Star Trek Adoration

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 10:41 PM - 10 Comments

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as Kirk and Spock in Star Trek

Opening this week are two films from opposite ends of the cinematic universe. One is massive, the other miniature. Both are baroquely plotted, time-warped dramas set in alien worlds, with meta narratives that hover between comic irony and high drama. One is Star Trek, the blockbuster reboot that seems destined to go where no Star Trek movie has gone before—far beyond its fan base. The other is Adoration, a return to form by Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan, who resumes the intimate, and intricate, scale of his earlier work with an arthouse gem destined to consolidate rather than expand his audience. Star Trek is a popcorn movie that I’d happily recommend to anyone; Adoration is a foie gras film, an acquired taste that will delight Egoyan gourmets and may leave others a little bewildered.

Star Trek

I come to this not as a fan, but as someone who has always viewed Star Trek from a distance as an amusing cult phenomenon. Like anyone else, I’ve cruised in and out of the various TV incarnations, and I’ve seen some (but not all) of the previous ten Star Trek movies, which ranged from laughable to forgettable. If you want a fan’s reaction to the new movie, you should read this report from Patricia Treble, Maclean’s chief of research: Star Trek from a fan’s point of view. But even this non-believer was delighted to ride the refurbished Starship Enterprise. With more than double the budget of any previous Trek movie, director J.J. Abrams (Lost) has rebooted the franchise into a new stratosphere, but he’s brought more than posh production values to the table. Without abandoning the Star Trek of sci-fi kitsch, he’s enriched the saga with unprecedented depth and maturity. And if my enthusiasm is any measure, he has pulled off that tricky balancing act—thrilling loyal fans while appealing to a broader audience of the uninitiated. To read my recent background piece in the magazine about the reboot, go to Star Trek’s perilous enterprise. Meanwhile, some thoughts on the movie, after seeing it last night:

Star Trek, a title that seems naked without Roman numerals attached, relaunches the saga with a new crew of actors playing the characters from the original TV series. Abrams kick-starts the prequel’s creation story, with a prolonged space battle that culminates in a Big Bang Genesis: simultaneously Captain James T. Kirk’s father is sacrificed in a clash with a Romulan ship while his mother gives birth to baby James in an escaping shuttle craft. Right from the get-go, Abrams brings an arresting sense of style to the visuals: the enemy craft, piloted by the Romulan villain Nero (a tattooed Eric Bana), looks like an ominovourous, dark-feathered sea creature. And there’s some flesh-and-blood punch to the violence. This doesn’t feel like a cartoon.

Flash forward to James Kirk in Iowa as a juvenile delinquent joy-riding a vintage red Corvette, then as a brash young man, a rebel without cause, taking on all comers in a barroom brawl. The actor cast as Kirk, Chris Pine, first struck me as a walking cliché of a blond All-American pretty boy, a callow combo of Tab Hunter and James Dean. But as he finds his rhythm, the performance acquires some edges, some wit, and we can see a glimmer of William Shatner’s jaunty signature in his reckless intimations of authority. Continue…

The passion and politics of opening night

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 10:15 PM - 0 Comments

Start your engines, and let the madness begin. For the next ten days, TIFF turns Toronto into the Cannes of North America, but rather than promenading down the Croisette by the beaches of the Côte d’Azur, those rushing to premieres will be sidestepping construction sites along Bloor St. in a city so thoroughly excavated it’s beginning to look like a Designer Walk war zone. Never mind. For those on their annual fall search for the cinematic grail, that’s just another obstacle. Navigating a major film festival is always an extreme sport. Scrambling t score a tough ticket or uncover a hidden gem is the name of the game. At TIFF, the stakes are high: no film festival in the world has a richer program. Which doesn’t mean all the films are great, or even good. No, with 312 films—including 249 features—from 64 countries, TIFF can seem like a motion picture paradise, or the industrial outlet mall of world cinema. The trick is to be at the right film at the right time.

I’ll do my best to keep up. Fortunately, I’ve had a head start, pre-screening films for the past couple of weeks. From what I’ve seen, the line-up doesn’t seem as strong as last year’s, at least among the high-profile American movies. That’s not necessarily the festival’s fault; it can only program what’s available, and 2007 offered an exceptionally good cinematic vintage that this year may be unable to match.

Tonight the 32nd annual Toronto International Film Festival kicks off with Passchendaele, a First World War epic starring Paul Gross, who also serves as writer, co-producer and director. I wrote about the film and Gross’s 10-year struggle to bring it to the screen in the current issue of Maclean’s—click on The war to make ‘Passchendaele’. Costing $20 million—a vast budget for a Canadian movie without foreign co-production financing, yet a spare budget for an ambitious war movie—Passchendaele is a remarkable achievement, even if the results are uneven.

Why is it opening the festival? Despite its international stature as the world’s leading film festival after Cannes, TIFF (to its credit) has an unofficial policy of always opening with a Canadian film, or at least one by a Canadian director. Choosing the right one is a process of elimination, and diplomacy. Continue…

And now, the final credits. . .

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 6:21 PM - 0 Comments

So in the end, how was Cannes? As I’m writing this, at 36,000 ft. somewhere above Greenland, I realize I’ll need a response for that question by the time I get back. The short answer: the weather sucked, and it wasn’t a banner year for films, but there were some good ones. They still need time to settle. As much as critics grumble about the quality of the films when we’re racing around the festival, by the end of the year, they’re usually starting to look pretty good. Some final reflections: Continue…

Atom Egoyan "overwhelmed"

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 24, 2008 at 8:49 PM - 0 Comments

Skipped a French movie to see Atom Egoyan accept the Ecumenical Jury Prize. Looks like my earlier announcement of it broke an embargo. Oops. Anyway, speeches were made, champagne was popped and now it’s official. Egoyan, who won the same prize for The Sweet Hereafter, said that at the time he didn’t really understand why that film was chosen. But he could see that Adoration, which hinges on themes of cultural tolerance, is a more logical fit for an award that honours a depth of spiritual understanding.

Here’s some footage I shot of Egoyan receiving the award this afternoon:

Egoyan's 'Adoration' wins a prize

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 24, 2008 at 7:02 AM - 0 Comments

This just in. Atom Egoyan has won the Ecumenical jury’s prize in Cannes for Adoration. It’s awarded by a different jury than the one chaired by Sean Penn, which decides the main prizes. With rather fuzzy criteria, the Ecumenical jury recognizes films that have a spiritual dimension and plumb the depths of the human condition. Previous recipients include Babel and Cache. Egoyan won the prize 11 years ago for The Sweet Hereafter, which then won the International Critics’ Prize and the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes before going on to receive two Oscar nominations. Whether or not Adoration will follow suit, at least Egoyan won’t be going be home empty-handed.

'Adoration' is adored, but not universally

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 1:18 PM - 0 Comments

Atom Egoyan’s Adoration premieres here tonight, and was unveiled to the press earlier today. I saw the film back in Toronto, and liked it, but figured it would polarize audiences in Cannes. After the failures of Ararat and Where the Truth Lies, which both suffered from overwrought ambition–and which even Egoyan’s fans had trouble defending–Adoration is a more intimate film on a much smaller budget. It shows the Toronto auteur returning to his tangled roots, and he seems to relish the freedom. This is classic Egoyan, a playful, perverse intrigue that throws a myriad of ideas into incestuous play and makes of virtue of a preposterous plot. I won’t go into detail here, but it’s about a teenage boy (Devon Bostick) who creates a fictional tale of a terrorist incident involving his deceased parents, which triggers a series of video discussion groups on the Internet and some very bizarre behaviour by the boy’s French/drama teacher, played by the director’s wife, Arsinee Khanjian.

I saw Adoration in Toronto before coming to Cannes. I wanted to attend the Che press conference, which conflicted with today’s press screening, so I didn’t witness the audience reaction to the screening first hand. But most people I’ve talked to reported that the applause was unusually warm and generous. As for the industry’s critical response, it won’t be in print until tomorrow’s trades are published, but from what I can gather there’s a mix of positive, negative and mixed. Egoyan’s films are an aquired taste, so you expect some polarization. But from what I could gather, the consensus was favorable. So I’ve just done a live interview on CBC Newsworld where I reported that Egoyan’s film has been well received in Cannes.

Then I just ran into one of the most prominent American critics here, who said he thought it was “astonishingly bad.” He said he could find half a dozen of his colleagues who would tell me the same thing. But the applause was generous, no? He said he interpreted the ovation as “sarcastic” applause. A few minutes later, another critic, who liked the film, argued that it’s Egoyan’s best since The Sweet Hereafter, then said some of the applause may have been sarcastic, if that’s conceivable, but from where he was sitting, it was genuine.

Only in Cannes, where a film’s fate is decided within hours, do you get people conducting forensic post-mortems on applause. Stay tuned. No doubt, the verdict from the world pantheon of film critics will be set in stone by morning.