Helsinki film lovers and the death of a Montreal festival icon

A delight about my stay in Helsinki over the past week was that my hotel was located immediately across the street from perhaps that city’s only art house theatre Cinema Orion. The elegant theatre dates from 1928 and is run by a non-profit association. Between touring around the city and a one-day visit across the Baltic to Estonia I was able to get at least one screening in, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun) a, well, campy horror flic starring Gillian Anderson. Not really my cup of tea although it did have some funny moments and I’ve always had a crush on said Anderson, here with long flowing blond locks. Also on tap were Oasis: Don’t Look back in Anger (Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace) and Pedro Almodovar’s Autofiction. There was also a monthly series of classic Finnish films, with the first, Ariel (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988) drawing a throng lined up down the block. And no sooner did I leave the screening than someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a fellow Canuck, who’d overheard me tell the usher how great the Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) was. Brynna was from Gimli MB and living in Helsinki three years, loving the place and agreeing with my very positive comments about the city from its calm urban character (little traffic, well planned parks and pedestrian and bike paths) to the sophisticated respectful Finnish people. By the way, the Helsinki Intl. Film Festival is coming up Sept. 17 – 27. If you’re going…

Very sad news that the founder of Montreal’s one-time great festival, Festival des films du monde,  Serge Losique has died. I attended the very first fest in 1977 (then rivalling Toronto’s, which started a year earlier) and was there for virtually every year since, regardless of where I lived in Canada. His cinematic biography traces to when he attended the Sorbonne in Paris where in the early 1960s, he rubbed shoulders with some of the greats of the French Nouvelle Vague especially Jean-Luc Godard. Back in Canada he was a major educator of cinema. The festival became hugely popular in Montreal and always ran in the 10 days prior to Labour Day, an end of summer big exclamation point. But in its last decade it fell on hard times, with allegations of financial mismanagement and sponsors withdrawing. In the last year I attended it lost a major multiplex and small theatres scrambled to reschedule films. Critics unrelentingly decried Losique for being a virtual dictator and creating a chaotic festival that was “uncurated” with titles simply acquired wherever he could get them. Its last year was 2019. 

And finally, when in Finland I stumbled upon one of the country’s major commercial cineplexes FinnKino and – wow. Not only was the lobby massive and high-end it featured wall-length self-serve glass-enclosed cabinets of prepared popcorn and hundreds of types of candy. Nothing like this in Canada!

Sympathy for the Coyote

Coyote vs. Acme is a “live-action animated” movie (meaning it combines cartoons with regular people). It’s a great premise. Anyone who’s a devote of the Bugs Bunny set of cartoons – and who isn’t (okay, maybe Gen Z etc.) – will love the idea. Wile E. Coyote of course is always outwitted by the “beep beep” Road Runner. All Coyote wants is a decent roast after all. And he can never get it. But he’s tireless, tireless. And he has invented innumerable schemes and contraptions to catch his prey only to, literally, fall flat on his face, or experience any number of ignoble endings - crashes, explosions, anvils dropped on his head. But, hey, he’s a “toon” so impervious to death, a cartoon version of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. The problem – and the point of this movie – is that Coyote relies on so many supposedly innovative products from the Acme Corp. And of course, they don’t work or, uh, literally backfire. So what to do? Well, sue the pants (flaming as they may be) off them. The movie is the first “live-action animated” picture featuring Bugs Bunny type characters since 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Roger Zemeckis). And it’s more than a welcome genre, as few films as there are. In the picture, Wile E. teams up with a cartoon lawyer (he, uh, represents toons) Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a down and out real life lawyer whose office is in a strip mall in, yes, Albuquerque NM. Avery is scared sh-less to go up against the powerful Acme Corp. – literally the biggest corporation in the world (even the picture's maker Warner Bros. is a subsidiary!) -  and its uber bullying lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena) but his staff and not least a frustrated goading Coyote (who doesn’t speak of course, only make faces and hold signs), push him on. I can’t criticize the mixture of cartoon and real-life actors - I always find this ingenious - but I did find the movie a little slow. And the theatre I was in (packed on a matinee Saturday with Cineplex offering $7 admission) got few laughs even from the kids. Still, I give the filmmakers E for effort. The “trial” that takes place between Coyote and Acme is also an analogy for big corps everywhere that make shoddy products, and makes one think of the 1970s era tobacco companies which conspired to push cancer-causing cigarettes on the populace. And Coyote, always depicted as a villain, is depicted somewhat sympathetically here, given his untiring efforts to capture Road Runner – more a frustrated inventor always rigging gadgets or at his blueprint table. As I say, a fun premise but a little tiring, unlike, uh, Coyote’s endless quest.

Jumping their bones on One Night Only

One Night Only (Will Gluck, Anyone But You) is a whimsical switch up on the Gen Z/Millennial dating scene. The premise is original. What if a puritanical government imposed sexual mandates on people who were not married? But gave them dispensation. For one night of the year they could have as much premarital sex as they wanted. Think New Year’s Eve for singletons. That’s the situation our two principal, characters, Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner) find themselves in as the countdown to their night of libidinous liberation begins. Allie is a commercial singer, Owen runs a pizza shop. Both are trying to find love – or er, whatever – on this luminous night when those of a certain status throw on their party togs and roam the streets and clubs in search of, well, at least the next available bedmate. This is a singles scene writ large. And because people are so pent-up for sex (aka horny) all manner of them want to cut corners, exploit or otherwise spend the night with someone they might otherwise never would. Other than the movie's scenes of sexual euphoria with couples on the streets or subways frantically embracing one another to get to coitus before the night is through (there are countdown clocks everywhere) the movie is a basic romcom. Girl meets boys if not sooner than later. Or you have to kiss a lot of frogs….. The film has an obvious novel premise (or gimmick), good enough for a movie theme but gets a bit tiring. I mean how much running about and seeing hysterical people jump each other's bones can you take? Okay, it’s fine as it goes. There are no real messages except at one point Owen suggesting the “fascists” might be on to something by limiting sex and making people think about what the real meaning of relationships should be. And of course there’s the subtle stab at the present US administration (which as far as I know isn’t’ prudish), when one character blames “Obama.” Obama, asks Owen? “Well, “the pendulum has swung,” she says. 

Obsession: Fatal Attraction for Gen Z

Horror films really aren't my thing. But I do have a taste in the genre in something a little unconventional, twisted or with a psychological dimension. And the fact Obsession (Curry Barker) was gaining critical gravitas - and let's face it there was nothing else worth seeing at the Bijou - I checked it out.  It starts out well, with our hero Baron (Michel Johnston) expressing his unfulfilled romantic quest for co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) to a pal at a diner. The friend says go for her. They nervously go out on a kind of date. And as he's dropping her off she wants to make one thing perfectly clear: she just wants to be friends. Which of course depresses Baron aka "Bear". But he had visited a magic store and bought a cheap One Wish Willow, a stupid kids game where you're supposedly guaranteed your wish if you break the stick in half. (I love the guy at the call centre.) Well...Bear breaks it and suddenly Nikki turns around and walks back to his car. She's miraculously, unexplainedly, now completely enthralled and seriously does wants a romantic relationship with our hero. So the damn kids thing does work! We've seen this plot or theme before. It most notably brought back memories of the 1987 classic Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne) with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. Only Obsession is for the Gen Z crowd. The film kept my attention but it's basically one dimensional - a straight ahead horror flick with some good acting especially from Navarrette. There's some pretty horrific scenes, amid a few laughs, but most people will probably be able to handle them. 

As per this movie, I'd booked a seat online only to arrive and find I was right next to a couple of chatty guys. So I moved up a row to an empty seat. A couple of seats to my left were a couple, yakking away and looking at their cellphones. I turned my head - twice - and stared point blank at them for a few seconds. The woman turned and saw that I was staring. Perhaps it quieted them. Then another couple, a couple of seats to my right, started their banter. So I got up and moved, all the way down to a place I never sit - midway up and exact centre. Best of all it was probably the best view in the house -not too far and not too close from the screen. I'll choose this in future. There was blissfully no other person in the row and none immediately in the row above. There have been reports this summer of blockbuster films like The Odyssey, The Invite and even Obsession, drawing droves back to bricks and mortar cinemas. And I cheer it. The problem is that folks still like to chatter. Is it because they're so used to watching movies at home that they've transplanted their living rooms to the theatre, and to hell with other moviegoers? Or is it just general self-obsessed rudeness? Probably some of both. 

The Odyssey: save your money from this overly hyped film

I can usually tell if I'm going to like a movie in the first five minutes. I went into Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey with optimism held high. But immediately there was something jarringly wrong. The characters spoke English! Yes, I know this is a tried and true Hollywood tradition dating back decades to movies like The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur and Cleopatra. But for some reason it didn't seem right here in such an obvious 3000 year old Greek myth. And partly it was who was speaking. In this case such recognizably box office boffo stars as Matt Damon (who otherwise does an admirable job as hero Odysseus) and Charlize Theron, who as a nymph looks like she's on a fashion set and can't be taken seriously at all. Yet I kept trying to find things admirable or absorbing about the film, partly I guess because of the overwhelming positive hype this picture has gotten in its one short week since release. But it never gathered traction. First, this is a movie heavily loaded with dialogue. Action film fans - who I suspect make up most of the audience - would have been numbed by all the weighted and grave conversations, about which I'd bet they couldn't care a flying fig about. And that's if they were decipherable because most were rather garbled. I really was expecting more action but it came few and far between. There were only a few mythical battles with monsters - the cyclops Polyphemus, the six-headed Scylla and giant soldiers who shred Odysseus' men and boats. Yes, the assault on Troy by Odysseus' Greeks - including of course the Trojan Horse - is dramatic but as dramatic or less than I've seen in a hundred other storming-the-gates type films. And really all these scenes are rather bloodless, both physically and emotionally. And, in between, the interminable dialogues among various characters, which may have put several members of the audience to sleep (the girl in front of me kept scrolling). This is a long film (172 minutes) and about half way through I gave up, my mind settling into a state of numbness and sort of on autopilot as the rest of the story unfolded. The best things about this film? Some of the ships and their grizzled rowers at sea fighting the elements and yes the dramatic encounters with the mythical terrors. The military costumes were good. But the film is overly long - thanks to the dialogue, Chris! - and could have been chopped by at least an hour. And I thought how it could have been improved by a more capable director (did I say that?). Less, less dialogue and more ambient sounds, creating surreal scenes and real psychological drama as the characters navigate through astonishing challenges, as befits a mythic journey.

A film with too much sex on the brain

I thought The Invite (Olivia Wilde) might be an update on Mike Nichols’s 1966 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor. Not really. Though the premise is two couples getting together for an evening’s gathering at one couple’s home. It’s a film based on the Spanish flick The People Upstairs (Cesc Gay) in turn based on his stage play. I generally liked it. Here you have two fashionable millennial couples meeting for the first time, though they had previously bumped into each other in their apartment building. The inviting couple – Wilde as Angela and Seth Rogen as Joe – are a quarrelling neurotic twosome, so disconnected one doesn’t know what the other explicitly told them that morning. The other – Hawk (Ed Norton) and Pina (Penélope Cruz) - seem more together and appear the dominant of the two. He’s a retired firefighter (dubious to Angela because of his fay ways) and she a sexologist with searing insights into the opposite couple’s behaviour. Hawk turns out to be a psychobabbling New Ager. Meanwhile Angela is the most insecure of the foursome, aiming to please with her charcuterie board and nervous tics. The damper is Joe, who’s not into it from the start. The film moves at a pleasingly quick pace and is abundant with close ups – even facial – of our characters, Wilde’s in particular with her excited eyes and scrunchy cheeks and goofy movements, reminiscent of Diane Keaton (to whom the film is dedicated). I enjoy seeing Rogen in anything and he’s perfect as the modern curmudgeon here. As the evening progresses there is some stripping down of defenses (like in Virginia Woolf) but we’re really on track for something else, which I don’t know if I was crazy about (reminding me a bit too much of the 1970s). One thing’s for sure: if this is similar to the Spanish flick, which I’d like to see (of course it's not on Netflix), the people who made these films have too much sex on the brain. I also found the ending - how to say - a bit schmaltzy. Besides the absorbing close-ups the film also featured a type of device I hadn’t seen in movies for some time, heavy violin chords to punctuate the storyline. That was brilliant. 

It was Tuesday (cheap night) at the movies and a light bulb had gone off in my head. Book online, damnit, and avoid the line-up at the theatre. Sure enough when I arrived the lobby was congestingly full of people. I simply wandered in and just showed my phone ticket code. Surprised more people aren't doing this…..Speaking of theatre-going, on the hottest day this year the cineplex offered welcoming AC and I had thrown on a long sleeved shirt for warmth. But when in Florida earlier this year I noticed moviegoers coming to the cinema with blankets. Well, it is Florida. It also reminded me of the old Mad magazine cartoon about people coming out of the theatre hating the movie but saying it saw was worth it because of the air conditioning!

The Windsor International Film Festival’s (WIFF) tickets go on sale Sept. 22. I can’t wait. This year, with a slightly later October festival start, I’ll be able attend the full 11 days of the magnificent little festival that grew into probably Canada’s best regional fest and is now rivalling many big cities’. 

In stunning Malta, it's a cinema fest by the sea

I wasn’t planning to attend the Mediterrane Film Festival. In fact I’d never heard of it before. Until that is I got an email from the British Film Institute’s (BFI) PR agency, doing publicity for it. And I’d recently had the idea of going to Malta. So why not kill two birds? It’s a week-long festival in the capital city Valletta and in its fourth year still small and growing with only 30 films. But it has garnered some major titles like The Christophers with Ian McKellen, Couture with Angelina Jolie, Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, Moss & Freud about model Kate Moss’s collaboration with artist Lucian Freud and Broken English about singing great Marianne Faithfull. The films were also mainly in the evening, which gave me lots of time

to sightsee around Malta and its two main islands. What disappointed me was the lack of attendance. There were screenings with less than 10 people  and I don’t think I saw one entire cinema filled, and the theatres (all at one complex) were not large. Hard to explain why. The city and environs were inundated with billboards and various city sites had special areas roped off for celebrity guests and awards. One Malta resident put it down to typically poor local planning - “it’s Malta!” – while another suggested “the Maltese” will take a while to get used to something new and different. In any case here are some capsule reviews. Australia’s Beast of War (Kiah Roache-Turner) was a strange mashup of an Oz version of Jaws and WWII survival. Some good acting about sinking ship survivors but strange that someone would want to make a movie so obviously like the original. Maryam Touzani’s Calle Malaga with perhaps Spain’s greatest living film actress Carmen Maura was a poignant statement on aging and place, set in a Spanish colony in the Moroccan city of Tangier. Leyla Bouzid’s In a Whisper, a family story, subtlety revealed the oppression that gays face in Tunisia. If The Last Viking (Anders Thomas Jensen) is an example of Danish black comedy I want less of it, please. The film somewhat amusingly exploited violence for violence sake to make – what? – a point. Lost on me. Ordinary Battles (Margo Roe & Brick) was two films about 1) a dedicated nurse’s professional on the job struggles and 2) interpersonal rivalries among a longtime group of friends on a wilderness trip. The acting was good in both. Larry Yang’s The Shadow’s Edge was one of those ultra-violent Chinese crime dramas – and the violence came hot and heavy and repeatedly over this more than two-hour flick - with more crashes, explosions, mass brawls using hundreds of stuntmen. Not exactly my cup of tea but you’ve got to admire the sheer energy of making a film like this. Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire is based on the real life 1970s kidnapping of an Indiana mortgage company honcho, and reminiscent of the current arrest of Luigi Mangione in United Heathcare Brian Thompson’s murder. Finally, another film based on real events, Nicolangelo Gelormini’s Gioia, was a searing romantic tragedy..... Let's hope this festival truly grows.