Dispatches

Paris – a city in love with cinema

Cinema is everywhere in this city. On any given day, upwards of 600 different movies are playing in hundreds of theatres and forums around the city. There are 108 English-language films playing today for example, from Carrie ('76) to Cheri ('09). Cult favourites from The Bride of Frankenstein ('35) and The Fearless Vampire Killers ('67) to Taxi Driver ('73) and Psycho ('60) are playing... but so are a block of relatively obscure movies such as Robert Aldrich's Grissom Gang ('71), the excellent Karl Malden- directed Crisis ('50), and The Music Lovers ('70), a strange Ken Russell-directed film about Tchaikovsky's life and music.

The French seem to be in love with the Americana represented in film while simultaneously despising all things American. It's one of those infuriating and wonderfully hypocritical French things that has no rational explanation. This is a culture old and strong enough to withstand the onslaught of endless American marketing, taking exactly what it wants from other cultures while maintaining its own. There are, for example, somewhere around 25,000 pizza joints and 300 Irish Pubs in Paris but no Italians or Irish people to be seen. American film would seem to fall into the same category.

French Cinema is a separate and sacred thing. It's odd how the national film industries of other countries raise and fall but the French just never stop cranking out quality films, year in and year out. That so many of the great film makers have hailed from this country is a testament to the nurturing and supportive audience that exists here (and the uncontested government funding that naturally follows).

With Cannes and TIFF coming to represent the two premier yearly film festivals, it's interesting to compare the two cities and how they approach film. The fact that Cannes is held 650km from the Paris is telling. Parisians just don't need the attention (even though they're at the epicentre of French film culture, their festival is at the beach) whereas Torontonians are validated by TIFF and thrilled to be the centre of something for two weeks every year. That being said, Toronto might just be the film festival capital of the world. It's become our forte. In a nutshell, I think Parisians are film fans and Torontonians are festival fans.

Unfortunately, TIFF has been changing over the last decade – from a festival that showcased film, to a festival that showcases celebrity. That isn't to say that Toronto isn't knee-deep in interesting and unique films for those 2 weeks (because TIFF continues - though sheer volume and it's interesting side-programming - to attract a terrific mix of the best and worst that cinema has on offer), but rather to point out that the focus of the festival (and perhaps more importantly, the media coverage surrounding it) has morphed into a star-gazing event that has made the festival financially stronger, but culturally cheapened it. Cannes seems mired in its own set of problems lately.

As Toronto continues to develop into a centre of film appreciation, we could take a page or two from Paris. TIFF's excellent Cinematique is a step in that direction offering up year-round access to a terrific cross-section of important films from various directors near and far, past and present. What we seem to lack is a mix of commercial theatrical screenings of films from the past offered for the sole purpose of enjoying the film. Toronto just doesn't seem to have the cultural gravity to see something from the past as worthy of money from the present. Andy from the Fox Theatre in the east end says they tank every time they do a classic other than Casablanca. Can you imagine how many would show up for The Grissom Gang? It's possible that we Torontonians favour watching our classics on DVD instead of out at the theatre but I'd hazard a guess that the new-is-better consumer culture of North America plays a big role too. We've all had people ask why some $60.00 Criterion title isn't a $0.99-for-a-month rental. “But it's so old?....”

We've got a little ways to go in T.O. to catch up to the vaguely preposterous French in terms of film sophistication. Every major city in the western world seems to have a hugely successful Film Noir festival except the city where festivals work best, our own. Once we build an greater appreciation for films from the recent and distant past, we'll have it all. One step at a time.

Sporgey

My mats better be straight.....

Just wondering if the mats are in a giant heap outside the FBW door. Hope you're all well.

I need a mat-cam.

We entered Terminal 3 at Pearson and popped out of the Paris Metro 150' from our hotel 10 hours later without ever going outside. My phone automatically works and we're listening to Jazz FM from Toronto on iTunes 5997km and 6 time zones away.

Got a cat feeding update on my phone from Aleks tonight.

Man, the world just keeps getting smaller.

Sporgey

Fast, Cheap and out of control. (1997)

A documentary film that draws and then joins the dots between a topiary gardener, a robotics engineer, a wild animal trainer and a devoted expert on the most unpleasant of animals, the naked mole-rat. It's inconceivable how such a set of interviews resulted in any sort of coherence whatsoever. That an objective filmmaker and a bit of honesty can draw close such a diverse bunch of characters is a testament to the power of film and the craft of documentary film making.
Without clumsy leading questions, our subjects are asked to talk about specific themes, the past, future, their profession and their own perspectives on life. Discussed are anxieties of redundancy, dying arts, cutting edge technologies, childhoods and the inevitability of an end. Juxtaposing the interview audio of one subject with the visuals of the work of another, it's intentions are at one minute ambiguous and in the next startlingly clear. Essentially as I think an observation of human nature, director Errol Morris weaves the lives of our four subjects into a film with subtle poignancy and a playful poetry to it all. You can read into it as much or as little as you want, but thoroughly entertained ye shall be.

Shield your eyes Kadas, it's a book review....

I just finished an odd but compelling book called Movieland: Hollywood And the Great American Dream Culture by Jerome Charyn. It was written 20 years ago and lent to me by a friend. I'm not sure if Charyn in a great writer – his rhythm is all over the place – or if Movieland is a great book, but he writes with such fanatical passion about American film that it was hard not to get caught up in the damn thing. The book starts out as a bit of a gushing fanboy ode to the Hollywood palaces of yore – giant movie houses with their own cloud generators, statues and ornate plaster moldings in the manner of ancient and imagined Egypt and China. They built these massive cinema shrines for a period of about 15 years from the mid twenties onward, some having as many as 6000 seats and 250 toilets(!). By the late-thirties they'd come and gone, replaced with more utilitarian and affordable structures. Charyn chronicles his early love of going to the movies, his affection and regard for Garbo, Leo B. Mayer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rita and later Brando and Newman. Through a combination of meticulous research and interviews (he discusses with Paul Newman just how fabulous Paul Newman for example), Charyn manages to shine a bright light into the early days of Tinseltown spinning wonderful tales and interesting tidbits about what made the place tick.

Then an very odd thing happens. The tone of the book changes and the Charyn switches gears into entirely new territory. The innocence and boyhood infatuation with all things Hollywood from the early chapters vanishes in an instant and the book takes a turn into the shadows, becoming deeply critical of the false mythologies projected on American theatre walls throughout the middle post war years. The cherished illusion so carefully assembled in the early passages of the book is shattered and the industry is exposed as a fraud more adept at trickery and delusion than finding a greater truth. These middle passages are written in a way of that conjures up the image of a jilted lover, as though Charyn had caught the movies in the middle of some compromising indiscretion. Strange as all that may seem, the book takes off at this point becoming far more interesting and informative. It's quickly becomes challenging and provocative and I would guess that this thematic shift threw most critics. I'm guessing his intent was to link the broadening awareness one achieves growing up (and the exposure of counted-upon truths to be merely illusions) with the sense of betrayal one feels at the time. It makes for fascinating reading, that's for sure.

Movieland ends on an up-note with a the rise of the independents and new young actors like Pacino, Hackman and De Niro tearing up the screen in the early seventies. Charyn has a knack for connecting the real world America with the dream factory reflection Hollywood offers up in a way few have. He's articulate and engaging and I learned more about American cinematic form in 272 pages than I ever expected. I'll try and track a copy down for the store if anyone's interested.

Sporgey

Prawns, Spawn and Autobots

For all the rave reviews Neill Blomkamp's District 9 received, on a first pass I found it engaging but vaguely disappointing, particularly as political allegory. A great premise and some clever script writing gives way to a third act that morphs into vintage Michael Bay-styled shoot 'em up and undermines the thought-provoking qualities of the first two acts.

First the upsides... and there are plenty. Visually, it's stunning. The CG integration is almost transparent and the aliens are repulsive and creepy. The lead actor played by South African Sharlto Copley is very good. He plays a character who's a combination of Kafkaesque-nightmare bureaucrat and bubbling idiot. Without giving away the plot, he is charged with the impossible task of moving an impoverished alien population of a million+ away from Johannesburg to a remote encampment several hundred kilometers away. The South African setting is a welcome change from traditional Euro/American framework of most modern science fiction. The underlying themes of race, displaced populations and man's capacity for cruelty are front and centre in District 9, admirable and unusual for a genre picture, but it's hard to find the moral centre and therefore the point of the film without first understanding the political context that Blomkamp is working under. An hour of Wikipedia research into modern South Africa later, I rewatched the film with a more up-to-date understanding of the issues facing the region today and it plays like a different (and much better) film on a second pass.

So it comes down to this. You can have great fun watching District 9 as a campy straight-up Sci-Fi with loads of gore and nasty black humour ….or you can view it as a complex allegorical treatise on modern race relations and humanity's unending appetite for self-destruction.

In order to discuss the deeper themes plumbed in District 9, a basic understanding of the plot's start point is necessary. In documentary/newscast flashback, we told that a massive alien ship arrived over Johannesburg in 1982 and hovered some 1000 feet above for over two decades. Why they came and how they became stranded is never explained. A mission is mounted to enter the ship and it is discovered that the aliens inside are in dire straits. They are starving and apparently unable to provide for themselves. The authorities make the area in the vicinity of the ship a holding compound for the visitors, where they feed and provide for them: District 9. They are fenced off from the rest of Johannesburg's population and detained in the squalid conditions of a shanty town. They are surrounded 24-7 by the military, ostensibly for their own protection but actually more out of fear. This fear is seemingly justified as violent clashes between the aliens and the human population begin to increase, leading to a decision to relocate the entire alien population, some 1.2 million, to a remote area 250 km. from the city. This is where the film opens.

A Catch-22 exists in cinema when it comes to dealing with matters of race. It's nearly impossible to write a script that delves in any substantive way into the issue without stirring up counter charges and claims of racism, a dilemma that certainly complicates a deeper reading of Blomkamp's script. Almost by definition, discussions about race are contentious - a subjective topic that more often than not divides opinion depending on the viewer's perspective. As a result, most movie scripts end up skirting the issue, avoiding it outright or offering up overly-simplistic examples where the lines are clearly divided along the good victim/bad oppressor theme. District 9 may be something of an exception to this rule. On the one hand it seems to be wearing it's rather obvious political stripes on it's sleeve but upon closer inspection it may indeed be saying something rather more profound and subversive.

Intentionally or not, there is a bleeding of pre and post-apartheid South African politics in the District 9 story line. On the surface it first appears that we are immersed in an allegorical pre-1994 South Africa, but as the story unfolds, much of the plot involves sociopolitical overtones from present day South Africa and it may serve the audience better to view this film as a post-apartheid parable about illegal immigration and Malthusian despair. (Malthus was an influential early 19th century writer who wrote extensively on matters of excessive population growth). The modern fable Blomkamp has fashioned here is a contentious and potentially explosive one – that black South Africans are prone to the saying and doing the same intolerant things that white Afrikaans were universally condemned for two decades ago. There are unpopular, politically incorrect elements of District 9 (specifically the portrayal of the evil Nigerian crime syndicate, among others) but we westerners have all but ignored the region since Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994 and it seems that the truth of the matter is rather more grim than you might hope. It seems that they didn't live happily ever after.

In order to properly contextualize the story in District 9, you also need to be aware of a couple of key political events in the recent past....

Political primer #1.... After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Afrikaans elite (aka: rich whitey) decided within three months to deal with the then-71 year old Mandela, confident that a black government wouldn’t be so influenced by the godless Commies as to immediately kill the capitalist goose that lays the golden (and diamond) eggs. The system that emerged has been fine for those whites rich enough to afford ample private security, but unsurprisingly bad for the Afrikaans working class, many of whom (including the director's family who reside in B.C.) left the country. Not surprisingly, the early decades of the new ANC government and a vanishing middle class have left the country corrupt, riddled with crime and flirting with anarchy. A sort of reverse ethnic cleansing has seen the country's skilled white middle class depart for safer havens and a vacuum develop in its place.

Political primer #2.... After 20 years of black rule, neighbouring Zimbabwe experienced a political meltdown/societal collapse in recent years that has left millions of refuges fleeing the country for the relative safety and financial promise of South Africa. This massive influx of refuges (3 to 5 million is the latest count) has caused a great deal of social unrest in South Africa pitting two black communities against one another.

In a recent interview, writer/director Blomkamp had this to say about the current state of affairs in South Africa:

“Another part of recent South African history that isn’t world news is that the collapse of Zimbabwe has introduced millions of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants into South African cities. … Now you have this powder-keg situation, with black against black … [W]e woke up one morning to find out that Johannesburg was eating itself alive. Impoverished South Africans had started murdering impoverished Zimbabweans, necklacing them and burning them and chopping them up.”

Armed with this information, District 9's political underpinnings make substantially more sense to the uninitiated and underinformed like myself. While the film is quite easily viewed as a piece of video-game escapism, the more interesting layers of the plot almost require a bit of background detail to help contextualize the story. Without this frame of reference, the film's allegorical side is all rather confusing. I understand why the film maker chose to shift the film into Sci-Fi fanboy territory and leave the more political aspects on the margins. It was probably the right decision. The fact that a sociopolitical context exists at all in District 9 is impressive enough.

Once this releases to DVD and a few others have had a chance to watch it, I'd be interested to hear what you thought of the film's trickier undercurrents.

Sporgey

Prawns, Spawn and Autobots

For all the rave reviews Neill Blomkamp's District 9 received, on a first pass I found it engaging but vaguely disappointing, particularly as political allegory. A great premise and some clever script writing gives way to a third act that morphs into vintage Michael Bay-styled shoot 'em up and undermines the thought-provoking qualities of the first two acts.

First the upsides... and there are plenty. Visually, it's stunning. The CG integration is almost transparent and the aliens are repulsive and creepy. The lead actor played by South African Sharlto Copley is very good. He plays a character who's a combination of Kafkaesque-nightmare bureaucrat and bubbling idiot. Without giving away the plot, he is charged with the impossible task of moving an impoverished alien population of a million+ away from Johannesburg to a remote encampment several hundred kilometers away. The South African setting is a welcome change from traditional Euro/American framework of most modern science fiction. The underlying themes of race, displaced populations and man's capacity for cruelty are front and centre in District 9, admirable and unusual for a genre picture, but it's hard to find the moral centre and therefore the point of the film without first understanding the political context that Blomkamp is working under. An hour of Wikipedia research into modern South Africa later, I rewatched the film with a more up-to-date understanding of the issues facing the region today and it plays like a different (and much better) film on a second pass.

So it comes down to this. You can have great fun watching District 9 as a campy straight-up Sci-Fi with loads of gore and nasty black humour ….or you can view it as a complex allegorical treatise on modern race relations and humanity's unending appetite for self-destruction.

In order to discuss the deeper themes plumbed in District 9, a basic understanding of the plot's start point is necessary. In documentary/newscast flashback, we told that a massive alien ship arrived over Johannesburg in 1982 and hovered some 1000 feet above for over two decades. Why they came and how they became stranded is never explained. A mission is mounted to enter the ship and it is discovered that the aliens inside are in dire straits. They are starving and apparently unable to provide for themselves. The authorities make the area in the vicinity of the ship a holding compound for the visitors, where they feed and provide for them: District 9. They are fenced off from the rest of Johannesburg's population and detained in the squalid conditions of a shanty town. They are surrounded 24-7 by the military, ostensibly for their own protection but actually more out of fear. This fear is seemingly justified as violent clashes between the aliens and the human population begin to increase, leading to a decision to relocate the entire alien population, some 1.2 million, to a remote area 250 km. from the city. This is where the film opens.

A Catch-22 exists in cinema when it comes to dealing with matters of race. It's nearly impossible to write a script that delves in any substantive way into the issue without stirring up counter charges and claims of racism, a dilemma that certainly complicates a deeper reading of BlomKamp's script. Almost by definition, discussions about race are contentious - a subjective topic that more often than not divides opinion depending on the viewer's perspective. As a result, most movie scripts end up skirting the issue, avoiding it outright or offering up overly-simplistic examples where the lines are clearly divided along the good victim/bad oppressor theme. District 9 may be something of an exception to this rule. On the one hand it seems to be wearing it's rather obvious political stripes on it's sleeve but upon closer inspection it may indeed be saying something rather more profound and subversive.

Intentionally or not, there is a bleeding of pre and post-apartheid South African politics in the District 9 story line. On the surface it first appears that we are immersed in an allegorical pre-1994 South Africa, but as the story unfolds, much of the plot involves sociopolitical overtones from present day South Africa and it may serve the audience better to view this film as a post-apartheid parable about illegal immigration and Malthusian despair. (Malthus was an influential early 19th century writer who wrote extensively on matters of excessive population growth). The modern fable Blomkamp has fashioned here is a contentious and potentially explosive one – that black South Africans are prone to the saying and doing the same intolerant things that white Afrikaans were universally condemned for two decades ago. There are unpopular, politically incorrect elements of District 9 (specifically the portrayal of the evil Nigerian crime syndicate, among others) but we westerners have all but ignored the region since Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994 and it seems that the truth of the matter is rather more grim than you might hope. It seems that they didn't live happily ever after.

In order to properly contextualize the story in District 9, you also need to be aware of a couple of key political events in the recent past....

Political primer #1.... After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Afrikaans elite (aka: rich whitey) decided within three months to deal with the then-71 year old Mandela, confident that a black government wouldn’t be so influenced by the godless Commies as to immediately kill the capitalist goose that lays the golden (and diamond) eggs. The system that emerged has been fine for those whites rich enough to afford ample private security, but unsurprisingly bad for the Afrikaans working class, many of whom (including the director's family who reside in B.C.) left the country. Not surprisingly, the early decades of the new ANC government and a vanishing middle class have left the country corrupt, riddled with crime and flirting with anarchy. A sort of reverse ethnic cleansing has seen the country's skilled white middle class depart for safer havens and a vacuum develop in its place.

Political primer #2.... After 20 years of black rule, neighbouring Zimbabwe experienced a political meltdown/societal collapse in recent years that has left millions of refuges fleeing the country for the relative safety and financial promise of South Africa. This massive influx of refuges (3 to 5 million is the latest count) has caused a great deal of social unrest in South Africa pitting two black communities against one another.

In a recent interview, writer/director Blomkamp had this to say about the current state of affairs in South Africa:

“Another part of recent South African history that isn’t world news is that the collapse of Zimbabwe has introduced millions of illegal Zimbabwean immigrants into South African cities. … Now you have this powder-keg situation, with black against black … [W]e woke up one morning to find out that Johannesburg was eating itself alive. Impoverished South Africans had started murdering impoverished Zimbabweans, necklacing them and burning them and chopping them up.”

Armed with this information, District 9's political underpinnings make substantially more sense to the uninitiated and underinformed like myself. While the film is quite easily viewed as a piece of video-game escapism, the more interesting layers of the plot almost require a bit of background detail to help contextualize the story. Without this frame of reference, the film's allegorical side is all rather confusing. I understand why the film maker chose to shift the film into Sci-Fi fanboy territory and leave the more political aspects on the margins. It was probably the right decision. The fact that a sociopolitical context exists at all in District 9 is impressive enough.

Once this releases to DVD and a few others have had a chance to watch it, I'd be interested to hear what you thought of the film's trickier undercurrents.

Sporgey

Thanks...

As summer wraps up and we move back into the fall schedule, we'd like to thank all of you for your efforts this summer (and while we were away).

Good job all 'round kids.

Scott

Look out!

Death rides a pale horse.....

The broken Mickcycle is in your back yard Joe, under the railing. After I dropped it off, I drove across Queen Street to Lansdown and headed up to the house. I'd forgotten just how truly bizarre it is in that stretch of Parkdale. It was like the day of the living dead. Everyone in T.O. should be required to pass through there once a month just to remind ourselves how good our lives are. Wow. What an eye-opener.

Sporgey

Nikkatsu Noir

Even though the Eclipse Series is intended to be a conduit for lesser films, it's proving to be the more interesting slate of releases coming from Criterion these days. Their 17th boxset, Nikkatsu Noir is a collection of 5 crime dramas from the storied Japanese studio released over a ten year period from 1957 to 1967. The last film in the series A Colt is My Passport is a title I've wanted to see for a long time. It was shot and released in 1967, the year before the much-more-famous Seijun Suzuki directed cult classic Branded to Kill, also from Nikkatsu. Both films starred the era's icon of Japanese cool, Jo Shishido and in some ways, A Colt is My Passport is a thematic and stylistic prequel to Branded.

The film did not disappoint. It's may be a standard gangster story - an assassin completes a hit and is subsequently hunted by both his employer and the rival gang – but director Takashi Nomura manages to infuse so many styles and influences into this one that you can't help but think of him as an early Quentin Tarantino. If Jean Pierre Melville and Sergio Leone did a film in Japan, it would have been this one. The black and white cinematography is crisp and stunning. The action is over the top but played without irony. This may be a world full of betrayers, femme fatales, and untrustworthy associates, but the hero still holds to a code, a theme explored in some detail in the earlier French crime films of Becker, Melville and Louis Malle. This idea of a criminal code of honour began to erode in Japanese cinema over the next decade with the release of films like Battles Without Honor and Humanity and Street Mobster but it remains front and centre in A Colt is My Passport.

I mentioned Leone earlier because of the completely unexpected treat that is the spectacular Morricone-inspired score that drifts in and out of the film. The music adds immensely to an already terrific film and the end of the picture is right out of Leone's Spaghetti Western playbook.

I doubt many of you have spent much time exploring Japanese cinema beyond Kurosawa and that's a real shame. I can't think of a better or more satisfying period of cinema than the Japanese output from the late '50s to mid '70s. Interestingly, this boxset serves as a terrific entry point to a period of film making that rivals nearly any other and it is for that reason that I implore you to give any of these five films a shot, if only to get a taste of what you're missing.

A little suggested filmography from the period follows. I've tried to order them with some effort to making sense of the genre in thematic terms.

You could do worse than start with this one, A Colt is My Passport from 1967. I'd follow it up with Kurosawa's 1963 High and Low (if you've not seen it), or Zero Focus a terrific mystery from 1961 by director Yoshitaro Nomura. Rusty Knife from 1958 is also in the new Eclipse boxset and definitely worth a look. Things get a little stranger when you move to the works of Seijun Suzuki but Branded to Kill ('68), Gate of Flesh ('64) and Tokyo Drifter ('66) are all amazing, zany and nearly impossible to describe. After you prime yourself with the '60s stuff move to the Battles Against Honour series (5 connected and chronological films) from the mid '70s about the rise of the Yakuza from 1945 to then. Finally, a must-see trilogy from the mid '90s by director Kaizo Hayashi, The Most Terrible Time of My Life ('93), Stairway to the Distant Past ('94) and The Trap ('96) might be another way into the genre. These 3 films were a revelation when I first saw them and I think they would hold up.

Do yourselves a favour and give a couple of these a shot. They're the best series of straight-up guy movies ever made.

Sporgey.

Basterds of Inglorious nature...

I've been mulling over last night's screening I, along with Kendall, Jules, Tom, and Joe (otherwise known as the A-Team) attended of Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

I'll be quick with this one as i don't feel fully equipped with the right adjectives to properly describe how entertained i was.
For my money, not only the best film of the year thus far, but the more i think of it, it is becoming my favourite Tarantino flick.

The film is driven by it's wealth of characters, all are a blast to watch play on screen. From the blood thirsty Basterds, to the chip cheerio Brits, and the various ugly Nazi dogs there's a lot here to enjoy.

For a second there nearing the end i thought maybe the film was going into excess with its anger and then you remember "oh wait, they're Nazis... fuck em'."

Tarantino perfectly balances scenes rife with cartoon violence and humour with scenes wrought with tension and Oscar worthy performances. The stand out performance comes from Christoph Waltz who plays Nazi Col. Hans Landa aka "The Jew Hunter", who steals every scene he's in.
The ad campaign for the film is quite the opposite of what the film is. The ads would make you think that the film looks like a fun action romp where Nazis get massacred for a good hour and a half. After the opening scene of the film, which runs almost 20 minutes, that sees Col. Landa talking to a French diary farmer under the suspicion that he is harboring Jews you realize that you are in fact watching a FILM. More a drama than an action film, the film itself is compromised mostly of long scenes. i would say there's maybe 10 scenes in the whole film. All of which are exercises in stress, you wait biting your fingernails waiting for every scene to explode. The tension mounting higher and higher to a crescendo the likes only a master director like Tarantino (that's right, he is a master) can provide.

If you can, see this at the cinema DO IT. It's definitely worth it.

oh... and Brad Pitt was ok.

A few recent watches

Thanks to Judd Apatow, I'm now wary of films about youthful aimlessness. They've typically revolved around jerking off, getting laid, dildos, taking it up the pooper and not much else. Adventureland is a definite exception, a rare, truthful and pretty smart coming of age film that doesn't play every scene for cheap laughs or maximum shock value. It's got a Freaks and Geeks quality to it that makes it a worthy timewaster. Recommended.

After reading some solid reviews, Sunshine Cleaning however, was a bit of a disappointment. It's melancholy but not terribly moving, humourous but not all that clever and never quite gets around to telling us much about its characters hopes and dreams. A mediocre film at best and about half as good as Little Miss Sunshine.

Despite its cast (Val Kilmer, Sharon Stone, etc.), the bland and generic sounding Streets of Blood is, not all that surprisingly, a bland and generic crime saga. I don't know what happened to Kilmer – this guy use to be an A-list actor and I've always liked him. He seems mired in an endless string of crappy direct-to-video projects lately however. A shitty TV movie of the week with a tenuous connection to its post-Katrina New Orleans setting at best that should be avoided. Oh and 50 Cents is in it, as if anyone needed another reason not to watch this.

The best thing I've seen lately is a trailer for Mike Judges new film Extract. Looks great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0cbA5qTvBY

Tyson is worth a look too.

Sporgey

The Wire, Season 7

I hadn't realized until after we moved into Segredos that the electrical utility for Wallace Avenue is actually Hydro Zaire, where their aim is to keep the power on 24 hours.... a week. This past Thursday/Friday/Saturday was our 4th extended outage of 2009 and Hydro Zaire staff restored our power a mere 36 hours after it went out this time, a marked improvement over the last few outages. They must have got a direct flight from Kinshasa or something.

A massive tree branch rendered Segredos dark and powerless during Thursday night's storm leaving a few secondary hydro cables (including ours) laying across the road. The initial emergency crews and the City of Toronto forestry department removed the tree bits on Friday morning but the cables were still laying across the road and very possibly still connected at the pole (it was hard to tell). The cops put up yellow “do-not-cross” tape about waist high across the entire road allowance on both sides of the downed wire and from my vantage point in the forward machine gun nest, I began an all-day observation vigil on how the people of Toronto act during an emergency.

About 80 percent of the pedestrians simply ducked under the tape (and half of those stepped directly on the cable) and continued undeterred on their way across this temporary no-man-except-me-land. After about 15 people had stepped ON the cable and not slumped in a smoking, quivering mass of electrocuted jelly, I assumed the cable was dead. Where the wire ran up to the pole, a small triangle of open and clear territory on the opposite sidewalk served as the path most took to avoid the extra 45 seconds it would have taken to go down any of the 5 alternate routes and not cross the police tape. About 11am on Friday, the first of many vehicles drove up on the sidewalk and blew through the tiny triangular opening and onwards to the obvious emergency their actions implied. The cops came back around 1pm and positioned their cruiser across the road after receiving a 911 call (I assume from a neighbour witnessing the same display of abject stupidity as I was). I talked to the cop and mentioned that people were actually driving their cars through the tiny wireless opening to which she responded “ What are they crazy?” I suggested that few people were as well placed to make that call as a Toronto Police constable. She smiled and nodded. We shared the secret knowledge that the humans are indeed out of their fucking wee minds. It's a bond you can only share with others and it connects you with the handful of others that have survived the awareness holocaust of the last 20 years.

The cop's presence stopped all but one attempt by a driver to go straight on through the death zone. The cop had to physically stand in front of the car to stop them from driving up on the sidewalk and making their way around the cruiser and through the yellow emergency tape. The driver was incensed that he had to turn around. I'd have shot him. One little girl with her Grandmama actually pulled on the cable repeatedly like it was a giant skipping rope. Grandmama just looked on in splendid isolation. Only 40% of the pedestrians were now crossing, past the cruiser, stepping over the tape and continuing on their merry way. The cop stopped bothering to tell them they couldn't do this after about 30 minutes and sat slumped and dejected in the cruiser until the first Hydro Zaire van pulled up at about 4pm Friday afternoon. By this time I would estimate around 300 people had walked over the wire and 30 cars had ran over or under it (at least while I was watching). With big orange rubber gloves the Hydro dude disconnected the cable from our side of the road and coiled it at the base of the pole on the other side. I later asked him why the big cartoon gloves to which he replied, “So I don't get killed. That cable was still alive. It's still connected to the buss.” He pointed up to the wires overhead and sure enough they appeared to be connected. The ¼ inch of plastic insulating jacket on the cable had protected countless people from being zapped over the course of the day and each and everyone of them was oblivious to this fact. You know they would have sued Hydro.

The Hydro dude replaced the cop and sat in his van until 1am Saturday morning when, at hour 28, a Hydro Zaire underground repair crew of about 15 Belgium Congo guys showed up. They exited the two vans did a lot of furious pointing and gesturing and realizing that all of the cables in the area were overhead, packed back into their vans and vanished into the night. At 5 am Saturday morning as light barely broke on a new day the overhead crew showed up and by 6am we had power again.

I bring all of this up in a sort of nervous defense of the tone of some of the pieces in the latest Buff Review. Nobody's complained, but I'll admit to wondering if - taken together - some of the writing in it might seem a little overly critical of Torontonians. Any thoughts that I should have tempered it a little vanished watching the humans fuck around with a live wire for a day and a half on Wallace Avenue. It was the very incarnation of the “me-world” we've descended into. Rather than acknowledge and adjust their actions to protect themselves, they ignored police warning tape and marched right on through. If it was 5 or 10% of them, I'd write it off as you-can't-fix-stupid, but it wasn't. It was MOST of them. Young, old, male, female, fat, skinny, wealthy, poor, white, Asian, black – it didn't seem to matter. A dog wandered up the street, took one look at all the potential danger, turned around and went back the way he came, one of the rare examples of an actual cognitive decision-making process occurring on Wallace Avenue that afternoon.

It isn't helping my spirits these days having just finished Chris Hedge's new book Empire of Illusion, a must-read for the chronically-depressed that describes modern day western society as a veritable “clown-culture”. That's the nicest thing he has to say about us. Every single supposition offered in this hyper-critical treatise on our disturbingly banal and aggressively self-centred culture of social-network mediocrity was reinforced and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt from my purview atop Segredos this past few days.

I'm putting a pool in the basement and not leaving the house accept for midnight spins on my new bad-ass Mickcycle as soon as they're both finished. Howard Hughes was absolutely spot-on.

I think Hydro Zaire should rethink this cable insulation thing too. A huge opportunity to substantially thin the herd was lost by covering up the wires on our electrical service cables. I pictured myself hiding the smoldering dead bodies of closed-road runners and listening behind a rock like Wiley E. Coyote for the next unsuspecting “Mee-Mee!” (the call of the Torontonius Stupidius Maximus species native to this area). Instead of birdseed on a paper plate, I was thinking of putting an iPhone in the middle of the road to draw them into the deadly embrace of my Acme Electro-Dehumanifier. I thought better of it when I recalled Wiley E. always ended up getting run down by some giant asshole in an SUV that didn't feel it necessary to treat an intersection where the traffic lights are out as a four-way stop. Then a giant-ass rock invariably fell on him.

It would seem that my tiny umbrella is just too small to protect myself from the human onslaught so I'm just going to swim around in my basement and avoid them.

Sporgey.

Kiss Me Deadly, Part 3

Fate? A calling? I returned home last night to discover the all-time baddest-ass bicycle abandoned behind Segredos. Normally on Saturday nights, the Saab headlights illuminate some plastered Portuguese dude taking a piss against the wall but as I pulled into my parking spot tonight, this ugly broken-down contraption appeared - almost like a vision. I wheeled it's wounded carcass inside Segredos's outer ramparts, surveyed the awesome brutal beauty of it and instantly christened it “Mickey”, in honour of another previously spent pugilist that rose like a phoenix from the ashes to become awesome once again.

Boys... you have a new project. The restoration of what is clearly the most intimidating, most terrifying and most devastating bicycle ever to make an appearance on the Toronto's newly commissioned girly bike lanes. Money is no object. This is Satan's two-wheeled land-yacht and no expense shall be spared in returning it to its former evil glory. I'm thinking a Mad Max meets Pee Wee Herman death machine but I leave the details up to you. This bike is fear incarnate. It says “I fucking hate you and will run over you just to hear the screams” This was clearly the bicycle of a sadistic madman, so we'll need to change what it looks like fairly dramatically. If he finds it, God only known what he'll do to the current owner. I'd like Kadas's name and cell number engraved on it just to be safe.


Where should it be delivered Joe? When can the operations begin?

Sporgey.

Trick 'r Treat (2008)

Just got in from seeing the world premiere at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. I was mildly let down by this, but only because my expectations were so high. This film was supposed to have been released in time for Halloween last year, but after much hype and message board discussion, it was inexplicably shelved at the last minute (never a good sign). Not as good as I hoped it would be, but not as bad as I feared it might be, Trick 'r Treat was quite a bit of fun - flawed, yes, and uneven (and implausible) in parts - but fun nonetheless.

The film plays very much like the EC comics-inspired Creepshow and Tales From the Crypt episodes, but with a few unexpected twists, and playfully inventive turns on well-worn legends. Not really scary - or even gory - by any means (in fact, aside from a very brief bit of top-frontal female nudity, I can't think of anything else that would push the film above a PG rating), but pretty satisfying altogether. My partner said, "It's like a Halloween-themed Scrooged", and I'm inclined to agree. This one would be good to toss on perennially as the leaves turn red and yellow and orange and scuttle across the street, and the wind blows colder...

Not recommended for everyone, but if you a) dig Halloween, b) like anthology(ish) horror, c) don't mind a slightly empty-calorie cinematic feast every now and then, and d) are terrified of that guy from Happiness, you'll more than likely find something in this one to get into. I'll be picking this up when it comes out on DVD.

Talking with Tarantino

In great anticipation of tomorrow's theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino's new film Inglourious Basterds, here's a fantastic interview between Kim West and the director. Please - please - go see this one at the cinema; more than any others I can think of, Tarantino's films hugely benefit from being seen on the big screen with a crowd that wants to be there, the true believers. I'll be at the Rainbow tomorrow night for the 10:30 screening, say hi if you're there...
(hat tip to Jeremy at that always superb Moon in the Gutter for the interview link)

Do You Know Harvey?

Last Wednesday, a phone call came in to the FBE from Linda Matarasso, who was interested in shooting a scene or two for her in-progress doc about Harvey Lalonde, Toronto's film fest volunteer extraordinaire. I gave her the green light to shoot on Saturday, and Kris got to meet the gang as I was away sleeping on a forest floor and struggling to start a fire without any kindling in the pitch black. ANYWAY! Linda and Harvey came into the shop on Saturday morning and chatted with Kris, got an ice cream, then got to work. The yet-to-be-named doc sounds really intriguing, and ties in with my previous post on film festivals in the city. Follow Linda's progress on the film (including her day at the Buff) at her blog You Know Harvey, and do yourself a favour and check out the dreamy photo of Kris. Give it a look and throw some support at a super cool doc.

Best blog headlining image ever

Howling at the Moon

Toronto plays host to many film festivals throughout the year, from tiny fringe fests like the Macedonian Film Festival, Cabbagetown Short Film & Video Festival, Bicycle Film Festival, imagineNATIVE (among many, many others), to massive, globally recognized celeb j-o seshes like the Toronto International Film Festival. Film festivals are exciting, uniting, and invigorating. At their best, they can reaffirm our faith in cinema as a transcendental and thought-provoking art form, and at their worst, they can at least provide a conversation starter: "You mean you attended Breast Fest too?". Kris and I recently bought passes to the Midnight Madness program at this year's TIFF, which is always a trip; even if the film sucks the bag, there are bound to be some sort of peripheral shenanigans and/or substance abuse-fuelled mania that make the whole thing more than worthwhile. "CARNIVALE!!!"

One fest to which I pay particularly close attention is the always spectacularly curated Toronto After Dark Film Festival, a celebration of new horror, fantasy, sci-fi and cult film that started out a few years ago as a weekend shindig (but has now expanded to a full week), begins next Friday (Aug. 14). The fest is beginning to take on a mantle similar to Montreal's thus far unparalleled - for North America, at least - Fantasia, and that's saying a lot. Five years ago, when my partner and I lived in Montreal, I bought a 10 ticket package to Fantasia and it turned out to be one of the cinematic landmarks of the past decade for me. Unfortunately, I'll be out of town for a celebration of the end of spontaneous blow-jobs while playing video games, er, I mean, a wedding, on the Friday and Saturday, but you can bet your dick (or vag - we're mad equal-opp at The Buff) you'll find my ass in the grungy seats at the Bloor Cinema for many of the other screenings in the TADFF fest.

One of the awesome things about living in the city is the opportunity to go to the cinema at any time and be awed, altered, saddened, elated, entertained, frightened, uplifted, enlightened. The fact that I have all these opportunites at my fingertips at any given moment is something I take for granted far too often. That all changes now. Get thee to a cinema.

Gobots!

Found this little gem on Rochester's Tech blog http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Amateur-analysis-from-supposed-experts.aspx

Interesting reading.....

Sporgey


Hi. I'm Tom from TomsTechBlog.com. Here at TomsTechBlog.com, We strive to answer your questions about technology so you can be happier.

Last week we talked about making a standard DVD player into a magic box that will play everything from vintage Mexican 78rpm Mariachi records to warped 12” Panasonic Laserdiscs to 8-tracks. That was easy. Today we're going to talk about turning your bicycle into a robot bicycle! All you'll need is a bike and some scotch tape.

First you take your bike apart and make a robot out of the spare parts. I know how to do this because I did it in England, twice!. I'm also a media technology graduate and have a bike that I've named Benjamin so I've definitely got a leg up on you there. The hardest part will be building the gyro-slant balancing unit. I used my front fender, a rear reflector and part of the chain to make mine. It worked perfectly – just like it did back in England where it's legal for me to work. You might want to get one of these if you're not a technology graduate like me. http://www.robotshop.ca/arduino-lilypad-accelerometer.html

Okay....

Step one.... locate your bike. Here it is!



















Step two.... take it apart
























Step three...rebuild it to look like this - a proper UK robot bike!


























(Alternate Step three..... or this!)



Friends, you shouldn't be afraid of technology. I'm not! If you don't know something – just make it up! That's what I do.

Cheers!

Tom.

Gamorra

Gamorra is awesome, I've never seen a mafia movie that's actually anti-mafia. Goddfellas, Sopranos there great movies but in the end they glorify violence and crime Scarface being the biggest example. It's nice to see that Italian neorealism isn't completely dead , it's a style I really like and when done well the viewer is able to see into the live of real people. The movie is a great look at how the Camorra control life in Naples and the sourounding areas and it's devestating effects on the local populace, every thing about this movie is top notch but to me the acting the cinematography really stood out. Defiantly the best mafia movie ever made.

The Criterion Project

I was just scrolling through the Criterion titles on their website to see which titles we were missing, and it struck me going through the list how few of the films I have seen, or how long it's been since I've seen some of my favourites. I have decided to undertake a sort of self-taught whirlwind history of the cinema, beginning with spine #1, I plan to go through them in the order of their spine numbers, as that will be a little less tedious than doing them chronologically, and allow me to watch, say, John Woo's The Killer immediately after A Night To Remember. Who knows how long it will all last, but I feel like I've been getting lazy watching films lately and I hope this brings me back on track. No schedule or deadline per film; when I watch it, that's when I watch it. No rules, really, other than the spine number order. I'll try to post reviews after I've watched each film, and they'll probably be fairly short as most of these films have extensive criticism already available (indeed, many include novella-length booklets of essays and interviews pertaining to the film). So, first up will be Criterion title #1, Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion...

(Also, certain titles have gone out of print, although we have a copy in some form or other, perhaps not Criterion; this is perfectly acceptable, as it is merely the films I wish to see, and am not handcuffed to the label, merely using it as a guide and not a rulebook. Oh, and yes - I am going to watch The Rock and Armageddon...again).

People. Are. Lilac.

This is the disparaging nickname that the Americans gave the PAL (Phase Alternate Line) system back in the day. It was in response to England referring to the yanks format as Never Twice The Same Colour while the frenchies SECAM was dubbed System Essentially Contrary to the American Method. Funny and interesting no? Well jog on then.

DVDs come in both Pal and Ntsc here at the buff but what we really need to worry about is the kind of copyright control over 'regions' of the world, North America being '1' and Europe being '2' etc. However, (ALL *edit) MANY DVD players can play any region DVDs. They just need to be "Unlocked"

disclaimer: Do this at your own risk neither I nor the buff will be responsible if you drop your remote in a cup of coffee whilst attempting this.

Simply find the brand and model number of your player and google it along with "region unlock code" i.e. "Sony DVR150 region unlock code", with a little time and research you can quite easily find a code for most players. This usually involves some sort of sequence of buttons you press on your remote, et voila. An all region player.

Edit* According to stellar dingleberry Tim Curry:

"About 1/3 of the DVD players made today are Universal, the other 2/3's being either exclusively PAL or exclusively NTSC. Even after the Region Code is hacked, the players in the later category cannot play DVD's from the the other format. You have to specifically get a Universal player for that. They are often refered to as "Multi-Region" players to make matters even more complicated"

CINEACTION is a Toronto-based film periodical that I pick up from time to time. I've gotta admit that some past issues have been a little unwieldy – the articles seem intent on sucking any joy that cinema has to offer by intense over-analysis – but this latest one, possibly the result of it's accessible Superhero theme, is terrific. As I skimmed through it, I couldn't help but think back to Dropkick's defense of the Superhero genre and here's one of cinema's headiest periodicals doing the exact same thing. Kudos Kadas. Not much in the way of online content on their website but I'll bring the magazine over to the FBE when I'm done with it if anyone's interested.

I, Giulio

Wow, what a film....

Il Divo, from writer and director Paolo Sorrentino, is one of those rare movies that restores and reinforces one's faith in cinema. You need one or two of these a year to make wading through all the mediocre stuff seem worthwhile. The film sketches the later part of Italian politician Giulio Andreotti's life, from around the early '90s to date (he's still alive, now 90). His career includes being Prime Minister of Italy several times and the film's title is drawn, with good reason as it turns out, from a name given to Julius Caesar. Andreotti's party, the Christian Democrats, after ruling for most of Italy's post-war period, floundered in the mid-nineties - the result of a series of damning corruption and Mafia connection charges - and has subsequently disappeared from the political scene. The film is anchored by an outrageous tour-de-force performance in the title role by Toni Servillo. It starts with a bang - quite literally - at point zero, and continues to crank up a weird tension for a solid two hours. A barrage of information is thrown at the audience in rapid-fire succession that worried me out of the gates. Was I supposed to take all this info in? It turns out not to matter – the intent of the details is simply to establish how expansive Andreotti's influence and power was.

Interestingly, Il Divo is everything that Oliver Stone's W. wasn't – stylized, surreal, informative, creepy, funny and most importantly, not afraid to take a position on the film's subject. It also needs to be said just how important Toni Servillo is to the film. His portrayal is simply astonishing and amongst the most nuanced and enigmatic performance I've had the pleasure of seeing. The score is excellent, the locations breathtaking, and the whole thing is brimming with an intensity and reckless excess that makes it hard to tear your eyes from the screen. It's big, complex and brilliant.

I don't know when it releases on Region 1 DVD (the one I watched is a UK PAL import), but this will be a sure-fired winner when it does. With Gomorrah and now this film, here's hoping that we're witnessing a bit of a renaissance in Italian filmmaking. They're two of the best films I've seen this year.

Sporgey

Tom is a big nob

It would seem the only way to get any exchanges flowing around here is to make some derogatory remark about someone, or comment on their spelling. Rather than contain all this fun to the comments pages, I decided to move my latest volley to a top-level blog post. My contention is noted in the title. Your misspelled/grammatically-challenged comments are most welcom. Stay tuned for my BSG Part 47 review titled; "Kendall can be a bitchy little Cylon at times" post in the next few days.

S

BSG Review, Part 46

After a self-imposed, 3 year cell-batical, I admit to being pretty stunned by the technological wallop packed into “smart” phones these days. It's a little like peering into a future that's already arrived. Coincidentally, I also just finished the final season of BSG, a series that - at its core - is a cautionary reflection on (and warning about) the perils of unchecked technological advances.

BSG's dystopian vision of humanity probably seems more important than it really is, but the series is distinctly (and by definition) a present-day construct, a pop-culture dissection of the trends and possible futures of a global society with right now as its starting point. Regardless of BSG's place in the science fiction canon, it's hard not to be impressed with the scope and thought that went into the series. To be frank, about half of it is well-packaged rubbish but the other half is though-provoking Sci-Fi at its finest. The series worked best when it was stripped down to pure survival mode. What needed to happen, who stepped up and who didn't when the chips were down made for great story telling and BSG excelled when the writers concentrated on the challenges of this struggle. When it wandered off into quasi-religious mode, the series noticeably deflated and became a bit tedious at times.

While it isn't integral to the BSG story arc, the brief glimpses offered into Caprica before the fall are underdeveloped and if BSG had a plot hole, this is it. For all the “beware-the-machine” rhetoric of the series, the rift at the core of the conflict goes strangely unexplored. Having seen the opening volley of the new series “Caprica”, which is set in the period when machines develop a consciousness (of sorts), I gather that the series' creators felt the same way. We'll have to see where they go with it. That being said, the vague cautionary tale about technology that BSG circles around might be deliberate and gives the series the benefit of allowing the viewer to imprint whatever they want on the warning. Depending on your perspective, the show could be about the automobile, big oil, the nuclear industry, the military, Apple or any of a dozen other things. Regardless of the rotating metaphor, what was evident during these pre-war-life-on-Caprica flashbacks, was the airy indifference displayed by its citizens to the pitfalls associated with their technologically advanced society.

Which brings me back to my new “smart” phone. The increasingly ubiquitous wireless world of cell phones, Twittering, text messaging, iPods, and other personal communication tools has grown exponentially in recent years and it's changing our society in ways we haven't begun to understand. Our individual and collective behavior is shifting to align with these new forms of interaction in both good and bad ways. The sheer accessibility to information, knowledge (and maybe more importantly, each other) also manifests itself in increasingly conflicting ways. We've all tried to have a verbal discussion with someone so completely immersed in their cell/text world as to become nearly impossible to engage with in the real one. Their attentions are difficult to maintain because they can't stop texting and twittering long enough to focus on an analog discussion. The huge irony of course is this - for all the new communication lines opened to them by their wireless devices, the cell-outs have lost their ability to communicate using the one they're born with. Amongst nearly all the converts, there also seems to be little realization that their most intimate communication is now modulated and controlled by third parties, a particularly troublesome relinquishment of their right to (and need for) privacy.

What I took to be the essence of the BSG story line was the danger associated with unchecked faith in technology. Granted they took it to a metaphoric extreme – the machines rise up and kill us – but the story is not new. It's been done countless times before - from H.G Welles to Planet of the Apes to The Terminator series, but at their core, these tales are all about the same thing.

In a way, BSG took the easy way out. By making the machines the aggressor, the show's creators removed human culpability from the equation, at least in any direct way. At worst, the humans were presented as a combination of arrogant and blissfully ignorant. The Cylon Frankenstein they created simply rose up and mutinied against their masters. It might have been interesting if they had explored the idea that benevolent passivity in a society addicted to a mode of communication that sometimes lessens rather than expands real discourse was ultimately to blame for its downfall.

Out of interest, I think that's where we are right now.

Sporgey.