Ivan Reitman warms up Whistler

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 1:21 AM - 3 Comments

Marie-Helene Bellavance wins Best Actress at Whistler in top prize-winner, 'Les Signes vitaux'

I spent the weekend at Whistler and got excited about snow. Not just the stuff on the mountains. Sure, last month the B.C. ski resort was blessed with the heaviest snowfall of any month in recorded history—5.5 metres—laying down an early base for that Olympic thing in February. And yes, I admit I did a little skiing. I even entered a “celebrity challenge” slalom race and came home with a silver medal that looks convincingly like the real thing. It’s heavy. But what got me excited was the snow onscreen in a Quebec movie called Les Signes vitaux, which played in competition at the 9th annual Whistler Film Festival and won its top prize, the $15,000 Borsos Award for Best New Canadian Feature Film—presented by Hollywood Canadian Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters). Written and directed by Sopie Deraspe, this exquisite drama is set against the bitter, austere beauty of a Quebec City winter, where snow serves as a bare canvas and a rich metaphor—for the naked  void between sex and death. This is not the  snowman-snow of Quebec’s Winter Carnival. It’s the snow that falls in silent shades of grey and squeaks underfoot, articulating cold, while it buries the past and turns a fresh page.

Les Signes vitaux—which is titled The Living Rate in English (though I’d prefer the literal translation, Vital Signs)—is the compelling story of a  young woman who becomes a volunteer in a palliative care home after the death of her mother. Sounds deadly, I know, and it’s not an easy sell.  But the drama hinges on the tension between this woman’s frustrated search for life amid death and her capricious, carnal romance with a failed musician she refuses to accept as her boyfriend. That’s not all. The woman is a double amputee below the knees. And we’re not talking CGI. She’s played by Marie-Helene Bellevance, who had both legs amputated at the age of 11. Continue…

Blindness, deafness and babbling zombies

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 11:27 PM - 0 Comments

One of the maddening things about TIFF, at least for a journalist trying to cover it single-handedly, is that most the action is front-loaded into the opening weekend. That’s when the big, star-driven movies premiere. The Hollywood studios invite a horde of North American press into town for junkets to promote these prestige pictures , and many of those same journalists have gone home by Tuesday or Wednesday. Which means if you want to get maximum media exposure for your film, you need to show it on the opening weekend. Which makes for a hectic time, to say the least. All this is by way of an apology to say it’s hard to find time to see all the absolutely unmissable films, interview all the absolutely irresistible stars and find time to blog on a daily basis. You’re always running to catch up to a festival that seems to be forever sliding through your hands.

It certainly doesn’t leave much time for parties, even though there are enough of them that you could make collecting bold-face names over cocktails a full-time job. Everyone keeps asking me, “Are you having fun?” Well, I don’t like to complain about life in the fast lane. Hey, I’m not in Afghanistan. But no, it’s not a whole lot of fun.

Last night, however, after screening my last movie, I did force myself to attend a party, even though I wasn’t in the mood. I thought maybe it will be like having sex when you don’t feel like it: it will turn out to be just what the doctor ordered. 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…

With the blonde leading the blind, let the games begin

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

On the eve of the 61st Cannes Film Festival, the French Riviera is cool and overcast. The local merchants are doing a brisk business in overpriced umbrellas. (With the over-caffeinated Euro pushing a coffee up to $5 here, French waiters now have a currency to match their attitude.) Tomorrow night a Canadian film will open Cannes for the first time in 28 years. Blindness is a co-production with Brazil and Japan. But despite the global pedigree and Brazilian director (City of God‘s Fernando Meirelles), Blindness was initiated and brought to fruition as a Canadian project —by Rhombus Media producer Niv Fichman and Toronto screenwriter Don McKellar, who spent six years adapting the novel by Nobel laureate José Saramago.

Blindness is an odd choice for an opening gala in Cannes. We’ve become accustomed to seeing the festival kick-off with empty-headed confections, like The Da Vinci Code. Even last year’s opener, Blueberry Nights, was pure fluff, despite its the auteur prestige of its director, Wong Kar-Wai. But Blindness is a high-minded thriller with a strong ensemble cast (including Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal). It’s a disaster movie, but one that subverts and dignifies a genre that’s usually associated with Hollywood excess. Blindness is a strangely elegant disaster picture, one that tries to salvage beauty from bleakness And in Cannes, where the zeitgeist marches in lock-step with the movies, perhaps this allegory about vision and light is perhaps pointing, or groping, to a theme in the program—at least if the official Cannes poster is any indication.

The poster could be captioned ‘The blonde leading the blind,’ which could also serve as a glib tagline for the opening night film. In Blindness, a strawberry blond Moore plays the one sighted person among victims of a blindness epidemic who have been brutally quarantined and incarcerated. I’m not sure what the blurred blonde in the poster is up to. Is she being blinded, censored, masked, naked. . . ? Most likely, all of the above. An appropriate image for a festival that trades in both Hollywood hype and art-house mystique. Cannes is a grand cinematic masquerade. We come here hoping to be surprised and shocked by something mysterious, something we’ve never seen before from cinema. Each year, the odds get longer.

There are some familiar faces. Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg will launch their Indiana Jones blockbuster amid massive hype on the weekend. Like Spielberg, Woody Allen is playing safe with a premiere outside the competition. Clint Eastwood, who’s almost as popular in France as Jerry Lewis, is joining the fray with a drama called Changeling. (He might have an ally in jury president Sean Penn, who starred in Clint’s Mystic River) Atom Egoyan, who forged his career in Cannes, will attempt to resurrect it with Adoration, which marks a bold return to his art-house roots. And Steven Soderbergh unveils Che, a four-hour, two-part epic about Che Guevera, starring Benicio Del Toro. It’s one of the most hotly-anticipated films in competition. But unknown quantities outweigh proven talents among the 22 features vying for the Palme D’Or. Take Charlie Kaufman. The screenwriter who gave us Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind makes his feature debut with, Synecdoche, New York, which looks to be another post-modern mind-bender. He’s thrown Philip Seymour Hoffman in with a dream harem of actresses: Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson and Dianne Weist. Personally, I’m looking forward to a thriller called Three Monkeys from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

In Cannes, the usual order of the entertainment universe is turned upside down. The auteurs are the stars and the Hollywood hype-artists are the hangers on. It’s the Olympics of world cinema. So let the games begin. I plan to be blogging daily. And I’ve come with a camcorder. So, barring technical difficulties, I’ll also be posting daily video blogs.

In the course of writing this, by the way, the sky has cleared. Even if these games are played in dark, we still care about the weather.