‘Payback’ reaps a cinematic dividend

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 16, 2012 at 12:15 AM - 0 Comments

A scene of BP's Gulf oil spill in 'Payback'

Payback. Although the title sounds like it could belong to a Nicolas Cage thriller, this is a wake-up call from the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum. And the only fireball you’ll see belongs to BP’s drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, I know it doesn’t sound like a good time, a National Film Board documentary based on Margaret Atwood’s book of Massey Lectures about myriad forms of debt—societal, personal, environmental, criminal and economic. Not an easy sell. But bear with me. This captivating film comes from one of the most seductive, least didactic documentary artists at work today, Canada’s Jennifer Baichwal. Her subjects have ranged from expatriate writer Paul Bowles and Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams to the toxic visions of Edward Burtynsky (Manufactured Landscapes) and exotic tales of lightning-strike survivors (Act of God). Like almost all her documentaries, Payback was shot by Baichwal’s husband, Nicholas de Pencier, a cinematographer whose lens seems almost magnetically drawn to poetry.

Wisely, Baichwal chose not just to illustrate Atwood’s book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, but to extend its ideas to fresh and vivid ground. Just as the book takes the notion of debt beyond financial matters to broad arenas of moral and political obligation, the film takes its ideas out into the world, as it unearths half a dozen specific stories in very different realms. Baichwal explores a irreconcilable blood feud between an Albanian farmer whose belly is scarred from bullets fired years ago by his neighbour. She drills down into the indelible environmental debt of BP’s Gulf oil spill. She makes us thinking twice about the beauty of tomatoes with stories of plantation-like slavery among Florida’s migrant farm workers. In examining the notion of “paying one’s debt to society,” Baichwal finds empathy for a drug addict who can’t stay out of jail, and presents media mogul Conrad Black in a tolerant light—the philosopher con turns out to be one of the film’s more thoughtful subjects. Continue…

21 Jump Street’s F-bomb bromance

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 11:45 PM - 0 Comments

Jonah Hill (left) and Channing Tatum as each others' prom dates in '21 Jump Street'

Before anyone can lambast Hollywood for cynically recycling yet another ’80s TV show, the movie spin-off of 21 Jump Street is a jump ahead with an early line of  preemptive dialogue. As a police captain reassigns the movie’s odd couple of loser cops—Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum)—he tells them the force is reviving a cancelled undercover program in the high schools. Making a crack about the lack of originality among the brass, he says, “All they do now is recycle shit from the past and expect us not to notice.”

One thing that this movie’s writers (Michael Bacall and Hill) cannot be accused of is milking ’80s nostalgia. The original TV series, which famously launched Johnny Depp’s career, was a relatively earnest teen drama that tackled some serious issues. With almost gleeful disrespect, the movie strips the series for parts and remakes it as R-rated action comedy. The notion of Hill, 28, and Tatum, 31, actually passing for teenagers in a high school is not remotely credible, but the movie is smart enough to send up the absurdity of its own premise. This Jump Street is flat-out farce, turbo-powered by drugs and a plethora of penis jokes that skate a stoned, wobbly line between gay-positive and homophobic. That said, this comedy has charm, wit and some good laughs. And yes, Johnny Depp inevitably does pop up in a priceless cameo— no matter how braced you are for that payoff, believe me, you’ll never see it coming. Continue…

David Lynch is the new face of Transcendental Meditation

By Matthew Hays - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 1:18 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

There’s no ordinary way to meet David Lynch. For Montreal filmmaker Sebastian Lange, that was definitely the case. In 2008, Lange was in India for the funeral of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement. It was there, on the Ganges River, that he met the man who would introduce him to Lynch, the famed filmmaker known for his eccentricity. Camera in hand, Lange was among hundreds of people in wooden rowboats waiting to witness the scattering of the maharishi’s ashes.

“I began hopping from boat to boat to get a better shot,” Lange recalls. He found himself face to face with Bobby Roth, one of the key spokespeople for TM, and a long-time teacher and practitioner. That led to an introduction on the Ganges to Lynch, one of several celebrities who have been trained in TM technique.

Lange decided that Lynch’s new role as a public face of TM would make a fascinating documentary. The result is Transformation, which Lange is currently editing and aims to have ready for the fall film festival circuit. For the past four years, Lange travelled with Lynch across North America, Europe and Asia, capturing his passionate lectures about the TM movement and its profound impact on his life.

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Skip ‘John Carter’; go ‘Salmon Fishing in the Yemen’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 9, 2012 at 5:01 PM - 0 Comments

Amr Waked (left) and Ewan McGregor in 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen'

John Carter, the year’s first big blockbuster opens this weekend, and looks like it’s headed for box-office disaster. I certainly found it pretty tedious. It feels about half an hour too long. And it plays like a cheesy rip-off of Star Wars and Avatar—but that’s because it’s based on the century-old work of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose work exerted a primal influence on both George Lucas and James Cameron, back when they were fanboy bookworms. So even though John Carter is based on the original prototype, it plays like a knock-off.

It’s the sage of a Confederate Civil War veteran who is mysteriously transported to Mars (aka Barsoom), where he plays Lawrence of Arabia to a horde of  green, four-armed, tusked barbarians. The movie marks the live-action directing debut of Pixar wiz Andrew Stanton. It also launches the action-hero career of Canadian Taylor Kitsch, who is as buff as the movie is bloated. If he’s lucky, the movie’s box-office failure will nip any future sequels in the bud. As Kitsch has already proven in Friday Night Lights and The Bang Bang Club, he’s too good for this shlock. To read my recent interview/profile of this 30-year-old actor from Kelowna, B.C, go to: The next action hero.

So, unless you’re still looking forward to puberty, you should avoid John Carter. But do try to see Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, one of the biggest hits at TIFF last fall. Continue…

‘Monsieur Lazhar’ sweeps the Genies

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 8:17 PM - 0 Comments

Genie winners Sophie Nelisse and Fellag in 'Monsieur Lazhar'

Philippe Falardeau’s beloved Monsieur Lazhar took the Genie Awards by storm tonight, winning six of its nine nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for its French-Algerian star Fellag. The film’s Genie triumph crowns a string of honours including an Oscar nomination, the best Canadian feature prize at TIFF, and the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.

Based on a Quebec play, Monsieur Lazhar is the touching drama of an Algerian refugee who takes over a teaching job in a Montreal classroom traumatized by his predecessor’s suicide. Continue…

Bucking the War Horse hype

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments

A scene from the Toronto production of War Horse

After a triumphant march from London’s West End to Broadway, War Horse opened last week at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre to rhapsodic reviews. Sporting a Canadian cast, the Mirvish production has wowed audiences and critics alike with its robust spectacle of horse puppets brought magically to life amid the fury of the First World War.  So when I had an opportunity to see a recent performance, I was pumped. Unlike some of my film critic confreres, I’d actually liked the Spielberg film War Horse (adapted from the same 1982 children’s book by Michael Morpurgo). I’d surrendered to its epic sentiment, flung myself through its barbed-wire gauntlet of sentiment and cliché, and quietly wept. The acclaim for the play was far more unanimous than for the movie, so I was fully expecting to be blown away.

To voice a dissenting view on War Horse, the play, is as uncool as confessing affection for War Horse, the movie. But the play was hard to love. Before I get lynched for crimes of critical insanity, let me clarify. I loved the staging. And I loved the horse puppets. Everything people say about these strangely animated creatures is true. Even though they’re being trotted around by clearly visible puppeteers, you watch those horses and believe they’re real. The suspension of disbelief is uncanny. The horses are fully formed characters, layered with uncanny nuances of motion—and emotion.

I wish I could say the same for the humans. I’m no theatre critic, but I was shocked by the strident pitch of the performances and the unleavened melodrama of the dialogue. Most of it was shouted, not spoken. Of course, drill sergeants and soldiers in the battlefield are supposed to be yelling at each other. But even on the farm, before Joey, our horse hero, gets sent into battle, virtually every scene is shouted.

Yes, I realize this is theatre, not film, and the actors have to play to a massive house. But after being spoiled by the naturalist  brilliance of dramatists like Robert Lepage, I’m always surprised that the old declamatory style of stage acting is still considered normal in a Broadway-scale production—especially one that employs such breathtaking innovation on other levels.

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The Oscar montage that never was

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 11:24 AM - 0 Comments

Now the Oscars are dead and buried, devoured by the microbial enzymes of countless Twitter feeds, let’s take one last look at a year in movies that the Academy only half-recognized. Lost in Oscar’s myopic gaze were films like Melancholia, Shame, Tintin, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Attack the Block, Drive, A Dangerous Method, Café de Flore, Le Havre, Mysteries of Lisbon, Into the Abyss, Project Nim and Nostalgia for the Light. Those titles were among the 2011 movies honoured by the Toronto Film Critics Association—along with many of the Oscar picks. So here’s the Oscar montage that never was, a mash-up of the TFCA’s 28 nominees and winners, edited by yours truly, using music only from the soundtracks:

Follow Brian D. Johnson on Twitter: @briandjohnson

Taylor Kitsch: the next action hero

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, March 2, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Frank Connor

Soon there will be no escaping Taylor Kitsch. Over the coming months, a trifecta of Hollywood blockbusters will christen this 30-year-old Canadian actor as America’s new action hero. As a Herculean gladiator in John Carter, a massive sci-fi opus opening next week, Kitsch battles great white apes in the Martian desert, while playing Lawrence of Arabia to a horde of tusked, green, four-armed barbarians that look like mutant exiles from Avatar. With an estimated budget of $250 million, it’s the kind of behemoth that could launch a franchise or shred a studio. Almost as ambitious is Battleship, a $200-million epic based on a board game. It hits theatres in May, with Kitsch in command as a U.S. Navy officer saving the world from an alien invasion. And in July he stars in Oliver Stone’s Savages, as an ex-Navy SEAL turned pot grower who goes to war against a Mexican drug cartel. Altogether, Hollywood is betting about a half-billion dollars on Taylor Kitsch.

None of this would have happened were it not for the blessed misfortune of a torn knee ligament. Growing up in Kelowna, B.C., he set out to be an action hero who would carve his exploits on the ice, not onscreen. As a Junior A star with the Langley Hornets, Kitsch was set to make the leap to a pro hockey career when a knee injury dashed his dreams. So he made another kind of leap, moving to New York at 20 to pursue a modelling offer and study acting. Now, a decade later—after proving his talent as a troubled football star in the acclaimed NBC series Friday Night Lights—this mild-mannered Canadian dreamboat has stepped into the ring as Hollywood’s new Great White Hope.

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Portrait of the Oscar as an Old Man

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, February 27, 2012 at 8:57 AM - 0 Comments

Oscar, that 84-year-old naked guy with a wandering eye, has always had a soft spot for an Old World accent. And at last night’s Academy Awards, it looked like the French are the new Brits. The silent, black-and-white marvel of The Artist—finally a French film without subtitles—won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Jean Dujardin. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which paid homage to the silent era with a 3D adventure in a Paris train station, also won five Oscars, including cinematography, but all were in the so-called technical categories.

Canada’s Christopher Plummer, 82, made history by becoming the oldest actor ever to win an Oscar, accepting the award for Best Supporting Actor prize for his role as gay father who comes out of the closet while dying of cancer. Even on the red carpet, he already seemed to be warming up for his acceptance speech.  “It’s about time I suppose,” he said, looking dapper in a black velvet tuxedo. “There’s not much left of me.” Later, as he clutched the Oscar, he delivered a graceful, witty script: “You’re only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life? I have a confession to make: when I first emerged from my mother’s womb I was already rehearsing my Academy acceptance speech.” He ended by thanking “my long-suffering wife, Elaine, who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.” Continue…

Eight rules for Oscar pools

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 24, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Shutterstock/Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Every year at this time, people ask me for inside dope so they can win their Oscar pool. Problem is, I’ve never won my own pool, and now refuse to join one. For a film critic, it’s a lose-lose situation—if I win, I have an unfair advantage; if don’t, I’m unqualified. This year looks more predictable than ever. With the rising profile of the Oscar primaries—critics’ lists, Golden Globes and guild prizes—the Academy Awards have become anticlimactic. But they’re still the only ones that matter. So for the love of the game, let’s play Oscarball! Here are some rules, and a batch of predictions from an unreliable oracle.

1. Oscar loves a good juggernaut. The Artist has swept the Directors and Producers Guild awards with no backlash in sight. Expect it to take Best Picture and Director. Caveat: Oscar loves to upset a juggernaut—Hugo and Martin Scorsese could do just that.

2. The best actors are not in the best pictures. The notable exception is The Artist’s Jean Dujardin. Otherwise, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are favoured to win Best Actress and Supporting Actress for The Help, which was shut out of every non-acting category but Best Picture. And Christopher Plummer has a lock on Supporting Actor for Beginners—its only nomination. Conversely, Hugo, which leads the pack with 11 nominations, doesn’t have a single acting nod.

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Everything you need to know about the Best Picture nominees*

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 4:34 PM - 0 Comments

Matt Sayles/AP

Brian D. Johnson doesn’t get to vote on the Academy Awards, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t done his homework on the year’s top movies. Our resident film critic chimed in the day Oscar nominations were released; covered the festival circuit, including Cannes for a 17th year, and TIFF; made a sound prediction back in December that Michelle Williams would go head to head with the Oscar queen, Merryl Streep, for Best Actress; and illuminated lesser known gems, like the Canadian contender for Best Foreign Language Film, Monsieur Lazhar. Brian also wrote about those other award shows—the Golden Globes, the Genies and the Toronto Film Critics Association‘s top picks of the year. But perhaps most importantly, he wrote about (nearly all) the films that are up for the Best Picture award (click on the film’s title to read the complete review):

The Artist

Written and directed by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, the comedy is smart and buoyant, but the simmering romance has disarming power. As with any Hollywood romcom, the most difficult trick is to generate emotional substance amid the comic contrivance.
The Artist does that with exhilarating magic, and you have to feel that the silence of the chemistry between the actors something to do with it.

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City of Toronto bans Baruchel ‘Goon’ poster

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 1:39 AM - 0 Comments

Banned in Toronto, the 'Goon' poster features star and co-writer Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel, the Montreal-based writer and star of the hockey movie Goon, seems to have goosed the City of Toronto into giving his movie some free publicity. Yesterday, the day of the film’s red carpet premiere in Toronto, the city took down 38 posters promoting the movie, according to Goon distributor Alliance Films.

The poster  features Baruchel, Goon’s co-writer and star (How To Train Your Dragon, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Tropic Thunder) gesturing in a way that the city found inappropriate. Alliance Films reports that the posters have been up for two weeks yet it  received neither prior notice nor any explanation as to why they were removed.

The cast of the film has been in Toronto for the last several days promoting the movie’s release.  “I question whether this has to do with Jay’s tongue or his ability to burn Maple Leafs’ jerseys, neither of which are offensive in any way,” said Goon director, Mike Dowse.

Commented Baruchel: “Another classic example of the cultural divide between Quebec and Ontario, I guess.”

Goon, a hockey comedy, delivers a wicked slapshot of profanity and violence, undercut with a sharp wit and a sweet streak of sentiment. The film has already offended some critics’ sensibilities with its unabashed romance of the enforcer, and its giddy embrace of violence—especially after last year’s deaths of three former NHL enforcers. Now, with the City of Toronto’s help, Goon‘s publicity campaign, like its hero (Seann Williams Scott), is mixing things up.

Does embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford have anything to do with the ban? Is he hoping to stir up a bit of culture war to distract the citizenry from his woes? Who knows. Alliance reported the city’s poster action in a press release at 12:36 a.m. today. And I’m sure as hell not phoning the Mayor’s house in the middle of the night.

Toronto and Vancouver: Hollywood can’t quite disguise them

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Kerry Hayes/Vow Productions; Shutterstock; Photo Illustration By Levi Nicholson

In a scene from The Vow, Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum park by the Chicago waterfront, strip down to their underwear, and scamper into the lake for a frigid late-night dip. But the lake is Ontario, not Michigan. The couple is cavorting on Cherry Beach in McAdams’s home city of Toronto, and the skyline is visible—minus the CN Tower. Canadian locales routinely impersonate American cities in Hollywood movies, but what’s striking about The Vow is how blithely it shows familiar glimpses of a city that’s supposed to be incognito. The lovers first cross paths at City Hall, and exchange their vows at a guerrilla wedding staged in the Art Gallery of Ontario. The movie is punctuated by postcard vistas of the real Chicago, but whenever the actors are in the shot, Toronto backdrops shatter the illusion, at least for anyone who knows the city.

There’s nothing wrong with faking locations. It’s something Hollywood has always done and always will. Movies, after all, are in the business of make-believe. But after so many years, the routine casting of Toronto and Vancouver for American burgs has become irksome, especially now that these cities have more personality and profile of their own. Ontario film commissioner Donna Zuchlinski claims local audiences enjoy spotting their hometown onscreen—“it adds to the movie-going experience, that sense of pride.” But stripped of its character, a surrogate city exudes blandness. In a confection like The Vow, despite a spirited performance from McAdams, that cavalier lack of authenticity penetrates deep into the bones of the movie, from the generic characters to the formulaic script. It seems to say: what the hell, the audience will never notice.

When American studios shoot movies north of the border, would it kill them to set one there? That almost never happens. Although Canada is the only country in the world that’s lumped into Hollywood’s domestic market, apparently we’re not domestic enough to be a place where people would actually live. “Americans want to see American cities,” says Toronto production designer Sandra Kybartas, a veteran of both Canadian and U.S. shoots. “They have a limited palate for exoticism.”

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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.”

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‘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…