Birdman and Keaton fly high

I tried for four-on-four last weekend. But I only made it to three. These were Viktor (Philippe Martinez, 2014), starring uber garrulous Gérard Depardieu, he of the seven bottles a day wine habit (that’s my man!) and justifiably notorious tax refugee (I’ll second that!). That was followed by Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014) (picture left) starring Michael Keaton. Finally, there was Theodore Melfi’s St. Vincent with Bill Murray. The fourth film that I wanted to get to, and am kicking myself that I didn’t, was Matthew Amalric’s The Blue Room (2014) starring the same. The AMC Lavonia 20 was the only cinema screening it. Wouldn’t you know, it’s gone this weekend….Which makes me want to comment on the threadbare audiences for critically acclaimed films in Detroit. Viktor, for example, had just one screening at Cinema Detroit in the old Burton International School on Cass Ave. I, dear readers, was the only person in attendance. There was a full human skeleton a few rows over in a seat but something tells me it didn’t pay…..In any case, here are a few capsule reviews: 

Viktor: Ah, the Russian Mafia. When I think of the Russian Mafia I think they’ve got to be just so many more times worse than their Italian kin. Depardieu as the redoubtable Viktor, just released from prison, seeks revenge for his son’s death. We’re taken on a tour of the Moscow underworld, which is great because it includes some stunning above world scenes of the contemporary city, along with Viktor’s solitary (of course) walk through Red Square. I’d pay to see Depardieu in just about anything. And in this picture he doesn’t much more than mumble and slowly amble along. That’s okay. Otherwise we’re treated to a slurry of mob clichés and a predictable story. 

Birdman: Here’s the first movie in a while I can say I was blown away by. (It helps if you haven’t read anything about the film.) This is a movie about the acting trade or more specifically one actor’s (Keaton as Riggan) attempt to redeem himself on the lofty stages of Broadway after selling out and becoming a schlock actor in Hollywood comic book adventure movies. Birdman can be a stand in for Keaton’s real life roles in the Batman franchise – yuck yuck. Not only does this film have a terrific cast (Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis) but as per its namesake it flies in terms of cinematography, plot and sheer top-of-form acting.  

St. Vincent: Leave it to me to conclude that this was an edgy-break-new-territory film about a nasty misanthrope. Murray as Vincent is a narcissistic people-hater alright. But this story about a Vietnam vet frozen in time travels a predictable path as he reluctantly befriends an elementary school kid (Jaeden Lieberher), son of his new next door neighbour Maggie (Melissa McCarthy). The movie ends up being pretty mainstream schmaltzy. 

As for The Blue Room, I’m doubly mad at myself for being so lackadaisical and missing it, especially after today re-reading the description: “Two adulterous lovers go from pillow talk to possible murder in this sexy, brain-teasing thriller. Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Grand Budapest Hotel) directs and stars as Julien…Based on a novel by celebrated crime writer Georges Simenon, this beguiling cinematic puzzle unfolds in an elliptical style that keeps the audience guessing every step of the way.”

Racking my brain, go Gone & calling Dr. Freud

It occurred to me this week that a rich source of blog posts has been eliminated from my life. That’s the demise of website-based rental service zip.ca. You see, I quite often watched a couple of zip DVDs (I know, old technology) each week. These of course were from the best of the art house and auteur catalogues. This obviously has left a vacuum. There is Netflix of course which I subscribe to. But as mentioned in previous posts poor Netflix doesn’t have quite the depth. So my movie choices are limited. In future I’ll have to put nose to the grindstone and try to eke out whatever I can from this rather mainstream site. Last night, for example, I found Steve Coogan (picture above left) in Alan Partridge (Declan Lowney, 2014), which has garnered hugely positive reviews and rates 88 per cent on RT. Yes I’m a fan of Steve Coogan – and caught him this summer in the sequel “Trip” series The Trip to Italy (Michael Winterbottom, 2014). In Partridge he’s pretty good in his normal rapid fire wit as a zany “d jockey” at a provincial radio station undergoing a new corporate format change. Having worked in radio I can vouch for the outsize personalities that walk broadcasting’s not-always-so-hallowed halls. But that’s about it. The movie descends into tedium – a mini jump-the-shark – when one of the jocks (Colm Meaney), having lost his job, takes the staff hostage. The movie drones on and even Partridge’s hilarity can’t save it. But I did learn a good substitute for F-word. 

Gone Girl (David Fincher), which has been among top box office draws this month taking in more than $110 million, is a movie I have no interest in seeing. That’s because I, well, hated the book by Gillian Flynn, also the movie’s screenwriter. Prosaic, predictable, manipulative and somewhat over the top, the book was also a smash – that's depressing - selling some six million copies before it went paperback last spring.

Does Xavier Dolan have a mother complex? The esteemed wunderkind of Quebec cinema’s latest is Mommy, another critically acclaimed hit. His first film in 2009 was called I Killed My Mother. Wikipedia described the 2009 film as, ”an exposé on the complexity of the mother and son bond.” And a Guardian writer described the latest as "a boisterous oedipal comedy." Calling Doctor Freud.

Day 3 at FNC: four films, four winners

Four films, four winners in day three at Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC)….The first, Beautiful Youth (Jaime Rosales, 2014) is a film about two Spanish twentysomethings ravaged by their country’s recent economic woes. To make money they have to act in a porn film. There are absolutely no regular jobs and after Natalia has a child their unemployment becomes a crisis. The viewer could be forgiven for intruding on the private lives of Natalia (Ingrid Garcia Jonsson) and Carlos (Carlos Rodriguez), so subtle is the acting as to make the relationship seem so real…..Foreign Bodies (Mirko Locatelli, 2013), from Italy, was my favourite of the day. In the film, Antonio (Filippo Timi) takes his youngest son Pietro to Milan to undergo cancer treatment. Staying in a dormitory Antonio encounters a family of Arabs and complains to his wife back home about how they talk and smell. When one tries to befriend him he can barely conceal his contempt. But unlike where many films would have gone, such as creating violent confrontation or outright racist incidents, Foreign Bodies is highly nuanced as Antonio tries to come to terms with these unfamiliar human others……Canadian filmmaker François Girard is acclaimed for his Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and The Red Violin (1998). In Boychoir (2014), shown at the festival (and where he was introduced before the screening by director Atom Egoyan), Girard brings together veterans Dustin Hoffman and Kathy Bates with newcomer Garrett Wareing, who plays Stet, a troubled pre-teen who has astonishing singing talent. Hoffman is the gruff choirmaster who tries to harness the boy's talent in a famed choir’s boarding school. The movie starts off slowly but eventually grips the viewer for a solid if predictable outcome…..Finally, Japanese cult director Shinya Tsukamoto got a rousing ovation after receiving an award in person prior to the screening of his latest film Fires on the Plain (2014) (picture above left). This movie is Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) on steroids. A lost Japanese soldier on a Philippines island during the Second World War walks through his own valley of death as a survivor of a vanquished army. Sick from tuberculosis and starving the temptations of cannibalism are all around. The horrors of war have seldom been so gruesomely and realistically depicted, all to an accompanying harrowing score.

Day 2 at Montreal's edgy FNC

Day two, three movies at Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema…..Call it a film travelogue. In PilgrIMAGE (2008) Father-daughter Peter Wintonick and Mira Burt-Wintonick (picture left) embark on travels around the world to go to the sources of the motion picture industry from its earliest beginnings. They travel to France, the home of pioneering special effects wizard Georges Méliès (he of the famous Le Voyage dans La Lune, 1902, with its iconic image of an astronomers’ capsule plunging into a very unhappy moon face). They sit on a park bench in Rolle, Switzerland waiting for home town hero Jean-Luc Godard to show up, a spin on – wait for it – Waiting for Godot. They travel to Nuremburg, site of the Nazis’ gargantuan rallies shot for propaganda purposes in Triumph of the Will (1935) by the technically brilliant but morally corrupt Leni Riefenstahl. They even dance on the hills outside Salzburg where The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) was made. Dad and daughter’s journeys are punctuated with musings, often light hearted but poignant, about the meanings and uses of film, from creating illusions, to empty vehicles of mass consumer fulfillment, to outright propaganda. It’s all put together imaginatively in a series of video journals linked as chapters in an artist’s sketchbook…..I found it harder to take an interest in Past Present (Tiong Guan Saw, 2013), about acclaimed Malaysian-Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, whose only film of which I've vaguely heard is I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006). This doc has Tsai returning to his childhood roots in Malaysia and revisiting some of the storied movie palaces where his interest in film was first started. Along the way there are praiseworthy comments from others in the Asian film world including by Ang Lee. But what struck me most about the film was how Malaysia in the 1960s seemed no different from any town North America. Rambunctious kids packed Saturday matinees or snuck into (Japanese) porn movies. And theatres had the same names as here, like the Odeon or the Rialto….Finally there was Isabelle Prim’s Le Souffleur de L’Affaire (2014), a complex mind twister that plays like a detective story centring on two important late 19th century artistic works. One is the first colourised film by Georges Méliès (see above), about the fire of the Grand Bazar de la Charité in 1897 - where many aristocratic women died - and the opening of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Could an Italian anarchist and prompter (le souffleur) be implicated? Rostand himself makes a time travelling appearance, egged on by famed actress Sarah Bernhardt. A running theme is the antisemitism of the period as referenced by the Dreyfus Affair. 

Montreal's FNC - a film festival's film festival

Attending Montreal’s Festival of New Cinema (FNC) (street pavilion pictured left) is a little like attending a conference on higher mathematics. Even devoted cineastes and festivalgoers might give pause – or be intimidated – by the various deep and obscure recesses of the film world through which the programmers have burrowed to select each year’s massive program -  380 films including 152 features – from more than 50 countries. This is my occasional October go-to fest in a lovely city where the autumn leaves are more advanced than in dear old Windsor. The FNC is really a film festival’s film festival, if I can say that. At 43 years it’s actually older than this city’s traditionally best known festival, the Montreal World Film Festival, held each August. And it has had the props from some of the world’s leading innovative directors from John Cassavetes to Spike Lee to Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch. So while critically acclaimed if sometimes obscure films are FNC’s flavour of the day it can seem surprising to find relatively mainstream movies sprinkled amongst the mix. Such was the case with Wednesday night’s opening film, Canadian director Philippe Falardeau’s The Good Lie starring Reese Witherspoon, now playing widely in the U.S. but which still hasn’t come to Detroit.....However, regular daily screenings didn’t get off to an auspicious start when the Argentinian film Jauja (Lisandro Alonso) starring Viggo Mortensen couldn’t be shown because the digital print was corrupted – bring back reel-to-reel! Next up was first time director’s Emma Dante’s A Street in Palermo, a tale of what happens when two people confront one another and refuse to back down. This is a terrific set piece about obstinacy and its ramifications as two car drivers going opposite directions on a tiny street refuse to back up to let the other pass, each believing they’re in the right….The next film was Seeing is Believing (2002), part of an homage to Canadian documentarist Peter Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992), about the power of the hand held camcorder as a “weapon” for activists to confront authority and record abuse. It shows how citizens’ videos have been effective in countries from The Philippines to Bosnia in documenting human rights crimes…..Finally I saw another first time director’s feature, Garrett Bradley’s Below Dreams. Set mainly in New Orleans the film follows three characters, all in their 20s, struggling to build lives out of unlucky or marginal circumstances. These mostly unprofessional actors, found on Craigslist, with similar personal life stories, created extraordinarily naturalistic portraits of everyday life.

Celebrated Hot Docs coming to Windsor

In addition to next month being the 10th annual edition of the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) – and having appropriately expanded dates (Nov. 1 – 9) - the next biggest new aspect is the addition of films form Toronto’s celebrated Hot Docs film festival, held every spring at its cinema on Toronto’s Bloor Street West (picture left). Twelve Hot Docs documentary films have been added to this year’s WIFF lineup spread throughout the festival, according to WIFF executive director Vincent Georgie……How did the WIFF - Hot Docs relationship come about? Turns out Hot Docs President Chris McDonald had been coming the last couple of years to our fest and had taken a personal interest in it. Of course WIFF staff like Georgie have gone up to Hot Docs and originally met McDonald there. “We had a conversation this year and said let’s do something together,” Georgie said. Given that someone like McDonald probably attends a great many festivals it might be surprising he’s warmed so much to ours. According to Georgie what McDonald likes best about WIFF is how warm and “engaged” the audience is. “Ours is very very much, it’s a peoples festival, so it has a feel that he’s always really enjoyed.” ….WIFF doesn’t pay Hot Docs for the movies but they will be introduced as having screened at this year's Toronto fest. “They are films that would have made their premiere at Hot Docs that we saw there and then said, ‘Okay this is something we want to bring to Windsor,’” he said. What are a couple of Georgie’s favourites? Advanced Style “is really fun,” he said. It’s about “supremely stylish glamourous women” well into later ages including their 90s. “You can’t help but smile when you watch,” he said. A second film is Love Me, about Ukrainian mail order brides and the industry surrounding them. “It’s something you sort of smirk at, the whole idea of mail order brides,” Georgie said. “But this actually I felt was really quite enlightening.” The full list of Hot Docs films:

ADVANCED STYLE | D: Lina Plioplyte | USA | 2014

BEFORE THE LAST CURTAIN FALLS | D: Thomas Wallner | Belgium/Canada/Germany | 2014

BRONX OBAMA | D:Ryan Murdock | USA | 2014

HARMONTOWN | D: Neil Berkeley | USA |2014

LOVE AND TERROR ON THE HOWLING PLAINS OF NOWHERE | D: Dave Jannetta | USA | 2014

LOVE ME | D: Jonathon Narducci| USA/Ukraine | 2014

POINT AND SHOOT | D: Marshall Curry | USA/Canada, 2014

WRITE DOWN, I AM AN ARAB | D: Ibtisam Mara'ana-Menuhin | Israel/Palestine | 2014

THE BACKWARD CLASS | D: Madeleine Grant | Canada/India | 2014

THE BEIJING ANTS | D: Ryuji Otsuka | China | 2014

THE STARFISH THROWERS | D: Jesse Roesler | USA/India | 2014

VESSEL | D: Diana Whitten | USA | 2014