An image from "The Host": It all depends on how you look at it.
I kinda wish I'd had girish's Toronto. I saw some great stuff -- "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" being my favorites, and was also impressed with "Volver," "Shortbus," "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and a few others. Not bad, but (as I wrote earlier) not as overwhelming as last year. I steered away from most of the big commercial titles (except for "Borat"!) and concentrated on some of the high-profile foreign and "specialty" films, including some that had attracted attention at Cannes. In other words, titles I thought readers of Scanners would be particularly interested in.
Girish, on the other hand, followed his bliss and... well, here's his assessment of his Own Private Toronto:
Of the eight TIFFs I’ve attended, I think this year’s was probably the strongest. Unlike last year, I took my laptop with me and fully expected to blog the fest, but it turned out that many of the films I saw were not so casually bloggable. I’m still trying to figure out how to think about many of them.
Of the twenty-five films I saw in Toronto, there were two flat-out masterpieces: Jia Zhang-ke’s Chinese diptych "Still Life"/"Dong"; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s "Syndromes And A Century" from Thailand. Other favorites: Pedro Costa’s "Colossal Youth" (Portugal); Alain Resnais’s "Coeurs" (France); Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s "Climates" (Turkey); Abderrehmane Sissako’s "Bamako" (Mali); Sophie Fiennes’ "The Pervert’s Guide To Cinema" (UK); Hong Sang-Soo’s "Woman On The Beach" (S. Korea); Bong Joon-Ho’s "The Host" (S. Korea); Jafar Panahi’s "Offside" (Iran); etc.
I had most of those on my "want to see" list, but they got bumped by other screenings or time I spent blogging from the fest. I'm hoping I'll be able to catch up with many of these (and I'll have to look up that Mali film in the catalog).
So, out of the "10 days, 352 films, and 27,747 minutes" of the 2006 TIFF, has anybody else had time to digest/recover? How was your Toronto?
"After 10 days, 352 films, and 27,747 minutes," a Toronto International Film Festival press release announces, the "People's Choice Award" (bestowed in recent years upon such films as "American Beauty" and "Tsotsi"), went to "Bella," an American film directed by Alejandro Gomez Monteverde. The Prize of the International Critics (FIPRESCI Prize) was awarded to the British film "Death of a President," directed by Gabriel Range "for the audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth."
More prize winners here. And I'll be posting more of my own thoughts about this year's frestival in the next few days.
"Beauty is overrated": Patrick Wilson to Kate Winslet in "Little Children."
What are your expectations about the second feature directed by Todd Fields (Nick Nightingale in "Eyes Wide Shut") after "In the Bedroom"? Ditch them -- a smart thing to do before watching any movie. If "In the Bedroom" was the child of Chabrol (specifically "La Femme Infidel"), "Little Children" takes a sample of Todd Solondz's DNA. I don't think it's giving away anything too important to say that "Little Children" is a melodramatic tragi-comedy (co-written by novelist Tom "Election" Perratta, based on his novel), and that the title refers not so much to wee ones who have been born recently as to the immature young adults who are now faced with raising their offspring.
It's a funny, frustrating, even infuriating film -- and at Toronto people seemed to either love it or hate it. I know I did. It just depended on the scene. I think I appreciate it more now, 24 hours later, than I did the moment it was over. It's an odd film, with a wryly intrusive, deep-voiced narrator who appears to be standing just behind the screen reading excerpts from the novel.
View image Wayne Newton and Suzanne Pleshette -- er, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore stud the all-star cast of "Bobby."
We're told that Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" takes place at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, but it feels like it was originally released back around then. It's "Earthquake" with the RFK assassination as the disaster. It's "Airport." It's "The Towering Inferno." A whole bunch of familiar actors play "colorful" characters swarming around the hotel, and their day will culminate in the death of a Kennedy. They talk about the movies -- new stuff like "The Graduate," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Planet of the Apes" -- but a retired doorman played by Anthony Hopkins explicitly invokes the model for "Bobby" and and its ilk: "Grand Hotel," the 1932 picture with Greta Garbo and an all-star cast. And "Bobby" treats the assassination as an event as strangely distant from its own present-tense as "Grand Hotel" was from 1968.
Sure, the requisite modern political parallels are present, as they are in virtually every film at the Toronto Film Festival this year. On the screen, on TVs in hotel suites, over the soundtrack, are actual speeches and sound bites from Democratic senatorial candidate Robert F. Kennedy, talking about how the country has lost its way in the quagmire of Vietnam, and championing rights for minorities and low-wage workers, etc., etc., etc. (It comes as a bit of a shock to remember that politicians were once articulate and sounded like they knew the meanings of the words they were saying.)
But why make "Bobby," which screened at the Toronto Film Festival as a "work-in-progress"? Why turn this traumatic national event into a Hollywood soap opera? The performances are fine for this kind of glitzy manufactured melodrama ("Where Were YOU When They Shot RFK?"), and on that level it's swell, trashy fun. It's just that the whole concept is inappropriate.
JT Petty's "S&MAN" (pronounced "sandman") is a little like "The Blair Witch Project" in that it starts off as a documentary about a filmmaker making a documentary, and then turns itself around on the viewer. (Also in the way it uses the web as an extension of the movie.) Petty himself has made transgressive horror films ("Soft Digging"), and he'd originally planned to make a doc for HDNet about a video peeping tom who got away with his crime because the neighbors he'd been spying on didn't want his footage made public if introduced as evidence in a trial. But (o, irony!) the peeper wouldn't agree to appear on camera. A person has a right to some privacy.
So, the movie Petty wound up making instead incorporates interviews with academics, psychiatrists, and underground horror actors and filmmakers that explores the line between horror and documentary, and the sado-masochistic aspects of both.
Professor Carol Clover, author of the seminal (sorry) "Men, Women, and Chain Saws" -- and some of the horror filmmakers themselves -- talk about their sensitivity to the mistreatment (or apparent mistreatment) of animals on the screen because, as Clover puts it, that feels to her like an "unmediated" experience. Footage involving humans, no matter how horrific, is still "mediated" because unless you can be certain -- and you rarely can -- that it's a genuine snuff film (like terrorists beheading their captors on the Internet), you can be reasonably sure it's not "real."
The DNA of "Black Sheep," the New Zealand silly, tepid horror-comedy (accent on the second; it's not the least bit scary), traces back to "The Howling," "The Birds," "Night of the Living Dead" (and "Dawn of the Dead") and "An American Werewolf in London" -- with a spot of Lou Jacobi in "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex...." I don't know that anybody in America would want to re-make a movie about genetically altered killer sheep (suggested titles: "Mutton Mutants" or "Baaaad Blood"), but I kept imagining what Joe Dante could have done with this premise. Rather, what Joe Dante ("Piranha," "Gremlins," "Homecoming," the aforementioned "The Howling") already has done with it.
An evil factory-farm sheep rancher named Angus (see, if it was an American movie it would have to be about beef) irresponsibly experiments with genetic engineering on the sheep farm he inherited from his father -- mostly so that he can name a new breed of Frankensheep after his family bloodline: The Oldfield. His lamb-o-phobic brother returns to the farm to sell off his half of the business and quickly get as far away from those docile white fluff-pots as he can. Meanwhile, Angus's horrid -- and, as it turns out, rabidly carnivorous -- mutant sheep are spread into the general population by a pair of idiotic eco-activists who have no clue about what genetic engineering is. (One: "This isn't going to be like the salmon farm is it?" Other: "Those fish died free!")
"Death of a President," the documentary-style speculative fiction about the assassination of the 43rd President of the United States, is seamless, intelligent and maybe even necessary to an understanding of George W. Bush's role in the world today, and his place in the wider scope of history. Especially when public awareness of the facts about his administration lags so far behind what has already been documented.
Written and directed by Gabriel Range, this very convincingly staged television "documentary" falls into a tradition of fictionalized British films (going back to Peter Watkins' famous "The War Game" and "Punishment Park" in the early 1960s) that use nonfiction techniques to explore contemporary social and political issues. Range himself made a film in 2003 called "The Day Britain Stopped," about what might happen if public transportation came to a standstill. Before that, he made "The Menendez Murders" (2002), described as another form of docu-drama.
The scenario is a familiar one: What would happen if a much-hated world leader was killed in office? Since the failed assassination attempts on Adolph Hitler, fictions imagining how things might have changed with the elimination of one powerful figure have fascinated historians and the public. How could they not?
We all know that three four U.S. presidents have been assassinated, and that every president faces that threat every day. Gerald Ford, one of our most benign chief executives, survived two murder attempts in the month of September 1975 alone -- and he was never as divisive and generally reviled as Bush Jr., whose methods and ideology have been vilified as Hitlerian in real-life speeches and demonstrations that we've all seen already. (I'm speaking only about the real-life hatred the man has evoked worldwide, not the aptness of the Nazi comparison or whether such virulence is justified by his words and actions in office.)
1) I haven't seen a bad film yet at the 2006 Toronto festival, but I haven't experienced the ecstatic highs of last year, either, when "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," "Brokeback Mountain," "Cache," "A History of Violence," "Capote," "51 Birch Street" and a few others made it feel like a cinematic renaissance was sweeping town in just a few days.
2) The official festival trailers before every film that I (and many others) complained about last year are vastly improved this time, mainly because the one with the festival logo itself lasts only about five seconds. That's a merciful relief to those of us who see it so many times.
But by this point in the fest, some are beginning to protest the Motorola sponsorship trailers that show a few seconds from various unbelievably inane "short films" shot on cell phones. At the "Red Road" screening this morning, a woman loudly blurted out: "I hate these things!" People laughed in approval. At another press/industry screening (I forget which one now), somebody in the dark proclaimed: "These are so bad! The critics agreed.
3) An amusing pass-time for regulars waiting for movies to start has been to guess the significance of the festival's poster image, the outline of a face with two red swatches where the eyes should be. In the animated trailer, the red things are wings that flutter down and alight on the eyeless visage like a crimson butterfly. But to me, the guy looks like Oedipus with buckets of FX blood gushing out of his sockets. Or maybe he's Mercury, and the victim of some artistic confusion about the where the ankles are located. Some new kind of trendy rose-tinted glasses for sale on Bloor Street, perhaps? Or a Scotsman? Another critic told me she thought it was supposed to represent what your eyeballs feel like after watching four or five movies at a stretch for several days.
If you have any interpretations of your own, please leave a comment!
View image Three tales in "The Fountain": Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz.
There's nothing tepid about Darren Aronofsky, and I love him for it. "The Fountain," his grand mythical fantasy that interweaves three tales about the fear of death and the quest for eternal life, is a terrifically ambitious spectacle that Aronofsky commits to completely. I have no idea how critics and audiences are going to receive it (I never do), but it's exhilarating to see somebody go this far out on a limb for his vision.
Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz appear as versions of the same characters in all three narratives. Dr. Tommy Creo is research doctor studying brain tumors while his wife Izzy (or "Iz," as in "is") is dying of one; as Spanish conquistador Tomas Creo, serving Queen Isabella during the 16th century terror of the Inquisition, who is sent on a quest for the Tree of Life in a story called "The Fountain," written by Izzy; and as some kind of monk/space traveller hurling toward a nebula with the ancient tree in what looks like an interstellar snowglobe, haunted by the ghost of Izzy.
Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" is that rarest of cinematic rarities, a fully and flawlessly realized fantasy film. It's also, as of today, my favorite movie of the dozen or so I've seen in Toronto. Layers of imagery and storytelling fold back on themselves to create a completely formed world. And, best of all, it's a fairy tale that has not been prettified or bowdlerized for kids. It stakes out imaginative territory much closer to the fantastic visions of Bergman or Cronenberg than to those of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien. (The R rating for "graphic violence and some language" should tell you something. I think the film earns its R -- though I'm sure there are plenty of kids under 17 who will love it -- but I'd prefer that the R be attributed to "gruesome imagination.")
It's 1944, after the Spanish Civil War, and the fascists under dictator Francisco Franco are fighting the insurgents (or rebel "freedom fighters," as the film portrays them). A little girl named Ofelia is taken by her pregnant mother to live with her evil fascist stepfather, Captain Vidal, at a military installation in an old mill in the forest, next to an ancient stone labyrinth. Ofelia longs to join her real father, now dead, and to sit at his side as the princess of a fantasy kingdom. Insects, faeries and a faun appear to her, claiming that she is the long-lost princess they, and her father, have been waiting for.
The cast of the Oscar-favorite film, "Home for Purim."
"For Your Consideration" -- Christopher Guest is blessed with the finest comedic stock company since the heyday of Preston Sturges. Guest, Catherine O'Hara (Goddess of Funny), Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, John Michael Higgins, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley Jr., Michael Hitchcock, Paul Dooley, Jim Piddock, Larry Miller... I get a thrill just seeing them share screen space in various combinations (and this time they've added Ricky Gervais and Sandra Oh to the mix). Every few years when they get together (the last time they were together was "A Mighty Wind" in 2003), it's like seeing old friends for whom you will always harbor a deep and abiding affection. Here's hoping they keep reuniting for many movies to come.
In "FYC," the subject isn't so much the movie industry (Guest already made the best American dissection of the contemporary film business back in 1989 with "The Big Picture") as the awards and publicity industry. We join a film in production -- a kind of kosher Tennessee Williams melodrama about a Jewish family in the South during the war, called "Home for Purim." Somebody on the web (or the "World Wide Internet" as the typically clueless HollyLuddites call it) claims the lead actress (played by O'Hara), an '80s sitcom star who's been virtually forgotten by the public and the industry, may be giving an "Oscar-worthy" performance, and a rumor is born that (as in "The Big Picture") takes on a life of its own.
View image O, say, can you see Borat? For what he is?
The New York Times headline about all the political films in this year's TIFF was: "At the Toronto Film Festival, Liberal Politics As Usual." David M. Halfbinger of the Times cites Barbara Koppel's Dixie Chicks documentary and the fictionalized doc about the assassination of George W. Bush ("D.O.A.P." or "Death of a President") in his round-up of evidence to support his thesis that Toronto "has been all but overrun with films attacking President Bush or the protracted war in Iraq — in subtle ways and like sledgehammers, with vitriol and with dispassionate fly-on-the-wall observation."
This may well be true (even though, as some would quickly point out, it is in the New York Times); I don't know because I haven't seen most of the films he lists (yet), though I'll probably get to a few. But I'm mildly surprised that he doesn't mention the two most scathing attacks on the Bush regime that I've seen so far: Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" (in which the Franco Fascists fight the local insurgents) and Sacha Baron Cohen's and Larry Charles' "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." OK, Halfbinger does mention "Borat," but mainly to say that Michael Moore was at the midnight premiere, where the projector broke down.
Before I forget to mention it explicitly: Yes, I loved "Borat."
View image Christian Bale in Werner Herzog's "Rescue Dawn."
For the first half of Werner Herzog's "Rescue Dawn," the fictionalized movie based on his documentary 1997 "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," I wasn't sure if Herzog had tamed the commercial feature or if it had tamed him. By the end, I felt it was the most harrowingly realistic and unsentimentalized P.O.W. film I'd ever seen.
The story is "inspired by" Dieter Dengler, an American Navy pilot (born in Germany) whose plane crashed in 1965 in Laos, where there wasn't supposed to be any bombing and before there was a "War in Vietnam." U.S. "military advisors" were there, supporting the South Vietnamese, but as far as most Americans were concerned, "war" hadn't broken out. Dengler survived the crash, was captured by Laotians, and held in what he and his fellow captives believed to be a Viet Cong camp. By the time Dengler arrived, some of the handful of Americans and Vietnamese interred there had been detained for more than two years already.
View image The ManuLife Center (glowing beacon in the middle of the shot), where most of the Toronto Film Festival press and industry screenings are held.
The hallway of the Varsity Cinemas, with theaters on both sides.
What's missing from these pictures? I'l tell you what: Roger Ebert! Many festival regulars have been saying it feels weird not seeing Roger around town this time of year. And in that respect, we're already anticipating Toronto 2007. David Poland at The Hot Blog expresses the sentiments of no small number of us on this morning:
Roger’s name comes up often as many of us gather in this annual reunion tour, as it is rather sad to have a festival without him. He missed his first George Christy luncheon in 22 years this year. But his gathered friends all applauded his improving health and look forward to seeing him next year.
View image Slavoj Zizek in the wake of Melanie Daniels, crossing Bodega Bay in a small motorboat.
At 150 minutes, in three parts, "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" (catchy title, no?) is probably the fastest-moving, most shamelessly enjoyable film I've seen in Toronto so far this year. There is no story, and only one character -- but what a character he is. He's Slavoj Zizek (more precisely, Žižek), Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, and he comes across as a delightfully unhinged Freudian maniac, the sort of heavily-accented mad doctor who might narrate an Ed Wood movie. But, believe it or not, he's the real thing. (I Googled him to be absolutely sure, and now I can't wait to read more of, and about, him.)
And what he does as narrator of this film (directed by Sophie Fiennes, sister of actors Ralph and Joseph) is talk -- and talk and talk and talk -- about movies. He's terrific at it, too. Turns out the good doctor is quite the cinephiliac (with a strong Freudian/Lacanian bent, natch), and in what feels almost like a two-and-a-half-hour free-association, he lets his brilliant and facile mind wander through many of the greatest films ever made -- with a heavy concentration on Hitchcock (emphasis on "Psycho," "Vertigo" and "The Birds"), David Lynch ("Lost Highway," "Blue Velvet," "Mulholland Drive," "Wild at Heart") and Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris," "Stalker"). One image, one idea, flows into the next, which makes for an intoxicating strain of film criticism.
This isn't quite the first film of this sort ("A Journey Through American Cinema with Martin Scorsese" springs to mind) -- but there ought to be more. The genre of movies about movies -- in-depth appreciations and evaluations of films that go beyond clip reels like "That's Entertainment!" into something deeper and, well, more entertaining -- is something I hope will blossom over the next few years. It's something I've been thinking about a lot: Film criticism needs to expand beyond mere words, and make better use of other media, including the web and film/video itself, where the images themselves can be seen while they are analyzed.
View image: Come blow your horn: Justin Bond sings "We All Get It in the End" at the end of "Shortbus."
The camera soars over a wonderfully colorful handmade model of New York City, popping into one window after another. At the tip of Lower Manhattan is a blood-red scar with two square lesions: Ground Zero. "Shortbus," John Cameron Mitchell's feature follow-up to "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," takes place in a fantasy New York -- a place of sexual healing and forgiveness -- located not in any precise geographical zone or erogenous zone, but between two temporal landmarks: September 11, 2001, and the blackout of 2003. In between, through brownouts and breakdowns, Mitchell posits a place of healing and humor and light and lots and lots of sex.
I suppose it wouldn't be wrong to say "Shortbus," the most celebratory and least prurient of movies, is about sex as a metaphor, but I think that's looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. (Speaking of which, voyeurism -- and therefore, cinema -- is an essential component; as our host, or Brothel Madame, Justin Bond says, welcoming a newcomer to his multi-chambered orgiastic party for the sexually gifted and challenged: "Everybody must participate. But don't be afraid to watch. Voyeurs are participants, too!") This really is a movie about sex -- and essentially a comic movie about sex (because nothing we do is more ridiculous or fraught with anxieties) -- but it's not sex as a stand-in for something else; it's sex as everything else that sex is.
There's full nudity and hardcore sex galore, but the movie's attitude toward all things sexual is less dirty than those twin beds in Rob and Laura Petrie's bedroom, precisely because nothing is prohibited, everything is permitted -- if you feel like it at the moment. Bond puts it this way: "It's like the sixties, but with less hope" -- a line that's already (and justifiably) become famous.
If you recall "The Origin of Love" from "Hedwig," the myth about how people were originally split in two and spend their lives looking for their missing halves, then you get the idea. Whatever it is these people are looking for -- love, liberation, intimacy, orgasms -- it's about yearning to find some form of completion, or resolution, through sexual congress.
View image Three Women of "Volver": Sister, niece/daughter, sister.
The dry east wind that howls through the little village in La Mancha where Pedro Almodovar was born, and where his latest film "Volver" begins, brings with it unease, fire and insanity. In the opening shot, it blows crisp dead leaves across marble graves, while women dust and polish the stones. Sometimes, they even come by to clean their own graves. It's just another housekeeping chore.
View image Wandering, lost, in the desert of "Babel."
"Babel" is the very model of a modern major motion picture about the inter-connectedness of people around the globe, speaking different languages in different countries and socio-political situations. The problem is that it remains a model for a movie, a contrivance. I was somehow reminded of the fantastic -- even sympathetic -- mutant creature from "The Host" turning into the flat, washed-up, dead sea monster from the end of "La Dolce Vita." "Babel" has the very best of intentions, and tries very hard, but cannot bring them to life. What I mean is, it left me cold. (And I cried almost all the way through the writer's last picture, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," because those feelings of lives tangentially but profoundly inter-related were so beautifully realized.)
After the screening, a film critic friend compared it to last year's "Crash" -- but quickly took it back, admitting it's not as painfully schematic as that. The intertwined stories concern: 1) a family of goat herders in Morocco, who come into possession of a gun for shooting jackals that threaten their herds; 2) the Tokyo businessman who originally gave the gun as a gift to a nearby villager while on safari in Morocco, and his deaf daughter, a schoolgirl who is desperate to lose her virginity; 3) an American couple (big names Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett -- both excellent) who have come to Morocco after their youngest son has died of SIDS, and who are plunged into the middle of an international incident -- though left feeling terribly alone -- when "terrorists" (actually one of the kids with the new rifle) shoot at their tourist bus and severely wound the woman; 4) the Mexican illegal caretaker of the American couple's two other children, who takes them with her to her son's wedding in Mexico when nobody else can look after them for the day.
I confess, I was interested in following each one of these threads, but by the end of the movie I felt the overall tapestry amounted to less than -- what should I call it? -- the aggregate of its warp and woof, I guess. I had reason to expect something more substantial and resonant from Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of "Amores Perros" and Guillermo Arriaga, the writer of that film and (especially) "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" -- the best movie of last year's Toronto Film Festival, of last year in general, and (for my money) of the 21st century so far.
ADDENDUM Just remembered something else I wanted to say about "Babel," an example of what's missing. The deaf Japanese girl and a friend accompany some boys to a Tokyo club, where a remixed Earth, Wind & Fire song blares over the sound system so loud that I could feel it in my chest. Yet, when the movie cuts to the girl's POV, there's no beat. In fact, she would feel the vibrations the way anyone else would, and I was surprised the movie didn't attempt to portray this (if only through the sub-woofers on the digital sound track). This struck me as a key failure of empathetic imagination, and a hackneyed portrayal of deafness, especially for a movie that claims to be about experiencing life through others in disparate circumstances around the world.
"The Host" (or "Gue-mool," which sounds better) is a South Korean monster movie in which a mutant amphibious creature swims beneath the Han River, scampers among the girders beneath its bridges, prowls its sewers, and occasionally leaps onto its banks to grab some human souvenirs. The creature is just doing whatever it's bred -- or mutated -- to do, but the monsters who created it, and who mischaracterize the nature of the threat, thereby making the thing practically impossible to catch or contain, are Americans -- portrayed as the world's most aggressive exporter of bureaucratic incompetence and misinformation.
In the first scene, set in 2000, a U.S. military official in scrubs (Scott Wilson -- setting the funny/horrific tone for the entire movie) directs a reticent Korean subordinate to empty potently toxic chemicals into the Han. After all, it's a big river. By the end of the film, a Senate investigating committee finds that the U.S. bungled the whole thing, and then compounded the damage by covering it up. Imagine.
Of course, the lives affected by this particular adventure in imperialistic hysteria aren't Americans, but Koreans -- in particular, the comically fractured Park family whose patriarch runs a riverside refreshment stand. On the political as well as the horror/science-fiction level, this time it's personal. The marvelous creature (part squid, part gecko, part salamander, part sandworm, part vagina dentata, created by San Francisco's The Orphanage), snatches the youngest Park (a uniformed schoolgirl of 13), and the rest of the clan reunites to avenge her.
Director Bong Joon-ho shifts tones with quicksilver dexterity, cannily keeping the audience (and the film) just on the edge of losing its balance and splashing into the Han. Humor turns to horror and back again in a flash, while generic requirements are both fulfilled and cleverly overturned. Even the pathos works, because it's a little bit cock-eyed. How does the movie do all this? Must be something in the water...
Born out of a suicide (a friend of the filmmaker's) and an attempted suicide (the filmmaker's own), "2:37" is a movie 20-year-old Australian Murali K. Thalluri never intended to write or direct. It just came out that way.
"2:37" is a suicide whodunnit. In the course of one day at school, multiple character perspectives, and a maze of Steadicam shots that virtually trace those in Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," we catch glimpses from the lives of several kids, any one of whom could turn out to the one in a puddle of blood on a restroom floor at 2:37 in the afternoon. (I wonder if the title isn't also a reference to Kubrick's Room 237 in "The Shining," another film drawn with a Steadicam.)
Though they appear to attend a big school, each of these kids feels utterly -- at times disconsolately -- alone. Even when they're surrounded by friends, the bonhomie is forced, superficial. Hey, it's high school. (As a friend said after the screening: "I guess it just shows that Australian high school is as f---ed up as American high school.") Emotions -- big emotions -- pass through like storms on any spring day. And that's part of what Thalluri is getting at: There's a whole catalog of After School Special subjects here (sex, drugs, other physiological and psychological problems) but any one of them, even the most trivial, could be the trigger for a suicide attempt.
The film flows naturally around its central contrivance, employing unforced performances by unprofessional actors and a visual style that uses available light to pull you into the worlds these students inhabit. The black-and-white reality-show style interviews with the kids are unnecessary, and the movie will no doubt be be met with charges of "derivative!" when compared unfavorably to Van Sant's masterpiece. But, even if I hadn't read the press notes (after the screening), I'd still admire the authenticity and unerring behavioral observations of "2:37."
(Side note: "2:37" was a 2006 Cannes Film Festival selection; "Elephant" won the Palme d'Or and the Prix de la mise en scène in 2003.)
View image The intersection of Bloor and Yonge on another night. (photo by Jim Emerson)
Here's the way my festival began: I was returning to my hotel room after dinner, around 8:30 Wednesday, the night before screenings began for the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. It was almost dark and the streets and sidewalks were crowded, everything lit up with the ambient glow of store signs and an advertising jumbotron looming over the major intersection of Bloor and Yonge Streets. A pair of police officers were standing in the street, directing traffic to clear the way for some motorcycle cops who rode through with their blue and red lights flashing. Farther down Bloor, more sirens and lights were approaching. The vehicles wailed as they turned, heading south on Yonge, followed by hearse after hearse after hearse after hearse.
"It's the soldiers," somebody said. Heads nodded. The cops in the street saluted as the limos made the curve. People on all four corners stood silently -- not stiffly or formally, but attentively, while the significance of the black parade soaked in. The procession passed and the two cops climbed on their motorcycles and rode on. The light changed, and we were on our own again, so we walked.
View image The intersection of Bloor and Yonge on another night. (photo by Jim Emerson)
Here's the way my festival began: I was returning to my hotel room after dinner, around 8:30 Wednesday, the night before screenings began for the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. It was almost dark and the streets and sidewalks were crowded, everything lit up with the ambient glow of store signs and an advertising jumbotron looming over the major intersection of Bloor and Yonge Streets. A pair of police officers were standing in the street, directing traffic to clear the way for some motorcycle cops who rode through with their blue and red lights flashing. Farther down Bloor, more sirens and lights were approaching. The vehicles wailed as they turned, heading south on Yonge, followed by hearse after hearse after hearse after hearse.
"It's the soldiers," somebody said. Heads nodded. The cops in the street saluted as the limos made the curve. People on all four corners stood silently -- not stiffly or formally, but attentively, while the significance of the black parade soaked in. The procession passed and the two cops climbed on their motorcycles and rode on. The light changed, and we were on our own again, so we walked.
There's nothing I hate more than a review that's mostly plot description -- unless it's a movie that's mostly plot. To me, movies are primarily about images, and after that, behavior, emotions, ideas, and so on. If there's a story in there, swell, but for me, story is the MacGuffin, the excuse that seems important when you're watching the movie, but which turns out to be just a tiny part of the experience when it's over.
So, I've always tried to avoid anything beyond the most basic statement of a film's premise, and perhaps a description of its main characters, when writing about movies. Which is why I'm so disappointed that so many of the entries in the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival catalog ($34.17 Canadian -- though the US exchange rate is practically even now) give away far too much.
I know it's tough to write these things (I did it for years in Seattle). You have to describe enough to make the movie sound enticing enough to potential ticket-buyers. But this is a festival, and one of the glories of a festival is getting to see something that hasn't already been pre-sold and ruined by giveaway trailers and TV spots. So, to cite just one example, if anybody's intending to see "Day Night Day Night" in Toronto, don't read the catalog description!
I'm getting ready to leave for the Toronto Film Festival and will be filing (and blogging) from there over the next couple weeks. Press/industry screenings start Thursday!
