Melancholia

****

Melancholia is to disaster movies what Lars Von Trier’s previous film, Antichrist, is to horror movies; not what you’d expect, daring, a little confounding and visual intoxicating from start to finish.

Yes, Melancholia deals with the end of the world, but there’s no good-natured scientists trying to beat the clock, no government officials preparing for the inevitable, and no scenes of natural disasters destroying landmarks. The end does not come bitterly, or with pomposity and reflection on human nature, it simply is. In other words, Melancholia has more in common with the Canadian film Last Night than it does with 2012, or anything from the Roland Emmerich oeuvre.

Split in two parts, Melancholia tells the story of sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsburg). Justine’s story takes place during her wedding reception. Newly married to the handsome though awkward Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), Justine seems initially happy, but as the night wears on there’s a gradual but obvious shift in her attitude.

Claire’s story takes place at a different point, presumably sometime later. Justine arrives at the country home of Claire and her husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) in a kind of malaise. The bigger drama though is in the sky, as a newly discovered rogue planet named Melancholia will be flying by in close proximity to the Earth. Claire has been reading online that the two worlds might collide, but John, as a scientist, says there’s nothing to worry about.

How the two stories line-up may be a matter of imagination, or lack there of. The latter would interrupt the wedding party as taking place at some point prior to Melancholia’s fateful approach towards the planet Earth, and there are certainly references to people seeing something new and strange in the sky. I wonder though if the whole thing wasn’t some kind of altered reality sequence. Of course, use of the word “sequence” is generous because it was basically half the movie, but everything was so hyper-realistic and had such odd little details. Why does Udo Kier hold his hand up to his face in Justine’s presence? What’s this all-important tagline that Stellan Skarsgård, as Justine’s boss and Michael’s best man, is trying to get out of her?

Those are a couple of the little eccentricities that make up the star-studded wedding reception scene. John Hurt plays Justine and Claire’s father and has a habit of calling every woman he meets “Betty,” as well as pocketing the silverware and asking the waiter for replacements, which he also pockets. Charlotte Rampling plays the mother of the bride who looks and acts like she swallowed a bitter pill. She has complete and total resentment about a) the fact of daughter getting married, and b) that fact the she was invited to attend. The whole scene is like a Neil Simon dinner party.

In contrast, the second half of the film presents a much more dower mood. Gone are the golds and oranges from the cinematography in favour of a starkly grey pallet. Also more demure is Dunst performance as Justice, which actually seems to talk hold over the course of the wedding reception. It’s Justine that lays it out cold in the second half, as Claire worries about a planetary collision Justine says she knows there’s a collision coming, which is fine because all life on Earth is evil and deserves to die. During the wedding reception, it’s Claire that’s the drink of cold water, doubting Justine’s sincerity and commitment to her new husband and new life.

But while Dunst gets the lion’s share of the attention, not to mention the sweet looking movie poster, the real stars are Gainsburg and Sutherland. Gainsburg is very, very solid as Claire, completely natural in both parts of the story although there are nuanced differences in how she plays Claire from one part to the next. Sutherland, meanwhile, does something I’ve never seen him do: play haughty. This is punched to comedic levels in part one as he snarls and grumbles under his breath about his mother-in-law and tries to make a statement by throwing her luggage out on the front lawn. Sutherland definitely looks like he’s having fun.

But Melancholia is mesmerizing visual poetry, and incredibly enthralling. Von Trier has previously said that this is one of his most optimistic movies, which considering that this is about the end of the world probably says a lot about the director’s frame of mind. But one could argue that there is something positive in seeing a movie about the end, and seeing people make peace with that without any hysteria or other madness. Gather you family close and accept with grace that worlds are colliding. I’m not sure what greater meaning we can mine from that, but it was sort of great watching it. Maybe that makes me a masochist.

Anonymous

****

The history itself maybe filled with holes, but I’ll be darned if Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous isn’t a very compelling film. A period conspiracy thriller, Anonymous supposes that William Shakespeare was a borderline illiterate and only moderately talented actor that through fate and guile got his name attached to the greatest collected written works of the English language. Well-acted, immaculately designed, and executed with a fair amount of competence, Anonymous may be the best Hollywood surprise from the Toronto International Film Festival.

And yes, I mean that Roland Emmerich. In Anonymous, you won’t see Shakespeare trying to thwart a global warning apocalypse, or battle alien invaders in a fighter plane. Emmerich has built a solid and consistent filmmaking portfolio of disaster porn, so much so that his last film, 2012, contained just about every natural disaster imaginable. From the beginning we wondered, can the man behind Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, do subtle? And the answer is he can.

Emmerich’s last attempt at semi-serious period filmmaking was The Patriot, a family drama set against the backdrop of the American Revolution about a southern plantation owner who joins the war effort to keep his eldest son out of trouble and get revenge on the British officer that killed his younger boy. So technically, the movie should have been called “The Revenger,” but leaving that aside, the film was awash in politically correct historical revisionism. Even though these were still Mel Gibson’s glory days, the idea of him being a benign slave owner seemed wrong.

But back to Shakespeare. Historical revisionism is still on the plate, but what conspiracy theory doesn’t play fast and loose with facts. One could say that Emmerich hasn’t been concerned with them before, so why start now? Emmerich paints a convincingly real portrait of London at the dawn of the 17^th century. It’s mucky, it’s dirty, it’s textual and it wonderfully draws you into the multilayered world of dissenting theatre and intrigue in the royal court. If nothing else, this sets the stage wonderfully.

Veteran actor Derek Jacobi opens the show, on stage in modern New York. Jacobi’s gravitas instantly draws you in and before you know it, you’re sent back to Shakespearean London. We’re thrown into the deep end rather quickly as playwright Ben Johnson (Sebastian Armesto) is interrogated about certain manuscripts left to his possession. We flashback again a few years earlier as Johnson’s latest work has the crowd rolling in the aisles, all at the expense of William Cecil (David Thewlis), one of the Queen’s key advisors.

The play is shutdown, and Johnson arrested, but he’s soon released at the courtesy of a mysterious benefactor who happens to be Edward, the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). The Earl offers Ben a deal: since he freed the playwright from the Tower, Johnson will pass off the Earl’s plays as his own. The first one to be staged is a little piece called Henry V, and it wows the crowd. Johnson, initially hesitant about taking credit for another man’s work doesn’t rise to the crowd’s demand for the author, but an actor in his company does. His name: Will Shakespeare.

Looking at the film, Anonymous is to Shakespeare in Love, what JFK is to PT-109. It’s the deconstruction of a myth as Rafe Spall’s portrayal of Shakespeare leans more to the buffoonish, and more than a little dim. Naturally, Shakespeare goes from grateful for the exposure, to thinking he’s the puppet master behind himself and blackmailing Edward for more money. That was pretty predictable, but it takes a lot of guile to take one of the most vaunted figures in Western history and bring him down to a level of typical pettiness.

But the cast is excellent, led by Rhys Ifans as Edward who plays cool and composed, but with a great deal of passion and dubiousness. He just a man concerned with art and the written word, stuck in a world where those are not supposed to be his concern because of his station, yet his disappointment doesn’t get aired out by making some kind of scene. Thewlis is appropriately slivery as Cecil, even if the character is a little too much the villain. And in an interesting twist, Emmerich casts mother-daughter actresses Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson to play the older and younger version of Queen Elizabeth I respectively.

But the one fatal flaw is that John Orloff’s script tries to cram in so much; from the history, to the politics, to the court room intrigue, to potential matters of incest, it would be like cramming 10 years of history of The War on Terror into one movie. We’re so hip deep in plot as the film begins it takes a good 10 minutes to get your bearings and know the players. There’s also a lot of formula in the film’s final act, but at that point you’re either with the movie or you’re not.

My friend Ian reminded me that to academia the notion that anyone but the man named Shakespeare actually authored his plays is taken about as seriously as ancient alien theories, but it does make a good story, like any conspiracy theory. Anonymous may play around with facts, but that play is fun and rewarding to the audience. And if young people can’t appreciate Shakespeare through the eyes of the guy always destroying the world, then I guess nothing will. Even if there were giant lizards in Elizabethan London.

Ides of March

****

George Clooney once again proves his directorial chops with Ides of March, a film about the dissolution of political ideals and betrayal of one’s principles and tight held beliefs in the struggle to not only do what’s right, but win in the total war climate of politics. What begins as a sunny-side Dr. Jekyll in the fine tradition of The West Wing or Mr Smith Goes to Washington becomes the malformed Mr Hyde we know and loathe from CNN. No one gets literally stabbed in The Ides of March, but the knife does turn.

Based on the play Beau Willimon Farragut North and adapted to the screen by Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov, Ides, although not inspired by actual events, is probably more closely related to the scandal involving former Presidential candidate John Edwards than anything suffered by current President Barack Obama. Against the backdrop of the Democratic primary in Ohio, two worthy but wholly different candidates are in a close race for the nomination.

The more liberal of the two is Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), whose campaign team includes the experienced political operative Paul (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and his more idealistic deputy Stephen (Ryan Gosling). Morris has a healthy lead, but a close race in Ohio could break either way, which could either mean a huge boost for his rival, or Morris’ securing of the Democratic nomination. But this isn’t a movie about Morris, but about Stephen, whose own beliefs are tested and, yes, crushed, in the face of the corrupting influence of politics. A simple meeting with the rival campaign manager becomes a question of trust; a romance pursued with a lovely intern leads to some startling revelations.

Anchored by an excellent performance by Gosling, Ides is startling for how quickly and easily one man’s idealism can fall apart and be betrayed, and not just by those he trusted, but himself too. Gosling gets to do a little bit of everything here: the self-assured operative at the top his game, the spiteful victim watching his well-laid world coming apart while getting progressively spiteful, and eventually the embittered survivor. Somewhere in there he’s also the charming romantic lead; Gosling’s chemistry with Evan Rachel Wood as Morris intern Molly, is electric and they definitely share one of the best “meet cute” moments in recent film memory.

But it is hard to pinpoint a stand-up supporting player in a cast this good. Clooney himself it subtly sublime as Morris, and confidently lets Gosling take the lead and make it his movie. Hoffman seems appropriately frumpy after years of politicking and is well-matched by Paul Giamatti, who plays friendly conniving very well as Hoffman’s opposite on the rival campaign. Marisa Tomei has a small part as a journalist friendly with both Stephen and Paul, and manages to set a tone despite the few scenes she’s in. And Jeffrey Wright also casts a long shadow as the senator on whom all political aspirations depend.

But the true genius at work in the film is how methodically everything turns. What begins as a movie that’s almost affectionate for the romance of politics, the naïve ideal that good people can do good work and campaign on their ideals, is not so much shattered as slowly decomposed over the course of the film’s running time. We all want to think that ideas mean more than perception, and that we want our leaders to be human while still being infallible, but what happens when we think we can have both ways and then realize we can’t, and that we were never going to? The final shot of Gosling, and the look on his face as he stares into the camera, sells the audience on just how far Stephen has fallen, and how much he can’t even believe it himself.

Still, I don’t think Ides of March is a politically cynical film. Perhaps in one way it can be seen as a plebiscite about politics in Obama’s America and is a warning about putting all your hopes on a single person to fix the tremendous faults and problems of our time. Or perhaps the greatest fault to human ideals is human failings, and that if you can find a leader who inspires your best and holds many of the things you believe in to be true, you should expect there may be another penny to drop. In any event, Clooney ably shows again that in front of or behind the camera he has a unique voice and a nearly unmatched eye for interesting material.

Watch, Rent, Buy, Devour: Devour

TIFF - Livid

Rating: ***

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury made a splash the last time they were at the Toronto International Film Festival with their first movie Inside. Sadly, I don’t think Livid will make as big an impact, but I don’t think that comes from a lack of trying. Livid is a haunted house mystery that’s creepy and engaging, but there’s not a lot that jumps out at the audience, or at least not a lot to make you jump out of your seat.

The film’s heroine, Lucie (Chloé Coulloud), is a young woman that’s training to take care of people shut in their homes. Lucie’s trademark is her heterochromia, she has one eye that’s blue and one eye that’s brown, a fact that’s immediately picked up on by Madame Wilson (Catherine Jacob), the experienced nurse training her. A trip to the country mansion of renowned dancer, Madame Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla) leads Lucie and two of friends on a midnight heist to rip off a comatose old lady of her rumoured treasure, but naturally that’s easier said than done.

So what’s the story? Well, it’s part ghost story, part Cube, part Black Swan, part Frankenstein, and part Let the Right One In. Perhaps that’s the contributing factor to the film’s interesting tone, it is a whole lot of different horror stories rolled into one package. But Livid clarifies nothing, and while the film goes along for the first half as a perfectly serviceable haunted house drama, it segues into a vampire story as he flashback and see Madame Jessel’s daughter eat one of her dance classmates and then run out into the sunlight and flies around inexplicably. It’s more or less all downhill from there.

But the film itself has atmosphere to spare. The production design and set decoration is so brilliantly realized that you should practically get Goosebumps just by seeing the on screen imagery. But for some strange reason there’s a disconnect between style and substance; the film looks amazing, there’s a story that seems like it wants to be told, but the film really leaves no lasting trace, no haunted feeling. I wouldn’t call the film a disappointment, but it was a kind of a letdown. Still, it’s a compelling let down just the same and it still kind of shows the promise of Hunger. Perhaps the third time will find the charm again.

TIFF - Last Call at the Oasis

Rating: ****

Every year, there’s at least one documentary that makes you frightful for the immediate future of the human race: Food Inc. made us scared of what we eat, An Inconvenient Truth made us afraid of the weather, and this year at TIFF that film was Last Call at the Oasis, and its issue is water, or rather the growing lack of it. Director Jessica Yu uses high-production standards and a calming tone to make people aware of one inexorable truth: we have a serious problem with the quality and availability of our fresh drinking water.

Smartly, Yu immediately puts the focus not on far-flung places in the world where we typically consider drought and lack of water to be an issue, but right in our backyard in places like Las Vegas and Southern California. Sure, this issue is global, as the film tells us that half the world’s hospital beds are taken up by people with water-born illnesses, but predominately Yu brings the issues home and makes a case that our “water footprint” in North America, is dangerously out of sink with our resources and usage worldwide.

Yu brilliantly draws the dangers by reinforcing the domino effect. In Las Vegas, about three per cent of the city’s water is used for those magnificent fountains along the strip. Due to a variety of factors, water levels in the Colorado River are going down. The Colorado, being where Vegas draws its water, are now looking to northern Nevada who fear that Vegas tapping into their taps will sap their wells dry. Meanwhile, at the Hoover Dam, which is fed by the Colorado, water levels currently sit at 1086 feet. The turbines stop spinning and generating electricity at 1050 feet.

Compounding to the loss of water, the water that remains is in danger from not just overuse, but from chemicals and pollutants as well. Enter Erin Brockovich, who once famously fought against a large corporation polluting a small town’s water and thus killing the inhabitants, and still fields dozens of requests daily from people looking for help. Sometimes the documentary feels like it’s going to break out into Erin Brockovich 2, but she’s a significant and recognizable figure on this issue and her prominence is understandable.

What’s interesting is that in spite of the somewhat apocalyptic idea of running out of fresh water, and the idea that we’re kind of screwed in any case, Last Call is surprisingly upbeat. You don’t walk about this movie with a cloud of doom over your head, and at least feel elated because there’s some indication that on the ground there’s a growing recognition of the problem, which is more than can be said of climate change six years after An Inconvenient Truth.

Last Call at the Oasis makes a compelling case, and does so with a light touch. It’s well made, well researched and certainly makes an impact with breaking you over the head with a diatribe. I’d say that this documentary is cool drink of water, but I think that there might be some implied waste there.

TIFF - Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope

Rating: ****

It took nearly 40 years but Morgan Spurlock finally made it to San Diego Comic Con in 2009, and what he saw was good. Spurlock’s enthusiasm translates in his documentary Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, as all the energy, excitement and unbridled nerd enthusiasm fills a tight 90 minutes highlighting all the lines, all the costumes and all the madness that is world’s largest yearly gathering of the geekish.

The film opens with the type of epic music you might expect from your average superhero movie, but the film actually goes much smaller than that. We meet Eric and Skip, two aspiring comic book artists hoping that showing their portfolios at Comic Con will be there in to the biz. We also meet Holly, a cosplay enthusiast who’s putting together an act based on the video Mass Effect for the masquerade, and hoping to prove her skills as a costumer. Representing the old school is Chuck, the owner of Mile High Comics in Denver who’s been going to Comic Con for 38 years and is just hoping to make enough money to keep selling comics. And finally there’s James, who met his girlfriend Se Young at Comic Con a year earlier and hopes to propose to her at this year’s Kevin Smith panel.

Although there are confessionals featuring celebrities and geek glitterati like Joss Whedon, Stan Lee and Harry Knowles (who all co-produced the film), the focus is really on these five “characters,” if you will. Director Spurlock, in an unusual move for him, keeps himself out of the story, which allows the five different storylines he’s following to unfold in a very natural way.

I’m not sure how Spurlock found or chose these five people in particular, but their stories unfold in exciting and dynamic ways. James’ plan to propose to Se Young, and the hiccups he therein encounters, is like something out of a romantic comedy, and the scene where he finally does pop to the question in front of Smith and literally hundreds of fans at the Q&A it has all the anticipation, if not more, than any average Hollywood rom-com. Meanwhile, over at the masquerade, the animatronic head on one of the costumes is malfunctioning as Holly’s group is a few minutes away from taking the stage. Talk about tension.

Through Chuck, Spurlock does touch on one of the sore spots for long time revellers at Comic Con, the growing de-emphasis of comics. Along with that are Chuck’s universal struggles of a stagnant economy and a business going through difficult changes as digital encroaches on comics as much as it does on any other print industry. He decides to sell a rare Marvel Comic that will go for enough money that he can pay off his debt, and made his business secure in the short term. It’s heartbreaking because Chuck is a collector too, and now he’s trying to scrape by, and he’s relegated to a corner of the convention that doesn’t get nearly the attention despite the fact that Chuck is one of the people that built Comic Con.

And it is to those people and the ones that follow in their foot steps to whom A Fan’s Hope is dedicated. It’s not to the Hollywood establishment that now treat Comic Con like a focus group and it’s not the celeb gawkers who just want to see stars, it’s the people with a hope and a dream and the creativity to and guile to try and make it happen. As a geek myself, Spurlock’s Comic Con is a crowd-pleaser through and through, heartfelt and lovingly dedicated to the people who only ever feel at home surrounded by movie collectables and people dressed as anime characters.

TIFF - Hick

Rating: **

Remember Hounddog? It was a movie that played at Sundance in 2007, and is infamous only for the fact that Dakota Fanning, playing a precocious young girl in the American South and infatuated with the music of Elvis Presley, gets raped. The miscalculating ineptitude of that movie and how it treated its polarizing centrepiece scene was foremost on my mind as Hick unfurled. That, and just what the hell is this movie supposed to be about and what is it trying to say?

Chloe Grace Moretz plays Luli, a Nebraska teen who has just turned 13. Luli comes from a hick family of do-nothing wastoids, and we know this because her dad picks her up from school drunk, takes her to the local bar for her birthday party where she gets such typical 13-year-old presents like a Smith and Wesson .45 revolver and a 7/11 key chain. Get it? They’re uneducated, drunken, misanthropic, American country bumpkin clichés! And to add insult to injury, the next day Luli’s mom runs away with a businessman, and her dad drives off into the sunset after telling her to “Stay sweet.”

With nothing to keep her at home, Luli packs up her sketchbook, her gun and her mother’s favourite blue dress and she hits the open road to meet some more Southern fried stereotypes. First she encounters Eddie (Eddie Redmayne), a twentysomething cowboy with a permanent limp, but don’t call him a “gimp” or you’ll set him off like a firecracker on the Forth of July. Next, she meets Glenda (Blake Lively), who not only gives Luli her first hit of cocaine, but makes the young runaway an accessory in a felony. Such wacky fun.

The key problem is Hick’s staggeringly confusing tone. There’s an undercurrent of danger seeing as how the main character is 13 and on the open road surrounded by some very unsavoury characters, some of whom pine after her in a blatantly sexual manner. But punctuated all along is this typical Hee-Haw humour and terribly drawn southern accents. The character Eddie for example can come across as charming, but makes occasional turns that scares you, and makes you afraid for Luli, but that’s the responsibility of the actor, and not for the director to shift the whole tone of the film.

But the real core problem of duality in the film was how we’re supposed to perceive Luli: is she a wise-beyond her years young woman in charge of her burgeoning sexuality like a red neck Lolita, or is she an innocent driven from home by the drunken disinterest of her parents, and naively unprepared for the dangers of the world? The film tends to lean towards the former, like when Luli stands in front of a mirror, dressed only in a t-shirt and her rainbow coloured undies, brandishing her new gun and quoting Dirty Harry and Norma Desmond.

But between all the road tripping and criminal offenses, there are little cutaways of Luli drawing pretty pictures about her idyllic life and the little brother who basically died days after he was born because her parents were too poor to get him proper medical help. And during these segments, Luli breaks the forth wall, which adds a meta-level to the further confusing style and tone you think director Derick Martini is supposed to be striving for.

But the malformation of the film’s DNA manages to not hold back the actors too much. Whatever side of Luli that Moretz has to play, she can play it very, very well. Lively shows, as she did in last year’s TIFF hit The Town, that she’s capable of a lot more than what’s she given weekly on Gossip Girl and she makes Glenda surprisingly complex in spite of her character’s somewhat limited role in the story. Alec Baldwin pops up late in the game as the one genuinely nice person Luli encounters in her travels, but I doesn’t come into the movie in time to redeem the general ugliness of the story.

While watching the film, I more than once jotted in my notes the questions, “What is going on?” and “Where is this going?” A meandering road trip movie is fine, and even hyper-sexualizing a young teenage girl is fine as long as there’s context and some assembly of a rational reason and a compelling story. Hick struggles to maintain focus, and seems more predisposed to try and shock us out of stupor with random characters and shocking sequences. The shock is that it’s not terribly shocking, or rather you can tell that they’re trying to shock you, and are thus unmoved.

If the word “hick” is defined as “A person who lives in the country, regarded as being unintelligent or provincial,” then Hick the movie is a proverbial hat trick.

Watch, Rent, Buy, Devour: Watch

TIFF - The Oranges

Rating: ****

Like something out of the world of Alexander Payne by way of Mitchell Hurwitz, The Oranges is a witty and uproarious look at how one man’s midlife crisis breaks apart two families only to rebuild them in new and interesting ways. First-time feature filmmaker Julian Farino has gathered an impressive and talented ensemble and has developed a script that’s sharp and insightful and replete with several big laughs. So much so that more than one viewing is recommended to catch everything.

The set-up is simple. Vanessa Walling (Alia Shawkat) has been home from college for two years, and though her dream is to design furniture, she finds herself perpetually redoing her portfolio and working a “McJob” while constantly finding reasons not to move out of her parents’ house. David (Hugh Laurie) and Paige Walling (Catherine Keener) are letting their marriage slowly slip away, but David does have a solid bromance with his neighbour Terry Ostroff (Oliver Platt). Vanessa remarks that she feels like a fifth wheel with her parents, Terry and his wife Carol (Allison Janney).

Into this serene bit of suburbia returns Nina (Leighton Meester), Terry and Carol’s daughter, who used to be friends with Vanessa, a long time ago, but they drifted apart in high school, and Nina left town and has never been back since graduation. When Nina discovers her boyfriend cheating, her whole independent world crumbles and has no choice but return home to New Jersey. Carol is pleased and tries to make love match between Nina, and David and Paige’s oldest child, their son Toby (Adam Brody), but that’s not the male member or the Walling family Nina feels a connection with.

With a cast like this, you can’t go wrong and they are more than up to the challenge of the subtle and wicked script by Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss. Any fan of dry wit and quietly quirky characters that still feel real and are drawn in a complex way will enjoy Farino’s efforts. And having cut his teeth directing episodes of Sex and the City, Entourage, and The Office he’s a director that knows how to building an engaging and hilarious character-based comedy.

The ensemble is solid, led very well by Laurie who casts off any resemblance to his well-known, prickly TV doctor role to play a man completely unsure and completely unengaged by life anymore. Laurie also has surprisingly good chemistry with Meester, who can mix both charming and insufferable with effortless skill. You really can believe that these two people could conceivably fall for each other, but the focus is just as much about how the people around them react to their mismatched, May-December romance as it is about the romance itself.

I want to especially highlight Alia Shawkat, who like Michael Cera cut her teeth as part of the cast of Arrested Development, and though she has yet to enjoy the kind of big screen success that her TV cousin has, she had the more difficult role. Like Jason Bateman she played the straight man, or woman, which is the most difficult part to play. Shawkat again plays the straight woman in this film, and she has to carry the film as the more adult figures fall apart in the midst of the affair. If someone gets a career kick from The Oranges, I hope it’s her.

But overall, The Oranges itself deserves a wide audience, and they will laugh. Or at least I think they’ll laugh. A theatre of 700 average, everyday filmgoers at TIFF certainly roared, and they roared in such a way that you couldn’t hear entire lines of dialogue. Masterful performances, a sharp script and tight direction make The Oranges one of the finest comedies I’ve seen in some time. An immensely rewarding time at the cinema.

TIFF - The Day

Rating: ***

Every Midnight Madness there’s always at least one unique post-apocalyptic drama, and unless it’s George Romero’s latest attempt to elongate his Living Dead franchise, it’s usually something good, or at least interesting. Zombies are foremost on your mind while watching The Day, a low budget end of the world drama about a group of survivors trying not to be eaten, but there’s a twist.

We open with Shawn Ashmore (X-Men 1-3) as he pulls the family van into a desolate suburban neighbourhood. Whatever apocalypse that’s happened, has happened, and Ashmore’s Adam, along with his wife and daughter are looking for provisions. While Adam investigates inside a promising house, the van is attacked by an unseen force, and he returns he finds the window smashed in and his wife and child missing.

Flash-forward to sometime much later. Adam now wonders the wild with four friends, including group leader Rick (Dominic Monaghan). Walking the back roads and trying to avoid trouble, but always on the look out for it, the group comes upon an old farmhouse, and they take shelter there from a pounding rain storm. And as these things go, the house holds a secret. A very bad secret for anyone looking for a meal, but doesn’t want to become one themselves.

The twist is that these folks aren’t running from zombies, but they’re running from cannibals. They’re regular old humans, but they just happen to live on other human beings. But they’re also not the types of cannibals you see in the similarly themed The Book of Eli, where you could tell a cannibal because they were basically hillbillies with a case of the shakes. Nope, these man eaters are clever, organized and unembarrassed about how they survive. “We’re all dying, you’re just dying faster,” one of them tells our trapped gang of five.

It adds an extra element of danger when we discover that this is the threat facing our merry band. As Zombieland so ably demonstrated, with a little cardio you can outrun a zombie, and like in I Am Legend, some monsters can only come out at night. But how do you deal with monsters when they’re just like you? When there’s no obvious advantage? You’re already starved, your resources are weak, they’ve got greater numbers and strength, and since they can live off their casualties, the odds will always be in their favour.

Director Douglas Aarniokoski also likes to take his time. He doesn’t tip his hand too easily, and indeed the film is more than a third over before we see the face of the enemy. There’s good build up and tension, and the film comes down to an old-fashioned siege on the abandoned farmhouse, the surviving humans and pack of angry cannibals. Aarniokoski is smart enough to not make it easy on our human heroes, we see them do an ammo count at the start of the film that reinforces how desperate they are, and there’s a reveal that makes you wonder if there’s any chance for any of them at all.

The story and the pacing were tight, but I did find the characters a little thin, Ashmore is pretty good, always seemingly like he’s on the brink of an emotional breakdown, but managing to keep it together as possible the group’s most level-headed member, and Ashley Bell (The Last Exorcism) is fascinatingly aloof as the mysterious Mary. But like a lot of horror movies, acting takes second place to staging, and at least in this respect The Day is a winner.

TIFF – Keyhole

Rating: ****

So far as Guy Maddin movies go, Keyhole is almost comprehendible, which despite the artistry and skill of the film is still kind of a disappointment because if there’s one thing you never want to be able to do in a Guy Maddin movie, it’s follow along. You see, a Maddin movie is one of those experiences where you want to leave the theatre and ask somebody what they thought and nod knowingly as if what he’s describing is exactly the same thing you think you saw and you don’t want to look like an idiot.

Keyhole is a stream on consciousness movie. It’s about life and death, and secrets and lies, and regrets and reconsiderations. Taking place entirely in an ethereal plain made up to look like your typical North American home. The various players appear to be an assortment of characters from the 1930s, gangsters mostly, hold up in a house during a police siege. It’s the end of the line, but the boss Ulysses does not want to fight his way out, rather there’s something he needs to accomplish in the house before the eventual raid.

Of course, that’s the straight-ahead, almost myopic perception of what the film’s all about. Being how this is a Guy Maddin film there’s layer upon layer of subtext, but there’s still this nagging bit about how I could follow along with the story. Where was the confusion? The bewilderment? The befuddlement? You know, all the staples of a Maddin classic. There was the black and white film, and odd moments of ghost falacio that remind you what world you’re playing in. And then there’s the treatment of Winnipeg as a Wonderland of an acid trip, which are all positive steps in the right direction.

This also might be Maddin’s most star-studded cast. Jason Patric plays Ulysses and throws himself into the world of Maddin with tremendous gusto. Isabella Rossellini, a veteran of the worlds of Maddin since The Saddest Music in the World, plays Ulysses’ wife Hyacinth, who fills the film with emotion and mystery. The always reliably creepy Udo Kier goes for daffy comedic, while former Kid in the Hall Kevin McDonald puts in a brief but memorable role as the loose link in Ulysses’ chain.

But like past Maddin films, Keyhole is a marvel of economy. Almost performed exclusively on the single, though complex, set of Ulysses’ house, Maddin makes the whole thing come alive thanks to the energetic performance of the cast, light camera work, and Spartan art direction. In other words, the house comes alive with both ghosts and memories; feeling that’s both nostalgic and visceral.

Walking out of the theatre, you realize that your head doesn’t have that usual ringing that a Guy Maddin film leaves you with, but that’s not to say that there wasn’t a lot to think about. There’s a surprisingly haunted quality that washes over you, and that’s despite the fact that there’s little on the surface to tie your personal experiences to the narrative and the tremendous comedy Maddin infuses the film with. Still, it’s a little nag, and that’s Maddin’s great gift, to smack you in the face with so much emotion, and so many visuals you don’t know what to believe anymore. Bravo sir.

TIFF - We Need to Talk About Kevin

Rating: ****

We Need to Talk About Kevin reminds the viewer that you don’t need a chainsaw and hockey mask to feel truly terrified by a movie. The horror in the film is nothing less than the abyss behind the eyes of a sociopath, and how one lives with the fact that everything they knew and loved is gone, how you know you’re somehow to blame, and how you knew, before all others, that something like this was bound to happen. Knowledge is the true horror of We Need to Talk About Kevin, and human emotion is the blood and guts spilled.

In an incredible performance, Tilda Swinton plays Eva Khatchadourian. Through the film’s disjointed narrative we see that Eva was something of a free spirit. We first see her literally being carried away during Tomatina, and through other small flashbacks and lines of dialogue we come to be under the impression that she enjoys travel, and not being tied down. We see brief glimpses of her courtship with Franklin (John C. Reilly), and the two marry and later give birth to their son, Kevin. More than the typical trials of motherhood, Eva has difficulties connecting to Kevin, and those difficulties aren’t completely one sided for Eva.

I’m not sure at what point we understand the fault with Kevin, one might even say its spoiled in the title of the film, but gradually we come to understand that Kevin has some deeply dark tendencies. Even as a child. I don’t know where they found the child actor to play Kevin in his early years, but he should be given serious Oscar consideration, or maybe serious psychological help. One of the two anyway. Ezra Miller as the older Kevin has a difficult task all his own: how does he portray Kevin’s growing sociopathic tendencies while still being a boy a mother would work hard to redeem? However he does it, Miller is seriously fascinating to watch, and a little terrifying too.

But make no mistake, this is Tilda Swinton’s movie and it is a tour de force performance that she gives. We see Eva through the frustration of being able to have the kind of bond with her baby that a mother expects with her son. We see her in anger as Kevin tests her patience and pushes her to the breaking point. We see her frustration with Franklin and his inability to see the growing darkness in their son. Then we flash-forward post tragedy. We see her as a pariah. We see her try and make some human connection. We see her used and abused. And we see her relish the smallest victories, like getting a job as a secretary.

The circumstances around what Kevin did are left murky in the details until nearly the very end of the film. Director Lynne Ramsay weaves wonderful bits of foreshadowing in stray lines of dialogue and a seemingly omnipresent sound of lawn sprinklers. As much as the film offers no answers, it really offers no questions either. The film is edited in a mesmerizing way, the different scenes ebb and flow together across the storyline of the film is a thing of beauty; it’s disjointed but it all makes sense in the end, and what you’re left with is a sense of what disaster can come out of a single human life, and humility and humanity of a mother’s love.

Without a doubt, We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most powerful works at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a work that tests the mind and the spirit. After the film ended, I found myself revisiting it in my own head, not so much reliving certain scenes, but more like my a feeling that I was bond in this kind of static state of mind. People like Kevin exist, and they have parents and people who loved them and tried to reach them, but there was just always something. In tragedy, we desperately want to someone to blame and it’s usually the person closest to the source. Ramsay dares to remind us that sometimes there’s no explanation for tragedy, and usually there’s more than one type of victim.

We Need to Talk About Kevin demands to been seen at least once.

TIFF - Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

Rating: ***

It’s a remarkable statement of fact that when the John McCain presidential campaign selected then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, they did only 40 hours of vetting. What’s more incredible is that in the three years since that, as it turned out, fateful decision, Palin has become one of the most analyzed (or over-analyzed) figures in American politics.

Now British filmmaker Nick Broomfield adds his analysis to the chorus in the documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha! and comes out of it without anything terribly new to offer. Politicos and the well-informed are already versed in Palin’s weaknesses as a politician, as well as the myriad of scandals that have plagued her and her distant relationship with the press. It also feels like maybe this documentary is a year too late, because even despite her still relative constant media appeal, it seems clear that Palin will only be a periphery player in next year’s presidential election.

If there’s a saving grace to the film it’s that Broomfield, for the most part, manages to hold off on doing a complete hatchet job on Palin. Whether or not his intent in the beginning was to explore Palin’s various skeletons, or if he wanted to make a truly balanced portrayal of the woman, Broomfield does the homework and the leg work to at least show how Palin went from small town mayor to one of the most pre-emanate voices on the political right in the United States.

What’s clear is that Palin can make enemies like no one else not dressed in a superhero costume. Not helping things is that Palin allies, save for an early interview with her parents Chuck and Sally Heath, don’t talk to Broomfield, so the argument is entirely one sided. Whether intentional or not, only one point of view is clear, and it’s the point of view that comes from a litany of people interviewed in the film. From John Stein, the former Mayor of Wasilla that Palin ousted, to her deputy mayor Colleen Cottle, to Mike Wooten, Palin’s former brother-in-law who she allegedly tried to fire as an Alaskan State Trooper, the message is that Palin is vindictive and spiteful, and if you make yourself her political enemy you are persona non-grata.

The interviews seem extensive, but as someone who is neither a fan of Palin nor her politics, even I was struggling to find a point in the documentary where I could enjoy the character assassination. There are really no surprises, and Broomfield’s Michael Moore like attempts to get his subject cornered at a couple of book signings rang pretty hollow. With one of the worst approval ratings of any American politician right now, it’s like Palin’s a pretty easy target, and trying to tag her with the tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Gifford and 18 others back in January, like she was the Capone pulling the puppet strings on a Valentine’s Day massacre, seemed to be stretching things in order to be topical.

What I would have liked more is if Broomfield had put the focus of his doc on Wasilla, Alaska itself, rather than it’s most famous citizen. From its picturesque surroundings to the obvious everybody knows everybody vibe, Wasilla is like Twin Peaks but further north and real. It’s got a serious issue with people and meth, it’s got 7,000 people and more than one-in-three of them are NRA members, and the entire place is a company town, and that company is Sarah Palin. Everyone’s got an opinion, and everyone’s got a story, and when Broomfield eases his focus more broadly it seems like he’s really got something.

If nothing else, seeing a middle-aged British man trudge through the artic wilderness wearing red flannel and dopey hat while carrying his own boom mic made my inner guerrilla filmmaker smile. As for the subject matter, Broomfield does what he can, and the film do well with the choir it’s performing to, but Palin is far too overexposed to get something truly new and probing. But compelling? You betcha!

Griff the Invisible

Rating: ***1/2

The notion of a singly-determined man to done a costume and become a superhero is not new, especially in the last couple of years. On the high-profile side there was Matthew Vaughan’s Kick-Ass, about a bullied teen that finds his chutzpah in a scuba suit, and on the low-profile side is James Gunn’s grossly hilarious Super about a man sent over a mental cliff after his wife leaves him. Now, offering a different tone is Griff the Invisible, which, like Super, originally bowed at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

But that’s probably where the similarities end. In fact, Griff probably has more in common with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s charming 2001 film Amélie, about a young Parisian woman who comes out of her vast inner world to make the lives of others a little bit brighter. Griff also has a socially awkward hero with a large inner world. And unlike films like Kick-Ass and Super, which uses superheroes as metaphor for escalation and power unchecked, Griff is about how the fantasy of imagining one’s self as super can make you open to the world in ways others may not appreciate.

Ryan Kwanten, whom fans may be solely familiar with playing Sookie’s dimwitted himbo brother Jason from True Blood, plays the title character. Griff, by anyone’s standards, is socially awkward to a fault. He spends his days working in customer service for an unnamed company, and is inevitably bullied by one of his fellow office dwellers (Toby Schmitz). But at night, Griff dons a black leather suit and runs the streets as a crime fighter, protecting the average guy from various ne’er-do-wells.

Griff’s world is thrown for a loop when he meets Melody (Maeve Dermody), the new girlfriend of his brother, Tim (Patrick Brammall). From when we first meet Melody, we automatically recognize that she and Griff are the real soulmates of story; Griff with his experimentations in creating an invisibility suit, and Melody with her belief that she can manifest the ability to space out her molecules and pass through walls. Griff’s feelings for Melody, and the inner conflict of crushing on his brother’s girl, forces Griff to go inside himself more and more, even as Melody realizes its destiny for her and Griff to meld their worlds.

The heart of the movie really is this touching and self-conscious romantic dance between Griff and Melody, and Kwanten and Dermody play things beautifully. It may have gone amiss in the past, but Kwanten can be quite adorable when his shirt’s on, and Dermody is lovely and poised. They both play understated really well, and don’t feel the need to play their parts with any kind of put upon quirks or ticks to reinforce the fact that they’re social outsiders. But the film’s script, written by director Leon Ford, confounded me in third act when it reaches for a plausible reason to make Griff flirt with normalcy just as his future with Melody seemed to be coming together.

What I did enjoy was how the film unfurled in atypical comic book movie fashion. Even Kick-Ass and Super, as much as they were trying to send up the genre, played right into it with villains and a climactic, winner-takes-all battle in the end. But while Griff is a romantic-comedy-drama masquerading in a superhero suit, it actually does a pretty good job of looking like one too. If you liked the world of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, with its primary colours and cityscapes that looked like they were taken straight out of the comic panel, then you’ll love seeing the world of Griff unfold.

For a connoisseur of the art form, Griff the Invisible is uniquely different, but is still satisfying taste in terms of being a superhero movie. It’s refreshing to see a film take on the genre and not make it about how “in real life” mentally disturbed people can take the call to being a superhero as an excuse to do violence and immoral things to others with impunity. Griff is a sweet film, and it has a positive message that seeing one’s self in heroic terms and believing in the powers of self-made magic and ingenuity, doesn’t necessarily make one mad. It also proves that delusion, like love, is best shared with the one you love.

TIFF - The Whistleblower

Rating: ****

The Whistleblower may not be one of the most talked about films of the Toronto International Film Festival, but it is one of the 2010 Fest’s most compelling. Like a police procedural with an international flavour, the film has the added gravitas of being “ripped from the headlines,” a hook that’s both compelling and repellent. Additionally, The Whistleblower features a first rate performance by Academy Award-winner Rachel Weisz, whose positively brilliant as she trades between frustration and inspiration from beginning to end.

Weisz plays Kathy Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop that takes a job as a private police officer in post-war Bosnia. As one of the few female cops on the force, Bolkovac manages to make progress in small ways in the prosecution of domestic violence against women, a measure that gets her recognized by the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights (Vanessa Redgrave). Under her new responsibilities, Bolkovac finds herself neck deep in the murky world of human trafficking in Bosnia, which has tendrils leading from the pimps to the very people that Bolkovac is working with at the U.N.

This is not surprising, and there really is no mystery for Bolkovac to solve, but what makes The Whistleblower compelling is a matter covered by many stories in the past, how can one person make difference amidst a system hopelessly corrupt. Bolkovac makes a few allies, like an internal affairs officer played by David Strathairn, but despite their reach and high standing, they turn out to be as powerless as she is when it comes to exposing complicity with the local sex trade.

Because of its subject matter, The Whistleblower is difficult to watch for a couple of reasons. First there’s the obvious and depraved abuse of these young women, many of whom were sold into slavery by people they loved and trusted. Although the film is rarely explicit in its depiction of the abuse, there are some rather chilling things alluded to or implied. The other difficulty is the sheer wall of obfuscation that Bolkovac encounters. Whether it’s the fact of the collusion of her colleagues or the fact that they do it so brazenly and without consequence, you can’t help but feel that there’s no way one person can make a dent in all of this.

Still, as they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Bolkovac is an admirable character, determined and committed, but at the same time flawed. She took the job so that she might have enough money to spend more time with her kids, but in the process she’s given a position requiring more than a six month commitment. However, the film doesn’t dwell on Bolkovac’s difficulties as a mother connecting to her children, but perhaps how she used that longing and poured her heart and soul into helping these young women.

A gut-wrenching journey, The Whistleblower tests your patience and gives you hope. Anchored by some pretty solid performances from Weisz, Redgrave, and Strathairn, as well as character actors like Nikolaj Lie Kaas and David Hewlett, this is a compelling drama and highlights a frequently overlooked issue. First-time director Larysa Kondracki, who also co-wrote the screenplay, keeps a very tight grip on the material and delivers the story with precision and determination. Well made with a good message, The Whistleblower is a film that deserves to be known far and wide.