TIFF 2012: Part 5

Men at Lunch & The Central Park Five

By coincidence, I saw these two New York-centric documentaries back-to-back.  

The former is about the famous 1930’s photograph of the construction workers sitting on a steel beam, casually having lunch despite the dangerous position that they’re in.  The latter deals with a criminal case in the 1980’s where five teenage boys were wrongly convicted for the sexual assault of a jogger in Central Park.

Both of them portray New York as a place where many cultures come together, and sometimes clash, but I thought The Central Park Five did a better job of it.  The five subjects are all very well-spoken, and through their interviews, you come to understand the racial tension that existed in New York at the time.  By the end of the film, it’s a real relief that they were exonerated, but at the same time, you still feel angry and sad that they wasted so many years in prison.

Men at Lunch, on the other hand, does not have the same narrative strength.  Essentially, it tries to tell the story of who those men on the beam were, but since nobody knows their identities for sure, it settles for making them into symbols of the many Irish immigrants who worked in construction at the time.  That’s fine, but the film gets a little repetitive, and keeps telling us how brave they were, how hard life was during the Depression, how the construction workers shaped New York as a city, &c.  I found it especially awkward when they tried to draw a connection between those men, and the men who are working now to build the new World Trade Centre tower.  The 9/11 scenes seemed a bit out of place and exploitative to me.

Rating:

Men at Lunch: 5/10

The Central Park Five: 7/10

Thale

Towards the end of the festival, I get a little tired.  I might have enjoyed this one more if I saw it earlier in the week.  I realize that it’s a low-budget movie, and I respect what they did technically.  Thale has some cool horror moments and some cool action moments, but maybe that’s the problem: it doesn’t feel like either a horror film or an action film.  I couldn’t really get into the story because I didn’t know what the characters were after.  But again, I was pretty tired.

Rating: 5/10

Tai Chi 0

This, on the other hand, was a much more suitable pace for a weary festival-goer.  It’s basically a Chinese kung-fu film, mixed with the style of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (e.g., whenever someone does a kung-fu move, the name of the move is shown in stylized text on the screen), with some steampunk thrown in.  Cartoonish action at its finest.  It’s the first film in a 2-part series, so structurally, it’s a bit off: what you think will be the final battle is actually just setup for the sequel, which makes the previous battle the actual final battle, and a little unsatisfying.

Rating: 7/10

TIFF 2012: Part 4

I’m going to go with a shorter, “rapid-fire” format today.  I’m just tired, okay?

Disconnect

Reading the description, I was a bit concerned that this would turn into a morally unsubtle “the Internet is bad” type of story.  I was pleasantly surprised that it doesn’t focus too much on the Internet itself; the Internet just a device to incite events and get the story going, and then mostly stays out of the way.  The focus stays on the characters, which is as it should be.  The characters sometimes behave in unrealistic ways in order to increase the drama, but I thought it was effective and was caught up in the film.

Rating: 7/10

Antiviral

A lot of the pleasure of watching this film comes from trying to figure out how the premise works.  I didn’t read the description beforehand and I don’t know what it gives away, but I’m glad I went in not knowing anything.  Unfortunately, once the premise is set up in the first act, the movie didn’t do much to keep me interested.  There are some cool and creepy visual moments, but I couldn’t really understand any of the character motivations, and I didn’t really care what happened to them.

Rating: 5/10

As If We Were Catching a Cobra

A documentary about political cartoonists working during the Arab Spring sounded like an interesting premise, but the execution was a bit lacking.  All the film is is a series of talking-head interviews with various cartoonists and artists.  There was nothing really visual or cinematic going on, so it’s just watching people talk and reading lots and lots of subtitles.  It was too much for me for an early morning screening, so I walked out, which is a rare occurrence for me.  Maybe this material would make for a good book, though.

Rating: waived because I didn’t see the whole thing.  But really it’s like a 3 or a 4.

The Bay

I keep telling myself that I’m tired of the whole “found footage” thing whenever I see one (I keep watching them though), but this one felt like a fresh experience.  Usually, found footage films have to jump through hoops to justify why there are cameras present, or they just don’t justify it and everyone is left thinking “why don’t you put down the camera?!” the whole time.  The Bay avoids this by mixing different camera sources, e.g. A TV news crew, security cameras, police car dashboard cameras.  Because of this variety, it often feels more like a well-edited suspense film than a found footage film.  It definitely kept me in suspense, although in hindsight, the “monsters” themselves are a little bit silly.

Rating: 7/10

Smashed

Good performances all around, but I thought this story about a young woman with a drinking problem oversimplifies its characters.  I didn’t feel like there was much depth to them beyond whether they are drunk or sober, and what they think about other people being drunk or sober.

Rating: 5/10

Much Ado About Nothing

Wesley and Fred.  Enough said.

Rating: 8/10

TIFF 2012: Part 3

Blancanieves

I’m going to have trouble talking about this film (actually talking, verbally, I mean, not writing about it), because I can’t pronounce the title properly.  It’s Spanish for “Snow White.”  Maybe I’ll just call it “Snow White,” okay? Okay.  So anyway, the movie is an adaptation of the Snow White story, transplanted into 1920’s Spain, and in particular, into the world of matadors.  It was the “Golden Age of Bullfighting,” the director said in the Q & A.

The fairy tale reference is both a benefit and a detriment to the film, in my opinion.  While it does add an other-worldly quality to the characters (especially the bullfighting dwarves), some elements felt like they were shoehorned in, like the poison apple, and the eternal slumber.  I thought the story was strong enough to stand on its own without having to hang it on the framework of an existing fairy tale.

Rating: 7/10

Byzantium

There’s something a bit cheesy about the whole vampire thing, and how they’re supposed to be all mysterious and ethereal and romantic.  Byzantium has that cheesiness, especially during the flashback scenes, which tell the origin story of the two main vampire characters.  The Victoria-era costumes and sets are well-produced, but they’re, you know, cheesy.  I think it might have bothered me more if I hadn’t recently been watching a lot of similarly historical scenes done with a lower budget on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (lower budget = more cheesy).

Stylistically and visually, I enjoyed the film, but I had some problems with the narrative.  The aforementioned flashbacks are interspersed throughout the film, and the origin story arc is supposed to parallel the modern-day storyline. But about halfway through, I had already pieced together the mechanisms of how the characters became vampires, and after that, I was just waiting for what I already knew would happen to play out.  As a result, I thought the flashbacks were starting to get in the way of the present narrative, and slowed down what is already a deliberately-paced movie.

Rating: 6/10

No

Speaking of cheesy, the 80’s were.  Cheesy.  Specifically, the media output of the 80’s (e.g. TV commercials, movies, etc.), when watched today, can often evoke cringes and bursts of awkward laughter.

The subject matter of No could have made for a very dark film—it follows a group of advertisers as they create TV commercials encouraging voters to vote against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile’s 1988 referendum—but the fact that the commercials they create are 80’s commercials adds a lot of humour.  There is a real danger involved (any election organized by a dictatorship is going to be fraught with corruption and threats) but when the anti-Pinochet “No” advertisers express their incendiary political ideas of freedom and democracy through commercials featuring dancers dressed in Day-Glo Spandex leotards, backed by synth-pop beats, it’s hard not to laugh at the contrast.  The filmmakers behind No have perfectly achieved a balance between humour and solemnity.

Rating: 8/10

TIFF 2012: Part 2

Dead Europe

Not too much to say about this one, other than that it’s not very good.  The story follows an Australian man as he travels to Greece to spread his immigrant father’s ashes.  He discovers some secrets about his father’s past, which are supposed to be dark and troubling, but we never really learn why the father acted the way he did.  The film instead relies on some unsubtle arguments between characters to establish that yes, there are disagreements between Palestinians and Jews, and between Catholics and Jews, and that yes, these disagreements are a part of European heritage and history.  Then we are just meant to transplant this information into our understanding of the father’s actions, and feel moral outrage or anger or something.  But there’s no real connection between the characters and the dreadful racist things they say, so I ended up not feeling anything at all.

Rating: 4/10

The Sessions

Not too much to say about this one either, other than that it’s very funny.  The three stars (John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy) are great, and funny.  It was so funny that I feel like I missed half the lines in the movie because the sound of the crowd laughing drowned out the dialogue.  I should watch this again at home so that I can actually hear what’s being said, and it will probably be even funnier.  Did I mention it’s very funny?

Rating: 8/10

The Girl from the South

If this was a Hollywood biopic and not a documentary, it might have gone a certain way: a youthful, idealistic girl engages in political activism (in this case, it’s for the reunification of Korea); gets the attention of the government in a bad way; overcomes hardships (like being in prison) while continuing to fight for her cause; and eventually becomes a hero, and a symbol for what’s right in the world.

The beginning of this documentary feels like it’s going to follow that plot.  The director, José Luis García, was in North Korea during a youth festival in the 80’s and filmed the “girl from the South”, Lim Su-kyung, during her press conferences and rallies.  The archival footage is very well-shot, and I kept wondering why this movie was only being released now.  It turns out that the more interesting part of the story occurs in the present day, when the director returns to Korea.  I think he is hoping to find that the girl (now woman) is still continuing her activism.  While Lim does still do a political radio show on the Internet, she’s become more subdued, and private.  She seems not to want to be on camera, and keeps taking the filmmaker to dinners in large groups, so as to avoid talking to him directly.  When García finally gets to interview her, it’s like pulling teeth as she keeps deflecting his questions.  She certainly still has her political opinions, but she’s no longer the charismatic and gregarious girl that she was as a student.

In a way, the movie becomes a story of how a person can change.  Lim does not live up to the symbol that she was supposed to be.  Whether it was the suffering she went through in prison, or the tragic accidental death of a family member, or just age, something changed her and made her into a real person, and not a stock character in a film.

Rating: 7/10

TIFF 2012: Part 1

The Deep

When I mentioned to my friend that I was seeing an Icelandic movie about the sole survivor of a shipwreck, he said, “So it’s like Cast Away, but cold.”  For about the first half of the film, this isn’t far from the truth.  Following an exciting marine action sequence depicting the accident, we see the man alone in the cold and dark ocean, struggling to swim.  The feeling of isolation is very powerful.  To combat loneliness, he even talks to a bird (instead of a volleyball).  Throw in some 127 Hours-style flashbacks and hallucinations, and it’s a dramatic, harrowing experience.

The second half is more subdued, and follows the aftermath of his ordeal.  There are two threads going on: one deals with his feelings of survivor’s guilt, and the other deals with the scientific improbability of his survival in low temperatures.  Neither of these threads is particularly satisfying (and the latter’s conclusion essentially boils down to this: he’s fat, and that’s why he survived).  The aftermath lacks tension, and has the feeling of a denouement, but lasting for half the duration of the film.

Rating: 6/10

Shanghai

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the whole of this film because I had to get to my next screening.  (When planning a schedule for TIFF, I seem to forget that I can’t teleport directly between seats in two non-adjacent theatres.)  Therefore, I can only comment on the setup of the film, which isn’t about Shanghai at all, but rather an Indian town that is about to be heavily developed by a large architecture/construction conglomerate.  There are those who oppose the builders because the locals will be losing their land, and the leader of this opposition group is involved in a motor vehicle accident which is probably not an accident.

From there, a small ensemble of characters try to find out what happened and who’s behind it, &c.  (During the investigation, the accident is replayed several times from different perspectives, which I morbidly enjoyed perhaps more than I should have.)  The setting, interconnecting plots, and political intrigue reminded me of the novel Sacred Games in a good way.

I guess I can only credit the film for making it hard to leave early.  I really wanted to find out what happened…

Rating: waived

9.79*

I’ve never seen one before, but I’ve heard that ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series is well worth watching, “even if you don’t like sports,” as is often made a point of.  After seeing this film about the 1988 men’s 100m Olympic final, I can see why.  It’s well-paced, and combines humour and drama so that by the time the race is shown (for the second time; the film opens with the race, and then repeats it later after introducing the participants and the various relationships and rivalries between them), you really feel what’s at stake, or at least what the runners feel is at stake.

Everyone must have been aware going in to the film that Ben Johnson later lost his medal and record because of his use of P.E.D.s, and in the queue before the movie, my friend and I were talking about who was guilty (Johnson) and who was innocent (Carl Lewis) and how wouldn’t it be ridiculous if Johnson himself showed up for this?

“He would get booed out of the theatre,” I said, and I meant it.  He was a cheater and a villain, after all.

To our surprise, he really did show up for the Q & A after the film, and received a somewhat enthusiastic round of applause.  I found myself applauding too.  Not that I have any great love for the man, but maybe the film showed that the situation was more complex than I previously thought, and that there were circumstances outside of Ben Johnson’s control, and maybe the morality of sports doping in general is not so black and white anyway, and besides, at least the guy told the truth in the end. To make one rethink one’s assumptions is all one can really ask for from a documentary film.

Rating: 7/10