Film Freak Central

Shivers (1975) [Vestron Video Collector's Series] - Blu-ray + Digital

They Came from Within
****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Barbara Steele
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In some sense, Shivers, a venereal horror movie that invites you to track the vectors of sexual intercourse among a group of apartment-dwellers, is a parody of a soap opera where the point is who is sleeping with whom. It's also a spit-take on those sex-ed hygiene films that try to frighten teenagers into abstinence. Set almost entirely in a Montréal apartment complex and photographed in a jaundiced palette that leans towards yellow-green, it's about the proliferation of parasites that make their way from body to body by a variety of sickening means, transforming their hosts into insatiable sex maniacs. Shivers was Cronenberg's first commercial feature, and by the director's own admission he was hardly equipped at the time to head up a production with any significant budget. And yet it's some kind of masterpiece. If it's a naive film in some respects, it benefits from naivete. The hurried, sometimes awkward mise en scène may as well be deliberate, given that it jibes so well with the film's chilly, alienating tone. Any cut corners in lighting, design, and special-effects work only enhance the generally grody feel. And there's a lot that's grody about Shivers. That's why it works so well as a chilling overture to a filmmaking career that critics have described as The Cronenberg Project, one in which the director uses film after film to explore love, sex, physical transformation, and mortality.

TIFF '20 'Quibi': Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom

by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some 'quick bites' in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe it's true that there's no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis that's jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleagues--Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)--while out celebrating Nikolaj's 40^th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn Skårderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommy's soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means "binge-drinking") is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowers--but, y'know, it's booze, and the four men eventually can't resist drinking past the point of "ignition," leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoon's credo from James L. Brooks's How Do You Know: "Don't drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better." Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role that's 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.

TIFF '20: Still Processing + Every Day's Like This

STILL PROCESSING
***½/****
written and directed by Sophy Romvari

EVERY DAY'S LIKE THIS
***½/****
starring Kacey Rohl, Daniel Kash, Francis Melling, Krystina Bojanowski
written and directed by Lev Lewis

by Angelo Muredda Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari mourns and preserves the past in her wrenching new nonfiction short, Still Processing, whose title puns on the intricate work of processing photographic images along with the spectral traces of those they depict. Evoking a tradition of poetic but philosophically robust memorial essay films and literary texts about engaging with the material record of the dead, from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil to W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, the film is nevertheless shot through with Romvari's modest sensibility. Though Romvari herself is front and centre throughout, the film is a quiet affair, shot in the loneliness of archives, darkrooms, and bedrooms, frequently lit by faint glowing lights and punctuated by a running subtitle track that elucidates the filmmaker's emotional state. A compelling marriage of form and theme, the film is also gorgeously photographed. Particularly striking is a sequence that finds Romvari working solo among the cold brutalist architecture of York University, taking old photos of her deceased brothers David and Jonathan out of the humble archive of the box they've been housed in for the first time. She delicately arranges their faces on a nondescript table that soon becomes a kind of installation, effectively massaging her siblings back to life through her hands in real-time, as if gesturing to the labour and art of processing grief that only filmmaking can accomplish.

TIFF '20: New Order + Fauna

Nuevo orden
*½/****
starring Naian Gonzaléz Norvind, Dario Yazbek Bernal, Mónica Del Carmen, Sebastian Silveti
written and directed by Michel Franco

FAUNA
***½/****
starring Francisco Barreiro, Luisa Pardo, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez
directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Bill Chambers I'd heard that Michel Franco's New Order was the new Parasite but from the rich people's P.O.V., and I'm here to tell you that Parasite from the rich people's P.O.V. wouldn't be Parasite. Still, I did find the basic premise of New Order quite promising as social commentary: In Mexico City, mounting class resentments spark an uprising against aristocracy on the same day a local heiress is due to be married. I imagined a modern-day storming of the Bastille, but this is a film, for better or worse, of 21^st-century ideas, and it introduces a wrinkle into our eat-the-rich fantasies--military intervention--that becomes a tsunami. An elderly man (Eligio Meléndez) who used to work for the family of the bride, Marianne (Naian Gonzaléz Norvind), shows up at the wedding claiming his sick wife needs money for an operation. (If you watch HBO's "Succession", you know the kind of territory he's wading into.) The mother (Lisa Owen) wants to help but is cowed by the guests' stinginess, while Marianne's brother (Diego Boneta) tips him like a bellhop and expects him to shoo. They're unwittingly justifying the fury of the vandals and looters advancing on their home; only Marianne is truly sympathetic to the old man's plight, going so far as to leave her own wedding (with one of the help in tow) to pick up his wife and drive her to the hospital. But during her absence, the military hatches a diabolical plan to manipulate the situation so as to solidify the caste system rather than see it evolve: they will abduct any wealthy citizens who've strayed from home--mostly the younger set, which leads to a lot of youthful flesh being exploitatively displayed as hostages are stripped naked and hosed down--and ransom them back to family members, pinning the responsibility for these kidnappings on the protestors.

TIFF '20: Inconvenient Indian

***½/****
directed by Michelle Latimer

by Angelo Muredda "You have to watch out for the stories you're told," Thomas King dryly intones early in Michelle Latimer's Inconvenient Indian as he ambles through a repertory-cinema lobby and sits down in his chair in Toronto's Fox Theatre to take in the film we're ostensibly watching. Latimer's unorthodox essay film, which doubles as a curatorial programme on the futures of Indigenous art and life emerging from a history of settler colonialism, is energized by that cautionary note about the high stakes of storytelling, a seemingly benign activity that's charged with both generative and destructive power. It cuts through the blizzard of whitewashed, endlessly recirculated images of Indigenous people as cultural throwbacks, from Nanook of the North onward, to anchor itself in Indigenous work of the present.

Mulan (2020)

½*/****
starring Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Scott Lee, Jet Li
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Lauren Hynek & Elizabeth Martin
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw You can become an expert in the folk history of Mulan if you do a general Google search. Sufficed to say the story of Mulan is an important one for my people, and when I say "my people," I mean my parents' culture, to which I am connected despite a lifetime trying to disentangle myself from it. I read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness decades ago and found in it the truest expression for me of...strangeness? Uncanniness? The alienation I've felt my entire life? I'm not accepted, I have come to accept, by the only culture (American) I have ever known, and my parents' culture despises me, and so here I am, an outcast caste without safe harbour. Being Asian-American for me has meant nursing an unquenchable yearning to be something else, and a wish never honoured to be mistaken for wholly acceptable. In my attempts to return to my heritage over the past decade, I've found myself discouraged by this chasm I've dug in my heart. I don't know if there's enough soil left in the world to make it whole again.

TIFF '03: Falling Angels

*½/****
starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams
screenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdy
directed by Scott Smith

by Bill Chambers Falling Angels has accumulated a lot of buzz over the past couple of days at the TIFF, but I don't mind telling you to ignore it. Basically a Sunday-funnies version of The Virgin Suicides, the film stars an already-typecast Katharine Isabelle as the most embittered of three daughters who live under the gun of a live-wire buffoon (Callum Keith Rennie) while tending to their catatonic mother (Miranda Richardson, doing a mean Joan Allen impersonation). It's set in the early Sixties, an excuse to splash the same old anti-suburbia tropes with a fresh coat of Day-Glo; the gap between the Canadian filmmaker and his/her audience doesn't get any smaller as a newfound satiric bent revitalizes the national cinema's incuriosity. Rennie and Richardson hardly suggest husband and wife (nephew and aunt, maybe), but more problematic is the latter's role, which requires of a terrific actress to sit silent on a couch for the film's duration, a slab of Canadian misery like one of the corpses Molly Parker bangs herself with in Kissed (also, like Falling Angels, based on a Barbara Gowdy novel). Falling Angels is, ironically, more realistic (ergo, likeable) in a series of flashbacks to the girls' temporary stay in a bomb shelter that exudes the colours and compositions of old "Davy & Goliath" cartoons. Programme: Perspective Canada

TIFF '03: The Barbarian Invasions

Les Invasions barbares
**½/****
starring Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze, Marina Hands
written and directed by Denys Arcand

by Bill Chambers Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire belongs to the homecoming genre of films like Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and John Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven, but its quasi-sequel, twice honoured at this year's Cannes Film Festival (for Marie-Josée Croze's performance and Arcand's screenplay), is a Muppet movie with socialists. When embittered poli-sci professor Rémy (Rémy Girard) is diagnosed with untreatable cancer, his estranged, millionaire son Sébastien (David Duchovny look-alike Stéphane Rousseau) seeks out Rémy's Marxist friends of yore--who have more or less gone their separate ways since that momentous dinner party in 1986 and are reunited in true Muppets Take Manhattan, Kermit-needs-me fashion--to be by his bedside for the old man's final days, while also scoring dad painkilling heroin from Nathalie (the plain wonderful Croze), the junkie with whom family friend Dominique (Dominique Michel), her mother, has irreconcilable differences. That the original's neo-realist gimmick of naming the characters after the actors playing them has been dispensed with for new additions to the cast announces Arcand's acquiescence to the inescapable fraudulence of motion pictures; the film's sentimentality, Arcand's embracing of it. Elements carried over from Decline are the most picayune in Invasions: Ever-intrigued by the preoccupations of the younger generations, Arcand's heart lies with Sébastien, whose story takes a moving left turn in the final minutes that looks to set-up another, more interesting continuation. Still, Arcand's narrative skills are as lumpy as Tim Burton's--subplots name-checking a cop (French-Canadian cinema fixture Roy Dupuis) and Nathalie's dealer add verisimilitude but seem to lead nowhere by accident, while the impositions of mild contempt for American culture are just that: impositions. (The barbarians of the title refer literally to they who toppled the Twin Towers, discussed in an ill-advised, Noam Chomsky-inspired interlude.) Uneven but affecting just the same, The Barbarian Invasions kicks off the TIFF on a promising note. Programme: Viacom Galas

TIFF '04: White Skin

La Peau blanche
**/****
starring Marc Paquet, Marianne Farley, Frédéric Pierre, Jessica Malka
screenplay by Joël Champetier, Daniel Roby, based on the novel by Joël Champetier
directed by Daniel Roby

by Bill Chambers I had a pretty good idea of where White Skin (La Peau blanche) was headed, and although I was more tickled that it had the French-word-for-chutzpah to go to those ludicrous extremes than disappointed that the outcome was vaguely predictable (if movies never failed to surprise me, it would only mean that I watch as many as I do in vain (besides which, no film uses a clip from Rabid indiscriminately)), there's something annoyingly retrograde about the whole megillah. The melancholic film starts off promisingly with a conversation between two men on the streets of Montreal: white Thierry (flavourless Marc Paquet), an aspiring author and undergrad, laments his incapacity for being exploited by the suddenly multiculti publishing world to Haitian roomie Henri (Frédéric Pierre, who should be the star); later, Henri plays the race card after getting stabbed in the neck by a (Caucasian) hooker, telling family and friends that a gang of skinheads did it. This sets the stage for a provocative Boy Who Cried Wolf satire that never materializes; instead, Thierry becomes infatuated with a redheaded busker (Karyn Dwyer doppelgänger Marianne Farley), his attraction inexplicable (because he can't stand redheads--it's their translucent skin, you see) but insatiable. She, alas, has cancer, so there will be sacrifices on both their parts (to say the least), and aye, there's the rub: she has "cancer"--embellishment has by such time taken the place of articulateness, effectively putting a stop to the picture's ethnological undercurrents. (A rather unfortunate juxtaposition of speeches about how blacks are more human than human and about how human beings are worthless suggests an editorial blind spot above all else.) Once again, Quebec demonstrates more aptitude for commercial filmmaking than the rest of Canada (even if the trashy, likeminded Decoys ultimately feels less indie), but I still say the national cinema could use rebooting. Programme: Canada First

TIFF '04: Blood

*½/****
starring Emily Hampshire, Jacob Tierney
screenplay by Jerry Ciccoritti, based on the play by Tom Walmsley
directed by Jerry Ciccoritti

by Bill Chambers Just the other day I watched Dial M for Murder, a single-set movie faithfully adapted from a stage play that never quite becomes theatre-on-film because, let's face it, we're talking about Alfred Hitchcock here. Jerry Ciccoritti is no Alfred Hitchcock--not that Ciccoritti's Blood wants or tries to be Dial M for Murder, but its Mike Figgis, let's-see-what-this-button-does aesthetic so reeks of overcompensation as to end up not only preserving the material's stage roots in amber, but also lulling us into a stupor. No doubt there's some method to Ciccoritti's onaninistic use of his editing console, an endeavouring to mirror, echo, or otherwise amplify his characters' addled state of mind, but Blood's subject matter is alien enough that a more straightforward shooting style might have proved less disengaging. Credit where credit is due that Ciccoritti--a pillar, as the co-founder of the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Company, of Toronto's queer and goth communities--is not an apprehensive or antiseptic director like most of his Canuck brethren (the eight-time Gemini Award winner surely benefited from working at the pace of television in that regard), but Blood, a stream-of-consciousness chamber piece about a part-time hooker (Neve Campbell-ish Emily Hampshire) deciding whether or not to make her own brother (filmmaker Jacob Tierney) the third party in an impending ménage à trois when he shows up at her door after a years-long absence, is nothing if not uniquely Canadian in its use of sex as a threat rather than as a promise. Programme: Visions

TIFF '05: Heading South

Vers le sud
***½/****
starring Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Louise Portal, Ménothy Cesar
screenplay by Laurent Cantet & Robin Campillo, based on short stories by Dany Laferrière
directed by Laurent Cantet

by Bill Chambers Heading South (Vers le sud) represents such a departure from the milieu of Laurent Cantet's previous film (2001's brilliant psychological thriller Time Out (L'Emploi du temps)) that you can't really say it rounds out a trilogy he started with Human Resources. Nevertheless, it resumes his fascination with people in transience, people who've erected complex façades to avoid the repercussions of personal or professional failure; Cantet's pictures are screwball comedies played straight, and we see ourselves reflected in them like Athene saw herself in the water. Thanks to a chilling, if red herring-laden, prologue wherein a Haitian mother tries to "give" her endangered teenage daughter to a respectable-looking islander, a black cloud looms over the piece--and it's just one of the many ways in which Cantet shrewdly exploits Haiti's mystique without falling back on Serpent and the Rainbow-isms, paving a road to doom down which three middle-aged spinsters defiantly walk. Wellesley professor Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), willowy Midwesterner Brenda (Karen Young, who gets to deliver one of the screen's finest erotic monologues since Persona), and earthy Montréaler Sue (Louise Portal) are returning guests at a kind of sex resort where they take turns patronizing Legba (Ménothy Cesar), a young gigolo who makes them feel not only beautiful but, critically, maternal, too. (When we first meet Legba, he's curled up in a foetal position on the beach, only to be 'awakened' by Brenda's touch.) Unfolding towards the end of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror, the 1978-set film relies a little too much on a working knowledge of Haiti's political history to sort out its narrative ambiguities, but by the same token, this seems to stave off noble-savage syndrome--of which the characters are guilty but the filmmaker, for a change, is not. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

TIFF '05: Capote

**/****
starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins, Jr., Chris Cooper
screenplay by Dan Futterman, based on the novel by Gerald Clarke
directed by Bennett Miller

Editor's note: I was so wrong about this film it's almost funny. It probably should've won Best Picture that year.

by Bill Chambers Richard Brooks's masterful screen translation of Truman Capote's true-crime (Tru-crime?) novel In Cold Blood is full of indelible imagery that at first seems to seep into the fabric of Capote beyond director Bennett Miller's control. But as the homages--most notably, both pictures postpone the pivotal slaying of the ominously-named Clutter family until showing it will subvert our expectations most effectively--accumulate and grow increasingly distinct, this tapered biopic begins to feel like a particularly vexing déjà vu. Except for his telltale slackjaw laugh, Philip Seymour Hoffman disappears into the title role, yet the movie is fundamentally superfluous: In presuming to tell the story of In Cold Blood from Capote's point-of-view, it presumes that In Cold Blood wasn't inherently told from Capote's point-of-view. And not only did Brooks's decision to leave the author out of his film as a character not dilute Capote's spurious liberal sympathies, if anything it found them better disseminated than this Dead Man Walking redux does. An early scene of Capote-as-raconteur, which has the electricity of Faces-era Cassavetes, gets one's hopes up, but in retrospect, it only portends Miller's knack for pastiche. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

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: 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: 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!