in which the leads were put were so convincing and their reactions to their impossible situation were almost unbearably moving. Here, one feels trapped in an aggravating Philip Glass sonata, where each scene exists solely as a foil for the next and each revelation becomes a transparent set-up for the ensuing real revelation, and so on ad infinitum. The point seems to be that one never knows in love, but surely some lovers' actions are less ambiguous than others. The absurd final shot, which has us reading a motionless body for either an actual or an imagined emotional response, is the most maddening example of this noncommittal gamesmanship, a case of a talented but lost filmmaker having his cake, eating it too, and then proclaiming, "There is no cake--or is there?"

TIFF '13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 2

A Grand Canal ***/****
19 mins., d. Johnny Ma
Beasts in the Real World *½/****
8 mins., d. Sol Friedman
Daybreak (Éclat du jour) ***/****
11 mins., d. Ian Lagarde
Noah ***½/****
17 mins., ds. Walter Woodman & Patrick Cederberg
Out *½/****
8 mins., d. Jeremy Lalonde
Seasick **½/****
4 mins., d. Eva Cvijanovic
Young Wonder *½/****
6 mins., d. James Wilkes

by Bill Chambers It opens with a bride and groom saying their vows, but as subtitled voiceover from writer-director Johnny Ma informs us, this is not a romance. A Grand Canal dramatizes the last days of Ma's father, a Chinese boat captain who angers a mob boss by turning away a shipment, then makes things worse in trying to collect on the boss's debt. Mei Song Shun--astonishingly, a newcomer--is powerful as a proud man reduced to grovelling in a scene exceptionally well-calibrated for tension and pathos, considering this is both a short film and a student film. Shun is so good, in fact, that it feels like a betrayal of his performance when Ma decides to up and break the fourth wall with B-roll of himself directing and narration elaborating upon the therapeutic value of this endeavour.

TIFF '13: Devil's Knot

**/****
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Something is off in Devil's Knot, the third film about the West Memphis Three in as many years, and it isn't just the Satanic panic that turned a bereaved community against three wrongfully-accused teenagers. Although its Tennessee setting takes him far from his usual haunt of Toronto, this material seemed like a slam dunk for Atom Egoyan, who's done his best work in films about parents dwelling in the endless hangover of their children's premature deaths. It's a shame, then, that his new film feels like a wheel-spinning exercise rather than a deepening of old themes. Egoyan's approach to this tapped-out story hits the dramatic and formal beats you'd expect from his filmography: here we get a child's cryptic, disembodied voiceover about what he's seen; there, a videotaped testimony that conceals more than it discloses. Ambiguity is the name of the game, just like in The Sweet Hereafter, where everything turns on young Sarah Polley's poker face as she ushers the adults around her into the topsy-turvy world of the title.

TIFF '13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 1

Cochemere **/****
12 mins., ds. Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski
Gloria Victoria **/****
7 mins., d. Theodore Ushev
Pilgrims ½*/****
8 mins., d. Marie Clements
Remember Me **½/****
15 mins., d. Jean-François Asselin
Subconscious Password ***/****
11 mins., d. Chris Landreth
The Sparkling River **½/****
18 mins., ds. Félix Lajeunesse & Paul Raphaël

by Bill Chambers TIFF 13's Short Cuts Canada programme starts viewers off in the deep end with Cochemere, a bifurcated, CG-embellished mix of puppets and live-action in which a nude, polarized Mother Nature, presumably (Google tells me the title means "mother checkmark" in English), intrudes on a stormy utopia to nourish with milky saliva the uncanny fauna, who then appear to return the favour in outer space, their rapey, goblinlike presence prompting a shapely, flame-haired astronaut to start masturbating in her sleep. Sometimes enchanting--the opening images seem found, like the hidden universes of Microcosmos (and, hey, a little Barbarella kinkiness goes a long way)--but ultimately impenetrable. Perhaps all you need to know is that St. Thomas Aquinas is thanked in the credits.

Telluride '13: Tim's Vermeer

**½/****
directed by Teller

by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his little gizmo-whatsit, then sits down, the consummate non-painter, to produce a Xerox-accurate replica of Vermeer's masterpiece. Various talking heads weigh in, day titles depict the passage of time, and by the end it's clear that the topic isn't so much technology's role in art (there's a proximate reality problem presented by the film that pushes it near to a place of science-fiction) as it is Jenison's apparent illness, his meticulousness becoming obsessive and even, at times, frightening, possibly to the point of self-destruction. For the experiment to work, see, Jenison must be unschooled in every required discipline of his project: architecture, costume design, construction, and finally painting. It makes the definitive last image suddenly ambiguous: how do we measure success, and what price is too steep?

Telluride '13: The Unknown Known

****/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations. When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening--an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has made, all the more timely now that the United States--under new leadership, elected on a platform of hope and change--is on the eve of another act of war.

Telluride '13: Tracks

*/****
directed by John Curran

by Walter Chaw Kind of like a dustier Eight Below, in which Mia Wasikowska walks four camels and a dog across the Australian Outback in a whimsical death march that I find, at my age (40), amazingly selfish and borderline sociopathic. Tracks is based on the true story of "camel lady" Robyn Davidson, who, in 1977, walked across a huge stretch of Australia because she really hated being around other people. Davidson says, by way of charming voiceover narration, that she didn't want to be a whiny bitch like the rest of her generation, but she replaces that option with becoming an ungrateful, surly, mortally-broken (by her mother's suicide--fair enough) girl-woman intent on taking camels with her on a trek across some of the most unforgiving terrain on the planet. Just because it's there, try to pay attention. So it's like Into the Wild, but terrible, scored as a child or James Horner would score it and directed like a not-on-purpose horror film in the way that people who've never seen any horror films...or other films...shoot in locations like these. It's also a crowd-pleaser that will attract everyone who doesn't want to be challenged by a movie--think Rabbit-Proof Fence, without the corollary benefit of making the middlebrow believe they're not racist.