Inaugural Black fest, the personas of PSH and film festival autumn

The inaugural Windsor International Black Film Festival gets underway Friday and runs through Sunday at the Windsor Armouries. Opening night is free with a panel discussion and short film The Cool and The Strong by Sheldyn Sam Moore. On Saturday films screen beginning 3 pm and the last one at 9.15 pm - $10 per person at the door. 11 films are on tap that day ranging from shorts to feature length and from Canada, the US, Caribbean and Africa. Closing night has a red carpet at 6 pm and awards presentation.

Watching a retrospective of the films of Philip Seymour Hoffman on the Criterion Channel I’m struck by the variety of different roles, personas and ages of the characters he plays. The best of the three I’ve so far watched is The Savages (Tamara Jenkins), a 2007-character study of two siblings (Hoffman and Laura Linney, photo) as they come to terms with the old age decline and death of their father (Philip Bosco). It’s a story that a lot of us have been through, dealing with a somewhat incorrigible parent and the depressing decision to take him to a nursing home. Rather pedestrian but the movie is saved by Hoffman and Linney's great acting. The second was David Mamet’s 2000 State and Main, with a great cast but incredibly stilted acting as if this was a stage play. It’s about a movie crew setting up a shoot in a small Vermont town with all the clichéd characters, from an obnoxious director played by William H. Macy and equally unsavory stars Alec Baldwin (channeling real life?) and Sarah Jessica Parker, fresh from her Sex and The City days. Julia Stiles is always great and Rebecca Pidgeon as PSH’s love interest a rediscovery. While PSH plays a gruff and arrogant professor in The Savages he’s a timid and baby-faced writer here. In Punch Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002) Hoffman is a slam dunk villain, a detestable character in a film (along with Adam Sandler and Emily Watson) that’s as absurd as it is boring. I’ll be tuning into more PSH films this week.

Autumn (unfortunately?) is just around the corner. But it’s also film festival time. And I’ll be in Montreal for 10 days in October for the always cutting-edge Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (festival symbol left), as I have been for many years. Then I’ll be back in Windsor for the 20th anniversary of the Windsor International Film Festival Oct. 24 – Nov 3 - the entire festival this time as it befits the anniversary (I'm usually travelling). I can remember when this one-time small fest started out, with screenings on an inflatable screen in the drill hall of the downtown Armouries and at the lamented Palace Cinemas. No Toronto festival? I never do, having gone twice and found it cumbersome and extremely hard to get tickets. And why bother, since many of the films will be in Windsor two months later? And, this year, a bonus, Media City, the region's experimental fest, has shifted its dates to immediately after WIFF, so that will be three-three-three festivals running next to one another!

A thriller that lives up to the name

There are films and there are films. A lot are highly rated, some very very. And I watch and I nod my head and ferret out a fine performance here, great sets and costumes there, an interesting storyline or theme. But so few really consume me. So, it’s exciting when I do find one that does. As was the case this weekend when I accidentally tripped over J. Blakeson’s I Care a Lot (2020) on Netflix, bookended bv Find Me Falling (Stelana Kliris 2024) with Harry Connick Jr. (saccharine romantic) and Locked In (Nour Wazzi 2023) with a mainly no-name cast drifting through endless fraught psychological evil. Wow, here’s a thriller that lives up to the name! Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike, who won a Golden Globe for her performance) is a professional guardian whose grift is to take over the estates of elderly people and extract their proceeds for herself. Her caring is all a veneer as she fends off offended family members who the courts obviously can’t trust because of personality flaws. Until, one day, she dissolves the estate of Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a retired but fully functioning senior living her best life in an elegant house on a bucolic tree-lined street. Marla has a scam with a local doctor who signs certificates over to her for “difficult” patients and Jennifer is one. But what Marla doesn’t know is that Jen’s outward demureness comes with baggage. That’s in the person of Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage). From here, the movie transforms into a kind of high stakes tennis match on steroids, with the two sides enveloped in a war of frenzied wits with each as corrupt and ruthless as the other. It’s a gripping tale and you don’t ever know how it’s going to end until, well, the very end – the way all good thrillers should be. Marla’s emotional ferocity is underlined by composer Marc Canham’s superb clanging score. Her seemingly Houdini-like properties are rivalled by Lunyov’s icy black cunning. There is a social theme, I suppose, to all of this: the exploitation of the old both by the institutional care establishment (think thousands of dollars a month for living facilities). And the way society treats the aged, as throwaway human husks, their worth – personally and financially – exhausted. 

One formulaic Hollywood, the other an intense absorbing experience

On a lazy long weekend and bored out of my mind since previous plans feel through, I hauled myself to Devonshire Cineplex to catch a movie with the biggest buzz right now, and another under the radar that I was surprised Devonshire was even screening. 

The first was A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski). I was barely aware of the Quiet Place phenom/franchise as Hollywood sci fi movies aren’t really in my orbit (get it?). But one newspaper called it “fantastic.” I’ll go see any movie if it’s that good. Buy, yup, this prequel to its two other films had H’wood written all over it. I was optimistic. But the beginning didn’t start out well – slow and in a nursing home? However, the main character, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is a cancer patient and only wants to devour a New York style pizza before her demise. The hospice takes a trip into the big city, only to find the skies overhead filled with weird planes and white bursts. You may know what happens next. But our hero, and an eventual hanger on, Eric (Joseph Quinn) are determined to make their way up Manhattan to a Harlem pizza joint, despite all the other shell shocked victims heading in the opposite direction. Very formulaic, and little tension despite all the apocalyptic terror. But the star of the film is the cat or cats, who have surprisingly wonderful “man’s best friend” instincts. 

Meanwhile, also at Devonshire (and continuing this weekend) is a very unexpected Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness. Wow. A mainstream theatre carrying one of the current avant garde cinema’s most outré directors? A treat! And it was. This is three-films-in-one at almost three hours length. Lanthimos helmed Poor Things last year with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo, a magic realism tour de force which won four Oscars. I’ve also caught his The Favourite (2018) and The Lobster (2015), a surreal take on sex and isolation. The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz wrote his latest off as “an aggressively juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will” and a “truly torturous experience.” Well, he can speak for himself. I found it fascinating. But then again, I guess I would, since I’m attracted to the abstract and the “in between” of human behavior that tries to get at, well, essential truths. Sort of like looking at a Picasso painting. Or watching a Harold Pinter play. If that’s pretentious, so be it. These three films are all connected by a character RMF but otherwise disparate. Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe are back with the au courant actor Jesse Plemons (whom I didn’t recognize) figuring front and center in every story. For brevity and possible inaccuracy let’s just say the first film was about questioning authority, the second about loss and doubt, and the third about demands of the commonweal. Hertz may have written the flicks off. But any film that makes you think and could provide hours-long discussion is worth it. At minimum it held my interest, more than I can say for A Quiet Place, which I walked out of.

Two weekends ago I caught part of WIFF’s Local Retrospective - WIFF Shorts 1 and Best of the Mark Boscariol 24 Hour Film Fest as part of its 20th anniversary celebrations.  These were only part of a weekend of films including features, made locally. It’s absolutely amazing the talent and commitment to film there is in Windsor-Essex. It’s not impossible to see the much underrated (for the arts) Windsor area become a filmmaking hub, just as WIFF has become one of the best film festivals in the country. 

Security up and crowds down at Windsor Jewish fest, and a French romantic icon

The 21st annual Windsor Jewish Film Festival is off to a great start at a different location this year, the downtown Capitol Theatre. The city’s Jewish federation said there would be stepped-up security and so there has been, with a well identified city police cruiser parked right in front of the theatre entrance on University Ave. and with a few officers outside or in the lobby. Opening night for the documentary The Catskills (Lex Gillespie) took place in the main Pentastar Theatre but subsequent nights (the fest continues through today with three films per day) are in the smaller Kelly Theatre. Are crowds smaller? It would seem so and there might be a good reason, given international political events which have spread currents worldwide including here. But there’s nothing to fear. Security is tight, food and beverages available, and those who have been attending are having a good time. As for the films,  Listen (Omri Bezalel), uncannily depicts a situation that is similar to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, about a determined young IDF officer whose dilemma is to save an Israeli prisoner or eliminate future terrorist threats. Very realistic, I was surprised it was made in the United States and not Israel. Meanwhile, The Man in the Basement (Philippe Le Guay) poses the dilemma of whether free inquiry should be tolerated even if it questions an historical event like The Holocaust. I was slightly surprised to see it in the lineup, and while powerfully acted and suspenseful, even the filmmakers come to no conclusion, as the events depicted end abruptly, making me wonder if they copped-out.

The death of French film star, Anouk Aimée at 92, affected me more than most acting deaths. She was a great beauty who, in one obit, is described as appealing to “unreconstructed romantics.” That’s me! She’s best remembered for her role in Claude Lelouch’s 1966 A Man and a Woman with Jean Louis Trintignant. But, as coincidence would have it, last Sunday I watched Federico Fellini’s famed 1963 8½, which also stars her as protagonist film director Guido Anselmi’s (Marcello Mastroianni) wife Luisa. I didn’t recognize her at first, her hair cropped short and wearing thick 1960s era squarw glasses. I would never have suspected the same woman who, while attractive, didn’t have the allure of the longer haired beauty in Lelouch’s film. Superficial appearances run deep! As for 81/2, which I’d seen snippets of in the past and is considered one of the best films ever made, I found myself at the end of it reflecting “This is two hours and 18 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.” With no real plot line, discombobulated sets and entourages prancing around hither and yon among, it looks like a film made up on the fly.  

Movies galore this month at Windsor Jewish fest and a WIFF local retrospective

This year’s Windsor Jewish Film Festival is on the horizon, with the opening feature The Catskills kicking it off next Monday night. It will be followed by nine films over the next three days. The Catskills, helmed by director Lex Gillespie, tells the story of the famous Jewish resorts in upper New York State during their heyday in the 1950s and 60s. The fest's main schedule gets underway Tuesday with Sabotage, the unknown story of a women’s underground operation at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Then the film Listen, more than appropriate for our time, is the story of a young Israeli soldier who searches to find her captured colleague in Gaza. That evening the film Syndrome K, narrated by Ray Liotta, depicts an incredible episode where Italian doctors rescued Jews during the Holocaust by inventing a fictitious disease that kept the Nazis at bay. On Wednesday there's the Toronto-set musical Less Than Kosher, where a “wayward singer's life takes a divinely uproarious turn when she lands a cantor gig in her family's synagogue, sparking self-discovery, family mishigas, and unholy chaos.” Also screening that day is The Man in the Basement, a contemporary take on how antisemitism inadvertently affected one family. Later Running on Sand is about a young Eritrean refugee living in Israel and who disguises himself as a famous soccer player. Thursday also sees three films: The Story of Annette Zelman, a WW II story of star-crossed lovers of different religions and based on real events. Home depicts the challenges of an Orthodox man’s professional dream which is perceived as a threat to his ultra-Orthodox community. Finally, The Narrow Bridge is about the friendship between Israeli and Palestinian people united, having “lost a child or parent in violent conflict, transform their grief into a bridge for reconciliation.” Films are at the Capitol Theatre.

This will be a great month for movie watching in Windsor. Following the Jewish fest and celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Windsor International Film Festival hosts its first Local Retrospective the weekend of June 21-23 at the Capitol Theatre. These might even be considered Windsor classics, shot here or affiliated with Windsorites and having screened over the years at WIFF. Titles are 100 Films and a Funeral, Best of Mark Boscariol 48-Hour Flickfest, The Birder, Iodine, Kili Klimb, Last Call, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Roberston and The Band, The Quick and Dirty, Reset, The Rise and Fall of the Grumpy Burger, Saving Grace, Sometimes I Think About Dying, This is What a Feminist Sounds Like  and WIFF Shorts 1 & 2. 

What's with those long Cannes' standing ovations?

I’ve been travelling lately and haven’t had the time to watch movies. So don’t have a lot to comment on. However, the Cannes Film Festival, just ended, always brings a smile to my face. That’s because so many films – seemingly good or bad in terms of future critical and popular appeal – end up getting standing ovations by the beau monde attendees. And not just a brief ovation but ones that last for minutes on end. This year, the haut monde beautiful people gave Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis – the “most talked about” firm at the festival – a seven-minute standing. Critically the movie, Coppola’s swan song for which he spilled $120 mil of his own bread and which stars Adam Driver, has been a bomb with some dubbing it Magaflopolis. Not to be outdone is Kevin Costner’s western epic An American Saga – Chapter 1. As a Brit critic sneered, “The Cannes audience gave it a ten-minute standing ovation, but perhaps they were just trying to get their blood circulating again.” What is it about these longstanding Cannes’ ovations that have been going on year after festival year? I posit the seats are too damn hard in the Grand Theatre Lumiere. Said Reuben Baron of Wealth of Geeks, “At most film festivals, any standing ovation stirs excitement. Not so at the Cannes Film Festival, where audiences will stand up and applaud for literally anything — even for films they also booed. To judge the true hype level for films premiering at Cannes, measure the length of a film’s standing ovation. Nowhere else in the world could a three-minute standing ovation mean “people didn’t really care for it,” but when moviegoers at the prestigious French festival love a movie, they’ll stay on their feet for 10 or even 20 minutes! Critics, the general public, and Oscar voters went on to share the love for some of these films. Others, it seems you had to be there to get into the applauding spirit.”

My upcoming festival schedule? There’s the Windsor Jewish Film Festival at the Capitol Theatre next month June 17 – 20 (see earlier posts about its rescheduling and venue change). And then I’ll have to wait until fall. But what an autumn line-up! I usually head to Montreal for the Festival du nouveau cinema (FNC) - the city’s oldest film festival but with often premier and cutting-edge works, October 9 - 20. Then it will be time to return home for the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) Oct. 24 – Nov. 3. And for the first time, Windsor’s under-the-radar but internationally well-regarded avant-garde festival, Media City, in its 26th edition, has been rescheduled this year to Nov. 7 – 11, immediately following WIFF. After being in London last fall and just getting the dregs of the famed BFI maybe, with advance notice, I could scoot over for a few days this year. But it also runs Oct. 9 – 20.  Maybe split the diff between Montreal and London?

Best of the bunch, Frosted over and another Hot Docs misstep

Some of the better films I've watched on Netflix lately have been the Argentinian film Rest in Peace, the French film Nothing to Hide and the US flick The Rewrite. In Sebastián Borensztein’s Rest in Peace (2024) a businessman is caught in a massive debt crisis and has to do something to save himself from the mob. What he does becomes an existential crisis for both him and his family. The film has taut acting and good pacing, shot in Argentina and Paraguay. In Nothing to Hide, this “dramady” is more drama than comedy if only because of what it reveals about the duplicitous character of human nature. The 2018 film by Fred Cavayé uses the metaphor of a full lunar eclipse for the evening of a dinner party, when a group of friends play a game that cuts too deeply into their psyches. (Interesting how even with dubbing rather than subtitles some foreign films can be better than American ones.) In 2014’s The Rewrite (Marc Lawrence) Hugh Grant teams up with Marisa Tomei in a college-setting comedy. I’d forgotten how enjoyable Grant is to watch, one of those actors you never want to miss a movie he’s been in. And he’s great here, the charming, witty and self-denigrating Brit who winds up in a job he never wanted in a backwater town he’d never heard of. Tomei, also a personal fave, plays off him equally, undermining his professional arrogance and giving him the comeuppance he deserves. 

But this film shouldn’t have been released. Jerry Seinfeld’s directorial debut, Unfrosted, came out this month on Netflix. The comedy, starring, again, Hugh Grant,  with Amy Schumer, Jim Gaffigan and Melissa McCarthy, is laughable alright but you’re laughing at it not with it. It’s a Baby Boomer’s delight as a fictional version of how Kellogg’s created everyone’s favorite breakfast joke, Pop Tarts. The entire film has the look of a cartoon. That's part of the point with all those breakfast cartoon characters, interesting how they so appropriately went together during Saturday morning TV cartoons. And while some of the sets are faithfully nostalgic, this flick just tries too be hard to be funny. (Ok, it’s Pop Tarts – we get it!) I felt sorry for Seinfeld with what amounts to a hokey premise and script with the look of a bad college stage play. Likely, all these good actors, their payday made, are trying to put this thing behind them.

Two things occurred to me when watching films from about 10 or 15 years ago, such as The Rewrite and Morning Glory (Roger Michell 2010). One is how better or more professionally dressed people were even that recent time ago. In offices suits and formal wear abound. Nowadays pretty much anything goes, often the uglier the better. The second is age. Many of those actors probably have gray hair now, nor likely dressed as well! And two dead giveaways for films that might seem recent but are many years old are the types of cellphones and desktop computers in scenes, especially those of the heavy boxy look.

Hot Docs, the long running Toronto documentary film festival, not only is in major debt and has suffered a management crisis where some employees walked last year calling the operation a  “toxic” work environment. But it had – just had - to come out and make a statement about the Israel-Hamas War. Of course it was biased to the pro-Palestinian side, the natural position of leftists, and the arts community is made up of plenty of them. According to Honest Reporting Canada, the fest “expressed sympathy for ‘the Palestinian people’ while failing to mention Israel or Hamas, the genocidal terrorist group which started the war, a single time. Equally bad, the statement falsely claimed that Israel is holding Palestinians hostage, a claim without any merit.” Hot Docs has never recovered from the pandemic with audiences down 40 per cent since 2019.