Is my desire for movies fading?

Is my desire for movies fading? Lately, after rather a full fall season of seeing some of the most talked-about films, am I losing my desire to go to the local cinema (there’s Windsor’s new Landmark though it’s playing the same films as our other two cineplexes, Criterion Channel or Netflix, not to mention hometown Windsor film festival’s monthly series)? Perhaps it’s because I was disappointed if not put off by some of the biggest titles. I loathed Anora (Sean Baker), which could end up sweeping the Oscars, about a Russian expatriate drug dealer and a Brooklyn hooker who go on a wild drug-fueled ride through the neverlands of New York. Why glorify this depravity? I was looking forward to Conclave (Edward Berger & Peter Straughan), the politicized maneuvers of electing a new pope, which admittedly had sound acting and stunning visuals but cardboard liberal and conservative stereotypes and a damp squid of an ending. Or The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) with Demi Moore as a washed-up TV host paranoid about her declining looks and her transmogrification into a younger double with enough sticky entrails on the floor to last me a lifetime. Bird (Andrea Arnold) was a sickening claustrophobic story about an off the rails father-daughter relationship; I’m surprised I lasted through it. Maria (Pablo Larraín) was okay but just, with Angelina Jolie reprising the famed Maria Callas in her melancholy sunset years. I did enjoy – okay, Joy (Ben Taylor), a Brit film about the scientific team pioneering IVF - and the equally English We Live in Time (John Crowley), a slow burn romantic drama with subtle above par acting. Other notables were Speak No Evil (James Watkins), a gripping real life type horror story and Nightbitch (Marielle Heller), a horror story about marriage starring Amy Adams. But I avoided both Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) and Queer (Luca Guadagnino) because these seemed gratuitously sexual flavors of the month. I loved A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg) (see review below), A Different Man (Arnold Schimberg) and The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi), the latter two starring the extraordinary and (literally) pliable Sebastian Stan, the first because of its utter black comedy, the second because of its tour de force, even though I like Trump. But on the whole movies lately seem kind of a downer, listless and trying too hard with few compelling stories. For goodness sake, after discarding a myriad Netflix films this month I ended up watching Queen Bees (Michael Lembeck, 2021). At least it held my attention, kind of. 

The Mousetrap, the longest running play in the world

This isn’t about film, although people have tried to make films of it. (They can’t until the play ends, and it never has.) It’s about Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, the longest running murder mystery and theatrical play in the world. I caught it a week ago at London’s St. Martin’s Theatre (photo) in the West End. It’s one of those events that just begs for attending, such an iconic play staged in the middle of the city’s teeming theatre district. But to be honest, I had some reservations before going and had never checked it out on previous London visits, largely because I thought it was too cliched, pedestrian or touristy. It may be touristy – the Thursday matinee I attended was almost packed – but I was glad to have seen it, and in English parlance, it was a jolly good time. (The price was also reasonable compared to other West End productions - about 15 Pound or $30 Cad). Arriving at the vintage 1916 theatre on West St., a block off Charing Cross Rd. and just up from Leicester Sq., the audience was treated to live piano renditions of standards and vaudeville – how appropriate. Every year The Mousetrap changes its cast in late November, so I was treated to a fresh group of actors. The play is in two acts with an intermission. (I only learned later that the bar has a board indicating what number production this is; by last February it had run 29,500 times.) There are eight players and one virtual performer, a recorded voice reading the news on the radio by one of the original actors of the 1952 production. The play has never had many well-known actors, but Richard Attenborough was among its original cast. But this contingent was certainly good and kept the suspense going. The story all takes place in a country boarding house with a group of oddball guests who, of course, each has a reason to be the murderer, according to the investigating detective. Half the fun is watching the idiosyncratic personalities - an irritating complainer, a foreign dandy, a fey artist, a suffragette, a stiff-necked retired army major, and the two proprietors, a seemingly normal married couple. I was also expecting to be bored but wasn’t. The staging almost had a camp aspect likely because of the play’s long history, iconic status and engraved stereotypes. Nevertheless, it was fun all around and at the end the audience applauded loudly and even cheered. As the cast took their bows we were advised, as per tradition, to never reveal the ending of the whodunnit. My lips are sealed. 

The emphasis is on "pain." And what's with modern parents?

A Real Pain is of those movies that is absorbing simply by dint of its characters. In this case it would be director Jesse Eisenberg who plays David and Kieran Culkin as Benji. They’re American Jewish cousins on a Holocaust Remembrance tour of Poland. Sounds sad? Not really. And you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it, if enjoy is quite the right word. But this film is more fun than drama though leaves a poignant message, to the point my eyes welled up at the end. Benji and David are as different as chalk and cheddar, David the responsible family man and Benji the anarchic wild one. Benji is yin to David’s yang – you know. Both actors are at top of their game as the characters first meet for their flight to Poland. Benji loves to hang out in the air terminal hours ahead of time simply because it’s cool he can meet the weirdest people. Kind of like him. So wild is he that he picks up a pre-mailed package of marijuana he had sent to the Warsaw hotel, then finagles their way on to the roof top for a little relaxed toking. On the tour, Benji becomes enraged with the tour guide for being too sterile in his description of Holocaust facts. And he demands that David “feel” the loss or the “pain” of the Nazi horrors. “If now is not the time to grieve I don’t know what to tell you.”  On a train they evade the conductor by not paying fares and joke that’s the reason “our people” were kicked out of Poland for being too cheap. The title? Well, the guide (Will Sharpe) does say it’s “a tour about pain.” But is Benji the real pain? Is he psychotic? Manic depressive? The burning of the personal into the historical is what charges this movie, regardless of what he is.  

What is it about modern parents they don’t know how to bring up their kids? Two recent movies or TV series made me shake my head and scream at the doofuses who were portrayed as mothers and fathers. The first is Let Go (Josephine Bornebusch) on Netflix where the punk daughter constantly berates her parents including with obscenities like “You argue all the f---- time” and “What the f---were you thinking? The whole point of coming here is my f--- competition.” The dour compliant parents only talk softly and try to appease. Same with the new hit series A Man on the Inside (created by Michael Schur) with Ted Danson, and his grandkids being the utterly most desultory teens. I don’t believe in corporal punishment, but it just made me want to slap them - and the parents.

That's a wrap: 20th edition of the Windsor International Film Festival

Here are my capsule reviews of several films at this year’s 20th edition of the Windsor International Film Festival, which ends tonight. Congrats on yet another successful year for this amazing and uniquely Windsor event which just keeps growing and growing!

Bonjour Tristesse: this part-Canadian remake by Durga Chew-Bose of the Otto Preminger 1958 classic has Chloe Sevigny in the Deborah Kerr role as the snobbish high-class matron. Every frame is beautifully shot by Maximilian Pittner and I thought Sevigny pulled off the role well. The problem was the often-fleeting dialogues among the other characters that seemed as languorous as the sun-drenched setting. A Different Man: Aaron Schimberg’s black comedy has a lot of assets including an intriguing premise and great score. A film about physical deformity turns into a character study with a bizarre, yet not really satisfying, twist. Firebrand: Karim Aïnouz’s take on Henry VIII’s rebellious – and last – wife, Katherine Parr is all Jude Law as the old awful monarch, an award-winning role. Alicia Vikander as the Regent is stiff and the script doesn’t give her a lot to work with. But the sets are probably accurate about how physically uncomfortable the 16th century monarchy actually was. It’s Raining Men was the perfect star vehicle for up-and-coming French actress Laure Calamy and she’s perfect in a surprisingly formulaic film where all ends well and no harm is done; there’s even a burst-out music and dance scene. Anora (Sean Baker) won the Cannes Palme d’Or and it won the WIFF LiUNA People’s Choice award. But it really did nothing for me, this one note story about a Brooklyn sex worker Anora (Mikey Madison) who falls in love with the immature and drug-addled scion (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch and the ongoing craziness – with seemingly every third line having the f-word – of their relationship. But, ah, what do I know? Maria (Pablo Larrain) stars Angelina Jolie as the late great Greek opera singer Maria Callas but in the autumn of her life when she’s striving to make a comeback. It’s very atmospheric and Jolie is reasonably good but who steals the show is Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis. The Battle of St. Leonard is a fascinating documentary by Quebec filmmaker Félix Rose about a late 1960s language war between Montreal’s immigrant Italian community and French Quebecois. It marked an important milestone in that province’s quest for French equality and language rights though the main activist Raymond Lemieux paid an emotional price. Conclave by Edward Berger has the stars – Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto and Isabella Rossellini - the lush sartorial trappings of elite Cardinals and the magnificent backdrop of the Sistine Chapel. Yet the intrigue and political gamesmanship plot gives way to a bizarre unexpected twist and a less than satisfying outcome. Skincare (Austin Peters) stars the versatile Elizabeth Banks based on a true story of the rivalry between two estheticians which spirals out of all proportion and demonstrates the twists to which the human mind is capable. 

Happy 20th anniversary WIFF, and Opening Night

It’s the 20th anniversary of the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) and it’s my 20th anniversary attending it too – kind of. I tend to travel in the Fall and have missed one or two editions. I remember how excited I was when a Windsor film festival was first announced in 2005, and I enthusiastically attended screenings in what used to be Armouries. Its vast parade hall was turned into a makeshift theatre with a giant inflatable screen (before it was rebuilt and now houses a state of the art small cinema). I remember watching movies at the four-screen former Palace Theatre on Ouellette Ave., since turned into the (ironically) now-closed Windsor Star newsroom. In fact, I even collected two seats from the old Palace when they were giving them away during renovation. The festival, started under the auspices of people like Peter Coady and Mark Boscariol, continued to grow and grow, and eventually re-established on a solid footing under Vincent Georgie and a host of government grants and private sector institutional funding (thanks especially Toldo Foundation and LiUNA625) that it now has the trappings of a newfound Windsor industry, presenting films on a year-round basis. It rivals festivals in much larger cities and in fact often outshines them in terms of volume, seminal titles and ease of access. Why would I want to go to the Toronto festival and deal with the circus-like atmosphere and hard to see films when I can watch many of the same features two-month later here, in a more intimate and people-scaled environment? In some ways WIFF's growth has been surprising, since so many people, often natives, used to put Windsor down as "lunch bucket uncultured town.” The joke’s on them. Not only the festival one of the most attended in Canada but it has partly enabled growth of a filmmaking industry, with numerous local cineastes displaying their wares through festival fixtures like this year’s four editions of Local Shorts and the Mark Boscariol 48-Hour Flockfest.   

Notes on last night’s Opening: I hadn’t seen so many people dressed-up since I was at a wedding five years ago. I loved it! ..Vincent Georgie is certainly to be congratulated for how he took the festival to another level after its first years under a different leadership and he was the logical keynote speaker....Among Georgie’s remarks was a Land Acknowledgement, the de rigueur newish and political  “woke” value signal which has permeated  public arts – and other - institutions and which to my mind is vacuous and won’t do a thing to help Indigenous people.....I was puzzled by the choice of the opening film, Shepherds, by Sophie Deraspe of Quebec. A kind of bohemian back to the land tale of an ad man who eschews the corporate world – and Canada – for a lifestyle of rural shepherding in France, as it was cliched and lacking the oomph I would have liked from a gala.  

My top picks for this festival: Maria (Pablo Larrain) - the Maria Callas story starring Angelina Jolie,  Bonjour Tristesse, a remake of the 1958 film starring David Nevin and Deborah Kerr (based on the Françoise Sagan novel) this time starring Chloë Sevigny and directed by Durga Chew-Boss; A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg’s dark comedy starring The Apprentice’s Sebestian Stan (who played Donald Trump); Firebrand (Karim Aïnouz) - intrigue in the bloody court of Henry VIII; It’s Raining Men (Caroline Vignal) –  the perfect vehicle for French star Laure Calamy; Anora, the current sensational hit by Sean Baker crossing a Brooklyn sex worker with a Russian oligarch; The Battle of St. Leonard ( Félix Rose), a documentary about a seminal event in Quebec’s language wars and as a native Quebecer I lived through it; and Conclave (closing film), Edward Berger’s  acclaimed hit starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow.  

Under the radar London Film Festival attracted big names

The London Film Festival was a delight. I only caught the last six days of it and made 12 films. But what was interesting was the buzz. The event, in its 68th year, skews a little under the radar, at least to other major film festivals. In fact, it doesn’t even register. Not like Cannes or Venice or Berlin or Locarno, or even Toronto. It seems to have the same status as that of the other of the world’s two greatest cities - New York. Does anyone even know there’s a New York Film Festival? But Londoners seem to enjoy it. And perhaps that’s all that matters. Alongside the sprawling British Film Institute (BFI) on London’s Southbank the red-carpet event packed in hundreds on the carpet itself, not to mention hundreds more standing on balconies overlooking (photo). Someone cares! And some big-name stars came out. Saoirse Ronan and Steve McQueen kicked it off with Blitz. Angelina Jolie there to showcase Maria, Cate Blanchett for Rumours. Canada (and Hollywood’s) Denis Villeneuve showed up for a lecture. As did Mike Leigh. The theatres were (mostly) packed. The cinemas themselves were of a wide variety – from the spectacular and voluminous Royal Festival Hall to the neighboring BFI’s four screening rooms, to several commercial cinemas on the other side of the river in the theatrical West End. I made it to screenings at the Curzon Mayfair and the Curzon Soho. Mayfair being the city’s most elite neighborhood where black cabs kept circling the block looking for fares from the affluent customers of upscale bars, people spilling into the street. I gazed at the buildings and thought of the modern (post war history) of the area, when Mayfair was a center of the British New Wave and subsequent cinema including origins of the 007 franchise. I kept imagining Dirk Bogard and Wendy Craig in The Servant (Joseph Losey 1963), set in the kind of high end buildings that dot the area with their large square mullion windows. And Soho the traditional nightclub district between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, on Saturday night virtually every square foot seemingly occupied with tourists and raving club goers. 

London Film Festival: Marriage traps, disability and being derivative

There have been a couple of movies at this year's London Film Festival which dealt with the prison-like conditions of marriage. One, Nightbitch starring Amy Adams and directed by Marielle Heller (based on the novel by Rachel Yoder) is a delight though that sounds bizarre given the subject matter. It's a black comedy about a woman being trapped in motherhood. Adams plays a one time semi-famous artist who gives it all up for marriage and to raise a family - er, one two-year-old boy. Yet her life is drudgery, totally taken over by the 24-hour travails of sleeplessness, mess-cleaning and the mind numbing meeting of other moms in the park or at library singalongs, which the character despises. One day she finds dogs are increasingly attracted to her and she's growing fir and developing more nipples. OMG, what is happening!? You'll find out if you see the movie. Another was Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari's take on India's arranged marriages. Uma (Radhika Apte) finds herself with a man (Ashok Pathak) who is a total stranger and in no way appealing. She acts out her frustration in a number of bizarre ways, which also have overtures to animals. The difference between Nightbitch and Sister Midnight (similar titles though) is that the first had a semblance of reality and nuance, the second goes for fake laughs with ridiculous scenarios. The audience lapped it up, however, cheering wildly at the end. One of the finest films of the 11 I've so far seen at the festival is French director Anne-Sophie Bailly's My Everything (photo). Her directorial debut is a subtle yet enduring portrait of a mother's relationship with her developmentally disabled son. Laura Calamy (Mona) of French TV series Call My Agent, and Charles Peccia Galletto (a developmentally disabled actor) take you into a very real story about the joys and frustrations of such bonding. Calamy is absolutely terrific as an everyday working class mom, trying to keep house and home together under sometimes trying circumstances. The entire film is brilliant and hopefully presages more wonderfulness from this director. I've never been a fan of French avant garde directior Leos Carax (Boy Meets Girl, 1984 and Holy Motors, 2012) - too disparate in their story telling and plainly pretentious. This 41 minute film is stirring but absolutely derivative in the tradition of Jean-Luc Godard, a Carax hero, with the audience hit with image after image of everything from the meaning of film to modern catastrophes, all stamped with huge sans-serif text. The best of the night came after the movie when Carax, on stage, mumbled short responses to long-winded audience questions that said more about the questioners' egos than anything.