Film Freak Central

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn't an embarrassing high concept. His years on "Robot Chicken" and "Moral Orel" demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far--between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield--McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter ("splat-stick?") flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There's a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

TIFF '18: One Last Deal

Tuntematon mestari
**½/****
written by Anna Heinämaa
directed by Klaus Härö

by Bill Chambers Olavi (Heikki Nousiainen) looks like Michael Haneke and projects about the same cuddly warmth as an art dealer whose basement shop has never done better than break even. One day at the auction house he frequently trolls, Olavi is caught in the tractor beam of an unsigned portrait of Christ by an unidentified artist, perhaps seeing a vision of his younger self in the bearded figure. He has a hunch the piece is a bigger deal than the viperous auctioneer (Jakob Öhrman) knows, and decides to bid on it with money he'd get from a big resale in a Hail Mary for both his business and his legacy. There's no small irony in that, as he's just allowed his teenage grandson, Otto (Amos Brotherus), to intern for him and in his preoccupation with the painting--attributed, somewhat bewilderingly, to Russian master Ilya Repin despite bearing little resemblance to Repin's actual 1884 portrait of Christ--doesn't quite see the potentially lasting impact he's having on a directionless kid, which is far more profound than scoring "one last deal." Olavi has been estranged from Otto's mother, Lea (Pirjo Lonka), since his wife died. There's a scene where Olavi accepts a longstanding dinner invitation from his daughter just so he can hit her up for a loan and she tries not to show how shattered she is by his obliviousness to her struggles, financial and otherwise, as a single mother while simultaneously impressing upon him that this was the official last straw. The actors are credibly at cross-purposes here and their performances are lovely, but their characters' dynamic is frankly overfamiliar, if not tired; the moment Olavi is stopped short by Lea's voice on his answering machine early on in the picture, this subplot is already over. Surprisingly sentimental for a Finnish movie, One Last Deal is at its most gratifying when it's less "Death of a Salesman", more Roger Dodger, with Olavi teaching Otto unorthodox lessons in survival all but guaranteed to mold him into a miserable and penniless old man possessed of a few arcane skills. It's a relatively engrossing film when it's about a weird job that really didn't need to be dramatically embellished to land as soft tragedy. Programme: Contemporary World Cinema

Fantasia Festival '18: Born of Woman (short films)

by Walter Chaw This is what I believe: I believe that men and women are essentially different and that those differences result in perspectives that are necessarily different. I don't consciously privilege one perspective over the other, but I acknowledge that I am not always aware of my prejudices. I think Wonder Woman would have been garbage if a man had directed it; and I think 20th Century Women, written and directed by a man, had beautiful roles for women. It's confusing and it can be exhausting, but at the end of the day, creating an equal opportunity for women and people of colour to tell stories (whether they're theirs or not) can only be good. So...

Hot Docs '18: Golden Dawn Girls

***½/****
directed by Håvard Bustnes

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers The eponymous Golden Dawn girls are three women connected by marriage or blood to Greece's relatively new but steadily growing Golden Dawn party. They've taken centre stage in the absence of the party's male superintendents, who are all incarcerated. (As Norwegian director Håvard Bustnes says at the outset: More on that later.) The Golden Dawn party evolved from a far-right newspaper into a fascist movement, though its affiliates rabidly resist the Nazi stigma. Nazis, they say, were German--this is Greece. Nazis were National Socialists, Golden Dawn-ers are Social Nationalists. My favourite defense comes from Dafni, mother of jailed member Panagiotis Iliopoulos, who insists that her son couldn't be a Nazi because he was born after WWII. In footage from a TV interview, Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris claims complete ignorance of this "Hitler" fellow when questioned about his "Sieg Heil" tattoo--"hail victory" simply seemed like a good message to spread via his arm. Asked why he had it written in German instead of Greek, then, he says the German font was an aesthetic preference. They have an answer for everything--never a good one, but typically one so literal-minded it shuts down discourse. Bustnes valiantly tries, over and over, to get them to budge, to confront their reflection--the image they present to the world.

TIFF '17: Euthanizer

Armomurhaaja
**½/****
written and directed by Teemu Nikki

by Bill Chambers Veijo (Matti Onnismaa) kills pets for people who can't afford to have them euthanized by a vet: Gas for the small ones, a bullet for the larger varieties. He feigns a mystical connection with animals to exact a steep price, though, shaming owners for being the potential cause of their furry friend's misery, like the young woman he chides for keeping her cat locked up in a tiny apartment. This doesn't stop some of his clients from using him as a glorified hitman, and when his dying father's nurse (Hannamaija Nikander) brings him a dog she "found" (i.e., liberated from its post outside a building) to contrive a reason to see him do his thing, his principles seem to take a backseat to indulging her kink. ("What did you see?" she asks him after he communes with the canine. "Enough," he replies. For the record, I think he's highly intuitive but not any kind of psychic.) Nevertheless, Veijo's sanctimony and desire to see animals shown mercy and humanity--when a veterinarian (Pihla Penttinen) questions the 'rightness' of his methods, he accuses her of prioritizing the maintenance of her lifestyle over the welfare of her patients--go a long way towards making palatable the endless stream of euthanasia (which, if it's any consolation, happens offscreen), and Onnismaa, a veteran character actor in his first lead role, summons real moral authority in playing him. Euthanizer finds a surprising amount of story in the cloistered milieu of a shop that's not bound to get a lot of repeat business, with Veijo earning the enmity of a small-time criminal whose dog he spares (and adopts), starting a sadomasochistic fling with the nurse, and torturing his father (Heikki Nousiainen) for past misdeeds by refusing to let him go gently into the night. It's ultimately the ruthless triangulation of a character who becomes suicidal over his own frailties when his righteous sense of justice eventually turns inwards. I think I've been starved for something like this, that presents a protagonist both unconventional and insightfully-developed--you get these kinds of antiheroes on TV but rarely in film, where the path to catharsis doesn't have to be agonizingly drawn out. (You get them even more rarely in American film, unless they're draped in capes.) But, not being possessed of that weather-beaten Finnish irony, I felt at a distinct disadvantage when confronted with the movie's grimy sense of humour, which is often borderline if not outright misogynistic. Some part of me couldn't wait to forget Euthanizer, and the film, for all the ghoulish residue of its subject matter, hasn't put up much of a fight. Programme: Contemporary World Cinema

Hot Docs '17: Hobbyhorse Revolution

***/****
directed by Selma Vilhunen

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 27-May 7, 2017 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Hobbyhorsists. They are predominantly young women, tweens and teens alike, who pretend to ride broomstick horses. The horses have names, idiosyncrasies, even lifespans (in a poetic externalization of personal growth, one girl's closet seems to double as a mausoleum for hobbyhorses), and they're billed alongside their riders in dressage tournaments that are surreal spectacles of girls bunny-hopping over fences while the crowd watches on tenterhooks, the way you dread an air-show crash or a figure skater's stumble. Slowly, though, the neophyte begins to decipher the nuances; at one point Aisku, the movie's sometimes-petulant lead, chides a beginner for moving her arms too much, and damn if this little note doesn't improve the youngster's game considerably. Hobby-horsing is a strange subculture but no stranger than bronies--and undoubtedly more athletic. The only reason to hate on it is if you're a misogynistic piece of crap. Finland's Hobbyhorse Revolution isn't the phenomenon's origin story, although it does find a common thread among the hobbyhorsists it interviews: they've all been bullied. (There's a particularly chilling ellipsis in cherubic Elsa's story: "There was this one boy... He didn't like that I was cheerful all the time. So he put an end to it.") Although being a hobbyhorsist sometimes exacerbated the abuse, the therapeutic value of the pastime and its egalitarian social scene appear to have made quitting unthinkable. Maybe it's the Scandinavian setting, but throughout Hobbyhorse Revolution I kept flashing back to Lukas Moodysson's extraordinary ode to seventh-grade riot grrls We Are the Best!: They are so many Tina Belchers, and yet there is something quite punk about our hobbyhorsists, who saw where the proverbial goalposts were and moved them for themselves. They're also hilariously profane. I love these dorks, enough to overlook that the movie's own brio never quite rises to their level.

TIFF '14: The Look of Silence

Senyap
****/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Bill Chambers Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing is devastating because it doesn't offer any moral opposition to the glibly boastful first-hand accounts of Indonesian death squads; and his The Look of Silence is devastating because it does. A B-side to The Act of Killing but no mere Blue in the Face afterthought, The Look of Silence follows Adi, a 44-year-old door-to-door optometrist whose senile father is 103 and whose mother improbably claims to be around the same age. The father has forgotten but the mother has not that Adi was preceded by a brother, Ramli, who was killed during the "communist" purge (the picture reiterates that anyone who didn't immediately fall in line with the military dictatorship was tarred with the same brush, regardless of political or religious affiliation)--though "killed" somehow undersells his execution, a two-day ordeal that culminated in Ramli's castration. Adi watches Oppenheimer's footage of the murderers describing his brother's death in that animated, kids-playing way familiar from The Act of Killing, though these are not the same two "actors" who appeared in that film, underscoring that a desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

The Best of Youth (2003) + Saraband (2003)

La Meglio gioventù
****/****
starring Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, Adriana Asti, Sonia Bergamasco
screenplay by Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli
directed by Marco Tullio Giordana

SARABAND
**½/****
starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Börje Ahlstedt, Julia Dufvenius
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman

by Walter Chaw Television is the great bogey of the modern era. Newton Minnow's vast wasteland. Marshall McLuhan's "massage." The corruptor of youth and the opiate of the people. The glass teat. Although it's been excoriated as the prime example of what happens to art when commerce intrudes upon it, when the moneymen at the gates break through to undermine the best intentions of television artists yearning to break free, I think it's more complicated than that. I think that television, like any other popular medium, is a cathode stethoscope held against the chest of the spirit of the world--a conduit to both what's good and what's venal in any culture. There are as many, maybe more, classics being produced for television now as there were during its Golden Age (and the good old days weren't always good, besides), it's just that we have more chaff to sift through before we get to the wheat nowadays--but more wheat, too. Say this for TV: it seems more capable of recognizing a hunger for quality than film does. Credit the smaller budgets and quicker turnarounds--something that's put cinema in the catch-up position in the early years of the new millennium.

Mindhunters (2005)

*/****
starring LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathryn Morris, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Based ever so loosely on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Renny Harlin's latest disasterpiece finds the Finnish fool at the helm of a slasher-cum-"CSI" episode, oiled-up and ready to apply a dangerous level of nihilism in the pursuit of cheap thrills and bad splatter effects. In Mindhunters, a few of the FBI's finest criminal profilers-in-training congregate for one last test under the Al-Pacino-in-The Recruit tutelage of crackpot Harris (Val Kilmer) at a remote military facility that's home to a phantom cinema where The Third Man plays on an eternal loop.

Whale Rider (2003) + Rivers and Tides (2002)

WHALE RIDER
***½/****
starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene, Vicky Haughton, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Niki Caro, based on the novel by Witi Ihimaera
directed by Niki Caro

RIVERS AND TIDES
****/****
directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer

by Walter Chaw The images in Niki Caro's second film, Whale Rider, are so heartbreakingly beautiful that at times the narrative diminishes its mythic gravity. It resembles John Sayles's brilliant The Secret of Roan Inish not only in subject, but also in the understanding that film has the potential to be the most cogent extrapolation of the oral storytelling tradition. When the picture's young protagonist sings an ancient Maori song to a dark ocean, there is an indescribable power to the film that springs from firelight--what we've lost in modernity as orphans to our collective past.

A Man Apart (2003) + The Man Without a Past (2003)

A MAN APART
**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Larenz Tate, Steve Eastin, Timothy Olyphant
screenplay by Christian Gudegast & Paul Scheuring
directed by F. Gary Gray

Mies vailla menneisyyttä
***½/****
starring Markku Peltola, Kati Outinen, Annikki Tähti, Juhani Niemelä
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

by Walter Chaw The one an absurdist sketch, the other just absurd, both Aki Kaurismäki's The Man Without a Past and F. Gary Gray's A Man Apart use violence as a catalyst for existential introspection, but while Gray's emetic excess deadens with its Death Wish-cum-The New Centurions wish-fulfillment fantasy, Kaurismäki's gentle fable finds grace amongst society's victims. Gifting their respective stars each with a hospital scene and subsequent resurrection and new lease on life, the two protagonists are paired with a lady love once back on the street--Kaurismäki's hero with a Salvation Army matron (Kati Outinen), Gray's with a ridiculously loyal partner (Larenz Tate) who discards his role as conscience to become an extension of a revenge plot that's made more ludicrous with a heaping dose of morality and a Lethal Weapon graveside penance.

Russian Ark (2003)

****/****
starring Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, David Giorgobiani
screenplay by Boris Khaimsky & Anatoli Nikiforov & Svetlana Proskurina & Alexander Sokurov
directed by Alexander Sokurov

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Russian Ark is a film that hoists its middle finger high against the cultural practices of nearly a hundred years. Implicitly appalled by the twin forgettings of communist and free-market logic, director Alexander Sokurov retaliates by erecting a monument to the proceeding three centuries of image-making--one that marks the entrance to a crypt perhaps, as Sokurov knows that time is running out on its preservation. Surely there's a heaping dose of snobbery in his approach, and a whole lot of wilful obscurity as well, but his expression of his thesis is so passionate and his technical execution is so seamless and beautiful that I could have forgiven him almost anything.

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 3

by Walter Chaw

FAITHLESS (2000)
Trolösa
***/****
starring Lena Endre, Erland Josephson, Krister Henriksson, Thomas Hanzon
screenplay by Ingmar Bergman
directed by Liv Ullman

It is perhaps most instructive to look back at the beginning of a life when contemplating the end of one. Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman spent his nineteenth year in The Skerries (a Stockholm archipelago), a tumultuous period during which he lost the girl he loved, lost his faith in religion, and finally lost a close male friend to death. That year, when married with the all-pervasive influence of playwright Strindberg and a tireless love of the theatre, provides the root concerns shooting through Bergman's filmography: the idea that marriage is a constant negotiation of losses (abortions and suicides included in that mix) and that should God exist, He is grown apathetic.