Intriguing, incisive and exasperating, this movie is that absorbing

I'm glad I clicked on Philippe Lesage's 2024 Who By Fire on the almost 12 hour flight back from Athens the other day. This after a couple of other art house/international cinema picks on the same flight - Sunburn from Portugal's Vicente Alves (2018) and 2024'a The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar's first English language film with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (is she in virtually everything these days?). Of the three Lesage's was head and shoulders above the others. When I saw it's length, two-and-a-half hours, it looked a bit daunting. But I took the plunge. And it's the best film I've seen in perhaps a couple of years. Who By Fire of course is a play on Leonard Cohen's song by the same name. But, no, the song is not on the soundtrack and for that, I'm thankful to the director - no need to ram the point home. How should I describe it? It's a meditation and dissection of friendships, coming of age rage, professional rivalry and people vs nature. The film opens with a very long shot of the back of a car driving in the Quebec wilderness, backed by a musical one note. It's eerie and ominous. Those in the car are a father, his two children and a friend. They arrive at a lake where another man, a long time colleague, flies them to his remote lodge. It turns out the two men, Albert (Paul Ahmarani) and Blake (Arieh Worthalter), are esteemed filmmakers. They're also intellectuals. Their initial meeting goes well. But over the course of several days competitive egos start to play havoc. Meanwhile one of the teens, Jeff (Noah Parker)  an aspiring filmmaker, is also sowing his wild oats. His attraction to Albert's daughter Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) is fraught with crude moves. And his despair leads him to a loss in more ways than one. Moreover nature in all its beauty and power is lurking in the background, inspiring and threatening. This is a very "talking" and character-driven movie and those who want "action" will tune it out. But those who like the study of human dynamics and the a slice of the best and worst of human nature will find it intriguing, incisive and exasperating. This movie is that absorbing.  

TIFF's film cancellation (now reversed) shows how wokeness can descend into immorality

It’s a case of woke going too far. This week the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) pulled a documentary about the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre of Israeli residents, in which some 1200 were slaughtered and another 250 kidnapped, as many as 50 still in Hamas captivity.  It was the worst pogrom since World War II. Canadian director Barry Avrich made a film about that day, The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue (poster to the left). It’s about a retired Israeli general, Noam Tibon, who hearing of the attack, raced in his car from Tel Aviv to the site of the attacks just outside the Gaza Strip, rescuing

his son’s family. The film was all set to go for this year’s TIFF Sept 4 – 14, which also just happens to be the fest’s 50th anniversary. The celebration will be tarnished. TIFF’s action follows the kind of spineless response to anything that is controversial in the wrong way. Sure, festivals and too many filmmakers think of themselves as courageous when they screen a film that challenges topics or politicians that are deemed politically incorrect, like the Catholic Church, big business, anti-abortion activists or right-wing politicians like Donald Trump. Filmmakers and festivals have long embraced the Palestinian cause. Even the avantgarde Media City fest here in Windsor-Detroit screened several pro-Palestinian films last year. But rare or more likely never will you see even one film that presents an Israeli viewpoint. In fact, in the case of The Road Between Us, this isn’t even political. “This film is not about politics, it’s about humanity, family and sacrifice,” director Avrich said. But because it’s told from an Israeli POV it is unacceptable and beyond the pale. The reason given by long time TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey for dropping it was “the risk of major, disruptive protest actions around the film’s presence at the Festival, including internal opposition, has become too great.” In other words, TIFF doesn’t have the courage of its convictions as few as they may have been. TIFF has also said it was because “general requirements for inclusion in the festival” were not met, such as clearing rights for the videos shot by Hamas and livestreamed during the attack. I couldn’t believe this when I first read it and had to read it several times. So, TIFF wouldn’t screen a film because the video hadn’t been approved by a terrorist organization? The decision unleashed massive outrage and for once not just by the Jewish community. And I was surprised yet gratified that as many as 1000 in the international film community signed a petition condemning TIFF. This includes such luminaries as Amy Schumer, Howie Mandel, Debra Messing and Jennifer Jason Leigh. But many other high profile actors and directors - including many Jews - have not signed it; I wonder why. Their open letter also said, “This follows the 2024 festival, which likewise didn’t platform a single Israeli documentary that didn’t disparage the country. In contrast, TIFF 2024 featured three anti-Israel documentaries, with four more slated for 2025.” My point above. TIFF has now reversed the decision, and the film will be included. I’m slightly surprised it did that. Perhaps it was facing a boycott by stars and powerful distributors.  We will now see how the film will be presented, how many times it will be screened, and how TIFF will protect filmgoers from what undoubtedly will be pro-Palestinian protests on the streets or even inside the theatre. But the lesson here? By its action TIFF has demonstrated how wokeness can descend into immorality. 

Finally, I'm watching Seinfeld - all nine seasons

With the exception of three or four episodes, I had never watched the enormously popular 1990s era sitcom Seinfeld. Chalk that up to not having a TV or cable. Now, with Netflix making available all nine seasons – and with a dearth of appealing movies both online and in cinemas – I’ve found refuge this summer in the comedy series “about nothing.” I’ve now binge watched, over more than a week, over a hundred episodes and am in the middle of season five. The few episodes I did catch during Seinfeld’s primetime I found enormously funny because they made fun of things no one had ever made fun of before. The show advertises itself as “about nothing.” But it is indeed about something. It’s just that the something’s are the nuances, crevices, margins and subtleties of everyday life. They are the things we think don’t matter but matter enormously. Yes, we’re looking forward to attending that ball game but freaked by the idiot in the parking lot or how long we have to wait in line for a hot dog. And we’re happy to celebrate a cousin’s wedding but concentrate on the tacky dress of the woman across from us or the tablemate with a piece of vegetable in his teeth. That’s what this show is about – the minor craziness of everyday life you think doesn’t matter but does. It’s hard to believe the series is 30 years old. And it’s surprising how much it shows. Take the fashions. Men with tucked-in overly large shirts look dorky. There is too much hair, including on men, on everybody! Interior décor from offices to restaurants to apartments have an overwrought formality or chintziness. And in the post-Covid era it’s hard to believe so many people once dressed so formally – dresses and hose on women and men in suits – on the job. But the humor remains intact. Because it’s universal. People from time immemorial have made judgments about others, often on the most superficial grounds like hairstyle, weight, clothes or matters of taste. Even how someone irritatingly speaks, walks or smells, bad or good. This is the 1990s and obviously some topics couldn’t be done today, like Jerry dating a Native American and catching himself before emitting phrases like “reservation” (for a restaurant) or “Indian giver” (for returning a gift). It’s hilarious but our overly sensitive environment wouldn’t permit it -  and to paraphrase Jerry, not that that’s a good thing. Even joking about gay people – “not that there’s anything wrong with that” – could draw a red flag. The characters are an oddball nexus of jerks – George (Jason Alexander) the fat perennial neurotic loser, Kramer (Michael Richards), the spaz hipster who thinks he knows everything and always has the inside track. The saner two are Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Jerry himself. But both elicit neuroses and from time to time odd fixations. With the show being so incredibly funny one is apt to forgive certain aspects, like the fact the men seem to have an endless stream of girlfriends, and who other than the equally neurotic or crazed would date George and Kramer? The show’s format opens and closes with Jerry, a stand-up comedian, doing his shows in a club. They’re the most boring elements and should have been axed. Otherwise, it’s on with the insanity of each “plot.”

This 'summer' film will haunt, and Arcand's prophetic 'Testament'

There are few films that have haunted me as much as Frank Perry’s 1968 The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. It’s now been more than a month since I’ve watched it (on the Criterion Channel as part of its swimming pool-themed summer films; yes, it's a genre) and I still think about it almost daily. I’ve always admired Lancaster, a mid-century icon, but this film reinforced just how intense an actor he is. The story is admittedly bizarre. But that underlines its mystique. Lancaster as Ned, one fine hot summer day, shows up at the backyard swimming pool of his Connecticut neighbors. He’s clad only in swimming trunks. He surprises his well-off neighbors, who welcome him and say it has been so long since they’ve seen him. He regales them whimsical stories about life and how, on this very fine summer day, he has this zest to swim. He concocts a scenario on the spot: in fact, will now “swim” right across the valley to his own suburban house. He’ll accomplish this by visiting all the neighbors along the way and swimming across their pools, portaging if you will, by foot, between houses. As he “swims home” he of course inevitably visits other neighbors, lounging by their pools or having pool parties. As he travels – again, only in trunks and barefoot across wide swathes of field and woodland – he is a beacon of goodwill and friendliness. And virtually everywhere he goes his neighbors remark that while it’s great to see him, it has been a long time. The story or theme is in what occurs as he stops off at one neighbor’s house after another. I will not go any further because this is a film the plot of which one must not in any way give away. Janice Rule and even Joan Rivers have roles. The setting is an affluent suburb of Westport Ct. and Ned Merrill, appropriately enough for the era, is an advertising executive in Manhattan, part of the gray flannel suit brigade that took the New Haven RR from suburbia each day into the city. The film is based on a John Cheever short story, so that might give you an inkling into the territory we’re heading. Watch it and this surreal tale will have you thinking and thinking and thinking. 

The great Quebec filmmaker Denys Arcand’s Testament (in 2023) is prophetic given a decision by Quebec City last month to cancel an historic painting. In the film, a jab at political correctness, protesters successfully force an institution to paint over an historic mural of indigenous people welcoming gun-toting European settlers. "There's a painting in there that's an insult to First Nations," scolds one protester in the film, of course a contemporary stereotype. In Quebec City last month, a city hall painting (left) depicting the moment famous French explorer Samuel de Champlain meets a First Nations chief, was ordered removed by the city's mayor Bruno Marchand because it was "offensive." 

An early June at the cinemas (à Montréal)

It's been a full couple weeks of movies since I arrived in Montreal earlier this month. Besides sampling films at my fave independent Mtl cinema, Cinema du Parc - in the same building in which I'm staying - I caught a couple of other movies at a great suburban cinema, CineStarz. First off was Wes Anderson's latest The Phoenician Scheme, as ambitious a movie as he's ever made. But it's all bizarre scenes and sets and not much emotional pull. Sure, it's good for a few laughs as Benicio Del Toro (Zsa Korda), a hated world industrialist, tries to secure his fortune to his offspring, Liesl (Mia Threapleton.) There's Anderson's usual mid century

visual twists, sight gags and purposely cliched characters from dorkish professors to urban guerillas. Cute. But the minute after the movie was over I forgot all about it.....Next up was Friendship (Andrew DeYoung), a delicious black comedy starring Detroit native Tim Robinson and ever-on-screen Paul Rudd. It's a surreal take on - what? Personal insecurity, suburban ennui, social awkwardness? Robinson's Craig really is an over the top character, whose almost every move and comment grates on those around him, even his family. And you can see how loneliness and social ostracization can turn

people into psychopaths.....I checked out Bring Her Back (Danny and Michael Philippou), which The Globe and Mail called "a "genuinely evil movie", "exceptional and impressive." The Film Stage went further: "a direct statement on the cheap exploitation of grief, channeling the existential nihilism of French New Extremity." Wow. I'm usually not into horror mainly because it's one dimensional. But with these accolades, I went. Only to conclude that, yawn, it's linear and says nothing much more about anything than what's on the screen, albeit a fantastic performance by Sally Hawkins.....I keep seeing reviews knocking Canadian director Celine Song's Materialists and wonder why. Saffron Maeve in The Globe: "a stiff, reluctant rom-com that cannot square the footloose idealism of its predecessors with the terrifying realities of today’s dating pool." Okay. Johnny Oleksinski in the NY Post: "unnatural and stilted" and "drags viewers out of the film." But but, despite an admittedly cliched storyline I was absorbed and the pacing perfect - even the "stilted" dialogue worked - portraying three characters trying to find the, um, perfect romantic match.....Finally, for a weekend night at the Parc, the "old ultra violence," Stanley Kubrick's 1971 A Clockwork Orange. This was my third viewing and it entertains as much as ever, though wonder if it could have been made in our current puritan and politically correct age, satire or not. Malcolm McDowell's breakout role as Alex, leader of the futuristic "droog" gang, is as searingly comedic as it is menacing. To quote the lad, "we were feeling a bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it being a night of no small expenditure." Outrageously hilarious!

More light-hearted fare at this year's Windsor Jewish Film Fest

It’s a decided break from the past at this year’s Windsor Jewish Film Festival, June 16-19 at The Capitol downtown. For years the fest has featured more serious and often Holocaust related films. That’s partly owing to what inventory was available and it skewed towards the reflective, historical and sad. But while obviously important there’s more to Jewish culture than that and this year’s lineup has much more variety. About half the films are comedies or dramaties led by opening night’s award-winning A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg 2024), a poignant yet mis adventurous tale of two cousins who embark on an ancestral pilgrimage to Poland.  Another is Bad Shabbos (Daniel Robbins 2024). What happens when a romantic couple of mixed religions’ parents get together for the first time at a Friday Shabbos meal?  There might be some confusion.  Matchmaking 2 (Erez Tadmor 2024) is a humorous sendup of an older devout Yeshiva student being forced into marriage. Yaniv (Amnon Carmi 2024) delves into the world of a New York Orthodox gambling den – who knew of such a thing? On the more serious side and about subjects we haven’t always seen depicted are The Blond Boy from the Casbah (Alexandre Arcady 2023), a whimsical tale of a boyhood in Algeria’s Jewish community in the early 1960s during that country’s nationalist revolution.  Pink Lady (Nir Bergman 2024) is a nuanced and reflective dive into an Orthodox couple’s relationship.   Torn (Nimrod Shapira 2024) addresses a subject very much in the news, the posting of "Kidnapped" posters following the October 2017 Hamas attacks and the reaction of those who flagrantly tore them down.  All About the Levkoviches (Ádám Breier 2024) is a story of the estrangement of a father and son, set-in present-day Budapest.  One film tangentially deals with the Holocaust but in its aftermath. Soda (Erez Tadmor 2024), is a drama set in postwar Israel where an immigrant is eyed suspiciously as a former Nazi collaborator. Finally, Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire (Oren Rudavsky 2024), closing out the fest, is a documentary about the great writer and Holocaust survivor whose writings transcend Judaism as an enduring witness to injustice. 

In Montreal, two iconic film palaces, each in their own way

Walking around downtown Montreal over the last couple of days – my first extensive trip to the city in more than two years - I happened by two major film complexes. Iconic in their own ways. One is Cinema Imperial, a more than 100-year-old cinema that would be to Montreal what the Fox Theatre is to Detroit. Once a vaudeville house in later years it became the Cinerama theatre in the 1960s (and, as a Montreal native, where I was taken to see How the West was Won (Henry Hathaway 1962 ) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (Henry Levin and George Pal 1962). In more recent years it became a centerpiece of the city’s late lamented Festival des Films du Monde (World Film Festival) which ended a 42-year run in 2019. It has also played host to the

city’s oldest festival, the Festival du Nouveau Cinema – still kicking – and the upstart Cinemania and Fantasia fests. But I was dismayed to see that the front doors had been papered over as if renovation was taking place...or something worse, such as closed for good. Reading online I found that in fact this “jewel” of Montreal’s entertainment and arts scene has indeed closed, at least temporarily. Various bodies – private and public - have tried to keep it afloat over the last decade, injecting millions of dollars including $3M last year from the federal government for restoration. But the doors are sealed shut.....Meanwhile at the other end of downtown the one time “shrine” of hockey, the Montreal Forum – where more Stanley Cups have been won than in any other venue – continues as a massive multiplex, now run by Cineplex. The Forum closed in the late 1990s, and US-based AMC took it over opening a 30-screen multiplex on different floors. Now Cineplex runs it. It is cavernous - where the former rink and hockey spectator seats used to be – and beautiful if also showcasing a lot of empty space! A few restaurants/bars and stores are on the ground floor.  But very few people were there on a weekday late morning.  When I stopped by to see what was playing, the most interesting film was Friendship (Andrew DeYoung 2024). But I took a pass because I wanted to keep on walking.