In Darkness, our other Oscar nominee from the sewer

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jasmin Marla Dichant/Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection

When the Oscars are handed out on Feb. 26, Canadians will have plenty to root for, with Christopher Plummer favoured to win Best Supporting Actor and Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar vying for Foreign Language Film, not to mention nominations for two animated shorts from the NFB. But another Canadian triumph, the most unlikely of all, has almost been lost in the shuffle. Competing with Monsieur Lazhar for the foreign language award is In Darkness, a Holocaust drama co-produced by Poland, Germany—and Canada. Although it’s directed by Polish veteran Agnieszka Holland, and is Poland’s official Oscar entry, it was created by a Canadian writer and developed by Canadian producers before the Europeans came on board.

The film unearths an astonishing saga. Just when you thought there was no more Holocaust lore left to be mined, In Darkness dramatizes the true story of a group of Jews in Nazi-occupied Lvov who hide in rat-infested sewers for 14 months, protected by a Polish Catholic thief and sewer worker named Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz). This Schindler of the sewers is a reluctant saint. At first he’s the ultimate slum landlord, agreeing to hide the fugitives from the Nazis for cash. But as the war grinds on, he becomes fiercely protective of the people he calls “my Jews,” risking his life and family to save them. But the film is no fable. Like the exquisite cinematography, which draws light out of the darkness, the moral tone of this claustrophobic thriller is deeply shaded. Intolerance and opportunism infect both sides.

“The characters are very nuanced,” says its Toronto screenwriter, David F. Shamoon. “I didn’t want that typical division between good and evil, the good Jews versus the bad Nazis or Poles.” A former advertising man, Shamoon, 64, was born in India and moved to Canada at 23 after living in Iran and the U.S.—his Iraqi parents fled Baghdad to escape anti-Jewish persecution in 1941. In Darkness is his first script to reach the screen and he spent eight years getting it there. He first stumbled across the story in a local newspaper, which led him to Robert Marshall’s 1991 book In the Sewers of Lvov. Shamoon says he turned down an offer from a well-known American director, because “I just did not want the Hollywood treatment, even though I was thinking of having it in the English language.”

Continue…

‘The Vow’ is empty; so is ‘Safe House’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 9:29 AM - 0 Comments

Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams in 'The Vow'

There are few Hollywood stars who appear to be as genuine, innocent, and downright likable as Canadian actors Ryan Reynolds and Rachel McAdams. Both have movies opening this week, his-and-her titles that present a fatal date-night choice of gonzo male action versus chick-flick romance. Reynolds co-stars with Denzel Washington as a CIA man  relentlessly on the run in the hellbent thriller Safe House. And McAdams co-stars with Channing Tatum as an an amnesia victim who loses all memory of her husband after a car crash in The Vow. Both of them do a decent job, but their respective talents are squandered in stories that go through motions of Hollywood formula.

The Vow is soft-headed romance and Safe House is gritty action, but both are disingenuous confections that don’t add up. Which is not to say they don’t provide some pleasures. McAdams has never looked more adorable, and Reynolds bulls his way through the bloody gauntlet of Safe House like that steed tearing through the barbed wire in War Horse. Men all over North America will be dragged to The Vow. It’s the designated date movie for Valentine’s Day, while Safe House pays fleeting lip service to romance with a token girlfriend who’s abandoned for a frantic marathon of gunplay, chase scenes, and torture.

The Vow

Rachel McAdams cruises merrily through The Vow as if she’s humouring her co-star, the script and the audience. Don’t get me wrong. I love Rachel McAdams. Who doesn’t? Not just because she has the beauty, warmth and candour of a true movie star, but because she can act: she seems incapable of a false note.  So what is she doing in a phony valentine like The Vow? As Canada’s sweetheart racks up another Hollywood romance, threatening to become the Meg Ryan of her generation, she should be holding out for movies worthy of her potential. She has, in fact, wrapped a new film directed by Tree of Life director Terrence Mallick, which is exciting. But in the meantime she deserves better than The Vow‘s shlock. She deserves a more substantial suitor than an expression-challenged Tatum Channing,  Hollywood’s hunk du jour. And finally, if she’s going to shoot a movie in her hometown, it should look more authentic than The Vow‘s lame attempt to pass off Toronto as Chicago. But then, everything about this romance seems inauthentic. Continue…

Talk about Tilda in ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, February 9, 2012 at 11:59 PM - 0 Comments

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'

Tilda Swinton has already won an Oscar, for playing a corporate bitch in Michael Clayton. So let’s crown her this year’s Queen of the Anti-Oscars—poster girl for the gallery of overlooked actors who gave incendiary performances in movies that were  too dark and weird for the Academy’s taste. Namely: Michael Fassbender in Shame, Ryan Gosling in Drive, Charlize Theron in Young Adult, Michael Shannon in Take Shelter, Woody Harrelson in Rampart, Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg in Melancholia. And what a fine bunch they are. But it’s probably safe to say that no performance among the 2011 awards contenders is as irredeemably dark as Tilda Swinton’s in We Need to Talk About Kevin, which opens this week in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

Based on the prize-winning novel by Lionel Shriver is the story of a mother’s worst nightmare—raising a problem child who grows up to commit a monstrous act as a teenager. The boy is a demon seed. In that sense, the question of nature vs. nurture doesn’t really arise, certainly not to the same degree as it does in Shriver’s novel, which unfolds as a series of letters by the mother, who is haunted by how much her poor aptitude as a parent may have contributed to her son’s evil disposition. In the movie, we feel harrowing empathy for Eva (Swinton)—as she tries to cope with the hellish aftermath of the crimes her first-born son, Kevin (Ezra Miller) has committed, and, in flashbacks, as she struggles to establish a bond with a child whose malevolence grows to psychopathic proportions over the course of 15 years. Continue…

Nazis invade from the dark side of the moon!

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 3:48 PM - 0 Comments

I knew there was a reason Berlin Film Festival should not be missed. Apparently the hot ticket at the Berlinale is not Angelina Jolie’s Bosnia drama, The Land of Blood and Honey, or Werner Herzog’s Death Row documentary, Into the Abyss. It’s a B-movie called Iron Sky about a Nazi colony on the dark side of the moon that, after 70 years of regrouping, is staging a full-scale invasion of Earth.

The 7.5 million euro Finn-German-Australian co-production has been sold to 30 countries and is set to open in April. As the film’s PR folk deliver this breathless news, almost more hilarious than the movie’s premise is the earnest tone of the filmmakers in boasting about their kampf, er, struggle to get the damn thing made, as if it were some kind of populist triumph:

“It was extremely difficult to make a movie like this. Honestly, it’s amazing we ever finished the film,” says Timo Vuorensola, the director of Iron Sky. “The many hardships and all the trouble we went through to make an indie product like this was staggering, but we pulled it through.” Says producer Tero Kaukomaa: “The concept of Iron Sky is strong. . . We really believe it can compete against the big Hollywood blockbusters ten times our budget. We aim to give these giants a good run for their money, and show what power a community like ours really wields. We are encouraging our fans to grab the trailer and spread it through the Internet like it was the end of the world.” [italics mine]

So here’s your chance to contribute, and make the Iron Sky Nazi invasion go viral:

Alberta ranch is home to lupine stars

By Anthony A. Davis - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Marie Schneider

As a car crunched up the dirt driveway to Andrew Simpson’s isolated ranch in the cattle country north of Calgary, his alarm systems went off. All 22 of them. It was a chorus of mournful howls that raised hairs on the neck.

There could hardly be better rural sentries than the wolves Simpson, 44, keeps on his ranch behind tall fences. “Don’t worry,” reassured Simpson as he opened the gate and his lupine sirens went up a few decibels. “They’re just saying hello.”

There are Arctic wolves and Canadian timber wolves with golden-eyed gazes and names such as Cooper, Tyka and Sweet Pea. A few lope gracefully across the grass to nuzzle Simpson, but it’s rare these days that the animal trainer gets to spend time with his pack. His company, Instinct, is in big demand for commercials, television and film. Though he trains other animals, including bears and big cats, wolves are 80 per cent of his business.

For the next two years much of Simpson’s time will be spent in China with a dozen assistants, raising and training a batch of wolf pups for their roles in a lavish Chinese production called Wolf Totem. Because his own wolves don’t resemble the smaller, redder breed found in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia where the film is set, Simpson had a Chinese zoo breed some animals so he could imprint himself on the offspring—he had to get them before they opened their eyes at 21 days.

“You have to bond with them and get that intimacy and friendship with them,” says Simpson, who started 12 months of training last fall. “If they don’t trust you, there’s no way they will do anything for you.”

With more than 150 films under his belt and numerous television shows, Wolf Totem is Simpson’s biggest project yet. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (Enemy at the Gates), the $30-million film, tentatively scheduled for release in 2014, is one of the largest-budget Chinese-produced movies ever made. Based on a Chinese bestselling book, Wolf Totem follows a university student’s government assignment during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The young man, appalled by his job imposing agricultural collectives on Inner Mongolia’s sheepherders, encounters a pack of wolves and is enamoured by the harmonic way they and the herders live in nature.

Simpson grew up on an isolated 19,000-hectare estate in the Scottish Highlands owned by aluminum-maker Alcan, where his parents worked. He loved the country life, and was often found with a frog or a mouse in his pocket, but as a teenager he dreamed of being a film stuntman. One sleety day when he was 20, his brother, after seeing Mel Gibson’s Mad Max, quipped that Andrew could, being single, skip off to Australia if he wanted to. Days later he did. There he found work as an extra on A Cry in the Dark, the Meryl Streep drama about the mom who claimed her baby was snatched by a dingo. Simpson worked with the dingo trainer for three weeks and found stints as an extra or animal training assistant before moving to Canada and working with Vancouver’s Creative Animal Talent. A few years later he started his own agency.

Filming is not easy on man or beast, and can strain the bond of trust. In the 2009 French film Loup, the script called for an actor and a wolf to fall through thin ice on a river. When Simpson’s wolf Digger scrambled out of the freezing water with confusion in his eyes, the trainer towelled him off and took him to a warm truck. Then the scene had to be reshot. Digger spent the next three nights curled up on Simpson’s bed.

Olivier Horlait, a French filmmaker who worked on Loup, hired the Alberta trainer for his own film, Nicostratos le pélican, released last year in Europe. Filmed on a Greek island, Simpson trained eight pelicans for the story about a boy and a bird.

“Andrew was amazing,” says Horlait, adding that finding a similar calibre of trainer in Europe is difficult. “He thinks like a director. And what I learned from Andrew is that we can get performance from an animal softly. Never with hard orders or behaviour.”

Busting ghosts in ‘Albert Nobbs,’ ‘Woman in Black’ and ‘W.E.’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:40 PM - 0 Comments

Glenn Close (left) and Mia Wasikowska in 'Albert Nobbs'

We have three period films opening this week, all written or co-written by women, directed by men, and all about tormented folks in what we used to call the British Isles. Two of them, Albert Nobbs and The Woman in Black, are both adapted from stories that originated in 1982; both take place in dour climes of the Victorian era; and both feature Janet McTeer in supporting roles. What all those coincidences mean, I have no idea.  W.E.,  as in Wallis Simpson, is unlike anything else. It shuttles between the 1930s and the present—but for all intents and purposes it’s set in the thoroughly post-modern mind of Madonna, its self-possessed writer-director. All three films, meanwhile, feature bold attempts at transformation: Glenn Close playing a man, Daniel Radcliffe not playing Harry Potter, and Madonna playing at being an auteur.

Glenn Close has a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her uncanny performance in the title role of Albert Nobbs, as a woman who disguises herself as a man to work as a hotel butler in 19th-centry Dublin. For Close, Nobbs has been brewing as a passion project ever since she starred in a 1982 stage version of the story. And her command of the role is so complete it’s creepy. Close is mesmerizing as Nobbs, a character who is so fastidiously repressed he/she is like a ghostly apparition on screen, even more haunting than the supernatural spectre that stalks Daniel Ratcliffe in The Woman in Black. The role is not about cross-dressing so much as annihilating identity. Nobbs is like an asexual alien; a visitor from the same austere planet that brought us Edward Scissorhands and any number of characters played by Tilda Swinton. She’s not the only cross-dresser in the movie. Janet McTeer portrays a robust lesbian who masquerades as a married man, an example that inspires Nobbs to embark on a deluded courtship, hoping to marry a capricious young maid (Mia Wasikowska) and invest her life savings into a mom-and-pop tobacco shop. Continue…

Men and beasts in ‘The Grey’ and ‘Tyrranosaur’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 2:35 PM - 0 Comments

Liam Neeson in 'The Grey'

There’s a fine line between man and beast. That’s the gist of two very different survival dramas about savagery and the human condition, both opening this weekend. In The Grey, a harrowing but preposterous thriller, Liam Neeson stars as the alpha male among a group of plane crash survivors who are stalked by ferocious man-eating wolves. In Tyrranosaur, an exceptionally grim kitchen-sink drama from Britain, Peter Mullan stars as a mean drunk who beats his dog to death in the opening minutes; things go downhill from there.

These movies belong to different genres, but both are what you could call ordeal dramas. Although I would hesitate to recommend either, each has its merits.

The Grey was shot in the snowy wilds of Smithers, B.C., so as a landscape survival saga it offers some rugged wintry vistas (just what we need in January). And as a visceral Survivorman who is doing a lot of his stunts and stuck in the cold without a decent pair of gloves, Neeson is a compelling physical presence, surviving both the elements and a relentlessly dumb script.

Continue…

Silence is golden for ‘The Artist’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

La Classe Americane/Ufilm/France 3/The Kobal Collection

A year ago, if you had predicted that the front-runner at the 2012 Academy Awards would be a black-and-white, silent film from France starring a pair of obscure actors, people would have thought you were insane. But this week The Artist reaped a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, second only to Martin Scorsese’s 3D children’s fable, Hugo, which scored 11. For the academy, which tends to fetishize its own history, this is a historic moment. Its two most nominated movies are both adoring homages to silent film, a genre that’s been dead for 80 years. The Artist is a French movie (finally one without subtitles) set in Hollywood at the end of the silent era; Hugo is an American movie set in ’30s Paris—wrapped around a tribute to Georges Méliès, a silent film pioneer of optical effects.

The two pictures present an astonishing convergence of cinema’s past and future—between a movie that revives the magic of silent film, and one that uses 3D to restore cinema’s first acts of visual wizardry. In embracing these movies, the academy may be on a nostalgia trip, celebrating a lost heritage in an age of franchise blockbusters. But there’s something else going on. Audiences are discovering the beauty of silence. That’s why The Artist is still the movie to beat for Best Picture. Silence is the new 3D.

From the moment it premiered to a rapturous response in Cannes, The Artist became the year’s most unlikely crowd-pleaser. Essentially it’s a romantic comedy, a frothy confection that poses no challenge to the audience. Despite the title, The Artist is not an art film. It’s the kind of movie Woody Allen would like to have made. In fact, like Allen’s Midnight in Paris (which has four nominations), it’s a reverie for a golden age. But its elegant conceit is more inspired, and instead of an American director rhapsodizing about Paris, we have a Frenchman (writer-director Michael Hazanavicius) mythologizing Hollywood. And nothing, not even British royalty, is closer to Oscar’s heart than Hollywood myth.

Continue…

‘Monsieur Lazhar’ is Oscar-worthy

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 12:01 AM - 0 Comments

Mohamed Fellag stars in 'Monsieur Lazhar'

With impeccable timing Philippe Falardeau‘s Monsieur Lazhar is being released just three days after its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film was announced. It’s not favoured to win. Even Falardeau would be surprised to beat Iran’s hugely acclaimed A Separation, which is also nominated for Best Original Screenplay.  But Monsieur Lazhar, which racked up a string of honours (including the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association) is eminently Oscar-worthy. This is a small but perfect gem of filmmaking.

It bears a certain resemblance to last year’s Canadian Oscar nominee, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies: it hails from the same producers, it’s based on a Quebec stage play, and has an immigrant theme. But as Falardeau himself has pointed out, it’s a less ambitious picture on a smaller canvas. While Villeneuve’s locations ranged from the Montreal to the Middle East, most of the action in Monsieur Lazhar is confined to a classroom. It’s reminiscent in some ways of Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (The Class), which won the Palme d’Or  in Cannes in 2008. But Cantet’s film was about the culture shock in a French classroom between immigrant teenagers and the formal Frenchman teaching them. Falardeau’s movie offers a different spin: an Algerian refugee wrapping his head around a classroom of Quebec kids. Continue…

Oscar anoints ‘Hugo,’ ‘The Artist’—and ‘Monsieur Lazhar’

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 3:17 PM - 0 Comments

Silence is golden, and this year silence may lead to Oscar gold. The Academy Awards nominations were announced today, at an early morning press conference in Los Angeles hosted by actress Jennifer Lawrence. The two pictures that topped the list of  nominees announced both pay loving homage to the vanished art of silent film. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which leads the pack with 11 nominations, is a 3D children’s fable wrapped around a tribute to French silent film pioneer Georges Méliès. Just behind it with 10 nominations is The Artist, the year’s breakout phenomenon, a French black-and-white silent film set in Hollywood at the advent of talkies. Riding a tide of critical acclaim, and already winning a key best picture award from the Producers Guild of America, it remains the favorite to win Best Picture at the Oscars, which take place Feb. 26.

It’s a good year for Canada, as Monsieur Lazhar, a gem by Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau, secured a nomination for best foreign-language film—though even Falardeau admits he’ll have an uphill battle beating Iran’s widely-acclaimed A Separation, which won the Golden Globe and has also received an Oscar nod for best screenplay. Falardeau will also be competing with a Canadian co-production in the foreign-language category—In Darkness, a gripping Holocaust drama by Polish veteran Agnieszka Holland, set in the sewers of Lvov, Poland.  Canada, meanwhile, has two of the five animated short film nominees—Patrick Doyon’s Sunday and Wild Life by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby. These are the NFB’s 71st and 72nd Oscar nominations, and you can view them on the NFB’s website.

The Canadian nominee who seems most likely to bring home gold is Christopher Plummer, nominated for his supporting role in Beginners as a gay man dying of cancer who finally comes out of the closet. Plummer is up against a wildly eclectic field—a theatrical Kenneth Branagh (My Week With Marilyn), a deadpan Jonah Hill (Moneyball), a stolid Nick Nolte (Warrior) and a silent Max Von Sydow (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). I’d  love to see someone try to cast them all in the same movie. Continue…

Sundance mourns indie film champ Bingham Ray

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 7:25 PM - 0 Comments

Bingham Ray attends the Talent Lab at TIFF2011 (Photo by Jason Matos/Getty Images)

Bingham Ray, one of the most beloved champions of American independent cinema has died. Ray, co-founder of October Films and lately executive-director of the San Francisco Film Society, suffered a stroke Friday while attending the Sundance Film Festival. He died today in hospital surrounded by family. He was 57.

While Harvey Weinstein is the only indie mogul to become famous, we’ve seen less celebrated U.S. distribution executives driven by a passion for the art, men like Tom Bernard and Michael Barker of Sony Classics. Bingham Ray was one of them.  I met him when I was researching my history of the Toronto International Film Festival, Brave Films Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever (2000). He was a generous interview, a joy to talk to, and bracingly candid. Here’s a passage from the book about a legendary bidding war between Bingham and Harvey Weinstein for Robert Duvall’s The Apostle at the 1997 edition of TIFF:

“. . . By midnight Miramax and October were slugging it out. Harvey Weinstein was in New York, bargaining by phone—he had watched The Apostle at a simultaneous private screening that night. Bingham Ray, October’s buyer, had left the Toronto premiere after forty-five minutes to make his bid. He was desperate to get the film. Octdober had just been bought by Universal that summer and was itching to take on Miramax. ‘We were dealing with the studio’s money, the house money,’ Ray explains, ‘and we wanted to stir it up to send a signal. There are all kinds of reasons to buy movies. The right reasons are because you love them and there’s an audience for them and you can build long-lasting relationships with the people who made them. Then there’s just trying to get on the map in a big, sexy way. October wasn’t bought by Universal to be a nice high-end art-house company. They wanted a vehicle to really compete with Miramax. I think that’s folly. Harvey had become a serious mogul. At October we were just getting our feet wet.’  Continue…

Angie, meet Gina—the new warrior queen

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

INFUSNY-198/USPA-11/CP

The heroine of Haywire, a new spy movie from director Steven Soderbergh, is a role that could have been written for Angelina Jolie. She’s distaff 007, a femme fatale with a cold gaze and a dominatrix flair for putting men in their place when not beating them to a pulp. It would be a typical assignment for Jolie, a warrior queen who has played secret agents in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Wanted, Salt and The Tourist. But Soderbergh was aiming for a realistic upgrade of the spy genre. And as he says in Haywire’s press notes, “I knew there had to be a woman other than Angelina Jolie who could run around with a gun.”

So just as he recruited a real-life porn star to play a prostitute in The Girlfriend Experience, the director cast a real-life warrior in Haywire—but with more spectacular results. Gina Carano, a top-ranked fighter in the brutal sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), makes an explosive screen debut as hard-boiled heroine Mallory Kane, a ruthless black-ops agent working for a private security firm. She not only performs her own fights and stunts, but carries the movie in what feels like a landmark role. Outside the Asian martial arts genre, she must be Hollywood’s first female action star drawn from the ranks of real-life gladiators.

Just as Carano has left the MMA cage to step in front of the camera, Jolie has broken out of her gilded cage to step behind it. She has written and directed an ambitious drama that frames atrocities in Bosnia with a star-crossed romance between a prisoner and his captive. In the Land of Blood and Honey is a foreign-language film with an all-Bosnian cast that tackles a still-controversial subject. Although reviews so far have been mixed, Jolie’s directorial debut (it opens this week, along with Haywire) is surprisingly strong.

Continue…

A documentary like no other documentary

By Kristy Hutter - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

NFB; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

The grizzly lumbers up to a tree in Banff National Park and runs its back over the tree, marking its territory. It rears up on hind legs to survey the park for food and threats. It moves its cubs carefully along the train tracks, offering a glimpse into its life that few humans would normally see. But when it was three, this bear was trapped and collared, numbered and tracked by park rangers. As they conditioned it to stay away from campsites, highways and golf courses, they also watched it on cameras triggered by motion sensors mounted at favourite haunts. One million black-and-white photographs later, Bear 71 is the star of the National Film Board’s documentary of the same name, but it’s unlike any documentary you’ve ever seen.

“It’s hard to say where the wired world ends and the wild one begins,” says the actor who voices the bear. “They can start a revolution on a smartphone, but can’t remember to close the lid of a bear-proof garbage bin.” The narration provides a comment about our dependence on technology to track nature, as well as the ethical dilemma around shooting rubber bullets at the animal to change its behaviour.

The only way to watch it will be on the NFB website starting Jan. 19, where a map of Banff National Park is imposed on a grid and the user follows Bear 71’s movements by scrolling over the cameras and can even look at other users by activating the computer’s webcam.

Continue…

Quebec and Croneberg lead Genies

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 1:45 PM - 0 Comments

Evelyn Brochu in 'Café de Flore,' which received 13 Genie nominations

Café de Flore leads the field competing in the 32nd annual Genie Awards with a total of 13 nominations, including best picture and director. The film marks a virtuosic return to form for C.R.A.Z.Y director Jean-Marc Vallée after his rather subdued work-for-hire, The Young Victoria. By vaulting ahead of the pack in the Genie nominations, which were announced today, Vallée wins some vindications after being repeatedly upstaged  by Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar—which won TIFF’s $30,000 award for best Canadian feature, the Toronto Film Critics Association’s $15,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award—and was picked as Canada’s official submission slot at the Oscars for best foreign-language film. Monsieur Lazhar ranked third among the Genie nominations, scoring in eight categories, behind David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, which received 11 nominations.

The big shock among the nominees was that Take This Waltz, the star-studded second feature from writer-director Sarah Polley received just two nominations—best actress for Michelle Williams and best make-up. That’s extraordinary given the depth of talent in the cast (Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman) and the fact that Polley’s sensational feature debut, Away From Her, won seven Genies and received two Oscar nominations. Continue…

Is Ricky turning into the Globes’ Billy Crystal?

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, January 16, 2012 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments

There’s a fine line between mean-spirited and warm ‘n’ fuzzy. Ricky Gervais swung from one extreme to the other in a twinkling last night, morphing from the hostile host who would never get invited back to the man who looks poised to become the Golden Globes’ Billy Crystal. And the Globes themselves—always the ‘fun’ party compared to the quasi religious ritual of the Academy Awards—even seems to have usurped some of Oscar’s dignity and gravitas. Where were the drunken gaffes? The sloppy acceptance speeches. Aside from Meryl Streep forgetting her reading glasses and stumbling through a speech before being played off by the band, everything went like clockwork. And was Gervais even drinking that beer on the podium?

Gervais, of course, had promised he wasn’t going to soften his act to appease critics, but there was a definite spoonful of sugar surrounding the satirical barbs this year.  He actually said some nice things about people. And it helped that he arrived at 69th annual Golden Globes riding a huge wave of hype. The audience was primed, the stars were ready to be roasted, and that made all the difference. Even Gervais seemed surprised by the tone of goodwill in the room, as he noted midway through the show, “It’s going well, isn’t it? You’re so much better than last year’s audience. They had a right stick up their ass.” Continue…

A Dangerous Method in Cronenberg’s madness

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Fassbender (left) as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud

Any film by David Cronenberg is an event. One that usually takes you by surprise When I saw A Dangerous Method amid a welter of pre-screenings for TIFF, I was shocked. . . shocked that I wasn’t shocked by a Cronenberg film. From the opening frames, a classic period sequence of a -carriage hurtling down a country road, I felt we on a strangely un-alien planet for this filmmaker. Then as the narrative unfolded with the elegant cadence of a Viennese waltz, I realized we were in a genre, but not one that Cronenberg had tried before: the period biopic. Though “biopic” seems not quite right; it’smore like a bi-biopic, a portrait of the galvanic relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen).

The film triangulates the birth of psychoanalysis via their intersection with a fierce Russian named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a volatile patient of Jung’s who who seduces both of them as she herself graduates from paranoid case study to headstrong psychoanalyst.  The film is based on a play, which is based on a book—The Talking Cure by screenwriter  Christopher Hampton (best known for another dangerous title, Dangerous Liasons). And much of the script is  lifted directly from Speilrein’s writings, which lends the dialogue an unusually literate, essayish intelligence. This is disconcerting from a filmmaker who has specialized in serving up flesh, with sashimi acuity, as a metaphor for the unconscious—rather than engaging in intellectual discourse about the id, the ego, and the cold war between death and sex in the human psyche. Continue…

Toronto critics love ‘Monsieur Lazhar’

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 11:33 PM - 0 Comments

Andrea Martin and David Cronenberg at the TFCA Awards. Photo by George Pimentel/TFCA

I must be the last journalist in town to blog last night’s 15th anniversary awards gala of the Toronto Film Critics Association. That’s because I’m TFCA prez, and thousands of small details have forced me to neglect the blogosphere and the tweet box for the last few weeks. We ramped up the TFCA Awards a notch this year, moving our champagne gala to the august art-deco Round Room of The Carlu. For the movie biz, it’s still an unusually intimate evening, with about 230 folks attending—the cream of Toronto’s film community. We consider it our annual truce between the critics and the industry. The presenter of our flagship prize, the $15,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, fell sick at the last minute. But Andrea Martin—Emmy-winning SCTV legend and Tony-winning Broadway star—stepped in like the trooper she is to present the Rogers Award. It went to Quebec director Philippe Falardeau for Monsieur Lazhar (also Canada’s official Oscar entry in the foreign-language film category), edging out the other two finalists, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore, and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Continue…

Spielberg’s creatures, great and small

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Paramount Pictures

Creatures have been good to Steven Spielberg. His career took off with Jaws, which starred a mechanical shark, got a stratospheric boost from E.T.’s animatronic alien, and made prehistory with Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs. Now he’s about to dominate the holiday season with a one-two blockbuster punch—a wartime epic about a horse trying to find his way home, and the animated tale of a Belgian boy detective and his wonder dog. But perhaps the most unstoppable creature of all is the man himself: the 800-lb. gorilla who leaves the biggest footprint in Hollywood.

There isn’t a filmmaker alive who is as powerful, successful or wealthy as Steven Spielberg. No one comes close. Over a 40-year career, the movies he’s directed have grossed over $8 billion worldwide, while movies he has produced have earned $12 billion. His personal net worth is estimated at $3 billion. And as the principal partner of DreamWorks, he’s also the only Hollywood director who controls a major studio. Despite winning three Oscars (for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan), Spielberg’s accolades haven’t always kept pace with his commercial triumphs. Lately he has left producing credits on a load of junky sci-fi—Super 8, Transformers 3, Cowboys and Aliens and Reel Steel. But after a three-year hiatus from directing—his last movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was arguably his worst—he’s back in the game. Spielberg the Artist has finally pushed aside Spielberg the Mogul.

The director has two high-pedigree blockbusters opening within days of each other: The Adventures of Tintin (Dec. 21) and War Horse (Dec. 25). Spielberg is also in the thick of filming Lincoln, a biopic about Abraham Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The director, who turns 65 on Sunday, has never been busier. When he finds time in his Lincoln shooting schedule to squeeze in an interview after postponing it twice, you can almost hear the meter ticking.

Continue…

The shape-shifting Meryl Streep

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady

In the opening scene of The Iron Lady, an elderly woman walks into a London convenience store, dithers in front of the dairy rack, then buys a pint of milk. The sight of her comes as a shock that never wears off. Though old and frail and addled by dementia, it is unmistakably Margaret Thatcher. Part of the surprise is seeing a legendary icon so enfeebled by age; the other part is seeing her so eerily incarnated by the shape-shifting Meryl Streep. By the end of the film, after watching Streep play the former British prime minister over four decades of her life, the likeness—from the imperious look to the mellifluous diction—is uncanny.

Looking not at all like Thatcher, Streep is holding court in a luxury two-storey suite with a fireplace, cathedral ceiling, and a vast bank of windows overlooking Manhattan’s Tribeca district. Her silky hair framing a unlined complexion, the 62-year-old actress looks casually stylish in a long purple jacket cinched with broad belt, black pants and sensible black boots with chunky heels. The suite belongs to the Greenwich Hotel, which is owned by Robert De Niro, who co-starred with Streep in The Deer Hunter, for which she received her first Oscar nomination 33 years ago. After a record 16 nominations, the woman who is routinely called The World’s Greatest Living Actress has won just two Oscars, and has been shut out since Sophie’s Choice (1982). She is overdue. Her tour de force in The Iron Lady, the crowning performance of her career, may be destined to break the losing streak.

But at this point does winning a third Oscar really matter? You expect Streep to demur with some modest words about art being its own reward. Instead, her Mona Lisa smile dissolves into a girlish laugh: “I’m very greedy!” she says.

Continue…

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 2.0

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 12:01 AM - 0 Comments

There was good reason to be skeptical about a Hollywood remake of  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. There was nothing wrong with the first movie, except that it was in Swedish and came with subtitles. (Strange paradox: while millions of  readers are capable of plowing through novelist Steig Larsson’s turgid prose in English translation, not so many are willing to read a few subtitles). Also, it was hard to imagine another actress improving on Noomi Rapace’s ferocious performance as Larsson’s cyber-punk heroine, Lisbeth Salander. But if anyone was qualified to take another crack at Larsson’s franchise, it would be director David Fincher, who has showed his mastery of the ritual murder genre in both Se7en and Zodiac.

Well, Fincher has succeeded admirably. His Girl With the Dragon Tattoo improves on both the book and the first movie. Right from the opening credits, we realize that this Tattoo will be a more luxurious, enjoyable ride. The über-cool black-and-grey title sequence, with bodies flowing like liquid mercury, could serve as the opening of a Bond movie. Of course, the current 007, Daniel Craig, stars as the Man Without the Dragon Tattoo—investigative journalist and Larsson alter-ego Mikael Blomkvist—but Craig is in strictly civilian mode here. Although his pyramid torso doesn’t quite match the book’s disheveled image of the hard-drinking, chain-smoking Blomkvist, Craig gives a modest, almost diminutive performance, leaving ample room for Salander to cut a swath through the story.

Rooney Mara rises to the insane challenge of the title role and nails it. She doesn’t take anything away from Noomi Rapace, who was sensational. But while Rapace cleaved to the Super Goth template set by the novel, Mara manages to make Lisbeth more human, and more believable, yet no less ruthless.That deep fault line of vulnerability—scarred over by a litany of childhood abuse—is always dimly visible, as a glint of desperation behind her bravado. Also, the love affair between Lisbeth and Blomkvist is also given a little more heat. In the book, she’s not permitted a shred of romantic feeling. In the film, as our feral avenger beds a man old enough to be her father, there are stirrings of emotional complexity.

Forgive me if I don’t labour through a byzantine plot summary. Even if you haven’t read the books, you probably have some familiarity with the story by now. But for those unafraid of spoilers, here’s the gist: Blomqvist is convicted of libel, set up by the tycoon he targeted. He’s then hired by industrial patriarch Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of his niece, presumed murdered by a family member. Leaving behind his editor/girlfriend (Robin Wright), Blomqvist buries himself in research on a cold and remote island off the Swedish coast. Eventually he joins forces with Salander, who outstrips him with her computer-hacking skills, and slides naked into his bed. She, meanwhile, has been raped by her state guardian, and wreaked vengeance, blackmailing him in ink and blood.

For much of the story, Salander and Blomkvist drive separate narratives, and the film skates between them with great finesse. The movie is a flat-out masterpiece of editing. Also it’s not easy to make dry research compelling, but Fincher shoots, cuts and collates text and photographs and web images with the dexterity of a card shark; I’ve never seen a more virtuosic dance of stills in a movie. There’s a long history of solving mysteries by photo editing, and in watching Dragon Tattoo I was taken back to the seductive power of images in its early prototype: Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

Screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Moneyball) does a superb job of upgrading, and streamlining, Larsson’s narrative without losing essential ingredients. If anything, the story seems to have more substance and depth than on the page, or in the previous film. Even though the running time clocks in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, the movie flies by. The Hollywood budget brings a lustre to the filmmaking that the Swedish movie could not afford—from Lisbeth’s motorcycle rides through the night to the glass hilltop mansion occupied by the Venger dynasty’s  CEO (Stellan Skarsgård).  It’s not as if Fincher has softened or sold out the story for a mass audience. Although the violence is slightly less lurid, and the romance more fully-fleshed—both welcome tweaks—it’s still a tough R-rated thriller.

Tattoo‘s blockbuster pulp origins likely won’t allow the film to achieve the pedigree of, say, Fincher’s previous movie, The Social Network. Although his movie is better than the book, it will be difficult for it to be seen as anything but a subsidiary of the Larsson franchise. Hopefully, however, the box office will allow this new franchise to play itself out, and Fincher won’t lose interest. After all, the only good film in the Swedish trilogy was the first one, directed by Niels Arden Oplev. He didn’t direct the second and third installments, and they played like cheesy TV movies. Lisbeth Salander deserves better—and Rooney Mara has got her back.

Kim Jong Il: ‘so ronery’

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 19, 2011 at 11:28 AM - 0 Comments

As many jokes and YouTube links made clear last night, Kim Jong Il’s image in the West comes largely from a puppet movie that he probably shouldn’t even have appeared in. The movie was Team America: World Police, a film made in 2004 by South Park (and later, Book of Mormon) creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone as their comment on the War on Terror, back before we completely won that thing. Kim was the villain that the titular Team went up against, plotting to unleash terrorism upon the world with the unwitting help of useful idiots like actor Matt Damon and U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix.

The choice of Kim as the villain, like so many of Parker and Stone’s choices, got them attacked for a failure of nerve on both sides of the political aisle. For liberals, the presence of Kim seemed like an attempt to avoid taking a stand on the Iraq war (though since the war started while the film was in development, it might not have been possible to make the movie about Saddam Hussein). For conservatives, it was sidestepping the issue of Islamist terrorism. But for Parker and Stone, the reason for the choice may have been a simple one: they find stereotypes really funny, and the character of Kim Jong-Il allowed them to dig up every possible stereotype and build scenes around them. The dictator’s big song is called “I’m So Ronery,” and it was that song, and clip, that made the rounds on social media yesterday night. Continue…

The art of cruelty in ‘Young Adult’ and ‘Carnage’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 3:15 PM - 0 Comments

Charlize Theron in 'Young Adult'

This is a week of movies messing with our expectations. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol defies the odds, breathing fresh life into a flagging franchise. Conversely,  Young Adult, the fourth feature from Jason Reitman—the Canadian director who could do no wrong—turns out to be a surprising disappointment. Reitman has had a charmed career. His first three movies— Juno, Thank You For Smoking and Up in the Air were all critically acclaimed hits. Each had a dark edge of satire, and potentially unlikeable characters managed to win our affection with appearing to make an effort. With Up In the Air, Reitman graduated from glib, and ventured into more mature territory, opening a chink in George Clooney’s emotional armour that Alexander Payne would blow wide open in The Descendants. For Young Adult, Reitman has re-teamed with Juno‘s Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody to create a movie that is as perversely self-destructive as its heroine.

Charlize Theron gives a raw, outrageous, multi-faceted performance as Mavis, a burnt-out writer of young adult novels who decides to win back her old boyfriend, Buddy (Patrick Wilson)—although he’s newly married with a baby. Carrying her miniature poodle in a pink shoulder bag, she waltzes into her the small Minnesota town she once called home, expecting Buddy to fall at her feet after a couple of drinks. Needless to say, things don’t turn out as planned. Continue…

Mission: Impossible—Rebooting Cruise, Le Carré and the Cold War

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:14 PM - 0 Comments

Paula Patton and Tom Cruise in 'Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol

I came to Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol expecting the worst. Five years have passed since the previous installment, which was so lame it looked like Tom Cruise’s days as super spy Ethan Hunt were numbered. But what a surprise!  Ghost Protocol, the fourth movie in the series, kicks the franchise back to life with a defibrillator thump of adrenaline and a sharp sense of style. There’s a great line in the movie—”Failure for a terrorist is just a rehearsal for success”—which may also apply to producers of  blockbusters. Here they took a gamble that paid off, by handing the reins to Brad Bird, who has made animated hits like Ratatouille and The Incredibles but has not made a live action feature until now. You’d never know it. The action scenes pop and sizzle, with a vertiginous sense of perspective that seems inherited from his animated work. Architecture plays a leading role—from Cruise rappelling off a 123-storey skyscraper in Dubai to dropping through the spiral core of automated parking garage that looks like a car-and-concrete version of the Guggenheim. High tech shades of Vertigo.

Cruise, who handles a lot of his own stunt-work, looks ageless, toned and torqued. He has a strange body, especially when he sprints, his arms jack-knifing to cartoon-like heights. Tom is always the Man Who Tries Too Hard. In this well-oiled machine of a movie he’s one well-oiled machine of a man. He’s so immaculate you can’t help but wonder if Tom Cruise is, in fact, an alien. Or simply a Scientologist. Fortunately, he is surrounded by actual human beings, including two terrific character actors.  His fellow operatives are a haunted analyst (The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner), a very funny rookie communications whiz (Shaun of the Dead‘s Simon Pegg), and a no-nonsense babe (Paula Patton). Continue…

Golden Globes shine on ‘The Artist,’ Gosling and Clooney

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Gosling (in a scene from 'The Ides of March') will compete with 'Ides' director George Clooney, nominated for 'The Descendants'

The Golden Globes nominations were unveiled this morning, and The Artist—France’s silent black-and-white valentine to retro Hollywood—continues to charm its way down the long road to the Oscars by topping the Globes with six nominations. The Descendants and The Help are tied for second place with four nominations apiece. Both George Clooney and Canada’s Ryan Gosling are golden. Clooney snagged three nominations, as best dramatic actor for Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, plus best director and screenplay for The Ides of March.  Gosling was nominated in the comic acting category for Crazy, Stupid Love, and in the dramatic acting category for  Ides, which has him going head to head against with Clooney. Unlike the Oscars, the Globes break down the best picture and acting categories into dramas and comedies-or-musicals, which allows the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) to better spread the wealth. But the rationale is often wonky. The Descendants, a quirky mix of comedy and drama, is classified as drama, presumably because someone dies; My Life With Marilyn was considered a comedy-or-musical, but though it’s got a couple of tunes, it’s not a musical, and despite some laughs, it’s much less of a comedy than The Descendants. Go figure.

The Globes gave a boost both to The Ides of March and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which have been ignored by most of the critics’ awards. Tattoo‘s cyberpunk heroine, Rooney Mara, hacked her way into a heavyweight actress slate,  competing with Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Viola Davis (The Help), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs).

The most notable snub was ignoring Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme D’Or in Cannes and has been honoured by several critics’ groups, including the Toronto Film Critics Association. However, its star, Brad Pitt, was nominated for Moneyball in the dramatic acting category, along with Clooney, Gosling, Michael Fassbender (Shame) and Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar). Honouring DiCaprio instead of Take Shelter‘s Michael Shannon underscores the HFPA’s tacky pedigree as a gang of junket whores who never saw a superstar they didn’t like. (If you think that’s too harsh, Ricky Gervais has said much worse things about the HFPA, yet they’ve hired him back to host the Globes, which adds a curious S&M kink to the junket whore role.) Continue…