If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it.
Emily Dickinson
As a mental exercise, I ranked the twenty films I saw at tiff. this week. They sorted themselves out surprisingly easily.
These were awesome, my life would be poorer if I had not seen these, and I would watch all of them again.
1) The Valley Below 2) Revivre 3) Haemoo 4) The Lesson 5) Impunity 6) The Red Rose 7) My Darling Clementine
These were a fine way to spend a couple of hours, they just didn't make me feel like the top of my head was taken off.
8) A Single Word 9) Atlantic. 10) The Goddess 11) The Good Lie 12) The Voices 13) Fire on the Plain
These seemed to be flawed in some way, or were more forgettable.
14) Manglehorn 15) Venice 16) Foreign Body 17) Madame Bovary 18) A Dream of Iron 19) Short Cut 20) Love in the Time of Civil War
The experience of the festival itself was fantastic. Well run. Super friendly people there. Excellent venues. I would do the whole thing over again next year, exactly the same, and I might just do that.
I don’t remember why I picked this movie to see in the festival. It was a while ago, and there’s been a lot of stimulation this past week. This is my last film of the festival. I don’t remember picking this movie.
But as I start watching it, I remember that I had heard the title, Fires on the Plain, the book. I came across it when I was looking up when the last Japanese soldier came out of the jungle after WWII, the guys who hid out for twenty years, never admitting the war was over. Amazing the answers that are at our fingertips on the internet these days. The question had occurred to me when I was reading Neptune's Inferno, James D. Hornfisher’s book on the naval battles of Guadalcanal. It was either that or watching Gilligan’s Island reruns.
Did you know they had the same problem in Europe? In 1939 the Nazis invaded Poland, partitioning it with the Soviets. Starting then, over the next six years, the Poles built up what became the biggest underground army in Europe, over a million men, to liberate their country from the Nazis. Sadly, after the war, they didn’t end up liberated at all, we (that’s FDR and Churchill) sold them out to the Soviets to try to buy some peace. The Soviets didn’t want this underground army of troublemakers running around in their version of Poland any more than the Nazis did, and went about imprisoning, executing, and generally being mean to them, so not all of the underground army’s members thought that the postwar demob was anything like a good thing. The last of the members of Poland’s Armia Krajowa was flushed out of the undergrowth only in 1963, almost twenty years after the war. They were called the "Cursed Soldiers."
Anyway, I learned that the last Japanese soldier also came out of the jungle finally in the 1960s. At some point in that research, I remember I heard mention of the novel Fires on the Plain, and I thought this might be the story of living in the jungle for twenty years after the war.
But it wasn’t. I must have misremembered. It’s the story of the final days of the war. The Japanese soldiers are exhausted and filthy and starving-—a single uncooked yam is regarded as a day’s rations. Those yams become a major plot factor in this film. Along with great spouting gobbets of bright red blood. Arcing slow-motion streams of blood, and a cloudy spray of exploding blood, and torrents of blood running down faces and bodies. What with the stress, and the organizational confusion, and having been denied his daily yam more often than not, our hero is losing it pretty heavily for a good portion of the movie, though he does manage to lose it with rubuous cinematic flair. This is more like Apocalypse Now than the Cuban hairdresser movie, except in this movie he’s got nowhere to go, there’s no destination, no goal, even hallucinatory, though he does adopt a negative goal of "not eating human flesh" as one of his motivating principles over the second half of the movie. The yams are a nostalgically half-remembered dream from the good old days by then, instead we’re shown the variety of ways to not eat human flesh.
Post Scriptum: Now that I'm back home and able to do some research, as opposed to making airy generalizations, I find that the movie is based on the novel by Shohei Ooka, who was actually there. And this is the second film realization of the novel--the first is a classic from 1959 (with a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes!?!).
Venice is a movie from Cuba, which you don’t see much of around here. The last movie from Cuba I saw was Our Man In Havana, which was filmed in 1958. There's probably been more recent movies, but they haven't hit the local multiplexes recently, gosh I wonder why. Venice is the story of three girls in Cuba somewhere, hairdressers, who go out together for a night on the town. A journey into the heart of darkness. Yeah, it’s just like Apocalypse Now, three girls’ odyssey into the dark heart of the Cuban dream. Except instead of Vietnam-era GIs it’s female cosmetologists. And instead of the upriver Southeast Asian jungle (“That’s Cambodia, Captain.” “That’s classified.”) it’s some bars and dance clubs. And instead of being based on a foundational member of the Western literary canon, it’s not. And instead of the drama, and the suspense, and the ineluctable unmooring of reality and casting off of common human morality, and the explosion of the sordid underbelly of the human psyche, there’s three girls talking getting progressively drunker and talking about boys. Wait a minute, why am I watching this again?
This was directory Kiki Alvarez’s second picture (Mr. Alvarez is a guy, hard to tell from the name, so you can’t just write this off as a chick flick). One of the actresses was also the writer, Claudia Muñiz, who played Violeta. The tiff. programmer said she saw the film being workshopped when she was visiting Cuba and fell in love with it then. Remind me again how I can become a programmer for a film festival?
The camaraderie between the three girls was sincere and energetic and spontaneous, and the characters were all interesting to watch, and their interactions had a juice that was undeniably authentic, and I have the feeling I would have liked it better if I found the experience of watching three girls talk to each other about clothes and boys more inherently interesting in itself. I suspect I do not belong to the target audience for this film, but what did I just say about it not being a chick flick?
I know Bulgaria isn't Russia, but this Bulgarian film reads like a short story by Tolstoy or Gogol. It would start something like this.
The Lesson
In a small town in Bulgaria, close enough to the nearest city that you could walk there if you needed to, but far enough away that you wouldn't get back home until late in the night, lived a woman, between thirty and forty years old, as the police bulletins would later vaguely report. She was industrious and hard working and prided herself on being always punctual, but she had married a weak-minded man who was sloppy in his habits, and who was not intelligent enough to realize that if you didn't make the mortgage payments to the bank, if you instead kept the money that your wife brought in through teaching English to schoolchildren, if you kept that money for yourself, then eventually the relentless and unavoidable wheels of the legal process would casually crush you beneath them, and that no amount of bluster or posturing would keep you from being ground up by The Machine, the way the butcher casually turns out ground beef from scraps from his meat grinder. The woman had been to the university in Sofia, and had a law degree, but now she was living with her husband and her small daughter in this tiny town.
One day the woman, whose name was Nadezhda though everyone called her Nade, learned one of her students had lost her pocket money, it having been stolen by another student. Nade took this very seriously, because she herself had the strongest compunctions against not only stealing, but breaking the rules in any way, or being dependent on anyone but herself. She was not overly proud, she just believed strongly in following the rules and paying what you owed and not taking things that were not due you. She wrote on the blackboard, in English, this being an English class, "Someone has stolen my wallet."
I could go on. I consider myself normally fairly stolid and phlegmatic, but I had to take my hat between my teeth and bit down on it to keep from running out of the theater.
This is a thriller. There aren't any car chases, or explosions, or scary monsters with flapping tentacles, but I really, really wanted to crawl down on the floor behind the seat in front of me, except that I couldn't because I also really, really needed to know how Nade was going to to get out of this. Watching Unstoppable about the runaway freight train wasn't nearly as fraught with tension as The Lesson.
I think this is (only the?) the second film this week that passes the Bechdel test. The fact that she's a woman is mostly irrelevant to the plot.
I've been here for almost a week now, and seen I think fifteen movies. The boundaries between world and film are starting to get a little hazy. And I sit down in the "Bloor Hot Docs Cinema" (a very cool theater--balcony, big window between the last row of seats and the bar), and see this thing, and it doesn't help clarify matters any, the boundaries are even fuzzier than they were before. What the heck did I just watch?
The director's first reaction after reading the script: "What did I just read?"
Her second reaction: "This is so fucked up!"
Her reaction the next morning after sleeping on it: "That was so fucked up!"
Here's a picture:
Yes, that's right, there's a severed, talking head on his kitchen counter.
I know the movie was a comedy, because a lot of the audience was laughing. Which is a good thing for me, because I wasn't sure whether to laugh or not, and I was probably too busy having my fuses blown to laugh anyway. It's an odd kind of comedy though. I wasn't getting any of the cues I'm normally used to to laugh. And I don't mean a laugh track, I mean the chaotic climax of a Laurel and Hardy scene, or a befuddled look from Bob Newhart, or the ba-da-boom punchline from the last in a series of hilarious David Foster Wallace footnotes, but there weren't any comedic moments or comedic timing stuff going on here, I'm still not completely sure what to make of it. Now, no one likes a good laugh more than I do...
The Voices is about a guy working in a toilet factory in a bum-fuck-nowhere town in the Midwest. He doesn't seem quite right. He talks to his dog and cat, and they talk back to him. He's seeing a therapist who gets him to admit he's avoiding his meds, thanks him for his honesty, but reminds him that they have a deal with state correctional facility and if he keeps avoiding his meds then he's going back in the slammer. Things eventually get very crazy, in an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind kind of way, and it's either horrifying or it's hilarious or it's both in some kind of crazy way. It's definitely not a comment on mental illness, both the directory and the writer were firm about that--it's about entertaining the audience.
Great anecdote: Marjane Satrapi, the director, described the perils of filming with a real cat as you'd expect. The dog, you tell it to sit and it sits. The cat, you tell it to do something and it wanders off in the other direction. Her editor was also the second unit director. They'd set up the shot and leave for the night, and the second unit director would sit there for hours going "here, kitty, kitty" until the cat spent a couple seconds in the place where they wanted it.
Ryan Renolds is one of those guys who's been in tons of movies, instantly recognizable but completely unnamable. She cast him after seeing him in The Green Lantern. "Anybody who could do such a good job in such a shitty movie..." she said.
Satrapi says she was a painter before she was a director. It shows in her really effective use of color pallettes. Most of the film is in bright colors and primary tones (they wear pink jumpsuits in the toilet factory where they work). After we find out he's crazy, bat-shit crazy, and isn't taking his medication. The talking head (see above) yells at him to "Take the damn pills!" and cows him into doing it, and then we see the world as it really is, not through the colored glasses of his craziness, and it's not primary colors and sunshine any more, and you can actually smell it, it's not pretty.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
I've never not liked a Ron Howard film. Actually, I don't think you can go wrong going to see something he put his name on, unless you're a total asshole. The Good Lie is billed as Quebecois director Philippe Falardeau's film, but it really made sense to me in the closing credits when I saw Ron Howard billed first under "producer." It's that kind of movie.
First lesson: when you're playing outside with a bunch of other children at the beginning of a movie, and you hear the sound of helicopters coming in from the distance, it's not going to be a good day. The bunch of children escape their South Sudanese village as it's bombed, strafed and burned, circa 1991 I think. We follow them as they walk hundreds of miles to end up in a camp in Kenya, at least somewhat removed from the fighting, surviving are three boys and one girl. A decade later, still in the same damn camp, they finally make the list to go to America as refugees. They're exposed to technology and hilarity ensues, and strife, and jobs, and they struggle to keep their little group together.
This movie has funny bits. I know because I heard the audience laughing at them. And it was a big crowd. I saw it at the Princess of Wales theater, a big 2,000 seat venue, on Friday morning, and it was packed, and the audience loved this movie. It was the best part of seeing a movie with a whole bunch of people, all of us laughing at the funny parts together, and getting all teary at the teary parts together, and applauding when the credits start, and for each star, and applauding again when the credits end.
It's painted in pretty broad strokes, it's got a lot to cover to press all the right buttons, all your buttons, and it doesn't linger long on any one bit or any one character, and it glosses over anything that's not emotionally necessary for the story arc--it shows the refugees' initial confusion at modern Kansas City technology, but doesn't show any of the training the host organization must have given them to get them up to speed. It's a fine, high-quality piece of filmmaking, worth the price of admission and a decent way to spend two hours of your life watching it. I don't think I'd be thinking of it much again in the future, if I hadn't just spent $1.29 in iTunes on one of the songs from the soundtrack.
The reason the film was playing in the big A-list venue, normally reserved for stage plays, is that it has Reese Witherspoon. It doesn't star her, even she admits the movie is about the Sudanese characters, not her. But having a real American Hollywood star is a huge draw, even here up in the far reaches of the parochial Canadian wilderness. It's one of two films she has here at tiff., and I sort of wonder if she isn't making an effort to re-establish her filmmaking creds a.k.a. "I'm more than just a bitchy diva movie star" in the wake of that DUI incident ("Do you know who I am?"). I don't blame her, and it's a pretty good way to atone, I just sort of wonder. The first thing I ever saw her in was Election, so I already associate her with independent cinema.
Here's the trailer. Watch it and just tell me you don't get misty-eyed. Ron Howard.
I just turned 49 yesterday. Holy shit, how did that happen? I don't even remember turning 30. Whatever, I'm definitely rolling down the tail end of middle age. This film takes place in that space. You can't pee at will any more. At work they are expecting you to be there every day. People you know start dying of cancer.
This is also a film about Stoicism. And I don't mean being unresponsive to discomfort, I mean the classical Roman virtue, like what Marcus Aurelius wrote about. I mean knowing what your duty is, and doing it. Sometimes your duty is picking up your cellphone, sometimes it's ignoring your cellphone. Sometimes it's writing a recommendation for an employee you really don't want to let go, and sometimes it's changing your wife's diaper, as she lays dying in the hospital, and both with sincerity and tenderness and commitment to the moment.
Revivre is a Korean film, tiff. 2014 is doing a special concentration on Korean film. This is a beautiful and evocative work, creative in the way it mixes timelines and yet effortless to follow, filmed with unobtrusive camera work that makes you forget you're watching a film and not living an experience, with just a couple moments of powerful imagery that make you fall back on your heels and reach out looking to keep your balance--in particular as the tension in the plot is reaching its peak he goes to a ballet, and later that night the images from the ballet merge in his dreams to incorporate what he really wants but can't ask for.
Because you don't always get what you want. It's ok to want it, and you shouldn't stop wanting things.
Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit you've embarked on.
He spends nights at the hospital, and drags himself into work in the mornings, goes out salaryman-drinking with the crew from work, goes back to the hospital and patiently cleans up his wife when she needs it. After Mom has died, his daughter asks him, "What was the hardest part for you, Dad?" but after a long silence he replies, "No, it's the patient who suffers."
There's a pretty girl in the office. He notices her, he'd have to be dead inside not to. But she's got her own stuff going on, and he's an old guy, and getting together would be wrong (thank you filmmakers for avoiding that trope). He thinks about it, it's a fantasy, but it would be a stupid idea.
There's a stupendously beautiful sex scene between him and his wife. She's having a short remission, feeling well enough to travel (i.e. not throwing up constantly), so they go out to their summer house one last time. While she's in the bathroom he sneaks out an old package of Viagra to make sure the evening comes together--if you think about what a late-stage cancer patient looks like you'll see why he might need some help. They do it, and it's awkward and painful, and he only makes it work by picturing in his mind, secretly, the young girl in his office. But the lovemaking was successful, and his wife is comforted I think that they were close that one last time.
Have you seen Kurosawa's Ikiru ("To Live")? I have, I saw it in Ron Disanto's class in college almost 30 years ago, and I still remember it. There's still a pattern of electrons firing across glial cells in my brain that have bits in this movie, thirty years later. Revivre works in the same problem space.
This movie haunts me. I think it's going to be one of favorites from the festival, top two.
I don't think the trailer captures the film, I'm not even going to link to it here. The picture above is more evocative.
Before I start, I have to say I have terrible, terrible diction. I talk too fast and I mumble. My high school drama coach made me rehearse with marbles in my mouth, and to no lasting improvement. My wife rarely understands anything I say without asking me to repeat myself. So I'm not putting on airs here. I freely admit that the worst efforts I mention here are miles above anything I can ever accomplish in a given day. That said...
Flaubert was French, he wrote in French. When the lights went down, I couldn't remember, but I suspected I'd be seeing a film in French, with subtitles.
The first character to open his mouth was Mlle. Emma's father, at her wedding to Charles, M. Bovary. 'Ee zpeeks een un ferry zick Franch accent. I'm thinking, ok, that's how they're going to do it. I can live with that.
Then some other characters speak. I hear the Precise. Clipped. Diction. of a Trained. British. Stage actor.
Listen to Alec Guiness:
Mos. Eisley. Spaceport. You will never Find. A more Wretched Hive. Of Scum and Villany.
Sorry, but we're watching Madame Bovary. At this point I'm slightly trepidatious, but I've watched enough PBS where I can deal with a French accent and a British accent in a movie in France.
And then Emma opens her mouth. And then I fell out of my chair. She's American. No, sorry, that would be "sheezuhmercan." Remember Natalie Portman mumbling her way through the low-numbered Star Wars movies? Oh. My. Fucking. God.
She's arguing with her husband, the country doctor, trying to talk him into fixing the clubfoot boy's club foot. Her husband protests that the procedure is beyond the expectations of a simple country doctor. "But you're not a country doctor," she says. Or that's what the script says. What she says is, "butchernoddacuntrydoctor." I was digging my fingernails deep into the palms of my hands at that point.
For Léon Dupuis, the young law student she has an affair with, they also cast a 'merkin actor. From apparently the same school of enunciation as her. When he tells her he's lived in Rouen, the Big City, Emma, desperate for news of a bigger world than she's living in, asks him to tell her about it. "Rouen?" he says, "It's even better than you can imagine." Or that's what he should say. What he says is "Izefenbedderthanukinamajin." Gaaah.
Emma's made mentions Emma's nice figure. The secret, Emma says, is a teaspoon of vinegar with each meal. "Afteraweek ya doneventasteit any more."
If there were nothing but other 'murkins acting in the movie, it would be fine. But all this mumbling is going on in the same scenes as actors who pronounce "duty" not as "doodee" but like a proper Englishman mindful of the British Empire's contribution to civilization would pronounce it: "dy-oo-tee".
Now I look up Mia Wasikowska's bio, and find that she's not 'murkin at all, she's a Strine! Krikey! Well, I'm flummoxed then.
But all that being said, even though I cringed every time she opened her mouth, I have to admit that Mia Wasikowska was completely utterly suited to the part, and committed to the it all the way down to her shoes. Besides my problem with her diction, she was utterly convincing as the shallow airhead who is so facile the only outlet she can find that makes her feel fulfilled is compulsive shopping, and who can't summon the presence of mind to handle the equation income - expenses > 0. By the end of the film I was gritting my teeth and clutching the arms of the chair watching everything go horribly, horribly wrong, and had completely forgotten my quibbles with diction. Wasikowska was so convincing as this woman whom God had given just enough intellect to not be satisfied with where she was, but not enough intellect or drive to actually deal with it. And Wasikowska is beautiful to watch.
I remember being hugely affected by the novel when I read it, probably twenty-five years ago. The film was powerful, and got all the important parts into it, and had the pacing just right. When it finished, I had a quibble that the final scene wasn't what I remembered it in the novel, but I don't think the novel is what I remember of the novel either.
And now that I'm writing this up, a week later, my memory of the film, individual scenes, is much happier than these notes I jotted down immediately afterwards. So I think it grew on me.
Yes, there's a period in the title. The filmmaker says all his titles have that. It doesn't "mean" anything. Though I notice that it does make it a complete sentence. So the word becomes an intransitive verb? Hmm.
Trailer:
So if you're making a movie about a guy windsurfing from Morocco to Europe, here's what you've got to work with: the guy gets on his board, he sails for a while and some stuff happens, and he either gets there or he doesn't. There's not a lot of different directions for the plot to take. Even the Odyssey wasn't known for its suspense and I-sure-didn't-see-that-coming surprise ending.
Like the Odyssey this film starts in medias res, as Fettah is already on the way up the coast of Morocco, almost to Casablanca, after which he'll need to head out into the open ocean.
The house was packed, but the film ended to muted applause from the audience. Was that a natural outcome from the ambiguous ending, or were they disappointed?
The actor, Fettah Lamara, pointed out in the Q&A afterwards that one possible reason the filmmaker described the journey the way he did is because he's speaking to all the poeple who are emigrating now from Africa to Europe, all the people who are getting ready to take the trip, a few of whom will drown or otherwise not survive the journey, and the director needs to remind those people thinking about it how difficult and dangerous it is and that success is not guaranteed.
I am now officially calling bullshit on the assertions I'd heard that Canadians are a better film audience than Americans. This is the third film in a row where someone next to me is an anti-film distraction. During My Darling Clementine there was a little picnic and discussion group going on to my right. During Haemoo somebody directly behind me was making a horrible clicking sound every 5-10 seconds the entire length of the movie. And here, more distractions from two guys to my right. And afterwards they left their cup in the seats! And their umbrella on the floor! Slobs! Aaargh, I hate going to movies!
You're a hard-as-nails sea captain with a heart. The national economy is tanking, the fish aren't biting any more, your old boat is falling apart, and/or your own "luck has run out." You get an offer to ship some illegal immigrants in from mainland China, for good money. Of course there's only one thing you can do with an offer like that. And things, as they say, go downhill from there.
The title means "Sea Fog" according to the director, assuming I heard him right. It's based on a stage play, from a true story, which really shows. It's a richly-drawn world, it's like swimming around in a novel. Every character, every member of the crew, and a good number of the refugees, are memorable, identifiably different characters. And the plot goes on like a good novel. Stuff happens, more stuff happens, you don't know what's going to happen next, but in retrospect the characters choices are inevitable, they were forced to act the way they did because of who they are, in retrospect that person could not have made any other choice but that one. I mean some seriously taut writing going on here.
Best line: "Look, we're all in the same boat here. I mean really--this is a boat! And we're in it!"
I would have been completely lost and absorbed in the world of the film except for the incessant clicking sound going on behind me. Never figured out what it was or who it was coming from. Fuck.
The trailer:
First-time directory? Jeez, and it's hard enough filming on the ocean. But he doesn't waste a lot of time on long elegiac shots of the tiny boat floating across the enormous ocean--he's got too much to say. Really captures the small spaces, and the dirt, and the hardness of working on an old pile-of-junk fishing boat.
Some socio-political background: There are a bunch of ethnic Koreans living in China. They want to flee China to the freedom and prosperity of S.K. They speak Korean. They do however, speak Korean as a noticeable dialect. The actress, Han Ye-ri in the Q&A afterward said that the most difficult part of the film for here was learning that dialect. An aspect of the film that was not something that came out in the subtitles. Another language tidbit lost in translation: at one point she's talking to the youngest crewmember, who has the hots for her, and is bragging about his status on the ship. "Why are you talking down to me?" she asks, "How old are you?" I know that the Korean language is extremely sensitive to status, I know that from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers where he talks about Korean Airlines crashes where the crewmembers were too deferential to communicate clearly that the plane was about to crash. So the boy was taking a high-status language position to the girl, which she didn't feel he deserved, and he was forced to transparently lie about his age to back himself up.
True story, out of 60 refugees, 30 died. Aftermath: A change in the law by the Korean assembly allowed ethnic Korean Chinese who managed to reach South Korea to stay in the country instead of being automatically deported.
