I saw two different movies today with a scene of a girl brandishing a tennish racquet as a weapon — Son of the Sunshine and Pinprick.

Nice rainy Vancouver morning today for the beginning of VIFF.

In alphabetical order, the films I am most eager to see:

• Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo: This documentary sounds awesome.


• Everyone Else: If this film by Maren Ade is half as good as her last film, The Forest for the Trees, it will make my top ten list for this year.


• Gigante: I tend to like movies about surveillance.


• Letters to Father Jacob: I can’t wait to see the latest film by Klaus Härö, director of Mother of Mine.


• The White Ribbon: This year’s Palme d’Or winner, directed by Michael Haneke, who already ranks as one of the best directors of this century because of Caché.

The festival is past the half-way mark and I haven’t found time yet to blog about the films I’ve seen — because I’m too busy seeing films. Just about everything so far has been pretty good; nothing I’ve hated and nothing I’ve thoroughly loved. My favourites so far are Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé); Giulia Doesn’t Go Out at Night (Giuseppe Piccioni); Flash Camera Movie (Sebastjan Henrickson); and Antichrist (Lars von Trier).

My biggest laugh reading through the TIFF official programme guide this year was the opening of the description of Last Ride:

Every few years a film comes along wherein every element works, leading to a completely realized piece of cinema – Last Ride is one of those films.

Okay, so every other film at the festival this year has some element that does not work, and is not a “completely realized piece of cinema”? And presumably no film at the festival last year or the year before was “completely realized” either, since it’s just every few years that such a film comes along.

I am in Toronto for the film festival. I had been intending to see two dozen or so movies this year, but there was too much I couldn’t resist so I have tickets for 29. In the first couple of days, on my schedule are Backstory/Cinema Museum, Antichrist, I Am Not Your Friend, The Good Heart, and The Ape.

Currently playing at the Ridge, Pour elle is the best thriller I’ve seen in ages. It begins with a young couple eating breakfast with their five-year-old son and getting ready for work, when the police bust in, arrest the woman for murder, and search the place while the five-year-old cries. You could find out more about the plot, but it’s better to go into the movie not knowing. Vincent Lindon and Diane Kruger are fantastic, and the pacing is perfect.

Some other movies I saw recently:

La Fille de Monaco: Very disappointing. Well, technically I shouldn’t even call it disappointing because I thought from the trailer that it would be bad, but then I read the description of the movie that there was a mystery in it, and “things are not as they seem” or some such thing, but that turned out to be a lie, things were exactly as the seemed, and the film was a bit preposterous and thoroughly dull.

500 Days of Summer: Good film, definite props for effective use of a drastically nonlinear chronology. The problem was that during the film I kept thinking of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which of course also told the story of a failed relationship by use of a nonlinear chronology, and of course was much better than 500 Days of Summer.

Parlez-moi de la pluie (Let It Rain): Reasonably interesting French film about two guys incompetently making a documentary about a politician.

Tokyo Sonata: The best Japanese film I’ve seen in a few years, although the plot is not entirely original; there was a French movie a few years ago with the same premise, L’Emploi du temps or Time Out.

Sin Nombre: Set in Central America, in the world of crime, gangs, and illegal migration, the film has an interesting narrative structure but was not entirely successful; I found myself confused until half-way through.

Crossing Over: For some reason I hadn’t heard of this apparently big-budget movie that stars Harrison Ford, but it turned out to be surprisingly good.

The Pool: Set in Goa, light but clever film about a teenage boy obsessed with a swimming pool at the neighbouring property that nobody ever swims in.

Un baiser s'il vous plaît (Shall We Kiss?): Engaging French film, structured as a story within a story, and sometimes a story within a story within a story, about kissing, intimacy, and infidelity.

The Hurt Locker is opening this weekend; I strongly recommend it. See my comments here.

I liked Moon but it’s too bad that the trailer and most reviews spoiled one of the plot twists. Nevertheless a provocative science fiction movie; Sam Rockwell is great.

Whatever Works was pretty disappointing after a good start. Usually I like Patricia Clarkson but this movie went way downhill as soon as she appeared. Actually it was heading downhill before that. I did like the first ten minutes or so.

Summer Hours (L’Heure d’été): a great film by Olivier Assayas.

Séraphine: I liked this but I got the impression that it was following the documented facts too slavishly. Maybe I’m wrong but it just felt that the events at the end happened without a reason. The film is about real people and in real life it may have been that there is no known explanation for what happened, but if that’s the case, it would have made a better film to depart from that and give some kind of foreshadowing.

While watching the new Star Trek movie I was enjoying it quite a lot, but the more I think about it, the more problems I see. First of all, could they not have given this movie its own name? Giving it the same title as the franchise, with no subtitle, just causes confusion (especially since there was already a film, in 1979, titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture).

Stop reading here if you have not seen the movie and don’t want to see major spoilers.
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When It Was Blue: A thoroughly engrossing film made by overlapping two 16mm films. The images are often recognizable, sometimes abstract, but never boring. I strongly recommend this; it plays again tonight (Friday) at 9:30. 9

Sheltered Life: I have seen a lot of boring films at VIFF this year, where all I could think of during the film was “when is this going to end”. Sheltered Life was not like that; it was completely watchable and interesting, but nevertheless not quite successful. Something seemed off about the geography of the movie; the script and actors suggested an Ontario location, but some scenes had obviously been shot in Vancouver. It gave the movie an artificial feel, reinforced by the style of acting (which you often see in Canadian movies and TV) that is more theatrical than cinematic. Questions kept occurring to me about how the characters were moving around. 6

The Romance of Astrée and Céladon: This movie was just so stupid, I kept think that Rohmer must be playing an elaborate in-joke, but I couldn’t figure out whether he was mocking the audience, movies in general, or himself. By the end I was wondering if he was intending to be serious; if so he failed completely. 3

Heaven’s Heart: A clever little Swedish drama, about two married couples. You find out at the beginning of the movie that one of the couples is getting divorced, then the action moves back several months to reveal why. The style is to use many close-ups, and it works because of what it catches in the faces of the actors. 8

Sonetàula: Long and slow; moreover, the first three-quarters of the movie had a remarkably dull colour scheme (mostly faded blues). I didn’t like this much. 3

The Hollow: I did not understand this film at all. Admittedly I fell asleep for 15 minutes or so in the middle, but I didn’t understand it even before that. A few interesting moments, but only a few.

Possibility of an Island: I didn’t understand this film either, and I stayed awake for the whole thing. It kept reminding me of that terrible Aronofsky film, The Fountain. 4

I spent today at the Ridge; was intending to see four long films but walked out on the last one. The others were worth while however:

The Rest Is Silence [Restul e tăcere]: Taking its title from a line in Hamlet, The Rest Is Silence is an excellent Romanian movie dealing with the early days of cinema. The main character, the arrogant but likeable Grig Brezianu, turns to directing silent movies after he is rejected from the theatrical academy. His father, a leading Romanian stage actor, tells him that it would be shameful to work in the movie industry, explaining that there are so many respectable jobs available, like selling fish or cleaning streets. Eventually Grig enlists a wealthy compatriot to produce his dream project, an epic about the Romanian War of Independence. The film is 140 minutes, but there was only one brief segment where I thought it dragged; the rest of the film was highly engaging. 9

La Graine et le mulet: I think the title of this film is supposed to have a double meaning, not reflected in the English title The Secret of the Grain. Regardless, this is a very strong film. I assume it was largely the result of improvisation; it has that loose sort of feel, which in this case works amazingly. The film is 2½ hours long and at the end I wanted to see more of it. Many brilliant performances, particularly Habib Boufares as the main character (a laid-off shipyard worker looking to open a restaurant on a boat) and Hafsia Herzi (as his step-daughter). It reminded me of Big Night. 10

Firaaq: This movie reminded me of Crash. Quite sad, but I liked it. 7

Paruthiveeran: I wanted to see this film on the strength of the glowing review (“elemental cinema” etc.) from the Financial Times excerpted in the VIFF program guide. Unfortunately, I don’t care for the acting style, where all lines are screamed instead of spoken. I also did not find the characters relatable and found the plot hard to understand. I walked out after an hour, and the movie was not even half over by then.

Parking [Ting che]: I really liked the lighting in this Taiwanese film. I liked the rest of the film as well; the story was engaging if sometimes overly jumbled, but in addition to that the cinematography stood out; the way yellows, greens, and browns were mixed in many scenes near the start of the film was beautiful. 8

Revanche: I was wondering how to pronounce the title of this movie; the VIFF staff and people in line were all pronouncing it as if it were a French word but I was half-inclined to pronounce it “re-VANN-chee” (like ‘Comanche’) because after all the movie is not in French. But it turns out that, at least according to Merriam-Webster, the recommended pronunciation in English is similar to the French word. The film itself is in German (taking place in Austria) and according to a couple of online dictionaries (Bertelsmann, Beolingus), ‘Revanche’ is a valid German word, pronounced as in French. The word means ‘revenge’, a concept that figures into the film, although somehow it never seems central. The film has a very unusual structure; its first forty minutes are about a Ukrainian woman and her life as a prostitute, and then the film changes locale and becomes something much different. Of course the first forty minutes do lead into the rest of the movie, but it seems odd, the narrative is chronologically linear but just does not fit into the conventional model of a movie screenplay. You could perhaps compare the structure to that of Advise & Consent (whose director, Otto Preminger, was also Austrian). As for the movie itself, it has kind of a haunting quality. There is plenty of plot but it still seemed to move slowly. But I am still thinking about it a day later. There was one scene near the end where the protagonist throws something into a pond and immediately afterward there is a gust of wind that makes the pond shimmer; I wonder whether that was purely coincidental, or was it a CGI effect, or was it set up some other way. During the film itself I found myself looking at my watch quite a bit (the film is 121 minutes); the film is simultaneously boring and interesting. Also the theatre (Granville #3) seemed to smell of bug spray which was making me sick, or maybe I was just imagining it because of the tone of the film. 8

Cosmic Station: A 30-minute documentary directed by Bettina Timm about a research station on a remote mountain in Armenia where astrophysicists study energy patterns coming from distant galaxies. Kind of a weird film, with many scenes of women at the research station preparing food: putting meat in a grinder and then wrapping it into little cabbage-leaf dumplings. There were interviews with the scientists about their work as well, but the focus seemed to be on the isolation of everyone working there. Ultimately I don’t think the filmmakers quite made their point, I wish they had been a little more explicit about what they wanted to show. The first few minutes of the print were very scratched up; I thought it might be intentional, because the scratches seemed to have some sort of pattern, but it probably was just damage. Or maybe the pattern of scratches on the print was supposed to be symbolic of the energy patterns that the scientists were studying from outer space? 6

The Lost Colony: An interesting topic: the Sukhum Primate Research Centre in Abkhazia. It once was a model of Soviet science but suffered damage when Georgian troops invaded the breakaway republic of Abkhazia in the early 1990s. The film documents the organization of an 80th Anniversary conference at the primate centre; it could be pretty interesting to see how an international scientific conference gets organized from within a country (Abkhazia) that has de facto independence but is considered by the world to be part of another country (Georgia). Unfortunately the film does not delve deeply into that issue, maybe the politics were so touchy that the filmmakers were not given access. One of the questions pondered by the film is, what happened to the monkeys that left during the attack? Is the “lost colony” of monkeys still living somewhere in the Abkhazian countryside? Or did they perish in the winter? The film does not solve that question. All in all, a pretty interesting film. 7

Here are the media screenings I caught this week:

The Wrecking Crew: This is one of those documentaries that you’d probably enjoy if you are already interested in the topic, but if you aren’t interested already then the film won’t change that. The subject matter is the group of ‘session musicians’ who played in the studio on a huge number of rock and pop records in the 1950s and ’60s. According to the documentary, the musical stars of that era did not play the music on their own records because they weren’t good enough; in essence The Beach Boys (and other big-name American groups as well as lesser names) were performers, not musicians. For recording the music in studio, the record companies needed professionals who would play the music well and get it finished quickly, without wasting studio time. Some of these session musicians were known as “The Wrecking Crew”; the film focuses on half a dozen or so individuals in that group who played on many (perhaps most) of the well known rock albums of that era, without getting credit on the album. The director of this film is Denny Tedesco, son of the late Tommy Tedesco who was a key guitarist in The Wrecking Crew. I found it surprising that so many well known rock groups did not play on their own records, but after making that point the documentary got boring for me because when it gets down to it I don’t have a huge interest in the history of rock music. 5

The English Surgeon: This is a fascinating BBC documentary about Henry Marsh, a London neurosurgeon who spends a large amount of time in Ukraine doing pro bono operations and helping a colleague there work within the poorly-funded and sometimes corrupt medical system. In a brilliant move, the documentary introduces Marsh drilling precise holes into planks in his backyard, talking about how much he likes working with wood while he makes his own packing crate to ship second-hand medical equipment to Kiev. Later in the documentary we see Marsh drill into people’s skulls instead of wood. Some questions: I was a bit confused about the story with one of the patients, Tania, and I also would have liked to know why the hospital in London made the decision to discard this medical equipment which Marsh brings to Ukraine and says is still perfectly usable. But all in all this is a top-notch film; it reminds me of the cogent medical writing by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker. 8

Passage: This documentary originally was going to be a fiction film about John Franklin (an explorer whose expedition to find the Northwest Passage went missing in 1845) and John Rae (another explorer who went out searching for Franklin and his men). The filmmakers then chose to make a documentary, incorporating some of the scenes of the original drama as re-creations, along with scenes of rehearsals and the actor who portrays John Rae preparing for his role by travelling to the Arctic and learning from Inuit experts how to build igloos and so forth. In addition there are interviews with historians as well as various types of round-table sessions. It kind of felt like three different movies mashed together; some of it was interesting but at 107 minutes I felt it was too much. 6

A Sense of Wonder: This film is just 55 minutes but I found it so unbearable that I walked out after half an hour. The subject is Rachel Carson, a science writer who died in 1964. Carson wrote some bestselling books on environmental subjects. The movie has an actress portray Carson, delivering lines taken from Carson’s autobiographical writings. Unfortunately, the actress tries to make the writing seem conversational and spontaneous, so that the resulting product is laughably artificial.

Blind Loves: An interesting Slovakian documentary about blind people in, or looking for, romantic relationships. The film was a bit cagey about how much was set up and how much was candid, and I thought the film could have been tightened up somewhat, but overall it was pretty good. 7

Largo: The worst movie I’ve sat through all year. This is kind of a variety show at the Largo night club in Los Angeles, with a lot of comics of whom only one (Sarah Silverman) was funny, as well as various musical acts that did not appeal to me. Filmed in black and white I suppose in an attempt to make it look more interesting, the movie seemed interminable and I couldn’t wait for it to end. 2

Burned Hearts: The program guide says that with this film “Moroccan cinema has come of age” but I’ve seen Moroccan films much better than this one. For the most part it was a broad, artificial type of acting that came across as amateurish, and it took me a while to distinguish the flashbacks from the modern-day scenes. I slept through the last twenty minutes or so.

Fifty Dead Men Walking: According to this article, the version of the film shown at TIFF is different from an earlier version to which Martin McGartland (the subject of the film) objected. I am curious to know what the earlier version was like and how they managed to edit it (in particular, was there any additional material shot, or was it just a rearrangement of existing material?). In any event, the film itself is just okay; to some extent I felt that I had seen it all before, thinking particularly of The Departed, which of course was much better. Also it was distracting that with all the actors putting on thick Irish accents, and the poor sound system at the Ryerson venue, I had trouble making out much of the dialogue. The style of the film looked like it was trying to achieve the same thing as Domino, although of course Tony Scott did it better. 6

A Woman in Berlin: Interesting idea for a film, based on a diary published anonymously in the 1950s, written by a German woman during the initial occupation of Berlin by Soviet forces, when most of the men were sent away to prison camps in Siberia and the German women left behind were subject to rape by Russian soldiers, taking revenge for the atrocities committed during the war by German forces against Russia. The film made a bit more sense after the director explained, during the Q&A, that he had been trying to stay true to the diary which did not have a specific plot but was in fact a real diary. An interesting idea, but I got impatient with the film and the lead performance did not draw me in. Dozed off for a minute or two a few times, especially toward the end. 5

Parc: I think I dozed off a little during this film, not for too long but just 10 or 15 seconds at a time. It’s now nine days after I saw it; I sort of remember the movie, mostly not being interested in it, and I don’t remember the movie as well as I remember the mistakes made by the TIFF French-English interpreter at the Q&A. 4

The Hurt Locker: The best action movie I’ve seen in years. This movie should be controversial, if anyone really pays attention to it. It shows the adrenaline rush of war, and why some soldiers crave war, while emphasizing how horrific it is. Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie are amazing as the leads, and all the supporting actors are good too (including Evangeline Lilly, whose acting here is better than on Lost). As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, I am a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow’s movies, and I think this is her best. 10

Tale 52 [Ιστοριά 52]: I liked this film although on a different day I might not have. It’s one of those films like The Machinist or Mulholland Drive where nothing seems to make sense; you ask yourself whether what you are seeing is the character’s fantasy, dream, or hallucination, or is there some supernatural or science-fiction explanation like time-travel? Or will we get to the end of the movie with no explanation at all? In Open Your Eyes (in my opinion the best of this subgenre) and The Machinist, we get an explanation at the end of the movie that pretty much sorts everything out into something consistent. In other movies, with no such explanation, I often have the impression that the filmmaker really had no coherent vision for the film, but just a whole bunch of cool ideas, and decided to mash them all together cryptically hoping that someone in the audience would see a brilliant work of art. In Tale 52, even though we never get a coherent explanation, I still am satisfied that the filmmaker knew what he was doing. It doesn’t have the exceptional acting of The Machinist but Tale 52 mostly managed to hold my interest, with various curiosities like a repeated game of Greek Scrabble. It even pokes fun at itself by having the characters talk about a movie they went to where somebody fell asleep. The trailer is on YouTube or at the film’s official web site. You can also watch the director’s Q&A at Rotterdam. Tale 52 has a lot of originality even though it isn’t stupendous. I will definitely be interested in seeing the next movie by director Alexis Alexiou. 7

Killing Kasztner: Very good documentary about an interesting and complicated subject. Kasztner was a Hungarian Jew who saved thousands of Jews from the death camps by negotiating with the Nazis in 1944. He emigrated to Israel and was assassinated in 1957 by an Israeli extremist after being accused of having collaborated with the Nazis. The documentary, directed by Gaylen Ross, explains this story while chronicling the attempts of Kasztner’s descendants to rehabilitate his name and establish him as the greatest Jewish hero of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the film also has several interviews with the man convicted of murdering Kasztner, who was released from prison after seven years. I felt that there were a few important questions that the film did not delve far enough into (such as the contents of various affidavits Kasztner swore) but this somewhat long documentary is rivetting throughout. 8

Skin: I thought this movie, set in apartheid-era South Africa, was pretty good, but I wish I had not read the desciption in the TIFF guide because for the first hour of the film I was only thinking, “okay, the acting is good but the story is exactly what I expected”. There’s enough drama but it needs some surprise. It is certainly worth seeing if you don’t know anything about it beforehand. 7

Flame & Citron [Flammen & Citronen]: A second Danish film this year that I did not care for. I guess I was hoping for a really compelling World War Two resistance story like Gaston’s War or Black Book, but the performance of Thure Lindhardt in one of the lead roles was just so restrained that I had barely any interest in what the character did or what happened to him. Mads Mikkelsen, the other lead, was great but it was not enough to save the film. 5

In Conversation with Kathryn Bigelow: This event in the Mavericks programme was interesting enough; I am a fan of Bigelow’s films (such as Strange Days and The Weight of Water) but in person she is not someone who tells scintillating anecdotes like Michael Moore. It was good to hear her talk about her work. The action genre may be denigrated by some of the film-festival crowd but, as Bigelow said, this kind of film maximizes the medium.