Film Freak Central

TIFF '06: The Myth

½*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Kim Hee-seon, Mallika Sherawat
screenplay by Stanley Tong, Wang Hui-ling, Li Hai-shu
directed by Stanley Tong

by Bill Chambers The Myth, or: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Turdbath. Sabotaging a potential comeback by trying to catch a wave (not unlike the myriad has-beens in the music industry who jumped on the disco bandwagon), Jackie Chan dips a toe in the unfriendly, nay, hostile waters of the wu xia genre recently revitalized by the likes of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. Although The Myth is cruddy-looking (HD's fine for George Lucas excretions and Robert Rodriguez fantasias, but it has a long way to go before it'll be ready for this kind of quasi-epic) and beset by shoddy effects work, blame for its near-unwatchability falls squarely at the feet of Chan and his frequent collaborator Stanley Tong, who directed the film and co-wrote its infantile screenplay. The pitch-meeting must've sounded like kindergarten--after all, it's got meteorites! And sword-fighting! And princesses! And archaeologists! And rooms without gravity! And swamis! And ghosts! It doesn't help that Chan's face has petrified with age and distress into a single, constipated expression, making his reaction shots so opaque as to be dramatically ineffectual. There's a decent set-piece involving a conveyer belt slathered in super-glue, but just the fact that the heir apparent to Fred Astaire would rather contrive reasons to move as little as possible during an action sequence than retire is proof of the production's mid-life crisis. PROGRAMME: Viacom Galas

TIFF '05: Romance & Cigarettes

*½/****
starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi
written and directed by John Turturro

by Bill Chambers Dennis Potter was a genre unto himself, and when he died, he took his recipe for what Heinz Antor called "humanist postmodernism" with him. It's painful to watch writer-director John Turturro, one of the great character actors of our time, invoke the writer in Romance & Cigarettes, as he reduces Potter's notion of pop music as existential catharsis to exactly what it wasn't: a gimmick--an alibi for air band. In the spellbinding film version of Potter's Pennies from Heaven, Christopher Walken comically menaces Bernadette Peters by lip-synching and doing a show-stopping striptease to Irving Aaronson and His Commanders' "Let's Misbehave"; in Romance & Cigarettes, Walken's performance of Tom Jones's "Delilah" is seemingly motivated by a weakness for musical filler. Considering the applause the film elicited from the typically unresponsive press/industry crowd, I guess the technique alone is visceral enough, but instead of illuminating the inner lives of the characters (which even a novelty ditty like "Teddy Bear Picnic" managed to do in the original The Singing Detective), Turturro's prosaic song choices superficialize the inner lives of his characters, making glorified jukeboxes of them all. Granted, once James Gandolfini's Nick Murder--a big galloot cheating on his wife (the ubiquitous Susan Sarandon, who's really starting to wear out her welcome) with an English tart (Kate Winslet, too good for this)--is diagnosed with lung cancer, the movie becomes less arbitrary, but we're left to do the heavy-lifting required by the tonal shift; suture and respite come only briefly in the form of perennial pinch-hitter Elaine Stritch (see also: Monster-in-Law). Give her an Oscar, already. 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: Fay Grim

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

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

TIFF '06: The Pleasure of Your Company

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

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

TIFF '06: Citizen Duane

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

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

TIFF '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 '08: A Christmas Tale

Un Conte de Noël
***/****
starring Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Cosigny
screenplay by Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bourdieu
directed by Arnaud Desplechin

by Bill Chambers A Gallic collision of The Family Stone (ugh) and The Royal Tenenbaums (woo) but far more palatable and novelistic than that might suggest, Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noël) unfurls over Christmas in bourgeois Roubaix, where the dysfunctional Vuillards have congregated to weigh their options now that matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with cancer. She needs a bone-marrow transplant, and the only potential matches are black sheep Henri (Mathieu Amalric) and Henri's suicidal nephew Paul (Emile Berling), whose mother, Henri's sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny, in a performance too smirkily opaque for its own good), had previously banished Henri from their lives due to the boundless contempt she's nursed for him since childhood. Backstories for the other members of the clan--curiously sharing their last name with the protagonists of Desplechin's previous film, the similarly dense Kings and Queen, thus facilitating the obvious comparisons to Salinger's Glass Family--and various satellite characters are gradually weaved into this narrative throughline (it's perhaps more accurate to say they're sewn into it like patches on a crazy quilt), eventually revealing a prismatic view of the season in which any yuletide survivor should be able to find her sweet spot. The pall of mortality hanging over the festivities created a frisson of recognition for me, as did an almost antidotal moment where an airing of The Ten Commandments briefly narcotizes everyone in the room, though that's neither here nor there. Indeed, the movie is more broadly appealing and consistently engaging than all that: Desplechin's familiar but no less maddeningly discordant mix of storytelling devices and cinematic techniques is finally anchored by the demands of the homecoming genre and the sentiments of the holiday itself. (Those sentiments, however, may apply more to Festivus than to Christmas, with the disease known as Graft-Versus-Host serving as a mordant metaphor for the inevitable yet inorganic reversal of the parent/child dynamic.) In that sense, it's not quite the galvanizing high-wire act that was Kings and Queen, but it is a gift that keeps on giving. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

TIFF '08: The Girl from Monaco

La fille de Monaco
**/****
starring Fabrice Luchini, Roschdy Zem, Louise Bourgoin, Stéphane Audran
screenplay by Anne Fontaine, Benoît Graffin
directed by Anne Fontaine

by Bill Chambers Her ringtone is a wolf whistle, her bedroom is decorated with Princess Di memorabilia, and she says things like "I feel orange." She's The Girl from Monaco. She's also a coarse variation on Sarah Jessica Parker's SanDeE* from L.A. Story (this time, it's she who does the weather), duking it out for the soul of lawyer Bertrand against his emotionally-involved bodyguard, Christophe. Bertrand (Fabrice Luchini) is in Monaco representing a suspected murderess (Stéphane Audran) in a case high-profile enough that the accused's wealthy son assigns Bertrand round-the-clock protection in the form of gentle giant Christophe (Roschdy Zem). But the biggest threat to lonely bachelor Bertrand, a doormat when it comes to the opposite sex, is Bertrand himself. Consequently, Christophe becomes his girl wrangler, going so far as to send one would-be stalker into a cum coma (™ Eli Roth's Hostel: Part II) on Bertrand's behalf. Thing is, Audrey (Bourgoin) has already been there/done that with Christophe; a succubus built like a porn star, Audrey is the kind of problem you can only solve with a serpentine stretch of highway, Grace Kelly-style. (If you think I'm being tasteless, you should see the movie.) I feel like I'm missing out on some in-joke based on the fact that Bourgoin was a real-life weather girl for the Canal+ channel, but her performance seems bravely-uninhibited for one that's implicitly self-referential. She sure does make an impression in any event for the McGuffin of a formulaic buddy comedy. Between this Anne Fontaine joint and Patrice Leconte's My Best Friend (another agreeable time-waster), it would appear that French filmmakers have just discovered said sub-genre, but they're not doing as much to subvert it or innovate it as their CAHIERS DU CINEMA peers/precursors would have done. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

TIFF '08: Rachel Getting Married

**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mather Zickel, Bill Irwin
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme

by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married has the cultural disadvantage of arriving soon after Margot at the Wedding and the personal one of following Claire Denis's 35 Shots in my screening log. Denis does so much more with so much less; perhaps sight-unseen, people have been calling this a return to form for Demme (as in, the form before The Silence of the Lambs created certain commercial expectations of/obligations in his work), but I don't remember him ever being this histrionic. And my heart sank a little when I saw that Declan Quinn, collaborating with Demme for the first time outside the documentary realm, had replaced the man who's photographed almost every one of Demme's fiction features to date, Tak Fujimoto, though I imagine the almost-painterly Fujimoto would have resisted Rachel Getting Married's Dogmé-influenced shooting style. Out on a weekend-pass from rehab, goth-y, parasitic Kim (Anne Hathaway, mannered and overmatched) returns home to disturb the shit before her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) marries African-American fiancé Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe, of TV on the Radio) and these long day's journeys into night are no longer viable. Unfortunately, the picture insists on pathologizing all the withering remarks and squirmy frankness via a Tragic Family Secret, making a kneejerk transition in the process from a caustic embarrassment comedy tempered by the director's trademark folksiness to a simply embarrassing melodrama for which a devout humanist like Demme seems overqualified. While I can't deny that Rachel Getting Married has some lovely grace notes in its plodding second half (see: a family tradition of competitive dish-stacking), it definitively jumps the shark with a wedding sequence (surely the most protracted since The Deer Hunter's) in which the film regains its comic footing in the worst way: because it's like a MAD MAGAZINE parody of a Jonathan Demme ceremony, complete with Sister Carol and Robyn Hitchcock performing, the groom inexplicably serenading his bride with Neil Young's "Unknown Legend," and Roger Corman in attendance. Sometimes it sucks to be an auteurist, but what can you do? PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

TIFF '08: Gigantic

**/****
starring Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, Ed Asner, Jane Alexander
screenplay by Adam Nagata & Matt Aselton
directed by Matt Aselton

by Bill Chambers Gigantic is littered with dead and loose ends, which wouldn't be a big deal if this were the quasi-freeform jazz of a Cassavetes or even an Apatow wannabe, but is a considerable problem when taking into account the crispness of the film's aesthetics. The clean 'scope compositions and fat-free performances become increasingly incongruous; by the time the movie stops short with everything and nothing resolved, you're convinced the filmmakers snatched a script out of the oven half-cooked after a window of opportunity opened up, not-unreasonably convinced that their cinematic faculties would see them through. Co-producer Paul Dano, suddenly charismatic and borderline handsome (going toe-to-toe with Daniel Day-Lewis evidently did wonders for him), is Brian, a single, 28-year-old mattress salesman who inexplicably dreams of adopting a Chinese baby to raise alone if need be; Zooey Deschanel, in a mesmerizing, career-best turn, is a spacey, baby-voiced sexpot named Happy; and a finally-funny-again John Goodman is Happy's crass millionaire father, whose need for a bed brings Brian into contact with his daughter. Fundamentally, Gigantic is about two lonely people coming together, and there's promise in how it inverts the Knocked Up formula by making Brian the expectant parent and Happy a maturity-deprived bachelorette. But there are just too many pointless, writerly indulgences--including a derelict (Zach Galifianakis) seemingly manifested from Brian's subconscious who shows up to terrorize him at regular intervals, and a scene set in a massage parlour I can't see surviving the channels of distribution except as a DVD supplement--cluttering up the narrative. Gigantic? More like "bloated." PROGRAMME: Discovery

Nanny McPhee (2005) [Widescreen] - DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Angela Lansbury
screenplay by Emma Thompson, based on the "Nurse Matilda" books by Christianna Brand
directed by Kirk Jones

by Walter Chaw Often as garish and shrill as it is magical and enchanting, Kirk Jones' Nanny McPhee throws into sharp relief the difficulty of describing the tightrope so artfully navigated by Babe: Pig in the City. In its favour, there are strong, fairytale-sinister undercurrents to it that feel authentic where the darkness of the slick Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events felt, on the whole, manufactured and arch, and the film finds its surest footing in an idea essential to children's entertainment: that every action has a consequence. The answer to the question of what, exactly, is Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson), or what generator produces these Mary Poppinses like sexless, befrocked clergy attending wayward British moppets, is that Nanny McPhee is stuffy consequence personified--the element of parents and/or society that, often with something like a supernatural hand in the eyes of a child, embeds itself in a growing moral conscience. There's something grand and mysterious about these figures, and Jones allows Nanny the freedom to be as enigmatic, omniscient, and omnipotent as a superego on the wax.

Irresistible (2020)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Carell, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Rose Byrne
written and directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart's Irresistible hates you, absolutely loathes you. It can't believe it has to talk to you and so it's smug and dismissive, and then at the end of it all, it offers up three different but equally repugnant endings that give the viewer a variety of shit sandwiches to choose from, though you do have to pick one. As a metaphor for what's going on in the world right now, it's on-the-nose. As a movie, it's an assault more objectionable than any Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke miserabilist exercise, because it clothes itself in an affable sheaf of menial, liberal equivocation--but underneath it's this boiling, nihilistic condemnation of every single one of you fucking idiots who let it get so bad. It brings to mind nothing so much as George Sanders's suicide note expressing boredom with the very notion of you to the very last. Everything is terrible. The experiment is over. We failed. There's no hope. And Irresistible is precisely the kind of asshole who offers a utopian social solution he clearly thinks is a hopeless fantasy but pretends is advice given earnestly so you don't think he's the other kind of asshole who just complains about how stupid people are all the time. It's a film about the mortal tone-deafness of liberals that is itself mortally tone-deaf.

Dolittle (2020) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Robert Downey Jr., Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent
screenplay by Stephen Gaghan and John Whittington, based on the novels by Hugh Lofting
directed by Stephen Gaghan

by Walter Chaw My memory of it is a little hazy now, but it's worried my mind in the decades since I first read it, "it" being a scene from Dan Simmons's Carrion Comfort where Holocaust prisoners are forced to be the chess pieces in a giant game, with the losing "pieces" summarily executed. Not ten minutes in, Steven Gaghan's Dolittle, the second reboot of the legendarily disastrous (but also Oscar-nominated) Doctor Dolittle, features a sequence where Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) and cowardly gorilla Chee Chee (voiced by Rami Malek) play a game of chess with mice as the pieces. One strikes another with a tiny sceptre. It's played for laughs, but I wasn't laughing; I have questions. One of them concerns young Tommy's accidental, near-mortal wounding of a squirrel (voiced by Craig Robinson) who suffers from PTSD in a vaguely terrifying flash-montage upon waking from surgery, and vows revenge. Another concerns how Dolittle, who's been secreted away in his overgrown manse for years and years after the unfortunate death of his also-telepathic wife (not unlike another Dan Simmons novel, The Hollow Man), somehow has a very young lion cub in his care. Where does a hermit who never leaves his house get a baby lion? Wait, I figured it out: Shut up, you joyless old fuck, this isn't for you, it's for dim children and the parents needing a break from them.

Vivarium (2020)

***½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris, Molly McCann
screenplay by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan's Vivarium cues what it's going to be about with a title that could, arguably, also describe movies: artificial, controlled environments constructed for the observation of collected specimens. As the film opens, nature footage of a cuckoo bird pushing baby birds out of their nest to take their place segues into grammar-school teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) leading a classroom of kids acting out a windstorm. In the next scene, Gemma counsels one of her young charges as the child discovers the dead-bird babies on the ground beneath a tree. A cuckoo could be responsible, she says, and it's terrible, of course, but it's nature. If you were to stop watching Vivarium there, about five minutes in, you'd miss some fun stuff, but the whole film has already been summarized. The picture boils every impulse down to biological impetus, you see. But rather than making Vivarium simplistic, this philosophical determinism makes the behaviours of its subjects extraordinarily complex and interesting.