Forget Gosling, Pitt and Clooney—check out the children

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 6:05 PM - 0 Comments

Cécile de France and Thomas Doret in 'The Kid with a Bike'

After previewing a bunch films at TIFF, the 36th edition of TIFF is shaping up to be a promising festival. Already you hear people handicapping the Oscars, which feels premature. But from what I’ve seen, some things seem obvious.

Look out for George Clooney, who brings us his best directorial effort to date with The Ides of March, a political intrigue in which he plays a Democrat governor vying for the presidency. A smart tale of backroom betrayal, it’s this year’s answer to The Social Network. The lead role belongs to Canada’s Ryan Gosling, who also burns up the screen in Drive,  co-starring with Carey Mulligan as a smouldering action hero reminiscent of Steve McQueen.  There’s no question that Gosling is TIFF’s It Boy.

Speaking of Steve McQueen, the British director of the same name who made Hunger will be at the festival with Shame, starring Michael Fassbender as a man obsessed with pornography. Once again Carey Mulligan co-stars, in the role of his self-destructive sister. And in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, Fassbender pops up again, as the kind of man who could offer treatment to some of his other characters—he plays Carl Jung to Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud.

One could keep daisy-chaining names like these through the entire TIFF program. But it’s just as interesting to trace the circuits of thematic synchronicity in the films, and leap to conclusions that there may be something wild going on in the zeitgeist. One distinct trend that I’ve notice from the movies I’ve seen is the haunting presence of feral children.

Some of the best performances I’ve seen are by unknown kids acting without a net. Continue…

No more Mr. Nice Guy for Seth Rogen

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 12:14 PM - 0 Comments

Anna Faris and Seth Rogen in 'Observe and Report'

This weekend, whether you’re up for comedy or drama, prepare to be shocked. The drama is Hunger, a visceral real-life story that follows the final six weeks in the life of Bobby Sands, who led the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. It was written and directed by Steve McQueen—no relation to the late actor who rode the motorbike in The Great Escape, but the OBE and Turner Prize-winning British artist. There’s nothing escapist about Hunger, which has been stunning audiences and winning awards ever since its premiere last May in Cannes, where McQueen won the Camera d’Or for best feature directing debut. The other noteworthy, though less auspicious, opening this weekend is Observe and Report, which bears the ebulliant pedigree of Canadian actor Seth Rogen. It’s a dark comedy written directed by an American iconoclast named Jody Hill, his second feature after the martial arts comedy The Foot Fist Way.

Observe and Report

Don’t let the jolly posters of Rogen and the harmless gags in the trailer fool you. Warner Bros. is doing it’s best to spin this as another boffo Seth Rogen comedy. But audiences who go expecting a night of light entertainment—or a sentimental farce reminiscent of Paul Blart: Mall Cop—are in for a rude shock. This is one of the most twisted movies released by a Hollywood studio in some time. The last one I can think of that’s went this far out of its way to be offensive is Very Bad Things. But it at least was consistently cynical and distasteful. What makes Observe and Report so disturbing is that it pays creepy lip service to rom-com convention and underdog heroism, then cracks open its booby-trapped narrative with the cold-blooded sentiment of a suicide bomber. I suppose you would call it a satire, but the target seems less important than the sheer relish of the assault. And the morality of it is so garbled, so punch-drunk, that you stagger out of it not quite sure if its one of the most subversive films you’ve ever seen, or one of the most retrograde. Continue…

Going hungry with Che

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 8:10 PM - 0 Comments

Slept in for a change. The Cannes programmers gave us a break today, clearing out the schedule to leave our palates fresh for this evening’s premiere of Che, Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic about Che Guevara. For once it was sunny. I was tempted to hit the beach, and almost did. But dark rooms exert an addictive pull in this place, along with the fear of missing something unmissable. So this afternoon I caught the final market screening of Hunger, which opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar last week. It’s a much-buzzed feature debut from British visual artist Steve McQueen (you think he’d at least call himself Steven to avoid confusion with the dead actor on IMDB.)

Hunger is a tough film, highly graphic drama about the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. It begins with a no-wash strike—a harrowing, maggot-ridden ordeal of prisoners wearing nothing but overgrown beards who are beaten and tortured in cells while they smear the walls with their own waste. (Yet another example of the bizarre sanitation theme that flows like an open sewer through this year’s Cannes program). The filth and torture sequences, which are almost wordless, are followed by a long, uncut stretch of staccato dialogue between IRA militant Bobby Sands and a priest trying to talk him out of the hunger strike. That scene is a theatrical tour de force. Then we come to the hunger strike itself. It transpires as an ethereal trip into a palliative afterlife, featuring actors with gaping sores who are so alarmingly skinny they could teach the cast of Schindler’s List a thing or two about dieting.

But I had to leave Hunger before the end. I was famished, and desperate to pick up a slice of quiche to-go before heading into Che marathon.

Starring Benicio Del Toro, Che was presented in two parts, two separate movies really, with a 15-minute intermission. The dialogue is almost all in Spanish, with English subtitles. The first part plays like a war movie, and traces Che’s guerrilla campaign through the jungles of Cuba, intercut with black-and-white re-enactments of his visit to the United Nations in N.Y. The second part plays like a thriller, and follows his disintegrating campaign in Bolivia up to his death, another saga of starvation and sickness. It’s hard to imagine either part working without the other. They’re a matched set of victory and defeat, an ascent to revolutionary heaven followed by the descent into hell. The story of defeat is more compelling.

At half time, the lobby was littered with little shopping bags marked CHE, each containing a bottle of water and half a sandwich consisting off a flattened leaf of lettuce and virtually nothing else between slices of squished white bread. An attempt to simulate jungle rations?

A few observations on Che:

• Soderbergh goes so far out of his way not to make a conventional Hollywood biopic that he offers not a shred of personal back story, or front story. Just meticulous history and warfare.

• No one has sex of any sort, or even talks about it, during the entire four hours—except a deserter who rapes a peasant girl off screen. But the men smoke a lot of cigars.

• About an hour a three quarters into the movie, it’s casually mentioned that Che has a wife and daughter in Mexico; moments before his death in the second movie he mentions that he has five children. That’s all we ever hear of them.

• There are virtually no close-ups in either movie. It’s hard to find Benicio Del Toro’s eyes. Everyone has overgrown beards, and things can get confusing.

• For no apparent reason, except to provoke a titter of recognition, Matt Damon pops up in a cameo, speaking Spanish.

• Che is a severe asthmatic. At one point, as he lies gasping from breath in the Bolivian jungle, he says, “All of us have made mistakes but I made the worst mistake when I didn’t bring my medicine along.” So if he’d taken a puffer into the jungle, instead of cigars, could that have turned the tide of history? Clearly he would have been better off making revolution in a desert climate.

• Che’s screenwriter is Peter Buchman, whose previous major credit is a jungle tale of a different colour— Jurassic Park III

I don’t have any video from my own camera today, but here’s some official footage of what was happening at Che‘s red carpet premiere: