Our top choices for TIFF 2010:
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Twitch - Though brash, bright and energetic there is just no way to quite shake the feeling that Miguel Marti’s Sexykiller is a film trying just a little too hard to pander to the cult audience, a film that takes what would have been a brilliant short film concept and stretches it beyond what it can bear to try and make a feature of it. There are moments of good, bloody fun, certainly, but the joke falls flat well before the film comes to a close and it commits the cardinal sins of simultaneously being a slasher that consistently cuts away from the kill shots and a t&a film that provides minimal t&a beyond the opening sequence.
Barbara is a medical student in an exclusive Spanish university. She is young, beautiful and attractive, surrounded by the best and brightest that her country has to offer. Barbara adores fashion, compulsively consumes Cosmo, and is a man-eater par excellence. She is, in essence, the culmination of the American dream: beautiful, sexy and with nowhere to go but up. But Barbara also has a dark side. When not in classes or out shopping she is a brutally violent serial killer carving her way through the university population, students and faculty alike. The police are at a loss. Assuming that the killer must be a man they have no chance of ever catching Barbara, no chance at all until a pair of students in school on research grants develop a brain wave analyzer with the ability to project the last images to be imprinted upon the brain… [Full Story]
Archive for 2008
TIFF Review: GOODBYE SOLO – Twitch
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Twitch - Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo stands as proof that you don’t need a lot of flash to create compelling film. All you need, really, are actors willing to bury themselves deeply into some compelling, believable characters to pull in an audience and Bahrani’s film has a pair of players willing to do exactly that. Red West is William, a cranky old man sick of life and everything about it. He has no friends. He has no family. He doesn’t work. Other than his regular trips to the cinema William doesn’t seem to like anything, really, and so he has decided that the time has come to simply stop. Enter Souléymane Sy Savané as Solo, the Senegalese cab driver that William hires to drive him up to a famous mountain lookout in two weeks time, a trip William obviously does not plan to return from.
This, quite frankly, is the entire film. And in Bahrani’s hands it’s all you need. Solo is a perfect foil for the cranky William, a non-stop talker who sees nothing but the good in life and people. Caring and gregarious Solo simply doesn’t see any boundaries when it comes to personal life and public life, he spills out everything about himself and expects the same from those around him. And so William is a puzzle to Solo, a deeply disturbing puzzle once Solo realizes the nature and purpose of their arrangement. And so Solo tries to respond the only way he knows how: if William is planning to kill himself as a result of his isolation and loneliness, Solo will see to it that William is not isolated. Though William is a hard nut Solo is determined to crack it… [Full Story]
Exclusive Clip: ‘Rachel Getting Married’ – Cinematical
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Cinematical - Cinematical has just received this exclusive clip from the much buzzed-about Rachel Getting Married, which just recently enjoyed its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. A few folks I know already named this their favorite of the fest so far, and we haven’t stopped hearing Anne Hathaway’s name being tossed around during early Oscar conversations. The film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, follows a woman (Hathaway) who returns home for her sister’s wedding following several stints in rehab.
In his review from TIFF, James said this of the film: “Rachel Getting Married is a terse, smart, funny and tough family drama about forgiveness and failure written by Jenny Lumet; it’s also a loose, smart, broad and bright film about family and love directed by Jonathan Demme. When these two things are in sync, the end result is something truly impressive – a moving story that appeals to your heart and soul without insulting your intelligence, a film full of big scenes that never stoops to the most obvious possible iteration of those big scenes, a movie loaded with great and sincere performances from the top down.”… [Full Story]
TIFF Review: THE EARRING – Twitch
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Twitch - One of my great discoveries at the 2007 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival was the work of Sheila and Nicholas Pye, highly regarded photographic artists who also stand as two of the very finest film makers this country has to offer right now. Their work is surreal and gorgeous, a perfect fusion of image and sound designed to draw an emotional response out of their viewers. And do they ever. Last year the pair came ot the festival with the darkly beautiful Loudly Death Unties, an almost Lynchian bit of work that was one of my favorite films in the festival, and this year they return with a new short titled simply The Earring.
For most of the year between films the duo have been living in Europe as part of an artists’ residency – they arrived back in Canada just days before the festival – and so The Earring makes for a fascinating study in contrast with Loudly Death Unites. While both are gorgeously photographed and rely on speed manipulation and sound design to create their worlds they are otherwise quite different. Loudly Death Unties is an exercise in tightly controlled design, shot in a tightly controlled environment that allowed for some elaborate camera movements and light design. The Earring, by contrast was shot largely hand held by Nicholas himself, almost entirely exterior. It’s a much more open film, one more reliant on natural lighting and environment and performance… [Full Story]
Nothing But the Truth – ScreenDaily Review
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
ScreenDaily - A dramatic fictionalization that conflates the political scandal of former covert intelligence officer Valerie Plame and controversial journalist Judith Miller, Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth is a miscalculated piece damaged by poor direction, mediocre writing and performances that feel consistently misguided and off-key.
Lurie (The Contender) is a contemporary director interested in the culture of politics. His films specialise in government process and how morality, power and behaviour are forefront against distinctive social and political institutions. His new movie evokes key newspaper titles such as All the President’s Men and Absence of Malice. Unfortunately, his own sensibility is that of a television director and the results are flattened and emotionally overwrought.
Kate Beckinsale and Matt Dillon lead a cast more impressive on paper than on film. Still, the top-heavy names ensure some limited theatrical exposure with the strongest returns likely to come in television. The international unpopularity of the actual story’s key participants marks an additional barrier to market success… [Full Story]
Nothing but the Truth – Variety.com
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Variety.com - The story of a journalist willing to go to prison to defend her right to protect her source on an explosive story, “Nothing but the Truth” itself resembles a workmanlike piece of journalism motivated by an outraged sense of injustice. Competently constructed and nicely acted by Kate Beckinsale and Vera Farmiga, Rod Lurie’s second femme-centric political meller, after “The Contender,” takes a similarly critical stand on the abuse of power, but its one-track mind and prosaic approach make the film as laborious as the case is interesting. Moderate B.O. would seem the best that can be expected for this Yari Film Group release.
Opening startlingly with an assassination attempt on the U.S. president, pic proposes a scenario in which the government launches a military attack on Venezuela, based on evidence that its unnamed leader was behind the plot. In a blockbuster story that puts the administration on the defensive, ace Capitol Sun-Times political reporter Rachel Armstrong (Beckinsale) outs Erica Van Doren (Farmiga) as a covert CIA op who went to Venezuela and reported back that the South American country did not instigate the attempt on the president’s life.
Erica, whose husband just happens to have been ambassador to Venezuela but who resigned in disagreement with the administration, is furious about her cover having been blown, but not as furious as the government, which assigns a special prosecutor, Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon), to convince Rachel to name her source. But nothing will make her budge and she eventually lands in jail for contempt of court… [Full Story]
TIFF Review: The Wrestler – Cinematical
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Cinematical - After winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler rapidly became the must-see of the Toronto International Film Festival, with huge lines at the press and industry screening this afternoon seemingly unaffected by the news that Fox Searchlight had purchased the film. After seeing The Wrestler for myself, I feel the need to extend a note of caution about the film, which sailed into Toronto buoyed by advance raves for Mickey Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a low-level professional wrestler — and we soon see how really, both those words could be in quotation marks — whose ’80s glory days are long over, scraping by at low-level, low-paying matches until a heart attack forces him to leave the ring and look at his life in the shadow of death. Many have already written about the parallels between Mickey Rourke and the swaggering, scarred wrestler he plays — early success, fame and notoriety, a series of mis-steps and mistakes taking it all away bit by bit as the years advanced — and the charge Rourke’s own rise and fall offers a filmmaker like Aaronofsky looking to explore ruin and redemption.
But don’t believe the hype — or, more importantly, look past it; if a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke’s work as Randy is physical, invested, powerful and sprawling — but it’s also quiet, sad and hauntingly wounded, too. And The Wrestler offers viewers far more than just Rourke’s performance — which, it must be said, is excellent — if they’re willing to not flinch from what it has to say: The Wrestler is a fascinating, rich, unblinking look at the dark, hunched mean streak that lies curled and poisonous inside of so much American popular entertainment and of so much American life. It’s early to say this, but The Wrestler is one of the most grimly exciting, magnetically repellent movies we’ve had in a long time; it’s flat-out one of the best American movies of 2008… [Full Story]
TIFF Review: Genova – Cinematical
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
ScreenDaily - Here’s a movie that deals with death and grief without hysterics, dramatic speeches or showy, Oscar-grubbing performances. Michael Winterbottom’s Genova has a logline that sounds maudlin and turgid – after she inadvertently causes a car accident that kills her mother, a young girl starts seeing mom’s ghost – but the movie turns out to be understated, down-to-earth, quietly sad. This is Winterbottom’s most intimate film since 9 Songs, and one of the highlights of his career.
Genova has the wherewithal to show its characters dealing with loss in ways that aren’t inherently cinematic. It would have been very striking, for example, to have the newly motherless children – the teenage Kelly (Willa Holland) and the preteen Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) – scream, rage at the world, and slam doors in the face of their well-intentioned father Joe (Colin Firth) before concluding that Family Sticks Together. And in a film like this, I would have guessed that Joe would spiral into an alcoholic depression, or perhaps start a tumultuous, guilt-ridden affair with the old college friend (Catherine Keener) who comes back into his life.
Those are the arcs I would have expected to see. But though a couple doors do get slammed, Winterbottom’s characters aren’t here to amuse us or push our buttons. Their reactions to the tragedy and their ways of adjusting to a new life in the titular city all paint a much more nuanced picture – and the effect is more heartbreaking than any number of manipulative stunts could have achieved.
Take Mary, played by a wonderful Perla Haney-Jardine as a girl who seems incredibly fragile but keeps blindsiding us with her resilience. She has nightmares, cries, and sometimes wets her bed, but it took me until an hour into the film to realize the depth of her guilt and pain. When it finally dawned on me how hyper-conscious of everything she had been all along, I nearly burst into tears myself. Hollywood loves little kids who are preternaturally plucky and courageous, but never portrays them with this much subtlety and sensitivity… [Full Story]
Photos from Day 4 & 5 – TIFFReviews.com
Monday, September 8th, 2008
Deadgirl – Variety.com
Monday, September 8th, 2008
Variety.com - Arriving on the heels of America’s torture-porn wave, “Deadgirl” takes a disturbing adolescent male fantasy and glosses it up just enough to pass for a legitimate horror movie. The plot, which concerns two friends who discover a naked woman tied up in an abandoned mental hospital and decide to make her their personal sex object, is extreme enough that few distribs would dream of touching it. Still, pic the skirts the edge without going over, and judging from the raucous reception during its Midnight Madness preem at Toronto, twisted auds clearly do exist for such blatantly “wrong” material.
The titular corpse more accurately qualifies as a “living deadgirl,” with the pic joining the recent trend of zombie movies that never identify themselves as such. Instead, tyro horror helmers Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel focus on the script’s more “River’s Edge”-like aspects.
Both J.T. (Noah Segan) and Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) can relate to rejection, which explains not only why they’d be lurking around a shuttered nuthouse but also why they’d be inclined to find their own depraved use for a Playmate-quality zombie chick… [Full Story]
TIFF Review: GOODBYE SOLO – Twitch
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008Twitch - Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo stands as proof that you don’t need a lot of flash to create compelling film. All you need, really, are actors willing to bury themselves deeply into some compelling, believable characters to pull in an audience and Bahrani’s film has a pair of players willing to do exactly that. Red West is William, a cranky old man sick of life and everything about it. He has no friends. He has no family. He doesn’t work. Other than his regular trips to the cinema William doesn’t seem to like anything, really, and so he has decided that the time has come to simply stop. Enter Souléymane Sy Savané as Solo, the Senegalese cab driver that William hires to drive him up to a famous mountain lookout in two weeks time, a trip William obviously does not plan to return from.
This, quite frankly, is the entire film. And in Bahrani’s hands it’s all you need. Solo is a perfect foil for the cranky William, a non-stop talker who sees nothing but the good in life and people. Caring and gregarious Solo simply doesn’t see any boundaries when it comes to personal life and public life, he spills out everything about himself and expects the same from those around him. And so William is a puzzle to Solo, a deeply disturbing puzzle once Solo realizes the nature and purpose of their arrangement. And so Solo tries to respond the only way he knows how: if William is planning to kill himself as a result of his isolation and loneliness, Solo will see to it that William is not isolated. Though William is a hard nut Solo is determined to crack it… [Full Story]
Exclusive Clip: ‘Rachel Getting Married’ – Cinematical
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008Cinematical - Cinematical has just received this exclusive clip from the much buzzed-about Rachel Getting Married, which just recently enjoyed its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. A few folks I know already named this their favorite of the fest so far, and we haven’t stopped hearing Anne Hathaway’s name being tossed around during early Oscar conversations. The film, which was directed by Jonathan Demme, follows a woman (Hathaway) who returns home for her sister’s wedding following several stints in rehab.
In his review from TIFF, James said this of the film: “Rachel Getting Married is a terse, smart, funny and tough family drama about forgiveness and failure written by Jenny Lumet; it’s also a loose, smart, broad and bright film about family and love directed by Jonathan Demme. When these two things are in sync, the end result is something truly impressive – a moving story that appeals to your heart and soul without insulting your intelligence, a film full of big scenes that never stoops to the most obvious possible iteration of those big scenes, a movie loaded with great and sincere performances from the top down.”… [Full Story]
TIFF Review: THE EARRING – Twitch
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008Twitch - One of my great discoveries at the 2007 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival was the work of Sheila and Nicholas Pye, highly regarded photographic artists who also stand as two of the very finest film makers this country has to offer right now. Their work is surreal and gorgeous, a perfect fusion of image and sound designed to draw an emotional response out of their viewers. And do they ever. Last year the pair came ot the festival with the darkly beautiful Loudly Death Unties, an almost Lynchian bit of work that was one of my favorite films in the festival, and this year they return with a new short titled simply The Earring.
For most of the year between films the duo have been living in Europe as part of an artists’ residency – they arrived back in Canada just days before the festival – and so The Earring makes for a fascinating study in contrast with Loudly Death Unites. While both are gorgeously photographed and rely on speed manipulation and sound design to create their worlds they are otherwise quite different. Loudly Death Unties is an exercise in tightly controlled design, shot in a tightly controlled environment that allowed for some elaborate camera movements and light design. The Earring, by contrast was shot largely hand held by Nicholas himself, almost entirely exterior. It’s a much more open film, one more reliant on natural lighting and environment and performance… [Full Story]
Nothing But the Truth – ScreenDaily Review
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008ScreenDaily - A dramatic fictionalization that conflates the political scandal of former covert intelligence officer Valerie Plame and controversial journalist Judith Miller, Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth is a miscalculated piece damaged by poor direction, mediocre writing and performances that feel consistently misguided and off-key.
Lurie (The Contender) is a contemporary director interested in the culture of politics. His films specialise in government process and how morality, power and behaviour are forefront against distinctive social and political institutions. His new movie evokes key newspaper titles such as All the President’s Men and Absence of Malice. Unfortunately, his own sensibility is that of a television director and the results are flattened and emotionally overwrought.
Kate Beckinsale and Matt Dillon lead a cast more impressive on paper than on film. Still, the top-heavy names ensure some limited theatrical exposure with the strongest returns likely to come in television. The international unpopularity of the actual story’s key participants marks an additional barrier to market success… [Full Story]
Nothing but the Truth – Variety.com
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008Variety.com - The story of a journalist willing to go to prison to defend her right to protect her source on an explosive story, “Nothing but the Truth” itself resembles a workmanlike piece of journalism motivated by an outraged sense of injustice. Competently constructed and nicely acted by Kate Beckinsale and Vera Farmiga, Rod Lurie’s second femme-centric political meller, after “The Contender,” takes a similarly critical stand on the abuse of power, but its one-track mind and prosaic approach make the film as laborious as the case is interesting. Moderate B.O. would seem the best that can be expected for this Yari Film Group release.
Opening startlingly with an assassination attempt on the U.S. president, pic proposes a scenario in which the government launches a military attack on Venezuela, based on evidence that its unnamed leader was behind the plot. In a blockbuster story that puts the administration on the defensive, ace Capitol Sun-Times political reporter Rachel Armstrong (Beckinsale) outs Erica Van Doren (Farmiga) as a covert CIA op who went to Venezuela and reported back that the South American country did not instigate the attempt on the president’s life.
Erica, whose husband just happens to have been ambassador to Venezuela but who resigned in disagreement with the administration, is furious about her cover having been blown, but not as furious as the government, which assigns a special prosecutor, Patton Dubois (Matt Dillon), to convince Rachel to name her source. But nothing will make her budge and she eventually lands in jail for contempt of court… [Full Story]
TIFF Review: The Wrestler – Cinematical
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008Cinematical - After winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler rapidly became the must-see of the Toronto International Film Festival, with huge lines at the press and industry screening this afternoon seemingly unaffected by the news that Fox Searchlight had purchased the film. After seeing The Wrestler for myself, I feel the need to extend a note of caution about the film, which sailed into Toronto buoyed by advance raves for Mickey Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a low-level professional wrestler — and we soon see how really, both those words could be in quotation marks — whose ’80s glory days are long over, scraping by at low-level, low-paying matches until a heart attack forces him to leave the ring and look at his life in the shadow of death. Many have already written about the parallels between Mickey Rourke and the swaggering, scarred wrestler he plays — early success, fame and notoriety, a series of mis-steps and mistakes taking it all away bit by bit as the years advanced — and the charge Rourke’s own rise and fall offers a filmmaker like Aaronofsky looking to explore ruin and redemption.
But don’t believe the hype — or, more importantly, look past it; if a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke’s work as Randy is physical, invested, powerful and sprawling — but it’s also quiet, sad and hauntingly wounded, too. And The Wrestler offers viewers far more than just Rourke’s performance — which, it must be said, is excellent — if they’re willing to not flinch from what it has to say: The Wrestler is a fascinating, rich, unblinking look at the dark, hunched mean streak that lies curled and poisonous inside of so much American popular entertainment and of so much American life. It’s early to say this, but The Wrestler is one of the most grimly exciting, magnetically repellent movies we’ve had in a long time; it’s flat-out one of the best American movies of 2008… [Full Story]
TIFF Review: Genova – Cinematical
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008ScreenDaily - Here’s a movie that deals with death and grief without hysterics, dramatic speeches or showy, Oscar-grubbing performances. Michael Winterbottom’s Genova has a logline that sounds maudlin and turgid – after she inadvertently causes a car accident that kills her mother, a young girl starts seeing mom’s ghost – but the movie turns out to be understated, down-to-earth, quietly sad. This is Winterbottom’s most intimate film since 9 Songs, and one of the highlights of his career.
Genova has the wherewithal to show its characters dealing with loss in ways that aren’t inherently cinematic. It would have been very striking, for example, to have the newly motherless children – the teenage Kelly (Willa Holland) and the preteen Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) – scream, rage at the world, and slam doors in the face of their well-intentioned father Joe (Colin Firth) before concluding that Family Sticks Together. And in a film like this, I would have guessed that Joe would spiral into an alcoholic depression, or perhaps start a tumultuous, guilt-ridden affair with the old college friend (Catherine Keener) who comes back into his life.
Those are the arcs I would have expected to see. But though a couple doors do get slammed, Winterbottom’s characters aren’t here to amuse us or push our buttons. Their reactions to the tragedy and their ways of adjusting to a new life in the titular city all paint a much more nuanced picture – and the effect is more heartbreaking than any number of manipulative stunts could have achieved.
Take Mary, played by a wonderful Perla Haney-Jardine as a girl who seems incredibly fragile but keeps blindsiding us with her resilience. She has nightmares, cries, and sometimes wets her bed, but it took me until an hour into the film to realize the depth of her guilt and pain. When it finally dawned on me how hyper-conscious of everything she had been all along, I nearly burst into tears myself. Hollywood loves little kids who are preternaturally plucky and courageous, but never portrays them with this much subtlety and sensitivity… [Full Story]
Photos from Day 4 & 5 – TIFFReviews.com
Monday, September 8th, 2008
Deadgirl – Variety.com
Monday, September 8th, 2008Variety.com - Arriving on the heels of America’s torture-porn wave, “Deadgirl” takes a disturbing adolescent male fantasy and glosses it up just enough to pass for a legitimate horror movie. The plot, which concerns two friends who discover a naked woman tied up in an abandoned mental hospital and decide to make her their personal sex object, is extreme enough that few distribs would dream of touching it. Still, pic the skirts the edge without going over, and judging from the raucous reception during its Midnight Madness preem at Toronto, twisted auds clearly do exist for such blatantly “wrong” material.
The titular corpse more accurately qualifies as a “living deadgirl,” with the pic joining the recent trend of zombie movies that never identify themselves as such. Instead, tyro horror helmers Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel focus on the script’s more “River’s Edge”-like aspects.
Both J.T. (Noah Segan) and Rickie (Shiloh Fernandez) can relate to rejection, which explains not only why they’d be lurking around a shuttered nuthouse but also why they’d be inclined to find their own depraved use for a Playmate-quality zombie chick… [Full Story]
