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TIFF Short Cuts Re\Mix

I was disappointed not to be able to fit in a Short Program while at the Toronto International Film Festival. The festival allows us to see many movies at once – movies that will go on to big box office success, movies that I’ve dreamt about since reading the book, movies from other countries and cultures that I wouldn’t normally be exposed to – but it also allows us an introduction to new and emerging film makers, many of these through short films. So while I didn’t get to see this at TIFF itself, TIFF introduced a new concept this year where you could buy a ticket to stream the program online, and then watch a Q&A session afterward with some of the directors (they call it round-table but we all know that table’s a rectangle, bitch).

The moderator suggested that 500 of their new best friends would be watching this short cuts program via vimeo, which is true. To all of the film makers: hello! We are so happy to watch and support. To masturbation and carbs: salut! I am watching, not because I wasn’t at TIFF (I was and am and will be) but because this is an experiment in offering programming via streaming that I was excited to be part of. It’s giving people the chance to bring TIFF into their living rooms, should they so choose, and for those of us at TIFF to bring it into our hotel rooms (god, how I’ve spent many long lineups dreaming of just that) t round out our schedules.

The short film selection included:

Boxing – directed by Grayson Moore and Aidan Shipley (of Canada)

A woman returns to her beginner’s boxing class after a tragic accident leaves her a widow. An overeager sympathizer becomes the vessel of her misplaced grief. Extremely well acted and implying a larger story than the one we’re told, this film is immediately bracing and interesting.

“You have to whisper metaphor” – Grayson Moore, on keeping their vague title, Boxing

The Ballad of Immortal Joe – directed by Hector Herrera (of Canada)

This animated short tells the cowboy poetry of Robert W. Service with really beautiful, folksy, unique animation and a catchy score by The Sadies. Sean couldn’t help but declare this one his favourite. Only six minutes long, it still tells the rich story of a gun-slinger, his ill-fated love, and the curse of his immortality.

“Everything you do is a self-portrait” – Hector Herrera, on how much his film represents his body of work.

Deszcz (Rain) – directed by Malina Maria Mackiewicz (of Australia)

A prisoner receives a visit from his mistress, who has told their son that he is already dead. If this isn’t actually true, it will be some day, any day, possibly tomorrow. A film school project with the parameters: 1 location, 2 actors, 3 minutes, Mackiewicz tells a fascinating story.

“You have to make your mistakes in a much more expensive and dangerous environment.” – Mackiewicz, on not going to film school

Kokom – directed by Kevin Papatie (of Canada)

A tribute to his grandmother, Papatie presents the story of the Anicinape people as a journey beginning and ending with resilience.

Dream The Other – directed by Abril Schmucler Iñiguez (of Mexico)

Diego dreams of another man’s life – his home, his family, every detail more interesting than his own humdrum life. The more he dreams, the more his own reality seems to transform and take on new meaning.

Bacon & God’s Wrath – directed by Sol Friedman (of Canada)

This is a mixed-media documentary that tells the story of 90 year old Razie Brownstone and how she’s about to eat bacon for the first time. Having kept kosher her whole life, often as a tribute to her parents and her beliefs, Razie discovered “The Google” 2 years ago, and its magic ability to guess the end of her sentences. Knowing that so many others had asked the very same questions that she’d struggled with, especially about faith, gave her a greater feeling of “connectedness” than she’d ever gotten at synagogue. The film is as experimental as Razie and you can tell by this long paragraph devoted to just 9 minutes of film that I found it entertaining and enlightening.

“Go out and meet other filmmakers…you learn a lot from engaging with othe pople.” – Sol Friedman’s advice to his younger self

El Adiós – directed by Clara Roquet (of Spain)

A servant is lying her elderly client to rest – gently dressing the body while also preparing food for the funeral and caring for the grieving mother and granddaughter. All of her duties complete, she finally dresses herself for the funeral – and what happens broke my heart.

The Call – directed by Zamo Mkhwanazi (of South Africa)

A taxi driver finds out that the prostitute he’s been seeing is pregnant with his child. What does that mean to him? Be with her? Change her ways? Abort? Courtney does it justice over at Cinema Axis.

That Dog – directed by Nick Thorburn (of USA)

I’m struggling to describe this one. Michael Cera and Tim Heidecker play these sleazy guys who house-sit for a buddy and wreak havoc in his apartment complex.

Thorburn on the joke of his title, That Dog: “A dog being either a literal canine or a kind of terrible person.”

I’m so glad I got to see these. A short film is a snap shot worth savoring. I hope you might discover these yourselves, and that you might recommend some of your own favourites.

TIFF 2015: Closet Monster

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The world premiere of Closet Monster, which screened on Sunday as part of TIFF’s Discovery program, was a heart-wrenching experience and I don’t just mean the film itself. Director Stephen Dunn wept openly when asked whether his first feature film was auto-biographical in any way and recounted the story of a hate crime that happened in the Newfoundland town that he grew up in and the fear of his own sexuality that it instilled in him.

Described by the TIFF website as “a coming-of-age (and out-of-the-closet) story”, this small Canadian drama is as much about living with trauma as it is about coming out. Oscar (Connor Jessup) witnessed a brutal hate crime growing up similar to the one described by Dunn and the memory has haunted him ever since. As he is terrified to discover that he himself may be gay, every sexual impulse triggers graphic flashbacks of the incident. His crisis comes to a head when a cute male Montrealer shows up in town for the summer.

Closet Monster is not a perfect film. Most of the problems seem to come from Dunn’s inexperience as a feature filmmaker. A plot device involving a talking hamster (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) is needlessly bizarre and goes nowhere. I found this easy to forgive though given the director’s obvious passion for the project. I got the sense that making even a single cut from material that he was so close to would wound him deeply.

There’s plenty to admire. Oscar’s anxiety about being true to himself is beautifully depicted, both through conventional drama and surreal fantasy sequences. And Jessup, who impressed me at the Festival three years ago in another small Canadian film called Blackbird, continues to be a young actor to watch out for.

Closet Monster isn’t always easy to watch but it is mostly very effective and moving and, if you’re up for it, I hope you’ll seek it out.

Tiffing Like Crazy

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I hardly know how to begin summing up our crazy time at the Toronto International Film Festival. We’re actually only about halfway through our experience, but if I don’t start putting down some thoughts now, I’m going to run out of usable memory space.

Day 1

Demolition: Our first film of the festival is still probably my favourite. Music-obsessed Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Wild) calls this the “most rock-n-roll movie I’ve ever made” and while that’s not the descriptor that immediately came to my mind, I do get where he’s coming from. I would call this movie vigorous. It’s very alive, ironically, since it’s about a man (Davis, played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who’s been numb for the past dozen years or so. It takes the sudden death of his wife for him to realize that he probably didn’t love her. And once that realization is made, his whole life starts to tilt to the left. He becomes obsessed with understanding and improving small, safe things: the leak in his fridge, the squeak in a door, the defective hospital vending machine. A surprisingly confessional letter about the latter connects him to a lonely customer service lady (Naomi Watts) and they stumble together toward truth, just two lost souls helping each other without even meaning to. Gyllenhaal is nothing short of amazing. We see him removed from grief, literally doing whatever he can just to feel – manual labour, loud music, the embracing of pain. Gylllenhaal does disconnection eerily well. But he also has some bracing bonding scenes with a young co-star, the two careening from frank discussions about homosexuality in Home Depot, to the point-blank testing of bullet proof vests. The mourning in this movie is off-kilter to say the least, and jumpcuts and flashbacks keep the loopy momentum going – sometimes quite elegantly, as the editing and cinematography are both superb. Davis busies himself with demolition – he likes taking things apart, methodically, to see how it looks inside, but he can’t quite put it all back together. The physical demolition of his house, of the things surrounding him, serves as an apt metaphor for his sorrow, for his life up until now. It is brutal and quirky and offbeat. Gyllenhaal has been turning in solid performance after solid performance, but this one might be The One. It’s an unconventional movie but also deeply spiritual in its way. Jean-Marc Vallée, when asked after the movie about this theme, responded: “Have you ever smashed the shit out of something? It feels great!”

The Lobster: I realize now, having used words like quirky and offbeat to describe Demolition, that there aren’t words to describe this one. Director Yorgos Lanthimos is a sick man. He has imagined a world not so unlike ours, he thinks, where single people are so ostracized that it’s been made illegal to be without a spouse. When alone, they’re forced into this hotel where they either find a mate, or get turned into an animal. Many fail. Exotic animals abound.This is how we meet Colin Farrell and John C. Reilly as they desperately attempt to be lucky in love. It’s got the deadpan feel of a Wes Anderson movie, only instead of the warm and fuzzy nostalgia, there’s bleak and panicky hopelessness. This movie won’t appeal to most, or even many, but if you can stomach the brutality, this movie is not without some major laughs. And believe me, you earn them. Sean was having a little post-traumatic shock as he lef the theatre, but a few days a lots of reflection later, he found the movie to be undeniably growing on him. The movie is absurdist and bizarre and unique. It is occasionally shovel-to-the-face brutal. Lanthimos understatedly calls it a movie “about relationships”, and his leading lady, Rachel Weisz called it his most “romantic” yet.

Eye In the Sky: Helen Mirren and Barkhad Abdi joined director Gavin Hood in introducing this wonderful film to us – just icing on the cake as the film itself would have been more than enough. Helen Mirren, as you might expect, is completely compelling as a Colonel who’s been tracking radicalized British citizens for 6 years. Just as she’s found them she encounters bureaucratic hell trying to get permission to do her job – that is, to eliminate the threat. What I didn’t realize going in to this movie is that it would not solely be a vehicle for Mirren but a really strong ensemble cast who all pull their weight to give this film so many interesting layers. Drone warfare is obviously a pretty timely discussion, but this movie is also an entertaining nail-biter, successfully blending ethical dilemmas with on-the-street action thanks to Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips) who ratchets up the tension. The crux: there’s a house full of terrorists. They’re literally arming themselves for an imminent suicide attack. Capturing them is not an option – they must be killed before they kill dozens, or hundreds. But just outside this house is a little girl, selling bread. So government officials debate her fate. Mirren the military tour de force is adamant that the terrorists must be stopped at any cost. Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad), the guy with the finger on the trigger, is not so sure. You can see the weight of this decision in his eyes, knowing it’s not his to make, yet doing everything in his power to stall. If he’s the heart and Mirren is the head of this operation, there are dozens of politicians muddling up the chain of command in between. The movie is asking us what is acceptable – the sacrifice of one bright little girl to save potentially dozens? The politicians waffle. The girl herself is not the problem, rather it’s the way it would look to the electoral public. How can they spin this? Who will win the propaganda war? Hood does a great job of subtly reminding us that no matter what, not everyone in the kill zone deserves to die. But at the same time, he lets us feel the urgency, lets us count the potential dead bodies if the suicide attack is allowed to continue. And who would be responsible for that? This movie never stops being tense, even when it draws uncomfortable laughter: Alan Rickman, at the head of the table of the dithering politicians, rolls his eyes for all of us as everyone passes the buck. This movie never flinches and it doesn’t take sides. There is an emotional heft to it and I felt it on a visceral level when this sweet little girl is callously referred to as but “one collateral damage issue.” Oof.

Sicario: Matt was ultimately disappointed with the film but was still lucky enough to be at the premiere where Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro were both on hand to answer questions along with Canadian director Denis Villeneuve.

We Monsters: A German film by Sebastian Ko about a mother and father who follow their most primal instinct to protect their teenaged daughter even as she commits an unspeakable crime. It’s weirdly relatable and abhorrent at the same time, and keeps asking us what we would do even as it pushes the envelope to deeper and darker places. Many shots are obstructed, keeping shady characters exactly that, a little out of focus, a little blurred, a little on the sly. The cinematographer cultivates a sense of dread expertly, boxing those characters in, keeping the shots almost claustrophobic. There’s a real sense of panic, of increasing alarm and desperation, and it’s not easy to watch. But it is kind of fascinating. Afterward, Ko was on hand to answer questions, and when someone asked him about the recurrent shots of a butterfly eventually emerging from its cocoon, he confessed that at first it was just meant as a metaphor for adolescence, but in the end he was struck that what emerged was a “pretty ugly creature” and made for a pretty fitting parallel.

TIFF 2015: About Ray/3 Generations

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I was absolutely blown away by the trailer for Gaby Dellal’s new family drama about a teenager (Elle Fanning) who seeks signatures from both parents allowing her to begin the process of sex reassignment surgery. My only concern going in was how the currently trending topic of anything trans would be dealt with. Would it be sensationalized or exploitation? Would it struggle so hard to stay PC that it wouldn’t say anything at all? Would Dellal take advantage of all the press surrounding the subject matter to produce shameless and obvious Oscar bait?

All my fears were laid to rest almost immediately. Dellal introduced the film saying that About Ray was not a story about someone who was transgender. It’s a story about family. This turned out to be absolutely true. The three leads (including Naomi Watts and Susan Sarandon as Fanning’s mother and grandmother) don’t play one-dimensional symbols of courage. These characters- as well as their house- look completely lived-in. Having to adjust to thinking of their (grand)daughter as a (grand)son is only a small part of the story of this family’s bond and conflicts. Fanning, Sarandon, and Watts are more than up for the challenge. They even look like a family.

About Ray is complex and always entertaining (eliciting laughs from Sunday morning’s audience in almost every scene) and never preachy. See it.

Note: when we saw this movie at TIFF, it was called About Ray. Now that it’s finally hitting theatres May 5, it has been renamed ‘Three Generations.’

TIFF 2015: Hardcore

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Midnight Madness coordinator Colin Geddes is a sick son of a bitch and I love him for it. If it weren’t for him, I never would have discovered The Raid or God Bless America, two of my favourites from TIFF 2011. His love both of cinema and ultra-violence has made Midnight Madness a regular stop on my TIFF tour.

To be fair, I only managed to sit through half of Saturday night’s premiere of Hardcore. From director Ilya Naishuller, who apparently used a similar style in a popular online short, takes an entirely POV approach to his tale of a supersoldier’s quest to rescue his wife from a psychotic psychic paramilitary leader feels like a failed experiment. Designed to put us right in the middle of the action, Naishuller’s style has the opposite effect. Seeing everything through the eyes of our badass hero, it can be impossible to tell exactly what’s going on, with most of the action movie money shots happening offscreen . The main problem, I think, is that we can never tell what the character is feeling. We see our hero run through his eyes but we never sense the hero’s feet hitting the pavement. When he jumps out of a plane, I never felt like I was jumping with him.

Of course,again- I left halfway through. Did anyone stay until the end? What did you think of Hardcore?

TIFF 2015: Ninth Floor

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When I first started at Concordia University in Montreal, news magazine Macleans had ranked the school as an embarrassing 11 nation-wide. The only Macleans measure on which we could chant “We’re number 1! We’re number 1!” was student activism. (Im)famous at the time (I have no idea if this has held true 15 years later) for its student protests, the Concordia Student Union refused to keep quiet on issues of social justice. During my undergraduate orientation, some sneaky CSU reps took some of us aside and told us their side of their conflict with the university’s administration. They told us one story (which, as I recall, they neglected to mention happened 32 years prior) about blatant racism on the part of one professor and the administration in general and how several students held their ground and seized the Sir George Williams campus’ computer room for two weeks until their demands were met.

This incident that I now know happened in early 1969 is the subject of Ninth Floor, which premiered Saturday night as part of the TIFF Docs program. Director Mina Shun makes her documentary debut and at times fails to ask the questions I would have liked to hear the answer to. Even onstage she seemed to still be adjusting to her new title of documentarian- accidentally referring to her participants as “cast members” more than once and even referring to one partipant’s tearful interview as his “Oscar moment”. Overall though, this is a POWERFUL film about an important two weeks in Canadian history and gets bonus points for searching for the roots of racism instead of taking the easier road of labelling some as the Bad Guys. Even professor Perry Anderson- who was the subject of the students’ original complaint- is treated with some compassion. The screening concluded with four of the film’s “cast members” – three participants in the occupation (one of whom later went on to become Canada’s first black Senator) as well as Professor Anderson’s son- taking the stage to a standing ovation in one of the most moving of my TIFF moments.

Both onstage and onscreen, the interviewees often speak of their actions in 1969 as those of young naive kids. I never speak up during question periods but what I wanted to tell them- but didn’t dare- was the ongoing tradition on campus of retelling against injustice and the pride with which my generation- all these years later- speak of their actions.

Freeheld Premieres at TIFF to an emotional audience

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It’s really exciting to be at the Toronto International Film Festival and very cool to be in the audience for the world premiere of a movie like Freeheld. Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, and Michael Shannon all walk the red carpet before addressing the audience to introduce the film, and then sit down to watch it themselves. It’s a special thing to share a movie theatre with the very people who have made the movie but it is very moving, and a profound honour to share it with the person who inspired it. Last night, Laurel Hester’s widow, Stacie Andree, was in attendance.

Packets of tissues were given out to us as we gained entrance, and as I made liberal use of mine, I wondered what this experience was like for her.

I hope it was cathartic. I hope it was empowering. I hope it was a fitting tribute.

I’ll write an actual review on this later; for now I want to reflect on what it means to have been part of this.

TIFF 2015: The Martian

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Since I read for leisure less than I’d like, it is rare for me to be hoping that Hollywood does justice to a book I absolutely loved. Andy Weir’s The Martian is that book. Jay handed it to me a while back and the way she did, I knew it was something special. The Martian is both the most accessible and most science-heavy science fiction novel I have ever read. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favour at some point and check it out. You won’t regret it.

When I heard that Ridley Scott’s adaptation of The Martian was premiering at TIFF 2015, it went to the absolute top of my list. And it quickly became clear I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Despite having a good window for our premium selections, the red carpet premiere was gone before we even had a chance at it. But fortunately, Matt used his window to grab Jay and me a pair of tickets for the next (and only other) TIFF screening of The Martian. We got to see it yesterday and it did not disappoint!

The movie is everything it could possibly be. My only question as we were leaving the screening was whether there was a way they could have kept more in the movie, because some of the problems that arose in the book did not make it into the movie’s two-hour-plus run time. But that’s inevitable and it’s not something I can criticize because the movie was expertly paced and there was nowhere to expand without losing momentum. It’s a reason to re-read the book but not a fault of the movie.

The best part of the whole experience was seeing the spirit of the book preserved and celebrated. As Jay pointed out afterward, while we lost a little Mark Watney time, we gained some time with the other characters, and it was a pleasure to get to know them better. It might even be a better fit with the theme shared by the book and the movie, namely that when we all work together, we can accomplish remarkable things. All we need is a little motivation. There’s no villain here. There are only challenging problems to be solved by the people who are determined to save one unlucky botanist, most notably the botanist himself. It’s a joy to watch it all play out, especially against the backdrop of a Mars that is both desolate and vibrant. The visuals are incredible from start to finish. See The Martian in 3D if you can – it’s simply spectacular.

The Martian is perfect. I can’t wait to see it again.

TIFF 2015: The Lobster

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I was scratching my head about The Lobster before one of many orange-shirted TIFF volunteers had ripped my ticket. All I knew was that it had better be good. Taking our seats only minutes after Demolition (our first screening of the Festival), the Lobster had some big shoes to fill.

I found it hard to tell how the audience in general reacted to yesterday‘s North American premiere. Their applause and questions seemed more courteous than the more rapturous reaction to Demolition and Eye in the Sky. I, for one, immediately congratulated myself for gambling one of my precious 10-pack tickets on this wonderfully bizarre movie.

In what I believe is his first English-language feature, Greek co-writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos told us that he and co-writer Efthymis Fllippou got to talking about how they’d like to make a movie about relationships and so…they made this. In a world where pressure on singles to partner up has reached a whole new level, recently dumped Colin Farrell is forced to check in to a hotel where he has 45 days to find a mate or he’ll be turned into an animal of his choice (a lobster in his case). The rules of this world are weird but oddly familiar, with hotel residents desperately seeking oddly specific things they can have in common with their dates (beware the nosebleeds scene, as well as so many others). It’s weird, but as the survivor of many bad dates, I sort of understood this world.

The Lobster is a laugh-out-loud funny movie, especially in the increasing absurdity of the situation and the Wes Andersony matter-of-factness with which the cast (Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, and Ben Winstan) deliver their absurd lines. It’s also, as Lanthimos and Weisz kept insisting, strangely romantic (albeit in a perverse way). It’s one-of-a-kind and I can’t wait to see it again.

TIFF 2015: Eye in the Sky

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I was disappointed that Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, and Alan Rickman were not at this morning’s encore screening of Eye in the Sky. Maybe they celebrated too hard after last night’s premiere.

That was the one and only disappointment of the whole experience. Eye in the Sky may in fact have exceeded my expectations. Director Gavin Hood had already addressed the subject of the moral sacrifices in preventing terror attacks in 2006’s Rendition but not nearly as effectively as he does here. When a drone strike targeting several known terrorists in Somalia – who can disperse any minute making it impossible to track all of them – becomes much more complicated when a little girl enters the kill zone. Commanding officers, drone pilots, and politicians from three countries must weigh the pros, cons, ends, and means as they desperately try and force someone else to make the tough decision. Risk killing one child to save 80 children? It’s tense as hell, beautifully shot, and funny. I would be interested in hearing from Jay and Sean, who were at last night’s premiere, whether their audience reacted so enthusiastically to the humour in the middle act as the desperate passing of the buck starts to resemble farce.

I should mention that, despite the absence of some of the film’s bigger stars, Barkhad Abdi (Oscar-nominated for his fantastic supporting work in Captain Philips) got up early to join Hood onstage for a thought-provoking and lively question period. I am not sure when Eye in the Sky is due for wide release but I hope a lot of people go see it.