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…

Bono, Madonna and Neil Young walk into a bar… looking for Brando

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

Rock stars have always seen themselves as movie stars in the flesh. From a black-and-white Bob Dylan playing hide’n'seek with the camera in Don’t Look Back to Mick Jagger performing as a man is stabbed to death near the stage in Gimme Shelter, the big screen validates rock’s delusions of grandeur as nothing else can. But it’s a two-way street. You can’t imagine Martin Scorsese’s movies without the Stones on the soundtrack. And Bruce Springsteen has talked about how his seminal album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was heavily inspired by American film noir. That was at last year’s TIFF, when the Boss, interviewed onstage by Edward Norton, was the hottest ticket at festival. This year, it’s raining rock stars. Continue…

Scaling the Everest of festivals

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 3:25 PM - 0 Comments

Trevor Haldenby/Flickr

For some, it’s back to school. For those of us who live and breathe movies, it’s time to disappear into the dark. Every September, Toronto’s fantasies of “world class” grandeur become red-carpet reality as the TIFF juggernaut turns our city into the Grand Central Station of cinema for 11 days (Sept 8-18). This year’s event marks the 36th edition of the festival, and each year it seems bigger than the year before. Cannes, of course, remains the grande dame, the opulent high altar of film; Sundance is the high-altitude American indie talent show; and venerable Venice, which ends just after Toronto begins, is the glittering Euro-Hollywood ball. But for anyone serious about movies in North America, TIFF is the main event, launching the fall season of Oscar-pedigree fare amid a full-course banquet of world cinema and a media circus of Hollywood stars.

As festival fever consumes the city, we brace ourselves for celebrity gridlock. Limos will choke the narrow downtown streets and the mugs of visiting stars will swamp our front pages for days on end. This is my world—show business as usual—but I’m always amazed by how the rest of the city puts up with it. Which is not to say civilians don’t play a role. Unlike Cannes, which exists in a fairy-tale bubble, TIFF thrives on a reputation for filling theatres with ordinary folk who happen to be ardent cinephiles. Overpriced tickets sell out weeks in advance. People take time off work, stand in line for hours, and track the festival buzz online like soldiers on the front listening to distant battle scores on short wave. That’s part of what makes this event so attractive to filmmakers premiering their work. You won’t find a more attentive audience. If your film doesn’t work here, don’t expect it to catch fire anywhere else. But the industrial-scale glamour of the festival—the lure of Hollywood royalty beyond the velvet ropes and wristband checkpoints—exists in a world apart and out of reach, a luxurious salon society sponsored by vodka brands and fashion labels. With each passing year, even I feel more and more like an outsider.

I’ve been attending TIFF almost since it began. Before reviewing its films, I drove them around town—in the early ’80s I spent three festivals delivering movies to theatres, racing a van through the streets and hoisting leaden cans of 35-mm celluloid up fire escapes to projection booths. Best job I ever had. After a quarter-century covering TIFF, writing a book about its history in 2001 (Brave Films Wild Nights), and making a couple of short films that were programmed at TIFF,  you’d think I’d have a grip on it by now. But each year this Everest of festivals seem to get bigger, and make you feel smaller.

Last year, with the opening  of the TIFF Bell Lightbox, it acquired a handsome new downtown headquarters, which stands as a proud and permanent incarnation of the event itself—a wide-open intersection of high art and pop culture. We love the Lightbox; it feels like home. But the festival itself is an ever more daunting challenge. Though it lasts 11 days, most of the action is packed into the first four, when most of the high-profile movies are shown and the city’s luxury hotels are packed with American media junketeers. Trying to screen an entire season of Important Films in a few days is a scheduling nightmare. Interview times gets sliced thinner and thinner to accommodate the ever-expanding media universe. And you find yourself scrambling to squeeze in 10-minute chunks of time with famous names, forced to choose between seeing movies and doing interviews. It’s so hard to say no to a celebrity. And the obscure gems of world cinema tend get lost in the dust.

Fortunately, we screen a lot of films in advance. For some of us, the festival started weeks ago. But as the curtain rises on Sept. 8, with a U2 documentary providing the bombast, the adrenaline kicks in and the real fun begins. On the right column of our Maclean’s TIFF webpage, you’ll find mini-reviews of my favorite films among the 336 titles at the festival. (No, I won’t see them all!) There are already 20 titles on my hit list, and still counting. Amid the hype, the buzz and the media frenzy, as everyone looks for the next Slumdog Millionaire or King’s Speech, as I look for the summit, I’ll try to keep my eyes wide open in the dark. Hoping being blown away by something I never saw coming.

What Oscar likes in a woman

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

In Conviction, Hilary Swank plays another working-class warrior—a dropout who gets a law degree to exonerate her brother; George Pimentel/Getty Images

Meryl Streep used to routinely complain about the dearth of strong female roles. Those days are long gone. In fact, Hollywood seems to have adopted a new double standard, by which women have a monopoly on outsized heroic virtue. Over the past decade, the Best Actor winners have included two psychopaths (Training Day, There Will Be Blood), a mass murderer (The Last King of Scotland), a prima donna journalist (Capote), a philandering junkie (Ray), and a shambling alcoholic (Crazy Heart). Only one actor was awarded for playing a righteous crusader: Sean Penn in Milk. With the women, it’s another story. Of the past 10 Best Actress winners, just one played a psycho: Monster’s Charlize Theron. Among the other roles are a beloved queen, a string of noble martyrs, and two stubborn crusaders—Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.

Real-life heroines tend to dominate Oscar-pedigree roles. And though it’s early to start handicapping the awards, the trend seems stronger than ever—with the notable exception of Natalie Portman’s sensational tour de force as a ballerina in the melodrama Black Swan. Lately I’ve seen a glut of powerhouse performances by actresses cast in true stories of underdog crusaders triumphing over long odds—Diane Lane in Secretariat (opening Oct. 8), Hilary Swank in Conviction (Oct. 15), Naomi Watts in Fair Game (Nov. 5), and Rachel Weisz in The Whistleblower (release date pending). Each of these roles fits a particular mould: a working mother who tests her family’s patience by taking the world by storm.

Continue…

FUBAR's Terry and Dean at TIFF

By Tom Henheffer - Friday, October 1, 2010 at 1:42 PM - 0 Comments

A couple of greasy-haired headbangers weaved their way into the hearts of Canadians one crushed beer can at a time in 2002 with the hilarious, unconventional and massively under-financed mockumentary FUBAR. The film, from director Michael Dowse, tells the simple story of Terry (David Lawrence) and Dean (Paul Spence) as they drink, listen to their beloved hair metal, and go camping in a bid to give’r one last time before Dean undergoes surgery for testicular cancer.

FUBAR II, premiering Friday, catches up with the boys a few years down the road as they get kicked out of their house and head for Fort McMurray to strike it rich. It’s rare for a sequel to best its original, but FUBAR II manages to cram in even more hilarious lunacy—and does so with a tighter story that also features some intelligent, but not overbearing, social commentary about drugs, friendship, and the problems inherent in fast money. Terry, Dean and Dowse sat down with Maclean’s before their gala opening—which started when they drove up to the red carpet on a flatbed truck pulling headbangers, a band, and strippers—at the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss the film, their message to Stephen Harper, and life since becoming hoser icons.

TIFF Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Sarah Silverman’s amazing week
She was at TIFF promoting Peep Show, but Sarah Silverman has been in town shooting Take This Waltz with director Sarah Polley. “Sarah is so supportive,” she told Maclean’s. “After my first take on my first day, she came up to me and said, ‘That was amazing!’ Then someone brought her a cup of coffee and she said, ‘This coffee is amazing!’ ” As for her Waltz co-star, Seth Rogen, she says, “He’s the least neurotic Jew I’ve ever met.”

Hosers to Harper: live a little
Just when you thought the hoser comedy had reached the end of its evolutionary rope, along comes FUBAR 2. David Lawrence and Paul Spence showed up in character to their red-carpet premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival—as Alberta metalheads Terry and Dean. Michael Dowse’s sequel to his 2002 mockumentary cult hit boasts a fatter budget and a sweeter story—an oil sands bromance that takes the moronic duo to the pipelines and peeler bars of Fort McMurray. Environmental rape and testicular cancer has never been funnier. Talking to Maclean’s, Dean (Spence) said Laureen Harper was an old hunting buddy of his father’s, prompting Terry (Lawrence) to suggest the Prime Minister should “make things cheaper, like 1984,” and “party with Laureen a little more.”

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Hollywood's new heroine: the skank

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Adam Taylor

In Easy A, a new high school comedy, Emma Stone stars as Olive, a sharp-witted, kind-hearted 17-year-old who cultivates a reputation as the school slut even though she’s a virgin. In a bizarre twist on a girl protecting her honour, she takes to wearing satin bustiers emblazoned with a red “A”—inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which, conveniently, she’s studying in school. It all starts with a fib to her best friend about a wild weekend tryst that never happened. Then, as an act of charity, she fakes drunken sex with a gay friend—which involves a charade of torrid screaming behind a bedroom door at a party—to immunize him against homophobia. “I always thought pretending to lose my virginity would be a little more special,” she sighs. But as Olive is branded a tramp, she turns the stigma into a mark of empowerment, waging a one-woman culture war against the school’s Cross Your Heart Club of Christian prudes. “If they want me to be a dirty skank, fine!” she says. “I’ll be the dirtiest skank they’ve ever seen.”

Continue…

Bill Gates on what’s wrong with public schools

By Kenneth Whyte - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at 10:17 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, is also one of the world’s leading philanthropists. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is perhaps best known for fighting poverty and disease in the developing world, but its main domestic focus is on education. Gates appears in the new documentary Waiting for “Superman,” which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. A powerful indictment of the U.S. education system, it features educators running the innovative Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools, and follows families desperate to get their children into high-performing charter schools. (Often controversial, charter schools receive some public money but do not follow the same rules or curriculum as public schools.) Gates believes the quality of teachers is of critical importance, and calls for a system of evaluation to reward the best, and get rid of the worst. He talked to Maclean’s editor-in-chief Kenneth Whyte in Toronto.

Continue…

Top 9 worst moments of TIFF

By Stephanie Findlay and Tom Henheffer - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 5:19 PM - 0 Comments

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Top 9 worst moments of TIFF

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Good film, bad screening

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the bold and beautiful new documentary from Werner Herzog that was almost cut off at the knees because of technical glitches at its premiere. The 3D projector was poorly calibrated, making the film difficult to watch, the camera froze at the beginning, and then the entire film shut down for about 10 minutes right at the climax. The documentary was moving enough that most critics didn't seem to mind.

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Next Natalie Portman disses the press

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Top 10 best moments of TIFF

By Tom Henheffer and Stephanie Findlay - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 1:25 PM - 0 Comments

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Top 10 best moments of TIFF

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Torontonian Cocktail

The fest's best drink was a Grey Goose cocktail at the Soho House Club made with vodka, organic cucumber juice and ginger beer. And honourable mention goes to the Roosevelt room for their signature martini with white chocolate and gold flakes on top.

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The Top 10 films of TIFF

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 10:48 AM - 0 Comments

TIFF triggers Oscar buzz for 'The King's Speech'

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 19, 2010 at 7:06 PM - 0 Comments

Deobrah Chow, director of 'The High Cost of Living,' winner of best Canadian first feature.

The people have spoken, and they’ve crowned a period drama about British royalty as  the most popular picture at TIFF. The 35th edition of the festival wrapped today with an awards brunch, and Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech—starring Colin Firth as George VI and Geoffrey Rush as his Australian speech therapist—won the  oxymoronically named Cadillac People’s Choice Award. Part of the TIFF ritual is to launch Oscar-pedigree films, and the audience prize has become a bellwether of Academy recognition—its past three winners have been Precious, Slumdog Millionaire and Eastern Promises.

Colin Firth in 'The King's Speech'

But even without this coronation, The King’s Speech was already touted as a clear Oscar contender. I didn’t see it, I’m afraid. Faced with a schedule conflict, I opted instead to see Black Swan, a decision I still don’t regret. Missing The King’s Speech was just one  casualty of the festival’s insane opening-weekend  crunch.  In fact, despite running myself ragged seeing films (I logged 54 out of 300), for the first time in 25 years of covering  this festival I managed to miss every damn one of the award-winners.

They include Deborah Chow’s The High Cost of Living, which took the $15,000 prize for Canadian feature debut, and Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, which received the $30,000 award for best Canadian feature. Chow thanked the award’s sponsor, Sky Vodka, “for saving me from working at Starbucks next week.” Then Villeneuve trumped that by saying, “I don’t work at Starbucks, but the federal Canadian income tax agency keeps calling me, so I won’t go to jail.” Which echoed a comment he made last January upon receiving the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award at the Toronto Film Critics dinner—when Rogers Vice-Chairman Phil Lind handed him a $10,000 cheque for Polytechnique, Villeneuve said he could now pay his Rogers cable bill. I was secretly hoping for Bruce McDonald to win the TIFF prize for Trigger, because I loved it, but also because the last time I saw him pick up some prize money he promised to buy a giant lump of hash.

As for Chow, she told me later that the Starbucks line was a joke:  she spent five years working on The High Cost of Living, supporting herself with web design and graphic design. The Toronto-born director shot it in her current home town on a $1.8 million budget. And like so many Canadian features this year, it has an American star, Zach Braff. It’s about the unlikely relationship between a drug dealer (Braff) and a woman expecting her first child (Isabelle Blais). Based on the play by Wajdi Mouawad, Villeneuve’s Incendies is  a drama of twin siblings in search of their brother and father after the death of their mother. Villeneuve’s film has been sold for U.S. distribution  to Sony Classics, which also picked up Barney’s Version. That’s great news for Canadian cinema.

Other TIFF awards:

• People’s Choice Documentary Award: Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson.

• People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award: the vampire movie Stake Land, by U.S. filmmaker Jim Mickle.

• Best Canadian Short: Les Fleurs de l’âge, by director Vincent Biron.

• FIPRESCI Special Presentation Award: L’Amour Fou, s documentary about late fashion designer  Yves St. Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, directed by France’s Pierre Thorreton.

Men with beards: Joaquin Phoenix, Vincent Gallo and 'Armadillo'

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 2:04 PM - 0 Comments

A Danish solidier in Afghanistan in 'Armadillo'

So it turns out that I’m Still Here, Casey Affleck’s documentary about Joaquin Phoenix, is fake. That’s what Affleck has been telling interviewers. He says his documentary was staged, and that Joaquin’s two-year bout of self-annihilation was a sustained piece of method acting. Conspiracy theorists might wonder if Affleck’s revelation of the hoax is another hoax, a cover-up. But I think we can take Affleck at his word. Also, there are tip-offs in the film itself—notably in the fiction-style credits, which cite Hawaii as a location, even though the final scenes allegedly occur in Panama. But it makes you wonder. As mockumentaries are being passed off as real documentaries, along with the proliferation of fake news, dramatizations and staged reality TV, people may start to have trouble believing the real thing when they see it.

Armadillo is the real thing. This astonishing documentary from Denmark is one of two powerful films that I saw yesterday about the war in Afghanistan. The other was Essential Killing, an unadulterated drama from Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski starring Vincent Gallo as a Taliban fighter who is captured, flown to a European country, then escapes. More on that later.

Armadillo was the first documentary ever programmed by the Critics Week section of the Cannes Film Festival, and won the section’s top prize. You can see why. There’s never been anything like it. Armadillo captures soldiers in the act violating the rules of engagement—and changes the rules of engagement for the combat documentary. A film crew led by director Janus Metz spends six months embedded with a contingent of Danish soldiers as they engage in combat with the Taliban. Metz shoots  his film like a dramatic feature, a composition of characters in a landscape. He follows these young men from the moment they bid goodbye to their families in Denmark to their baptism of fire in the Helmand province of southern Afghanistan. They are new recruits, eager for a taste of combat. Much of the film unfolds as a waiting game. The Taliban are out there, an invisible presence less than a kilometre away, but maddeningly elusive. The soldiers try to befriend the local farmers, who are impeccably polite and gracious, but won’t divulge information for fear of getting their throats cut by the Taliban. Also, they don’t appreciate seeing their cows blown up and their fields destroyed by anti-Taliban forces. All the men have black beards; any of them could be the enemy.

With just sporadic bursts of combat, tension builds until a squad of volunteers are dispatched to ambush the Taliban. The soldiers blacken their faces. It’s the Big Game. The camera follows them into the thick of the firefight, just steps away from the Taliban fighters, who are holed up in a ditch. There is total chaos and confusion amid of bullets. Some of the Danish soldiers are wounded. Five Taliban are killed in a grenade attack. . . but not exactly. When the Danish soldiers come home, as jubilant as a victorious football team, they relive the action and talk about how the Taliban men were still moving when they finished them off with volleys of machine gun fire. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that this is a violation of the rules of war, until the news leaks out and there’s outrage back home. Even then, the soldiers see nothing wrong with what they’ve done. They talk frankly about the incident in front of the camera, which by now seems to be accepted as a loyal ally. The soldiers are not presented as villains, but as likable, ordinary young men. The film is about how they become hooked on the adrenaline of combat. It shows us—sadly, horrifcally—how war works.

Vincent Gallo in 'Essential Killing'

Essential Killing begins in Afghanistan, with the U.S. capture of a nameless Taliban fighter (Vincent Gallo) in a desert canyon after he kills a couple of U.S. soldiers who were busy getting stoned. But this is not a war movie. It’s an escapist adventure on every level. Gallo’s character is captured, interrogated, then flown in shackles and orange overalls to an unnamed European country, where a fluke accident allows him to escape. The rest of the movie unfolds like a cross between The Fugitive and a wilderness survival tale. It takes place in cold and snowy realm that’s worlds removed from Afghanistan. Its hero is the quintessential brother from another planet. But he’s resourceful, and because he’s the hero we root for his survival, the politics notwithstanding. Gallo’s role is almost entirely silent. There are grunts and groans, but he doesn’t have a single word of dialogue. I found Essential Killing to be a welcome oasis from the mad traffic of TIFF, all the celebrity interviews and buzzed movies. Directed by Polish master Jerzy Skolimowski, it’s a gem of pure narrative filmmaking: a wordless vision of character struggling for his life in a beautifully austere landscape that’s as foreign to him as the moon. Yet unlike so much ghettoized art-house fare, there’s nothing challenging or difficult or about this film . It reminds us that art and entertainment on rare occasions can blissfully coexist.

A scene from 'Essential Killing'

Ben Affleck hits ‘The Town’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 17, 2010 at 6:37 PM - 0 Comments

Rebecca Hall and Ben Affleck in 'The Town'

The director/movie star is an exalted pedigree. It requires a talk-and-chew-gum-at-the-same-time talent that always seems a bit miraculous and requires an old-school Hollywood chutzpa that seems to be a thing of the past. After all, Kevin Costner is off touring with a band and Warren Beatty is raising kids. That leaves three legendary actor-directors who are still hard at, and all of them showed up to unveil new films at TIFF: Woody Allen (You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger), Robert Redford (The Conspirator), and Clint Eastwood (The Hereafter). But none of them appeared on screen. And none of their films really set the festival on fire. Allen’s comedy was perfectly enjoyable and replete with delicious performances, but it didn’t add up to much; this was Woody on cruise control. Redford’s resonant courtroom drama about the military abuse of justice in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was fascinating but stodgy. And I never did get to see The Hereafter because Warner Bros. did such an immaculate job of burying it—violating TIFF protocol by allowing it to be shown just once, at the premiere, with no press screening and no repeat screening.

But one emerging double threat who confirmed his talent in a big way was Ben Affleck, who’s both the star and director of The Town, a gripping heist movie. Based on Chuck Hogan’s novel The Prince of Thieves, this is the second feature Affleck has directed, after making a promising debut with Gone Baby Gone (2007). It’s another complicated crime thriller set in Boston. But the story, which has a locomotive momentum, is much less circuitous.  And Affleck considerably expands his palette, showing a flair for staging gritty action sequences, including a chase scene that uses the narrow streets of Boston the way the The French Connection used New York. The car chase has become such a cliche that it takes some originality to get me excited by vehicles smashing into each another. But this one is an exception.

The film also balances the fireworks with some rich character drama. Doug MacRay (Affleck) belongs to a hardened crew of bank robbers who pull off elaborate, heavily armed bank jobs in Hallowe’en masks. During the robbery that opens the story, they take the bank manager (Rebecca Hall) hostage. Then, after releasing her, they worry she may incriminate them as a witness, so MacRay stalks her, and strikes up a relationship that, against his better judgment, turns intimate. As we wait for her to discover that he was one of her abductors,  MacRay starts think that he should quit robbing banks while he still can, and run off with the girl of his dreams. But he’s under pressure from a hard-core confederate name Jem, who is played by Jeremy Renner with the same cowboy machismo he displayed in The Hurt Locker.

Complicating the plot on the personal front is a family scenario that involves McRay’s  father (Chris Cooper), a ghost-like figure serving hard time, and a drug-addicted single mom play by Blake Lively (Gossip Girl) who is Jem’s sister and MacRay’s ex. Meanwhile an FBI squad led by John Hamm (Mad Men) is closing in, and the crew’s sadistic boss, a florist played by Pete Postethwaite, is threatening to prune MacRay’s manhood with his gardening shears if he so much as thinks about early retireent. That’s a a lot of, uh, balls in the air. But to Affleck’s credit, he keeps the action running smoothly, and the suspense ratcheting up, all the way to climactic heist in Fenway Park. He also elicits  excellent performances from his ensemble, notably Lively and Hall, who both more than hold their own in this cops-and-robbers clubhouse.

Hopefully after this effort, Ben Affleck won’t have to star in a dumb romantic comedy ever again.

Steve Nash on Terry Fox

By Tom Henheffer - Friday, September 17, 2010 at 12:49 PM - 0 Comments

Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope is so ingrained in Canadian culture that it’s hard to believe there could be any aspect of the story left to tell. But don’t dismiss Into the Wind, the new documentary on Fox by Phoenix Sun’s point guard Steve Nash and his filmmaker cousin Ezra Holland.  The documentary, set to air on television as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 program, goes far beyond what most Canadians know about the icon. Through archival footage, new interviews with  Fox’s friends and family members, and complete access to his daily journals, the film goes deeper and explores the fights, anger and the personal struggles he had to overcome, bringing life to the bronze statue, humanizing the legend and proving the man was even more of a hero by showing him as the ordinary and sometimes frail person he was. It sounds cliche, but it’s hard to watch the film without welling up a little. Nash and Holland sat down with Maclean’s to discuss their personal hero, making the movie, and why they feel the story needs to be told today.

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 17, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Is the Lady a mere copycat?
In its way, Lady Gaga’s tireless hunt for ways to shock us is nothing if not ambitious. Last week, it was her pals at PETA who were outraged after she appeared on Vogue Japan’s cover wearing only slabs of meat. Her Warholian shtick is now under fire as not being as original as we think. Yana Morgana claims Gaga stole her late daughter Lina’s flair for theatrics after the two recorded a dozen songs together in 2008. “Every other word she says is from Lina,” she told the New York Post.

Painting the town white
François Croteau, the mayor of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, Que., hopes to cool his corner of Earth one white roof at a time. He’s proposed a bylaw making white roofs mandatory on all new buildings in the Montreal borough so they generate less heat. Roofs under repair would also have to be painted white, though residential peaked roofs are exempt. The plan is endorsed by Concordia University engineering professor Hashem Akbari, who is campaigning to get 100 of the world’s largest cities to go white. Changing all the roofs in the world would be equal to parking the world’s cars for 20 years, he says. Councillors vote in October.

Newspapers: the next big thing
Prince, the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince, is having a boffo summer since he famously declared the Internet “completely over”—as “outdated” as MTV. He’s playing last-minute stadium shows and occasional small gigs, maintaining his reputation as a musical rebel. He gave away for free his new CD, 20TEN, in four European newspapers, including London’s Mirror. Fed up with Internet abuses, he’s banned YouTube and iTunes from using his songs. “I really believe in finding new ways to distribute my music,” he told the Mirror, which, incidentally, was founded in 1903.

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Werner Herzog emerges from the cave

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 10:59 PM - 0 Comments

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams premiere was a mess. The 3D cameras weren’t calibrated properly, the picture stalled briefly near the beginning, and the projector shut down completely just after the climax, forcing the theatre to turn on its houselights and bringing the audience to awkward, premature applause. It wasn’t an ideal situation in which to watch a film, but Werner Herzog’s new documentary was brilliant enough to remain completely enjoyable despite its awkward first steps. Herzog and his crew were given unprecedented access to art that has adorned the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in southern France for 32,000 years. A landslide sealed the entrance, preserving the art so that it looks as if early man brought burnt timbre to bulging stone only last week.

Sexing up Spitzer in TIFF’s year of the doc

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 1:24 AM - 0 Comments

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and his wife, Silda, in 'Client 9'

Today, for the first time, you could feel TIFF hysteria begin to subside. The festival is heavily front-loaded, with meat market of stars and press junkets jammed into the first few days. Now it’s suddenly quieter. Which is fine by me.  At this point, it’s still hard to get a fix on the buzz. No obvious Slumdog Millionaire has emerged from the fray as a contender for the audience award, and there’s no indie sensation that’s come out of nowhere to take the festival by storm. But perhaps it’s just that people like me (the media) have been so intensely preoccupied mainlining movies and interviews that we haven’t found the pulse of the festival. One clear trend is the program’s wealth of sensational female performances—by Carey Mulligan (Never Let Me Go), Hilary Swank (Conviction), Yun Junghee (Poetry), Rachel Weisz (Whistleblower), Rebecca Hall (The Town), Rosamund Pike (Barney’s Version)—and above all by Natalie Portman in Black Swan. I expect hers will be the act to beat at the Oscars. And of all the major films, Black Swan seems to have had the most electrifying impact so far, though it’s not the sort of heartwarming triumph-of-the-human-spirt stuff that wins audience awards. As a hallucinatory melodrama, it’s also an anomaly at this year’s festival, where many of the more compelling films are reality-based—from non-fiction dramas like Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours and Steven Silver’s The Bang Bang Club to documentaries such as Waiting for Superman and Errol Morris’s Tabloid. (Though to be exact, Tabloid is about a real-life soap opera that takes on surreal proportions.)

Some biggest names at TIFF have,  been on hand to promote documentaries—Bill Gates, Bruce Springsteen and Steve Nash. Unlike those heavyweights, the star of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer didn’t brave the red carpet, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had.  Client 9 is no puff piece, but it’s crucial step in Spitzer’s road to redemption. Spitzer, the so-called Sherriff of Wall St., comes across a ruthless but heroic gunslinger saddled with a tragic flaw and a monumental case of hubris. Long before the economic collapse, he declared war on the fraudulent profiteering of the financial industry, targeting AIG’s insurance scam in his role as New York’s attorney general, then going after state corruption as the state’s governor. For casual observers, who may have only discovered him when the sex scandal broke, the film illustrates how big a superstar he was on America’s political landscape.

Like  Inside Job, another powerful documentary at TIFF, Client 9 sets out to expose the financial system that robbed America blind. Much of the narrative is devoted to Spitzer’s combative campaign—and to showing how his enraged enemies manoevered to take him out. His interview subjects include a contrite Spitzer, who’s reluctant to delve too deeply into his own motives, and the rogues’ gallery of Wall St. tycoons who rejoiced at his downfall.  Although the film does not dig up any  new earth-shattering evidence, it pulls the story’s elements together to make a compelling case that the FBI went out of its way to target him for political reasons—the federal government is not usually in the habit of pursuing johns. Of course, Spitzer was guilty of outrageous hypocrisy, and being a creep. But the film compares that to a much larger atrocity—suggesting that paying for some high-priced sex is no crime compared to destroying America’s economy and defrauding millions of innocent investors.

Ironically, however, the allure of this film lies in the salacious details of the sex scandal that furnished Spitzer’s enemies with such lethal ammunition. Director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) frames his hard-hitting exposé with erotic eye candy and a nightclub beat, as images of  seductive models and Spitzer’s campaign swim through the neon wallpaper of Manhattan. As the camera scans the website ads of the Emperor’s Club, the escort service where prices start at $1,000 an hour, Leslie Feist purrs Secret Heart on the soundtrack. Even Spitzer’s enemies, the fat cat businessmen who want his blood, are gorgeously photographed. Every frame of this movie reeks of money and sex and gleaming opulence.

Neither Spitzer’s wife nor the spotlight-craving Ashley Dupre, his celebrated one-night stand, are interviewed. But a giggly manager of the Emperor’s Club regales us with tales of his paranoid phone calls. And an actress re-enacts  transcripts of the filmmaker’s interview with “Angelina,” his favorite escort, who would not appear on camera. On their first date, she says Spitzer didn’t want to waste time talking: “I hate to put this crudely, but he was a trying-to-get-his money’s worth type of client and I said I don’t want to see this person again.” But she did.  Spitzer himself, despite his valiant crusade, comes across as a nasty sonofabitch, a man with a mean streak. Unlike Bill Clinton, this is not someone you warm to, and camera doesn’t either. But you do feel that America would be a lot better off if this trigger-happy enforcer hadn’t lost his gunfight with Wall Street by indulging  his own reckless sense of entitlement.

Ode to the short film

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments

Watching the shorts at the Toronto International Film Festival is like indulging in fine tapas: the films are like mini-meals, each with a flavour as unique as its filmmaker. Some see shorts as a stepping-stone to big features for neophyte auteurs—think Sarah Polley, who made her 2006 directorial debut with a short and went on to win two Oscar nominations. But they’re also the place where established filmmakers can experiment with new ideas.

Though shorts are sometimes neglected in favour of feature films at the festival, Alex Rogalski, the programmer for Short Cuts Canada, points out that the origins of film are with these compact stories. “From the beginning of filmmaking, people were making short films which later, because of commercial reasons, turned into features,” he says. “I’d rather see a six minute film I think about for 90 minutes than a 90 minute film I think about for six minutes.”

This year, Short Cuts Canada had its highest-ever number of submissions to date (650, and growing every year). Forty films, which range from two minutes to 30, were selected for six programs. Three emerging directors agreed to talk to Macleans.ca about their films and what comes after the short.

The feminist filmmaker: Nadia Litz, best known for her roles in indie films like Monkey Warfare, made her directorial debut at TIFF this year with How to Rid your Lover of a Negative Emotion Caused by You. The black comedy, which is rich in stomach-turning gore, uses blue globs inside the body as a metaphor for the negative emotions that have grown out of a relationship between a woman and her boyfriend. “When you’re with someone, there’s always something about your partner that you want to change or that you wish wasn’t there,” says Litz. “The more you try to get rid of it, the more it actually festers.” The lead character, Sadie, unsuccessfully tries to cut those negative emotions right out of her boyfriend and Litz’s message is one of acceptance. “It’s about taking the bad with the good,” she says.

Litz also takes the feminist approach to her story. “In relationship movies, I find that the woman is quite passive, whereas the male is going through this crisis of who he is,” she says. Sadie, in contrast to the stereotype, is not afraid of wielding a knife and has difficulty expressing herself. “As females, we often get this label that we’re very communicative and in touch with these emotions and feelings when sometimes we aren’t,” Litz says. “I wanted to tell a story about that.” While Litz enjoyed directing even more than acting and hopes for another opportunity behind the camera, she says she doesn’t differentiate between shorts and features. “We were in some type of production for almost four months and we shot for 5 days, which is long for a short film. The process is very similar.”

The unintentional politico: Kevan Funk, 23, wrote and directed A Fine Young Man, using part of his student loans (otherwise earmarked for studies at Emily Carr) to pay for the production. His Cold War-era story focuses on two CIA agents who find their latest recruit in a young American and ask him to join the fight against communism. The writing is witty, and the period film echoes contemporary questions around recruitment for extremist causes. While Funk admits the short is a response to what he’s been reading in the news, “I never set out to make a political film or a film that was politicized.” For him, the film is about belief. “Anytime you have an unquestioned faith or trust in anything, even yourself, it’s a dangerous thing,” he says. “You can really blind yourself.”

After Toronto, Funk hopes the film is accepted at American festivals. He is also ready with a full feature treatment for his short. “I hope this film can be a testament to what we can do. I have a lot of confidence that we can make a feature film out of it.”

The social commentator: In Above the Knee, Greg Atkins tells a delightful story about Jack, a suburban office worker who opts out of his suit-and-tie uniform and puts on a skirt, changing the way his co-workers and his wife perceive him. Atkins, who made the switch from acting to directing, says he was inspired by the women’s clothing that filled his studio (his partner is a women’s wear designer). “I tried on women’s pants at one point, and this idea of the business world and the uniforms in that world and breaking that uniform started stewing in my brain.”

At first, Jack’s change is met with dismay. But soon, the people in his life embrace—even encourage—the atypical behaviour. For Atkins, the short is about more than breaking social norms; he also wanted to comment on the nature of relationships. “You can be with somebody for a long time and it’s scary when they change–a job, new friends, a new hobby. Nobody can know the other wholly but when they’re in your life you have to accept that and be open and accept them.” Though Atkins dreams of doing a feature one day, he says he wants to continue with shorts for now. “I find many features can be cut down into a short. With shorts, you get to explore one or two ideas in a really strong way instead of diluting the idea over the course of two hours.”

Springsteen talks Dylan, darkness and the “survivor guilt” of fame

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 12:57 AM - 0 Comments

A few minutes before Bruce Springsteen stepped onstage in the 550-seat flagship cinema of the new TIFF Bell Lightbox, a stage hand removed the guitar stand. Which seemed to confirm it wasn’t going to be that kind of show. It was, however, the hottest ticket at the festival: a chance to spend an hour or so in a relatively intimate theatre listening to actor Edward Norton interview the Boss about music, cinema, celebrity and politics. And it seemed as strange for them as it was for us. Springsteen is perfectly at home singing for 20,000 people, and Norton (Primal Fear) can comfortably shape-shift into a psychopath in front of a movie camera. But they were both novices at performing in an onstage interview, which had a certain homespun charm.

As part of TIFF’s Mavericks program, Springsteen’s dialogue with Norton was presented in advance of the world premiere of Thom Zimny’s documentary Promise: The Making of Darkness the Edge of Town. There was a palpable excitement in the air. As TIFF programmer Thom Powers nervously confessed, “I will be able to breathe for the first time in six weeks.” When the Boss hit the stage, there was the expected standing ovation and chants of “Bruuuuuuuce.” But the audience quickly settled down and sat in rapt attention without a single fan outburst. Obeying strict orders, there was no texting, tweeting or cellphone photography. I’ve been driven crazy all week by flickering Blackberries among industry types in screenings. But this was the best-behaved crowd I’d encountered since this film festival began—ironic considering they’d come to see a rock star.

Springsteen and Norton came out dressed almost identically in black shirts, black boots and jeans.  They both seemed a bit awkward at first, joking about their wardrobe. Norton, who explained he and the Boss have been friends for 11 years, went out of his way to act casual. It’s always interesting to see a star play the role of interviewer. I’ve conducted an interview or two in my time, off and on stage, and though it’s not high art, it is an acquired skill, like acting or playing guitar. Norton’s questions were long, rambling and tangential; he tended to answer them by the time he got to the question mark. But at least they were intelligent, and informed by his friendship with Springsteen. He also covered the vital issues:  the creative process, the balance between intuition and craft, the influences, the ambition, the politics—and that pesky vision thing. Springsteen even got to talking about his  children. When Norton suggested that every generation thinks its going to be the first generation of cool parents, Springsteen laughed. “That doesn’t work,” he said. “Why would my kids want to come out and see thousands of people cheer their parents?”

The one thing they didn’t dwell on was the music, which gets plenty of attention in the documentary. Instead, Bruce ruminated on its thematic course, something he struggled with in the insanely laborious recording of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the 1978 album that followed the monstrous success of Born to Run.

“I was afraid of losing myself,” said Springsteen, explaining that one minute he and the  the E-Street band were “a provincial group of guys with no money ” who had never been on an airplane and thought New York was “million miles away.” Then he was a superstar who was, nonetheless, broke, in a legal battle with his manager, and worried about being “gobbled up” by fame. “It’s easy for you to be co-opted,” he said. “The irony of any kind of success is the conversation you’ve struck up is also the one that makes you a bit of a mutant—a mutant in your own neighbourhood. And it leaves you with a good deal of survivor guilt. Nobody knows anybody who has any money—except you.”

Springsteen talked about Darkness on the Edge of Town as his pivotal album, where he set the direction that would set his career. In the early years, “we were all creatures of the radio,” he said, stressing that “records” were his prime influence. But the Boss has a more than  passing affinity with film. The sense of landscape in his songs is archly cinematic, and as he explained, heavily influenced by American film noir. Early in the interview, he referenced Bob Dylan and David Lynch into the same line as he recalled listening getting “the first true picture of my country” when he heard Dylan’s Highway 61 as a teenager—”1960s small-town America was very Lynchian,” he said. “Everything was rumbling. Dylan took all the dark stuff that was rumbling underneath and brought it too the surface.

As Norton noted, Springsteen referenced movies from his first album, with lines like “I could walk like Brando into the sun.” But with success, he was flung into an epic landscape, with the Vietnam war still fresh and  American cinema erupting around him: “Popular pictures were dark, bloody pictures that dealt with the flipside of the American Dream.” During the Born To Run tour, he recalled, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro treated him to a private screening of Taxi Driver. Then he added, as if it had just occured to him, that Jon Landau—the producer taking over his career at the time, was a film critic.

Things got interesting when Norton started asking about wild impulse versus painstaking craft. Springsteen talked about the virtue of craft. “Dylan,” he said, “was very, very conscious; he just wouldn’t talk about it. . . The construction of image, there’s no getting around it. That doesn’t mean it’s inauthentic. Writing and imagining a world, that’s a particular thing. The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul. . . I wanted to bring in the full landscape of the country.

Springsteen talked about the massive ambition he had in the 70s. “There was something in the hardness of it, that young naked desire. We wanted people to hear our voices and we set our sights very big. I wanted the pink Cadillac and I wanted the girls, but above all I wanted a purposeful work life.”  Darkness on the Edge of Town, he said, was his attempt to find that. In marathon studio sessions—documented by intimate black-and-white footage in the documentary—he recorded some 70 songs. Slashing all the feel-good numbers, he reduced the album to “the 10 toughest songs I had.” They were “carved meticulously, consciously out of a huge hunk of stone, with a lot of ego and ambition.  That, he said, “was the beginning of a long conversation I had with my fans.”

Norton asked if he ever worried about being overtaken by the next generation of rockers. “If you’re good,” said Springsteen, “you’re always looking over your shoulder. It’s the life, the gun-slinging life.”

So yes, I took notes as I sat in the 5th row, close enough to feel a connection, marvelling at how odd it was to quietly watch the Boss perform musicology on his own career—Uncle Bruce easing into his role as the elder. It was by turns fascinating, inspiring and slightly sad, all this rumination about the meaning of those glory days. Then suddenly it was over. The rock star and the movie star slipped off stage to a few polite shrieks of protest. Later outside the theatre, as I chatted with Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy,  we noticed a stagehand carrying away an unplayed acoustic guitar.

Sassy Cassel and perfect Portman

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 5:08 PM - 0 Comments

On Sunday, I was slated to cover a slew of parties, but I got news that afternoon that my grandpa was in critical condition at the hospital. I arrived in Ottawa that evening and spent a few hours hanging out by his bed. He passed just hours later in the early morning. By the Monday evening, I was back in Toronto to cover the Black Swan red carpet. It was a daunting task, but on with the show.

The screening was held at Roy Thompson Hall, the same theatre where The Town red carpet took place. But the mood was much more subdued for Black Swan than for The Town. Maybe fatigue had finally set in among the media. It was also policed with more intensity, with publicists coming by to request that we move our toes back behind the black tape barrier.

Continue…

Matt Damon and Clint Eastwood: Race, death, and Hereafter

By Tom Henheffer - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Hereafter is an unusual film for Clint Eastwood. It’s a paranormal drama about people in three different places around the world who are forced to come to terms with mortality, a real departure from his more down-to-earth stories examining themes like politics, race and aging. Matt Damon plays a blue-collar worker and reluctant psychic who can speak to the dead, but hates his strange ability. It’s his second film with Eastwood, the first being 2009′s Invictus, where he played the captain of the South African Rugby team in the World Cup following the dismantling of apartheid.  Damon and Eastwood spoke to Maclean’s on the red carpet at Hereafter‘s premiere, and spoke about how the film asks life’s most difficult question, what happens after we die?

Lantos scoffs at Jewison's claim that Richler saw Brad Pitt as Barney

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

In yesterday’s blog, I reported a conversation I had with veteran director Norman Jewison, who told me that about decade ago he was involved with producer Robert Lantos in an attempt to adapt Barney’s Version, and that the book’s author, Mordecai Richler, wanted Brad Pitt to play Barney—the role eventually performed by Paul Giamatti in the movie that premiered at TIFF on Sunday. Brad as Barney? It sounds preposterous, but Jewison swore that was Richler’s dream.

Well, last night I ran into Lantos, who dismissed the director’s claim as pure nonsense. Not only that, the producer insisted that Jewison was never even involved as a candidate to direct Barney’s Version. And Lantos should know: he was the only producer who ever owned the screen rights to the book. “Someone is not remembering things correctly,”  he said. Jewison told me he had tried to persuade Dustin Hoffman to play Barney, while Richler imagined Pitt in the role. But Lantos says he and Richler had talked about casting Hoffman, and that Pitt’s name never came up. (By the time the movie got made, Hoffman ended up playing Barney’s father.)

So the story just gets curiouser and curiouser. Canada’s biggest movie producer is suggesting that its most venerable director is promoting a fictional version of events,  a situation that would not be out of place in Richler’s novel.  At the rate things are going, this blog, like Barney’s Version, will need corrective footnotes.

Meanwhile, for my story on the making of the movie, go to Barney, unbound.

Brad Pitt as Barney? It was Mordecai Richler's pipe dream

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, September 13, 2010 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Norman Jewison wanted Dustin Hoffman (right) as Barney. The role finally went to Paul Giamatti, and Hoffman plays his dad

Ran into Norman Jewison at Hotel le Germain, at a swish champagne reception for Saturday night’s TIFF premiere of L‘Amour Fou, the Yves St. Laurent documentary. I happened to mention I’d seen Barney’s Version, telling him that after all these years, producer Robert Lantos has finally got it right. Then I remembered that Jewison was one of the original directors Lantos had tapped to make the movie. And Norman, the master raconteur, began to regale me with stories of what happened to his version of the Mordecai Richler novel when he had a run at it about a decade ago.

“Mordecai wanted Brad Pitt to play Barney,” he told me.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“No, he was serious. Mordecai wanted Brad Pitt!”

The veteran Canadian filmmaker went on to explain that Richler had envisioned a movie that would focus on the young Barney Panofsky, the bohemian libertine in Paris. Jewison says he was more interested in the older Barney, and his final romance with his third wife, Miriam. He says he wanted to cast Dustin Hoffman as Barney—Hoffman ended up playing Barney’s dad in the movie that finally got made years later.

“I always thought Dustin Hoffman was the only actor who could play Barney,” says Jewison, adding that he tried to talk Hoffman into the role but the actor didn’t find the story compelling enough.  (At this point, Jewison goes into a lovely imitation of Dustin Hoffman hemming and hawing).

Back then, the director explained, there wasn’t a script. Before his death, in 2001, Richler was working on a script for Lantos. But Jewison says he tried to persuade him to give it up, telling him he was a novelist, not a screenwriter, and that he should step down and “get a really good technician to write the movie and give it some structure.” But Lantos stood by Richler, says Jewison, who eventually moved on to another project.

Anyway, that’s Norman’s version; I’m sure Lantos has his own. After Richler’s death, the producer burned through a string of screenwriters, including an Oscar winner. Lantos chased the riddle of filming the novel with the persistence of a  detective trying to solve a cold case, and the passion of Barney pursuing the love of his life. In the end, two relatively unknown Canadian talents—Montreal writer Michael Konyves and Toronto-born director Richard J. Lewis—cracked the adaptation and brought it to the screen, with splendid results.

The irony in all of this is that when Lantos met Dustin Hoffman to coax him into playing Barney’s dad, Hoffman’s initial reaction was that he loved the script but he should play Barney, although he knew he was kidding himself, and that by then he was too old. (He’s 73.)

Barney’s Version, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, had a gala North American premiere at TIFF last night. For more on the making of the film, read my story in Maclean’s: Barney, unbound. And I’ll get to hear Lantos’s side of the story first hand, when I interview him onstage at an event staged by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television on the 40th floor of the Royal Bank tower on Thurs. Sept. 16.

UPDATE: For Robert Lantos’ version of these events go here.