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.