Fantasia: Day 5

Reviewing and working a day job is definitely starting to take a toll on me. I've been averaging two movies a day, but I think I'm only going to make it to The Sparrow tonight, being that I still need to get a hold of people out West and pack for my trip on Wednesday.

Films so far have been more hit than miss, with the biggest miss of all being Mother of Tears on Saturday. Actually, it almost qualifies as so bad it's good, which I'm sure isn't much consolation to Argento fans. L remarked on the fact that everyone who was leaving the theater had the same stricken look like their dad had just died. It really is saying something that the best part of the film, and everyone seemed to agree with me on this one, is the monkey. If you have a chance to see this movie, do yourself a favour and skip it, lest you break your heart. Or at least make sure you've got one hell of a buzz going on.

The other miss was opening film Truffe, which despite some cool visuals and uniformly good performances wasn't quite weird enough for me to recommend. It's unusual for a Quebecois film, but the thin story probably would have worked better as a short.

Surprises so far were MMORPG documentary Second Skin and Miike Takashi's Sukiyaki Western Django, which is way more entertaining than it had any business being. Strange? You bet, but rather accessible by Miike standards. Still, I'd be damned if I could have understood the English dialogue without the English subtitles.

Three of the stronger films I've seen so far were all Spanish: indie horror [REC], which is far more effective than it could have been (I screamed out loud more than once), sci-fi who done it Timecrimes and apocalyptic crime thriller Before the Fall (3 Dias). Out of the three, Before the Fall was my least favourite, due largely to an over reliance on cliche and Hollywood style plotting and character development.

Also good were Who's that Knocking on My Door, a quiet revenge film from Korea and Germ's biopic What We Do is Secret, although I'm going to have to meditate a bit more on this last one. Parts of it reminded me of 24 Hour Party People it the way it captured the energy and excitement of a scene, but some parts were playing it a little safer than maybe they should have.

Another highlight was watching Gordon Liu tear up during the multiple standing ovations he received before and after the screening of Disciples of the 36th Chamber, an airy and infectiously fun Shaw bros kung-fu pic.

I've got to hang out with a bunch of cool people so far, including festival programmers Mitch, Simon, Mi-jeong and King-wei, Simon and Rick from The Naked Lunch radio show and Jason and Rob of Hobo with a Shotgun fame.

And for those who are interested, Film Threat has already posted some of my reviews:

Truffe
Sukiyaki Western Django
[REC]
Who's that Knocking at My Door

And Jeremy and I also collaborated on a pre-festival piece.

My new movie night column, Meeko's Movie Night Massacre will go online tomorrow.

Ooh, and if you wanna check out the Fantasia Trailers, go here. And there are video recaps of each day of the fest on YouTube.

Movies I Watched Instead of Writing: Junior

The NFB (ONF out here) does a free screening series on Tuesdays at their Cineroboteque downtown and this week Marie-Claude and I checked out a very interesting documentary about junior hockey called, appropriately enough, Junior.

Filmmakers Isabelle Lavigne and Stephane Thibault followed the Baie-Comeau Drakkar for an entire season, focusing not on the drama on the ice, but the drama off the ice. In fact, there is no game footage in the film at all.

For people not that familiar with the behind the scenes of Major Junior League hockey, the film is definitely an eye opener. The majority of the players have agents and the business aspects of the league are obvious. While the coaches do believe that they can turn these boys, generally in the 16 - 20 age range, into major league players, they have other considerations as well: filling seats, keeping league officials and team owners happy and potentially propelling their own careers.

The film opens with Benjamin Brault, one of the Drakkar's star players being lectured by a man we eventually learn is his agent. His face is that typically blank canvas of the teenage male visage, equal parts stoicism and dumbfoundedness. We are not sure how much of this he is absorbing, but we are equally unsure of how much we want him to absorb. For a kid who really does look like he'd rather hang out with girls and party all night, there is a lot of pressure coming from a lot of different places.

The film is particularly hard hitting because of the techniques employed by the directors. There is no game footage, and there are also no interviews. All reactions are authentic, as they happened. The sense of the audience really is that of being a fly on the wall, in the locker room, in the coach's office, on the bus, in hotel rooms. We are even privy to a secret trade negotiating meeting in a Tim Hortons (it really doesn't get much more Canadian, does it?)

Typically poker faced players and coaches are subjected to unending close-ups, the better to catch a tell-tale eyebrow twitch or shift in focus. The close-ups are so tight as to almost induce a sense of claustrophobia in the viewer, which ultimately increases the drama in what are in a lot of cases one-sided or one word conversations.

It is also interesting that the Drakkar are not a particularly winning team. They struggle through most of the season and the heartbreak of the players is obvious, particularly when they don't even manage to win the last game of the season. It is not often that you see that many teen aged boys all crying in the same room. We are also privy to last minute trades against the wishes of the player and painful surgery.

While ultimately a very quite film, but powerful enough to be recommended as essential viewing for anyone with children with ambitions of playing major league sports.

The film will also be airing on Radio-Canada on May 1st.

Movies I Watched Instead of Writing: Mémoires Affectives & Mon Fille, Mon Ange

After trying and failing to watch the Jutras (Quebec's answer to the Oscars) a couple weeks ago (just too "French" for me, and by "French" I mean "lame"), we opted instead to rent some of the movies that were either nominated or had won in previous years. While compiling a list of our options we discovered that we had missed out on quite a few recent, good, Quebecois films, so we've got some work ahead of us.

That night we rented Mémoires affectives (2004), Séraphin: un homme et son péché (2002) and the "classic" Quebecois comedy, Elvis Gratton (1981).

After staring at the screen in disbelief for the first 10 minutes of Elvis Gratton, I decided that I would rather watch "the one about the guy in the coma", so we popped in Mémoires affectives with former pretty-boy Roy Dupuis. In the 18 or so years since endearing himself to every pre-teen girl in Quebec with his role in the seminal tele-roman, Les Filles de Caleb, M. Dupuis has managed to develop into quite a talented actor and is easily one of the biggest stars in the province.

The film opens with someone taking Alex (Dupuis) off of life support, but instead of just dying the act forces him out of the coma he has been in for the last 6 months. As a side effect of being in a coma for so long, Alex has almost complete amnesia and is therefor useless to the multiple police investigations he is involved with, the first pertaining to who tried to kill him in the hospital and the second being how he found himself in the coma in the first place.

His wife, Michelle (Nathalie Coupal), from whom he was estranged at the time of his accident; wants to pretend that everything is fine and that the years of trouble never happened. His daughter, Sylvaine (Karine Lagueux), is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother's hypocrisy, but she too struggles with what role she wants this man to play in her life. Alex, for his part, is more concerned with putting back together the pieces of his identity, even if the resulting picture is less than admirable.

I won't give away too much more of the plot as one the most engaging things about the film is trying to put together all the disparate memories and clues together along with Alex. We discover information at the same time as the character and because of Dupuis' touching performance we are usually as surprised and disappointed as he is when the information is negative. Unfortunately, the director introduces too many mysteries to properly resolve all of them at the end of the film, but this is far from a reason to avoid the film.

The film is similar in many ways to Memento in the way that it plays on our notions of memory and identity, but in many ways it is a much stronger film because it focuses more heavily on character development and setting. The acting is uniformly good, with Dupuis stealing the show with a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of a man literally searching for himself. The cinematography is beautiful in that typically Canadian way and the choice to set the film in Baie St-Paul in the winter yields some spectacular shots.

Overall, Mémoires affectives (Looking for Alex in English) is a very strong Canadian film and while not perfect, it is definitely worth a look.

That Wednesday we rented the "controversial" Mon Fille, Mon Ange (My Daughter, My Angel). Promoted as a gritty look at the real world of online porn, the film is actually a Holywood-ized who-done-it melodrama, with some of Michel Côté's hammiest acting to date. And yes, that is saying something.

Côté (who L. likes to call Quebec's answer to Al Pacino), plays Germain Degenais, a former lawyer now working for the office of a prominent cabinet minister in the Quebec legislature. His daughter, Nathalie (Karine Vanasse), has taken off to the big bad city of Montreal to attend university and unbeknownst to her parents, fallen in with the wrong crowd: namely, strippers and pornographers. While settling in to an evening of "working" alone in his study, Germain is shocked (shocked I say!) to discover his "ange" promoting herself on a porn site as "Samantha", the new girl. See, she's going to be poppin' her porno cherry live in 4 days, meaning Germain has only 4 days to get to Montreal, find, and save his little girl.

The film utilizes an interesting device of starting at the end, the result being one dead porno producer, and tracing things back through Germain's admission to a work colleague and Nathalie's interrogation by a police detective, played by Christian Begin. We don't actually know who killed the sleaze-bag and the film does a good job of conceiling the true killer right up until the end. Both Nathalie and Germain confess that the other has done a terrible thing, and its up to the audience to determine what is meant by their statements. Neither one is what the other believes them to be, Nathalie the perfect student is really Nathalie the backdoor slut and Germain's perfect political exterior covers some rather shocking rage issues; but does that make either one of them a killer?

The film is briskly paced at an hour and 25 minutes, so the audience is seldom bored. However, this doesn't leave much room for plausible character development and this is the film's greatest weakness. The exception is Laurence LeBeouf as Nathalie's childhood friend Angelique, who radiates with a primal energy in her portrayal of an almost middle-class girl in way over her head and she deservedly won this year's Jutra prize for breakout performance.

While entertaining enough, Mon fille, mon ange is a largely forgettable who done it and not really worth seeking out.

Movies I Watched Instead of Writing: C.R.A.Z.Y. & Control

Sorry I haven't been updating this as regularly as I would have liked, but the last week has been a never ending cavalcade of packing, cleaning and last minute socializing. However, we did manage to sneak a couple of movies in there as well.

C.R.A.Z.Y. This 2005 film was a monster hit in Quebec and apparently one in eight Quebequers saw it in theatres. It also swept the Genies that year and had been on our to watch list for a while. So, in an attempt to further psych ourselves up for the move we decided to finally give it a chance. And I am very glad we did. Backed by an awesome period soundtrack (which apparently ate up most of the budget), C.R.A.Z.Y. tells the story of the Beaulieu family, a fairly average French Catholic family and their "exceptional" second youngest son, Zachary. See, while all four boys are very different, Zack is the wrong kind of different, the kind that alienates him for much of his childhood from his macho father (an excellent Michel Côté). The highlights of the film were definitely the performances, particularly Côté, Danielle Proulx as the mother and Marc-André Grondin as Zachary. I also recommend checking out this excellent CBC article.

Control If you've known me for any length of time you know that I am a HUGE diehard Joy Division fan, so when Beej informed me that the Ian Curtis biopic was playing at this year's VIFF, I had to squeeze it into the schedule, no matter what. And I have to admit that I was very apprehensive when I heard that Tony Wilson and Deborah Curtis had finally giving the project the go ahead, but the fact that they were basing the film on Deborah's heartbreaking book was some consolation. I also admit to having mixed feelings about Anton Corbijn as the director. Sure, it was fairly common knowledge that his move to England in the 1970's was inspired by Ian and Joy Division's music, but I have to say that I was not all that impressed by his music video output. While his grainy black and white esthetic is iconic, it doesn't really showcase a lot of depth or dramatic development.

However, all my fretting was for nought. Control is a beautiful, powerful, and very good film. Comparisions to Saturday Night, Sunday Morning are certainly appropriate as Macclesfield is a working class town and Joy Division was a working class band. Samantha Morton does a marvelous job as Debbie, never falling into the trap of playing the victim or the shrew, instead emphasizing her love for Ian and her initial starteling innocence. Sam Riley is also incredible as Ian, an ambitious but fragile man worn down by fate and his own fickle wants.

My other favourite preformances include Toby Kebbell as Rob Gretton, Craig Parkinson as Tony Wilson and Joe Anderson as a delightfully crabby Peter Hook.

The naturalistic and heartbreaking performances are aided by several directorial choices, including the use of a stark black and white portrait which both conveys the spirit of the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s and allows Corbijn to best demontrate his painterly photographic style. Corbijns framing and use of shadows tell stories where the dialogue is absent, particularly in the way he frames those around Ian and Annik when they are together: backs turned perfectly away, but present and compliant none the less.

The other surprisingly effective trick employed by Corbijn was to have the actors to play their own instruments during the concert scenes. Because Joy Divisions music is not technically difficult, the difference in their playing is barely noticeable, but the immediacy and energy their playing brings to their scenes makes it incredibly easy to understand how they became popular so quickly. While Sam Rileys melodic tennor can be distrancting to those accustomed to Ian Curtis haunting mono-baritone, the power with which he sings conveys the character perfectly.

My only complaint is that because the film is such a slow burn, for those already intimate with Curtis story, it does seem to drag at times. And yet, eventhough we all know how the film has to end, it is even more heartbreaking than we could have imagined.