Film Freak Central

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

*½/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, Finn Little, Jon Bernthal
screenplay by Michael Koryta and Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, based on the book by Michael Koryta
directed by Taylor Sheridan                     

by Walter Chaw A certain déjà vu occurs with movies that feature what Gregory Peck once referred to as an endlessly replicable script. The hero who has endured trauma and, through the auspices of the film's familiar master plot, is given an opportunity to heal. In the parlance of this formula, perhaps there will be surrogate parents and children, replays--whether in the service of a literal time-loop or a figurative one--of inciting events with the opportunity to redress them, or... Look, I'm trying to find a clever way to say that Taylor Sheridan's Those Who Wish Me Dead is a new movie you've seen at least a hundred times before. It is one in every ten films or so. At its best, it's a cozy throwback to deadening programmers like The Client that saw great casts and decent budgets at the mercy of airport-rack bestsellers adapted by rote and delivered on time. At its worst, it's a meta-game of Scream where the instantly-exhausted viewer can nail major plot points based solely on the casting and the style of swooping once-helicopter/now-drone establishing shot. Maybe that's why there are so many superfluous cuts in this film--like how the introduction of one character to her summer home is split into six separate shots, none of them telling anything more than how she has arrived and managed to unlock the door.

Body Politics: FFC Interviews Dusty Mancinelli & Madeleine Sims-Fewer

Even among the generally positive responses to Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli's superlative Violation, one finds evidence of the predictable fallout that occurs whenever a woman in horror, particularly in the rape-revenge category of horror, fails to adhere to expectations of victimhood. Surely a woman who reacts to rape with violence is psycho, yes? Violation has as its closest analogues the Greek tragedies involving a woman cruelly wronged who righteously wrongs in return; the final image of the film is as clear a metaphor as I can imagine for how we all, men and women alike, take on the sins of the father in our various acts of consumption, both gustatorial and sexual. I was excited to speak with co-writers/co-directors Ms. Sims-Fewer (who also stars) and Mr. Mancinelli about their film and its positive--if sometimes confused--reception. So often, exhaustingly often, when one seeks to change perception, one instead manages to reveal how unchangeable perceptions can be. We should be beyond this conversation in 2021. In a lot of ways, Violation reveals that we've yet to properly broach the topic. The pair, sitting on a pale blue couch with a Frida Kahlo throw pillow between them--an appropriate totem of gender ambiguity and, indeed, rage, I thought--were engaged and smart about what their film was about. Violation is intentional in a way that very few movies can get away with--and it gets away with it because it's, y'know, brilliant. I started by asking them the perhaps obvious question of why men hate women who reveal themselves as fully human.

Crisis (2021)

*/****
starring Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear
written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki

by Walter Chaw Nicholas Jarecki's Crisis is a Stanley Kramer piece, a "means well," ripped-from-the-headlines message flick that hews closer to 3 Needles than to Traffic in terms of effectiveness and humility. In place of dialogue, there is exposition; and in place of performances, there are swollen forehead veins and trembling lower lips, aghast at the injustices of a cold universe. Crisis sheds "importance" from itself like dander from a stressed but beloved pet, and it's unseemly to come down too hard on it when its greatest crimes are that it is middlebrow in its politeness and really doesn't have much to say beyond what's already inherently obvious. It's possible to do stuff like this and make something like The Insider--that is, something powerful, artful, and transformative. More commonly, it turns out like Crisis has turned out: instantly forgettable and mildly embarrassing in the way of your hip dad trying to jam with you about the evils of the sticky icky. Oh, and use a condom, son.

Sundance '21: Violation

****/****
starring Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse LaVercombe, Obi Abili
written and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli

by Walter Chaw Just the image of a man, naked, fighting for his life against a clothed assailant after a sexually-compromised engagement feels by itself something like rebellion. Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer's Violation isn't the first in the struggle, but it's a powerful addition to a fulsome rape-revenge subgenre that, with classics like Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45, Lars Von Trier's Dogville, and Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave leading a to-this-point male-dominated field, has always had something on its mind about the way women are brutalized in a society that sees them mainly as appendages for male desire. What I like best about Violation, though, isn't its similarities to modern examples, but rather its relationship (not unlike Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring) to ancient examples such as Medea and Atreus. Indeed, the film lands somewhere between the two: the House of Atreus cursed because of a rape and playing out through the rendering and surreptitious cannibalism that Violation makes distaff through Medea's vengeful filicide (at least in the Euripedes telling). Violation is ancient Greek, too, in the pulling of atrocity into the immediate comparison to not the indifference of the natural world, but the transformative viciousness that animates it. Things are always in a state of violent flux; it's nature's lone promise. And this cosmological tendency towards equilibrium is only achieved through the passing through of distant polarities. The road to "fine" leads through bliss and blood.

DIFF '04: Being Julia

*½/****
starring Annette Bening, Catherine Charlton, Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham
directed by István Szabó

by Walter Chaw Shrill and unlikeable, Being Julia is reasonably assessed as an at least thematically faithful adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's soulless novel Theatre, just as it's fair to compare it to the acclaimed Mephisto, director István Szabó's other condemnation of the stage. But that doesn't mean it's any good. Annette Bening plays Julia Lambert, a grand dame of London's West End accurately labelled a cold, evil bitch by her emotionally-unavailable actor husband, Michael (Jeremy Irons). Julia beds down with young Tom (Shaun Evans), who in turn beds down with ingénue Avice (Lucy Punch); in a fit of pique, Julia sets out to destroy Avice. The idea is that poor monster Julia is incapable of separating reality from the stage--setting the stage, as it were, for a film that addresses layers of sign and signifier through a climactic play-within-a-play-within-a-film. But it's all done with so much spite and so little self-awareness that Julia is actually made the hero in some kind of klutzy, pre-Blitz version of The First Wives Club. Older women deserve to be humiliated for sleeping with younger men and young women deserve to be humiliated by older women. Only the men win, an important thing to remember when this male-dominated production is brought up in conversation as an example of a woman's film. Lesbian and gay subplots abound, mainly for the purposes of giggling at their whimsical perversity (there's more giggling in Being Julia than there is at a Japanese schoolgirl convention), and no other middlebrow peeve goes unpunished either when writers and the expressionist theatre are mocked for the bemusement of what the picture refers to as the jackassery of the unwashed, anti-intellectual public. Originally published: October 19, 2004.

Head in the Clouds (2004); Bright Young Things (2003); Vera Drake (2004)

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, Stuart Townsend, Thomas Kretschmann
written and directed by John Duigan

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
**½/****
starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Stephen Fry, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
directed by Stephen Fry

VERA DRAKE
***½/****
starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney
written and directed by Mike Leigh

by Walter Chaw There's a certain fascination embedded in our images of wartime England. When a film comes birthing across the pond this time of year, dripping with prestige and a whiff of stuffiness, what can it be but awards fodder laden with lovely sets, sepia-stained cinematography, handsome wool and silk costumes, and largely European casts that remind of how venal American mainstream casts tend to be by comparison? Something about the Blitz still intoxicates--perhaps England's steadfast refusal to surrender their island sanctuary to the barbarians at the gate tickles at our national self-delusion, trading on the belief, once ironclad, that our borders were as sacrosanct, or that our intentions in establishing a New World Order were ever that noble. Now, without the comfort of our own inviolate island sanctuary (what was Manhattan pre-9/11 than that--and what was it after but the biggest metaphor for the irony of capitalist arrogance since The Titanic?), there's just that much more reason for moth-balled middlebrow arthouse audiences to snuffle up great pinches of mid-twentieth century British pluck and remember from the cloistered perspective of a cloth chair a when that never existed--at least never for them.

Love and Monsters (2020) - VOD

***/****
starring Dylan O'Brien, Jessica Henwick, Dan Ewing, Michael Rooker
screenplay by Brian Duffield & Matthew Robinson
directed by Michael Matthews

by Walter Chaw The kind of movie someone like Joe Dante might have made for Roger Corman once upon a time, Love and Monsters, Michael Matthews's follow-up to his Five Fingers for Marseilles, is a joyfully, unashamedly silly American kaiju modest in its ambitions and occasionally poignant for that modesty. In Love and Monsters, a broad (very broad) updating of L Q. Jones's deep-cut cult movie of Harlan's Ellison "A Boy and His Dog," a lovable schlub named Joel (Dylan O'Brien) is ensconced in a bunker with a handful of other survivors thanks to a plague of monsters that has obliterated 95% of the human population. It's possible to go deep on how these monsters are the result of "chemicals" raining down on the planet because emergency rockets were fired into a looming asteroid, and how if this is a quarantine allegory, its ultimate message that you should leave quarantine is unfortunately-timed, but the picture is too good-natured to deserve much opprobrium for misreading the room.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio's Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the twenty-four hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It's therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day--on the hour, almost--that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana's eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Scary Movie 3 (2003)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Anna Faris, Charlie Sheen, Regina Hall, Denise Richards
screenplay by Craig Mazin and Kevin Smith and David Zucker
directed by David Zucker

by Walter Chaw Even without the Wayans Brothers, the latest Scary Movie sequel is unspeakably bad. A disjointed series of set-piece recreations from popular films (Signs, The Matrix Reloaded, The Ring, 8 Mile) populated by idiots and scripted with a flat collection of obvious fall-down gags and scatology, the picture doesn't even respect the movies it mocks enough to understand what it is about them that fails. More, with the absence of the Wayans (who are replaced by David Zucker, one-third of the braintrust behind successful spoofs like Airplane! and The Naked Gun), the repeated shout-outs to heroes of hip-hop (an entire record label shows up in cameo bits) and attendant disrespect of the culture land with disturbing racial undertones. The film is aimed specifically at an African-American demographic: That's one thing when the filmmakers are African-American, another thing altogether when they're not.

The Shipping News (2001)

**/****
starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel by E. Annie Proulx
directed by Lasse Hallström

by Walter Chaw In 1994, E. Annie Proulx was plucked from obscurity to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Shipping News, her second novel. The story of "large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere" Quoyle struck a nerve with its combination of lyricism and evocation of the provincial "foreignness" of Newfoundland, Canada. Personally, though I found Proulx's prose intoxicating, the book's final thirty pages seemed discordant and atonal to me--they betray the mood with a kind of desperate urge towards resolution that feels contrary to the quirky, steady melancholy Proulx had established. (It comes as little surprise that the end of the novel was written before the rest of it.)

Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, David Duchovny, Omar Benson Miller
screenplay by Allan Loeb
directed by Susanne Bier

by Walter Chaw I love Danish director Susanne Bier's Open Hearts, the second Dogme95 picture by a woman and one of the most affecting tragic romances I've ever seen. (Much of its power is attributable to a scene where a man, newly paralyzed, dreams of reaching across a small space to touch his lover's hand.) I thought, even given the middling quality of her follow-ups Brothers and After the Wedding, that we'd found in Bier a distinct, exciting talent, an artist interested in charting the course of grief described in the coming-apart of complementary halves and doing so with minimal fanfare or melodrama. It usually would take more than one picture for me to lose the religion, but Bier's done it in brilliant fashion with her English-language debut, Things We Lost in the Fire. Blame her screenwriter Allan Loeb for a goodly portion of this glorious debacle, one that features an early exchange in which a father defines "fluorescent" for his six-year-old son as "lit from within," leading the boy, of course, to pipe up with, "Do you think that I'm lit from within?" Not that Bier escapes accountability: Refusing to let go of her Dogme flirtation, she shoots most of this gas-trap in total silence and extreme close-up, marking this boilerplate tearjerker as uniquely, unwatchably pretentious. It's also maudlin, mawkish, unintentionally hilarious, and utterly devoid of human emotion. The word I'm searching for, I guess, is "alien." After the extraordinary humanism of Open Hearts, to see Bier at the wheel of this infernal exercise in clearing off the mantle is nothing short of horrible.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020)

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finnernan, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see Freaky in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don't be a dick.

by Walter Chaw "You've gone strange on me," Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that's impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn't himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he's surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he's vulnerable to the mistakes he's made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning "parts" or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven't been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don't think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow's nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

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 '07: Just Buried

*½/****
starring Jay Baruchel, Rose Byrne, Graham Greene, Nigel Bennett
written and directed by Chaz Thorne

by Bill Chambers Just Buried (formerly Pushing Up Daisies) stars Jay Baruchel as Oliver Whynacht (get it? "Why not?" Me neither), a neurotic with a really annoying affection (his nose bleeds when he's nervous) who inherits a small-town funeral parlour from his estranged father. He's ready to hand over the reins of the money-hemorrhaging business to a competitor when he falls under the spell of the Lady Macbeth-like mortician, Roberta (Rose Byrne), whereupon the two hatch a scheme to drum up business that rather rapidly transforms them into makeshift serial killers. The casting of Baruchel triggers acid flashbacks to the similarly tactless Fetching Cody, but to its detriment, Just Buried has far more shame, its every Guignol set-piece an exercise in Greedo-fires-first evasiveness. Indeed, until the inevitable unleashing of Roberta's inner castrating bitch (the underlying misogyny of which is tempered by how tiresome Baruchel and his character have become), the movie is so terrified of complicity that it's downright sterile. Blame the Brits for making this kind of morbid farce look easy and Canada's nation of amateurs for dabbling in yet another genre incompatible with our core decency. In all, not the sinfully delicious good time one expects, though it does put the sphinxlike Byrne to good use. PROGRAMME: Canada First!

TIFF '07: Emotional Arithmetic

**/****
starring Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, Max von Sydow
screenplay by Jefferson Lewis, based on the novel by Matt Cohen
directed by Paolo Barzman

by Bill Chambers A "Never Forget" PSA done up as a Bergmanesque psychodrama, the destined-to-be-retitled Emotional Arithmetic at least has the good sense to co-opt Bergman veteran Max von Sydow, who turns in the kind of twilit performance that functions as both a compendium of and an exquisite gateway to a storied career. Asked point-blank how he managed to survive the Holocaust, a prison sentence, and shock therapy, Sydow, as the noble but senile Jewish poet Jakob Bronski, snarls, "I'm hard to kill." It's a goosebumps-inducing moment that has already indelibly etched itself on Sydow's iconography for me, and it fleetingly transforms Emotional Arithmetic into the elegy I think it wants to be--maybe even a savvier one at that. But the movie--in which childhood sweethearts Melanie (Susan Sarandon) and Christopher (Gabriel Byrne) are reunited at the farm of Melanie's college-professor husband (Christopher Plummer) by/with the man, Jakob, who facilitated their release from French internment camp Drancy--is just a little bit maddening. Part of the problem is that veteran TV director Paolo Barzman seems to see only in macro. A perfect example of this is an encounter between Plummer and Byrne that must've taken hours to light but is virtually unravelled by a stray hair on Byrne's person: it becomes an almost hypnotic distraction. And so it follows that the film's didactic façade doesn't really hold up under scrutiny; the moral of the story is hard to wrap one's head around, since it laments history's short memory while advocating selective amnesia as a survival mechanism. Admittedly, I also have a pretty low tolerance for Sarandon, Roy Dupuis (struggling with an Anglo accent as Melanie's son), and countrified intellectuals in general, but that's my cross to bear. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

TIFF '07: The Tracey Fragments

½*/****
starring Ellen Page, Ari Cohen, Max McCabe-Lokos, Max Turnbull
screenplay by Maureen Medved, based on her novel
directed by Bruce McDonald

by Bill Chambers When I say that The Tracey Fragments applies the Tarnation method to fiction filmmaking, I say it exasperated with the whole Pied Piper mentality that follows any aesthetic innovation. I admire Tarnation, don't misunderstand, but a big part of that admiration rests in the picture's total invention and definitive application of a form that fits its function. Unfortunately, for every E.T., there's a Mac and Me--and for every original like Jonathan Caouette there's a dilettante-in-waiting like Bruce McDonald. The Canadian Kevin Smith, McDonald burrows into Tarnation like a tapeworm to nourish this anaemic faux-diary of a would-be runaway. Ellen Page is predictably dynamic in the title role, but in all honesty, I'm already sick of her coy nymphet routine, and there's no real relief from it here; you can't shake the feeling that Page, twenty years old offscreen, is condescending to the character, a late-bloomer who lives in her head. If you stop and think about it, The Tracey Fragments' tacit correlation of Tracey's demons with Caouette's--far fewer of which are imagined or self-created--is at best clueless and at worst downright offensive. Gay men are not teenage girls! (Consider how superficial are the similarities between Tracey's and Jonathan's mutual retreat into fantasy realms dominated by pop-cultural signposts: Tracey has Rupert Pupkin-esque skylarks about people falling down to worship her, whereas Jonathan mainly seeks catharsis by placing himself in the shoes of other lost souls.) I did find it interesting that only women left my screening early, though I suspect this was just a coincidence: Even with the film's scant running time of 77 minutes, the unrelenting use of splitscreen is bound to give anyone a headache. PROGRAMME: Visions

TIFF '08: Derrière moi

Behind Me
**½/****
starring Carina Caputo, Charlotte Legault, Patrice Dubois
written and directed by Rafaël Ouellet

by Bill Chambers The title translates as Behind Me, which is sort of where I want to put this Lukas Moodysson-esque downer. I hasten to add, though, that this is a work of fierce emotional intelligence, and I honestly can't decide whether its profoundly upsetting closing minutes (however bullshit they might be) are an example of the characters letting us down or the filmmakers letting the characters down, cynically betraying them and the scenario for shock value. What's interesting is that the logline sent out to the press for Derrière moi obliquely gives away the ending whilst framing the entire film in the context of it--but I hadn't read this synopsis beforehand and do wonder whether being more aware of the contours of a plot would've made the coda more palatable or simply killed my patience for the movie's slow burn. In Derrière moi, Léa (Charlotte Legault), a comely 14-year-old girl staying with her grandmother in some French-Canadian backwater, catches the predatory eye of Betty (Carina Caputo), a twentysomething drifter too exotic, worldly, and dominant a personality for sheltered only-child Léa to resist. The set-up is nothing if not psychologically acute, and the constant undercurrent of remorse in Legault's performance rings truer than, say, Evan Rachel Wood's total and instantaneous divorce from her conscience in Thirteen. And it's unfortunate that Betty's hidden agenda subverts Caputo's rich characterization of a woman whose sophistication act is so pathetic that it takes someone much younger not to see through it; Betty's desperation is rendered all too circumstantial by that final turn of the screw. PROGRAMME: Vanguard

Return to Never Land (2002) - DVD

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
screenplay by Temple Mathews and Carter Crocker
directed by Robin Budd, Donovan Cook

by Bill Chambers I can only assume that Disney buried Peter Pan in Stephen King's pet sematary, for resurrected in the misbegotten Return to Never Land is one sour Fairy King. In the original Peter Pan, the title character lost his shadow; in the sequel, Peter is all shadow, a fascist dictator separated from the malicious Captain Hook by a single distinguishing feature: the hook. Return to Never Land pits the two in conflict once more, this time over the stolen treasure of Captain Hook, which Peter has stowed away for a rainy day. The movie gives no indication as to how Hook acquired the chest full of gold in the first place, thus our introduction to Peter is as a thief. And by the end of the picture, that's the kindest thing I could think to call him.

Kaena: The Prophecy (2003) + The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998) [2-Disc Special Edition] - DVDs

KAENA: THE PROPHECY
*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
screenplay by Tarik Hamoine and Chris Delaporte
directed by Chris Delaporte

THE LION KING II: SIMBA'S PRIDE
½*/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
screenplay by Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus
directed by Rob LaDuca & Darrell Rooney

by Walter Chaw There's a timorous, resonant quality to Kirsten Dunst's voice. It's amazing, really: it vibrates at a contralto as tense and lovely as a cello string drawn--I think it's her most attractive feature. She's tailor-made, then, to be a vocal performer, and finds herself as such in French filmmaker Chris Delaporte's plodding misfire of a movie Kaena: The Prophecy. Completely computer-animated, it's every bit as ugly and prosaic as its American cousin Ice Age (insomuch as it even includes a prehistoric-squirrel vignette towards the end) and obsessed with the jiggle dimensions of Kaena (or is that me, obsessed?), who must save her tree-world Axis from destruction at the hands of the evil Selenites (whose queen is voiced by Anjelica Huston). The story is so Joseph Campbell hero's journey-obsessed, so humourless and--how do I say it delicately?--Bakshi in its execution, that poor Dunst, in the title role, is wasted on plucky pronouncements and grunts of exertion as her .gif alter-ego leaps hither and yon.

Guest of Honour (2020)

**½/****
starring David Thewlis, Laysla De Oliveira, Rossif Sutherland, Luke Wilson
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda "He sounds like one of those people you hear about but don't see," Luke Wilson's pastor Greg tells bereaved daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) early on in Atom Egoyan's Guest of Honour, laconically cutting through an exposition dump as only Luke Wilson can. Greg is drafting his eulogy for Veronica's father, the recently departed health inspector Jim (David Thewlis), for whom the film itself is a kind of prickly eulogy. A cold fish with inscrutable motives (he claims he's just working to protect the public from contamination, even as he wields his badge with extreme prejudice), Jim is the quintessential Egoyan protagonist. He's a moral question mark in a suit, like the tax auditors and insurance adjusters who have served the somewhat dimmed star of English-Canadian cinema so well in The Adjuster and Exotica. Imbued with a puckish meanness by Thewlis, Jim is the lynchpin to a modestly successful exercise that epitomizes Egoyan's annoyingly self-serious puzzle-box style, as well as, thankfully, his playfulness.