Here is the trailer for Shut Up And Play The Hits… the movie of 2012 for me.

Its world premiere is at Sundance, later this month, when there are 5 screenings scheduled. Agh, how I wish I could be at one of ‘em!

Take Shelter, dir. Jeff Nichols

Jeff Nichols wrote and directed one of my happiest discoveries of the past year, Shotgun Stories (2007), which also features the star of Take Shelter, the estimable Michael Shannon. (Okay, full disclosure: I have an extreme case of the h-h-hots for Mr. Shannon. Fair ’nuff?  In fact, Shotgun Stories may have been the Shannon performance that hooked me. You might know him best as Agent Van Alden Awesome in HBO‘s “Boardwalk Empire”.)  It is a quiet but devastating little film about a feuding family that I highly recommend–the writing and performances are beautiful.

It is on the basis of Shotgun Stories that I am keen to see Take Shelter.  Again written by Nichols, it is the story of Curtis–a young husband and father and a crew chief for a mining company in the American Midwest–who may or may not be taking a frightening trip around the proverbial bend.  I expect it will be up to the viewer to decide which is the case… as Curtis struggles to understand the same thing onscreen.  

Shannon has covered similar ground before–most obviously in Bug (both on stage and on film), where his character Peter believed he was a victim of biological testing by the military but may, in fact, have escaped from a mental institution. As someone colourfully put it, he tends to end up in roles where he plays someone who is one stubbed toe away from a psychotic break.

“There are dark forces in the world, and if you pay attention to what’s going on around you, you end up incorporating it into the storytelling. Maybe it’s some aspect of myself that’s coming through that people are seeing, that I am in fact a quiet psycho.” His gentle, non-psycho smile suggests he finds humor in the typecasting.

- New York Times interview with Michael Shannon by David Carr

In Take Shelter, I expect to see a quiet performance from Shannon, as his character must confront fear for his family’s safety and fear for his own sanity.

What I like about Michael Shannon is that he’s so fiercely intense—carries things on his face—but the most interesting part about Mike is the layer of sensitivity underneath all that intensity. When people can cast him in those roles and find that moment, then that’s when I find him most fascinating. If he’s just crazy, if he’s just mean and brutal, he does that amazingly well—but that’s not what I go for. That’s not what I tap him for.

- Jeff Nichols

Into the Abyss, dir. Werner Herzog

If you know me, then you know that one of my favourite directors is Werner Herzog, so it will come as no surprise to find his new film on my Chasing the Buzz list.  It’s a given that if Herzog has a film at TIFF or Hot Docs, I’ll wanna see it. Last year, it was the wonderful Cave of Forgotten Dreams and the year before that it was both Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done (starring… wait for it… Michael Shannon!).

This year, Herzog takes us into the abyss when he focuses his attention on inmates on death row in the U.S.  He talks with people convicted of murder–including one man who killed his girlfriend and her two mentally disabled sons and a woman convicted of kidnapping and murder. He looks at the crimes and their legacy, in both the victims and perpetrators. Not sure what will be more difficult–his talks with the families of the victims or those with the murderers, themselves–but this will certainly be his heaviest film in quite awhile.

Urbanized, dir. Gary Hustwit

Urbanized is the final film in Gary Hustwit‘s design trilogy, following Objectified (2009) and Helvetica (2007)–both of which I enjoyed at Hot Docs.  It appears that Hustwit’s investigation into how design affects our lives started with something small (the design of a font), got a little bigger (industrial design of everyday objects), and now is quite large (the design of the very cities where we live and work). I have found this series to be engaging and entertaining and enlightening and I stumbled upon the first film only because I’m a bit of a font geek; lo and behold, Helvetica turned out to be my favourite film at that year’s festival!

Along with architects, developers, city planners and politicians involved in various urban design projects around the world, Hustwit talks with ordinary citizens who have managed to influence the development of their own communities.  Seeing as how half of the world’s population now lives in an urban setting and it’s projected that 75% of us will be doing so by 2050, the design of them is something that will affect the majority of lives on this planet and the citizens’ voices can carry significant weight.

As I watch the pitched battles over bike lanes and car tolls, proposed ferris wheels and monorails, it strikes me that the citizens of Toronto might be interested in this film as great changes to the Big Smoke are promised (or threatened, depending on how you look at it).

There are about 15 other films that have caught my eye at TIFF this year. I’ll see if I can make the time to tell you a bit about them soon.

As always, sincere thanks to Peter for inviting me to participate again this year!  It’s always fun.

Two jumped out at me immediately: Red, a story about revenge starring the always wonderful Brian Cox…

and Let The Right One In, a Swedish vampire film based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist…

If you are a Facebook member, you can see all 8 hi-res trailers here. Otherwise, g’wan over to the TAD site to watch ‘em.

I attended last year and I gotta say I hadda blast. I was really impressed with this upstart fest: it was well organized, the programming was international in scope, it included short programmes as well as features, it cut a pretty wide swath of genres (horror, SF, documentary, animation, cult, musical, and unpredictable combinations thereof), and it attracted thousands of patrons who weren’t averse to a little grue. Or a lotta grue, for that matter.

Plus, it dovetailed with the annual Toronto Zombie Walk! Beat that, TIFF!

→ originally published 2008-08-27

Y’know, I felt expectedly sad but still in control throughout Grant Gee’s documentary about Joy Division—long one of my favourite bands—before finally breaking down and sobbing over a visual pun at the end of it all. Gee had overlaid footage of a New Order performance of “Shadowplay” and footage of a Joy Division performance of same (one shadowing the other, you see) and, my God, what a terrible feeling of loss came over me.

Ian Curtis was gone before I’d ever even heard the band. I was introduced to the music of Joy Division by my friend Peter (who had eclectic tastes and who introduced me to a lot of interesting music) when I was in third-year university. At that time, the band’s dark and brooding post-punk music resonated with me and it has remained very important, very personal to me even though I’ve gone through a lot of changes since then. The intriguing thing about their music is that it just doesn’t sound dated. It doesn’t sound out of place today—nor has it ever, throughout all the years since it was laid into wax. They were way ahead of their time back then and, despite their minimal output, are generally considered a hugely influencial band.

I first heard of Gee’s documentary in the run-up to TIFF07, where it got its world premiere. This film, along with the North American premiere of a dramatized version of the story (Anton Corbijn’s Control) meant that Joy Division was certainly well represented at the film fest. Unfortunately, neither film screened during the few days I attended and—naturally—neither film ever showed up onscreen in the city where I live, so their release this summer on DVD was much anticipated.  

I wanted to see the documentary first. Coincidentally, director Grant Gee was the cinematographer of the Scott Walker biography I saw at Hot Docs last year. (And how’s this for odd? The author of that Sydney Morning Herald article I linked to a couple paragraphs ago likens Scott Walker to Ian Curtis and I ran into that old friend of mine who originally introduced me to Joy Division at the Scott Walker screening. Hum the theme from The Twilight Zone here, plz.)

The film features interviews not only with the surviving band members but also managers, producers, music journalists, and various hangers-on–including Ian Curtis’s “other woman”, Annik Honoré, and his widow, Deborah, who does not actually appear onscreen but whose comments (quotations from her book about life with Ian: Touching From a Distance) are included as intertitles throughout the film. But one of the main “characters” in the film is Manchester, itself. The city was bleak and dirty and charmless in the rough wake of the industrial revolution that started there, and at one point guitarist Bernard Sumner says he doesn’t think he’d ever even seen a tree until he got a motorcycle as a teen and was able to get out of the city on it. But as the music scene sprouted and then flowered in the late 70s and into the 80s, the city’s revitalization began and Gee posits that the latter is entwined with the former and Joy Division is at the centre of that renaissance. Interspersed throughout the film are images of Mancunian locations strategic to the band’s history, and they are achingly subtitled “Places that are no longer there”.

Of course, the main thing that is ‘no longer there’ is the one that casts the longest shadow over the film: Ian Curtis, himself, who committed suicide on the eve of the band’s inaugural North American tour in May, 1980. He is the subject discussed by everyone he left and more than once I found myself wondering how differently all these lives would’ve turned out if he hadn’t died all those years ago. Joy Division (including gifted producer Martin Hannett, whose contributions to the band’s sound cannot be overlooked) had a profound effect on music in just that short period of time they were together… As someone points out in the film, before Joy Division, punk music was all about “Fuck you!” but Joy Division said “We’re fucked”. They showed that this new music could be used to express deeper feelings and that is, I think, something very important to remember about them and their musical legacy.

Then, a few nights after I watched Gee’s documentary, as the heartbreaking conclusion of first-time feature director Anton Corbijn‘s Control played out before me, I broke down in tears again. Great wracking sobs, actually.

Control–based on Deborah’s book—is a fictionalized account that is focused more on Ian Curtis than the band as a whole and features a drop-dead-perfect performance by newcomer Sam Riley (with whom I fell madly in love!). Riley not only manages to look like Curtis and move like Curtis, he manages to sound like him too. Riley and the three other actors who play the band members (Joe Anderson as Peter Hook, James Anthony Pearson as Bernard Sumner, and Harry Treadaway as Stephen Morris) learned to play their own instruments and sing for these roles and, I’ll tellya, if they ever decided to tour as a Joy Division tribute band, they’d be playing to sold-out rooms. They are that good. Samantha Morton is equally wonderful as the put-upon Deborah, who married Ian when they were both very young and bore him a daughter, Natalie (who, according to director Corbijn’s commentary, actually appears in the film as a fan of the band—in the front row of the performance the band gave at Derby Hall in Bury after Ian’s first suicide attempt), weathered his on-and-off affair with Annik Honoré before finally giving up and filing for divorce, and was the one who discovered Ian’s body hanging from the laundry drying rack in their kitchen.

Corbijn is uniquely qualified to make a film chronicling the band. He was one of its chief photographers back in the day. He knew them. And that this is his first feature-length film is astonishing to me, as I found it not only visually stunning but perfectly paced and emotionally engaging, with exquisite performances pulled from his actors. I honestly can’t find fault with anything about it. His commentary on the dvd is quite interesting because he explains his reasons for some of his decisions that made this film so unique. For instance: it’s shot in black and white. Why? Well, he explains, look through the photos taken of the band… They’re all in black and white. Each photographer who addressed the band shot them in black and white. I think the black and white feels more “serious”. It creates (or, perhaps, maintains) a feeling of distance between the photographed and the viewer. The only colour footage of Joy Division is in television and concert film clips. Weird, eh? But photographers just seemed to understand that black and white was the right way to photograph this band. Personally, I love black and white film, and this is certainly one that would, I think, lose visual power if it were shot in colour. I was very interested to hear Corbijn’s explanation of how he understood Ian’s plight… He says that he thinks that Ian’s downfall was that he was trying to please everyone (Deborah, Annik, the band, their fans, etc.) while still trying to please himself. And he found that this was impossible. It seems he only saw one way out.

In the film, during the recording of what turned out to be Joy Division’s last album, Closer, Annik worriedly tells Tony Wilson that Ian really means what he writes in his lyrics. Wilson dismisses her concern, with something like “oh, tut, it’s just art”. But as it turns out, she was right (and Wilson, himself, confirms this story in Gee’s film)…

…and it had to end badly:

In fear every day, every evening
He calls her aloud from above
Carefully watched for a reason
Painstaking devotion and love

Surrendered to self preservation
From others who care for themselves
A blindness that touches perfection
But hurts just like anything else

Isolation, Isolation, Isolation

Mother, I tried, please believe me
I’m doing the best that I can
I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through
I’m ashamed of the person I am

Isolation, Isolation, Isolation

But if you could just see the beauty
These things I could never describe
These pleasures a wayward distraction
This is my one broken prize

Isolation, Isolation, Isolation

→ originally published 2008-08-26

→ originally published 2008-06-19

‘I have a bad feeling about this…’
- Indiana Jones, quoting Han Solo, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Damn, I knew it was a mistake to let hope and a few (over-?) generous reviewers overwhelm my longstanding belief that another Indiana Jones film would be a fiasco… As I start to write this, I just got back from seeing the latenight screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Incredibly Long and Charmless Movie Titles, and I’d rate it somewhere between the hokey-jokey Last Crusade and the screamy-corny Temple of Doom. And closer to the latter than the former. None of ‘em even comes close to the pure cinematic joy of Raiders, of course.

But at least I didn’t hafta pay to see it.

The film bolts out of the gate and maintains the frenetic pace of a gallop to the end. It needs to stop and take a breath. It needs to pause and take a look around and think for a minute. Instead, it’s just one furious action set piece after another. But for all that, there are no thrills. I wasn’t moved to the edge of my seat even once. I never felt any sense of danger for the characters onscreen, even when they went plunging over three (count ‘em: 3) enormous waterfalls. (Overfuckingkill. That’s the film in a nutshell.)  

It’s hard to feel scared for the characters when the danger is so badly CG’d. I’m tellin’ ya, the (not so) special effects are impossibly fake-looking and the whole damned thing looks like it was shot on a soundstage. It’s not just that the sets look built out of plywood and styrofoam and plaster of paris, either.

It’s the cinematography. I think back to how beautiful Raiders of the Lost Ark looked… think of those blue-white desert skies or the shot of the sun rising and hitting the map room where Indy stands with the Staff of Ra. It’s not the usual cinematographer (Doug Slocombe did the original 3 films; Janusz Kaminski did this one), which could be part of the trouble.

A bigger part of the trouble, though, is David Koepp‘s screenplay. It meanders. Worse, it bores. How many times did I sit there, wondering, “Where in hell is this going?” It was chock-full of caricatures rather than characters–not that terrible a crime in an homage to the old serials, of course, but at least in the past we’d get a villain like René Belloq who was like a dark and bizarro version of Jones, himself. In this one, we have the one-dimensional Irina Spalko, played with a single expression and a cartoon accent by Cate Blanchett in a severe wig. And–here’s the rub–Indy fucking well helps her! WTF?! And the MacGuffin this time? It’s seriously lame. (I suspect the MacGuffin was George Lucas’ idea, though. Not Koepp’s. Gots to give (dis-)credit where it’s due.)

And the direction of Steven Spielberg… Has he forgotten all he useta knew about how to construct an engaging film? Gadzooks, this thing is a mess! Nothing works in this film! Nothing!!

The worst thing is that this Indy isn’t the Indy I know and love. This Indy is surprisingly witless (hell, the whole damned screenplay is): his smartass remarks are mostly cringe-worthy, he is fooled not once but twice by a (lazily-conceived and -written) sidekick, and he helps the enemy. And I don’t think he uses his whip once–even though it probably would’ve worked better than a snake as a rope to pull him out of one jam he found himself in. It’s like he got not just old (which isn’t bad) but stupid (which is bad).

The supporting characters are mostly pointless. You could take Mac and Oxley right out of the film and it wouldn’t miss them. And please take Marion back out of the picture. She scares me with all those teeth. Plus she didn’t really have anything to do (until the dénouement, that is). And Mutt… If that sucky little biatch with the bad ‘do is the future of the franchise, then I have seen my last Jones film.

And don’t get me started on the monkeys. And the prairie dogs.

Terrible film. Reviewers are cutting it too much slack.

→ originally published 2008-05-24

Y’know, in the olden days, I’d've flipped out over that. I woulda stormed the projection booth, cussing and flailing, spittle flying. (I know, I know what you’re thinking: “Carla? Swearing? Nawww!” But it’s true! Believe. It. Or. Not.) It seems I have mellowed.

Up ’til that point, though, I can tell you that this is probably the best comic book adaptation I’ve seen onscreen. (And this coming from a diehard Hellboy fan. Sorry, GDT.) It’s an absolute blast–it’s got all the action you’d expect in a film of this genre, plus more wit than you’d expect, and a first-rate performance in the lead. Ah loves me some Robert Downey Jr, and his built-in bad-boy rep serves him well as Tony Stark–whose life-long self-absorption gets turned on its head (kinda like the final reel of this screening!). It’s still there, mind you–and this is good because I prefer my heros flawed–but leading him in a different direction after a rather major epiphany.

Downey’s razor-sharp delivery is perfect for Stark. His darkness is perfect. His intelligence and quick wit are perfect. And how he learned to perform his lines backwards and upside down is some kinda miracle. Genius! (Plus, umm, this might sound a little drooly girly but, oh my, those muscular shoulders and arms look mighty fiiiiiiine in those muscle shirts!)

(Incidentally, we were each given two free admissions to try to make up for the badly fracked screening, and one of mine will be used to see this again. All the way to the end right-side up next time. I hope. By then, of course, you will have seen it y’self, so I don’t need to tell you about it. And if you haven’t seen it by then, yeesh, crawl out from underneath that rock.)

→ originally published 2008-05-01

Ishiguro built his geminoid in his own image. Make of that what you will.

In fact, he coined the word “geminoid” from the Latin geminus, meaning “twin” or “double” and oid, which indicates “similarity”. And the damned thing does really look like him. If he were a robot, that is.

Apparently, he got the idea for this because he is so busy. He can’t be in two places at once, after all. So he built this copy of himself–sculpted from casts of his body–so that it could, say, sit in a meeting at the office while he was working elsewhere, and it would stand in for him as he spoke through it and manipulated it via remote control. ‘If I could have one at the university, and one at ATR, I would just do all my work from a hot-springs resort.’ Well, okay… it makes sense when he puts it that way. But he also wonders if people could come to have feelings for these things.

His thought was that something that looked like him and spoke in his voice could carry sonzai-kan, or “presence” in a way that his mere voice over a conference call couldn’t.

But I dunno… this thing made my skin crawl. I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me. When he introduces his young daughter to it for the first time–after having told the documentary film crew that he is certain that she will be able to accept it easier than an adult would–she shies away from it and doesn’t even want to look at it. She refuses to touch it and can’t wait to get the hell outta the room.

I can’t blame her. I mean, I don’t wanna pick it apart–it’s a remarkable piece of engineering–but the face simply does not work. And it looks like the “skin” is rubbery in a naaasty way. While we do see Ishiguro complain about an earlier version’s inability to form its lips to match the words he is speaking through them, the finished version looks no better. I can understand what he’s trying to achieve, but I don’t think he’s there yet. And, frankly, I don’t see how having this thing sitting in a room while he is manipulating it by remote control from elsewhere is somehow better than just being there via videoconferencing. Surely the image of the real person has more sonzai-kan than this bucket of bolts does. Or mebbe that’s just a film-lover’s opinion.

Anyway, this doppleganger is not the only robot in the film. There is also Paro.

Paro is what’s called a “mental committment robot”:

Unlike industrial robots, “Mental Commitment Robots” are developed to interact with human beings and to make them feel emotional attachment to the robots. Rather than using objective measures, these robots trigger more subjective evaluations, evoking psychological impressions such as “cuteness” and comfort. Mental Commitment Robots are designed to provide 3 types of effects: psychological, such as relaxation and motivation, physiological, such as improvement in vital signs, and social effects such as instigating communication among inpatients and caregivers.

Why a baby seal, you ask? Well, they tried it first as a cat. But the designers found that people are so familiar with cats that all they could see was how fake the kitty-Paro was. So they figured that fewer people were familar with baby harp seals… and they were right. People no longer focussed on what was “wrong” with it and focussed, instead, on how “cute” it was.

We see Paro introduced to nursing home resident Mrs. Körner who, while she knows it is not a real animal, nevertheless forms what appears to be a genuine emotional bond with it. To be honest, these sequences were really upsetting to me… The repulsion I felt towards Professor Ishiguro’s geminoid was nothing next to the horror of the thought of being so alone in this world that I have to resort to artificial companionship. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach as I watched this genuinely sweet lady cuddle this mewling thing, cooing to it and stroking its (fake) fur. It makes me cry, even now, just to think back on those sequences… It’s not that I think the good feelings it engendered in Mrs. Körner were a bad thing. Quite the contrary! But the thought that this is what we’ve come to makes me feel very sad for all of us.

I think Ambo’s film is quite wonderful in that it could provoke such a strong emotional reaction from me. It is a fascinating subject told well–with humour and with empathy–and easily one of my favourites of Hot Docs ’08. See it if you get a chance.

→ originally published 2008-04-28

Well, wouldn’t you just know it, but the only time I ended up having to sit down at the front of the theatre at this year’s Hot Docs was for the one film I absolutely hated and wanted to get the hell outta before it was finished. There was nothing I could do but just gut it out.

The write-up on this thing described it as being about Carlos Castaneda‘s five “wives”, who mysteriously disappeared right after his death—never to be seen again. Sounds like it might be interesting, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when the director introduced her film by saying that she doesn’t normally make her films for an audience—she makes them for herself—and then added, ‘I hope that if you don’t find what you are looking for in this film, you find something else’, well… As it turns out, I didn’t find what I was looking for and all I found in its absence was frustration and boredom.

Minou Norouzi’s Anatomy of Failure reminds me of something that was made by a self-absorbed teenager who doesn’t know 1. how to construct a story, 3. how to capture something interesting within the frame, 3. how to draw a comprehensible story from the people she sets before her lens, or 4. how to focus her fucking camera!

I sat and seethed through this self-indulgent thing. What on earth the programmers saw in this, I dunno. I saw some blurry navel-gazing shit on a beach and then a bunch of interviews with flaky nouveau-hippies.

At least the opening film was interesting. It was called The Apology Line and was a rather poetic little film about an anonymous phone line in Britain that you call when you need to apologize for something and you don’t feel you can make your apology to the person who deserves it. Some of the apologies are funny while others are wrenching. Directed by James Lees, it won the Best Short Documentary award at the festival.

Minou, the number is 0800 970 93 94.

→ originally published 2008-04-26