At WIFF: Amherstburg radio doc a standout

My fave movie so far at the Windsor International Film Festival is Gavin Michael Booth’s Radio Renaissance: Amherstburg’s New Wave, a documentary about the creation of CKBG FM 107.9 in little old Amherstburg.  The doc is a passion project by an A’burg native about the dream and sometimes arduous process of applying for a license for the small-town station, a rarity in this age of media cutbacks and station closings. It was the dream of local radio & TV personality Marty Adler (now sadly deceased) and hit the airwaves in July 2023. Booth’s doc is a comprehensive and well-edited film, interviewing the key radio station players and capturing the town’s ambience, depicted as a friendly closely knit historical place where a radio station can only help enhance community. It’s too bad the film is only being screened once…..Meanwhile I also liked Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. I’ve long been a Jarmusch fan, one of the key innovators in the post-1970s American independent film movement. The film has three stories focusing in order on Father, Mother and two siblings. The first features a periodic visit by the estranged children to a grizzled rural recluse. The meeting is awkward if friendly but not everything is quite as it seems. The second has two daughters visiting their mum, again on an annual visit and again in a stilted yet stylized setting which evokes some guffaws. The third has a brother and sister ruminating in an empty apartment about their deceased parents. The cast is stellar: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling and Cate Blanchett among others, and there are fine street scenes of Dublin and Paris. The first two stories are the most interesting if only to follow the self-conscious personal interactions but it’s questionable what the stories all add up to…..Next came Colin Farrell in Edward Berger’s (Conclave, 2024) Ballad of a Small Player. The setting is “the gambling capital of the world” Macau China and Farrell plays a Brit expat at the end of his gambling tether. Other than some spectacular scenes of the city’s forest of skyscrapers and gambling dens, and some great editing of our man on the run, the film is really an embarrassment. Every cliché in the book is thrown at the screen, from the disheveled expat (there are numerous sweaty closeups of Farrell’s face which likely will make many a femme swoon) to shambolic hotel rooms, well-groomed crowded baccarat tables and an obvious if distressed love interest. But it’s all formulaic, stylized even, and we can’t possibly care about the character…..Finally, Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. Trier, like Jarmusch, is a director whose films I will always catch. The film could be up for some big Oscars. But while good, I found it slow and even plodding (half an hour could have been chopped off the 133 minutes) – just barely keeping my interest – and ultimately is a sappy story, surprising for Trier, about an estranged father and famed movie director (played by the great Stellan Skarsgård) and his actress daughter (Renate Reinsve). Elle Fanning has a star role as an actress both as a character in the film and obviously in the film’s cast.....The 11-day Windsor International Film Festival began Oct. 23 and runs until Nov. 2. Go to https://windsorfilmfestival.com/

Richard Linklater's masterpieces

Richard Linklater has come a long way from Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993) – films admittedly that caught the zeitgeist of a certain youth subculture of a certain era but, direction-wise, unrecognizable from his latest two films, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague (the latter showing at this year’s WIFF). I caught both back-to-back last weekend at Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema, and they blew me away. Linklater has been “maturing” since those so-Nineties subculture entries in the Before trilogy (with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) and Waking Life (2001). But none of these can prepare someone for Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague. First, Blue Moon. This “portrait” of American Songbook classic lyricist Lorenz Hart is astonishing, mostly due to Hawke himself, though you’d never know it was him. I kept asking myself throughout: who is this performer? The makeup is so astounding Hawke’s entire body structure, beginning with his (balding) head, has been transformed to replicate Hart. Moreover, this is ultimately a one man show, an almost continuing monologue (writer Robert Kaplow) of 100 minutes as the musical icon at turns philosophies, critiques,

ruminates, tells stories and jokes about the Broadway stage, after walking out of former co-songwriter Richard Rodger’s opening night Oklahoma! Lorenz lambastes it as a crass middlebrow production symbolized by an exclamation mark! Is he bitter? Yes, but also reflective and still high-spirited, as he regales bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) at the famed showbiz bar Sardi’s in March 1943, just months before his death in an alcopholic stupor…..Next up was Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague. Hold on to your hats at this exquisite re-creation of Paris’s New Wave circa 1960. Seemingly a documentary and filmed in grainy black and white so reminiscent of the era, the movie depicts those seminal figures that transformed not just French cinema but world filmmaking – Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda, etc. – but most of all Jean-Luc Godard - and the making of his first and breakthrough film – a classic and one of the most transformative films in cinematic history, Breathless. Seldom do even the best filmmakers get historical accuracy completely right – there’s always something off about the clothes, hair styles, mannerisms or background street scenes – but Linklater seems to have perfected it…..Two glorious films that I’d say are masterpieces.