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. 

Shed a tear as yet another arthouse cinema closes

It is with a very sad heart that I read that The Maple Theater in Bloomfield Township has closed. This after the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak was torn down almost two years ago. It was a sad day for local cineastes then and it’s a sad day again – two major blows within two years. That leaves people in the wider metropolitan area with  just the Detroit Film Theatre at the DIA. There is of course Cinema Detroit, which has also been downsized, and now housed in Planet Ant Theatre in Hamtramck. And of course, WIFF’s monthly schedule in Windsor. But for Detroit, it’s a major blow for independent theatres and screening of arthouse movies. I have long time memories of both theatres, often attending one or the other on a weekly basis, sometimes with friends, on dates or alone. For “The Main” I’d drive from my apartment in downtown Windsor, up I-75, then take 11 Mile to Main Street and the corner parking lot in Royal Oak. Sometimes we’d frequent Royal Oak’s robust dining scene before or after. I remember one time heading home from a film on 11 Mile and being stopped by a cop for speeding. “Would you do that in your own country?” the officer said. Thankfully I didn’t get a ticket. When the Emagine Royal Oak multiplex in The Main's backward opened about a decade ago that created more parking problems with a partly shared lot. And as the commercial and condo complex built up around The Main, this increased congestion and a further strain on parking. Among the last times I attended the cinema I parked blocks away on residential streets. Meanwhile I also loved the more modern Maple (one time Maple Art Cinema), also three screens, because of its interesting suburban vibe in the Bloomfield Plaza shopping center, which often had a cool restaurant or bar, one of the city’s best known Jewish delis in Steve’s, and in recent years a Trader Joe’s. I one time got a Montreaux Detroit Jazz Festival poster by Andy Warhol & Keith Haring framed at Frames Unlimited, still at the plaza. And incredible history: What is now an Andiamo’s restaurant on the parking lot was the Machus Red Fox, the last place where disappeared Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa was seen. From Windsor, it was a long haul drive up there: the Lodge to Telegraph and several miles up to West Maple. Claim to fame: I remember seeing Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom in line once. Sometimes, I would see a film late on a Sunday night, driving on near deserted freeways back to Windsor and getting home by 1 am, when I had to be up just a few hours later for work. One of the first times I drove there, in early 1991, I remember returning on I-96 near the Ambassador Bridge, tuning into the news and learning that Operation Desert Storm, the allied repelling of Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, had just begun. Oh, memories, memories.

I almost fell out of my chair when watching the new Ripley eight-part series on Netflix. Among the trigger warnings at the beginning of the series were “language, smoking, violence.” Smoking? Well, I never!

Good news! Jewish film fest changes not in response to threats

This is good to know. After a lot of speculation in light of world events, the 21st edition of the Windsor Jewish Film Festival has not changed its dates or venue due to any threats or security reasons but simply for decisions that it made on its own. The event is usually held mid-Spring but now will run June 17-20. The venue was also changed from its longtime home at Devonshire Mall to downtown’s Capitol Theatre. WJFF programmer Joe Schnayer said it was “time to mix things up” with a new location. “The Capitol brings a new energy, a new ambience and showcases downtown Windsor with lots of great restaurants and attractions nearby.” The change in dates is only because the Capitol, city-owned and operated by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, is a busy venue and these were the next closest dates available. “The Capitol Theatre had several other events in the months of April and May (when we usually have our festival) so June was the best option for our festival this year,” he said. But, in light of the Israel-Hamas War and now the attack by Iran on the Jewish state, Schnayer said there will be extra security. “To ensure the safety of our guests and volunteers, the Windsor Jewish Film Festival will have a greater security presence than we have had in the past including a police presence throughout the festival.” Despite threats elsewhere such as in Vancouver and Hamilton “very few cities actually cancelled their festivals,” Schnayer said. “A few have postponed and Hamilton had to move to a different venue but very few have cancelled altogether.” He said the festival will continue as a public event. “It is important to our festival and our community that we continue to share Jewish culture and history, regardless of external factors.” Schnayer said 10 films will be on tap from North America, Europe and Asia.

I finally watch The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), one of the two most seminal popular horror films coming out of the poist-0war new Hollywood, the other being Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, which I also have never seen. Scary? A couple of moments, after which when I turned on a hall light after a bathroom break, for good measure. But the actual horror part of the film took a lot of building up to get there. Otherwise, we see scenes of a quotidian world where actress Chris MacNeil (a very young Ellen Burstyn – she’s now 91!) goes about her life in Georgetown DC. I’d forgotten Bergman’s preeminent actor Max von Sydow as Father Merrin, the all-seeing Catholic priest, has the titular role. The tumult in daughter Regan’s (Linda Blair) bedroom looked pretty real. But I still wonder why movies can’t get fake blood - looking all too much like tomato ketchup – right……The next night I watch an entirely different film by the same director, Deal of the Century (1983) starring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines and Sigourney Weaver, a comedy about an incompetent arms dealer (Chase) who stumbles upon, well, the arms deal of the century. It’s a send-up of the international arms trade and would make a good pairing with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). And while I laughed along, in light of what’s going on in the Middle East right now, I also in part doubted the film’s message. Without that triple layer of Israeli defense, backed by US and Arab allies, last night, Israel would have been utterly devastated today by Iranian missiles and drones today.