Tracking Shots: TIFF (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008)

Catching Up

2011-09-28T18:41:00.000-04:00

I went immediately from the end of TIFF to a four-day work meeting in Gatineau, so my good intentions of catching up with the end-of-festival films went unaddressed. Finally have a moment to start to add to the record of this year.

Since getting back to the "real" (as opposed to "reel") world, I've been asked several times one of the following two questions:

1) What was my favourite film?
2) Was TIFF 2011 better than previous years?

After seeing about 45 films this year, there was no single film that stood above the rest. The year's experience is more like a classic bell curve -- there are a few really good films at one end; a few poor, if not terrible, films at the other and the bulk of the films rest somewhere in the middle. The hope is that more films occupy the first group than the third.

Fortunately, there were only a couple of films ("Goon" comes to mind) which truly underachieved. While not very good, "Killer Elite" and "Hard Core Logo 2" were more of disappointments than outrages -- there was potential, but the end results fell short.

The final impression of TIFF was that it was comparable to previous years. There wasn't a comedy on the level of "The Trip" last year nor was there a film that really pushed like the envelope like films I've seen in the past. That may be a result of the (good or bad) choices I made, but the overall impression was that it was "pretty good".

I'll add a few more entries on some of the other films I saw this year. Stay tuned.

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Outside Satan

2011-09-16T17:38:00.001-04:00

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Killer Elite

2011-09-15T21:00:00.001-04:00

Based on a true story involving SAS and private sector assassins, "Killer Elite" boasted the talents of Jason Statham, Clive Owen and Robert De Niro and a lot of ammunition and explosives (i.e. this was a guy's film).

The editing and even the title sequence suggested that they wanted to capture some of the magic of the two Bourne films directed by Paul Greengrass. Unfortunately for them, they did not have the facility for shooting action that he has.

While there was nothing overtly wrong about the film, it just became increasingly tedious and predictable as the story wore on.

Something to watch if there's nothing else on TV.
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Surviving Progress

2011-09-15T09:46:00.001-04:00

"A Short History of Progress" was critically acclaimed piece that had a life as both a Massey Lecture and a best-selling non-fiction book. It's now been adapted as a documentary for the NFB.

The basic premise is that "progress" is not always a positive step and that there exist "progress traps" where a perceived improvement actually makes things worse. Traps may become so serious that they lead to the downfall of a civilization. The types of traps he describes include over-consumption of natural resources, over-population and the excessive concentration of power and wealth in the hands of oligarchs and elites.

It's the last one that becomes the central theme of the film. Although a number of the interviewees come from an environmental / biological perspective (for example, Jane Goodall and David Suzuki), the overwhelming focus was on economic arguments.

For me, this was ultimately disappointing. It felt a bit like a classic "bait-and-switch" tactic -- I was intrigued by the notion of progress traps and wanted more of that beyond a simple definition and ended up with 90 minutes on the description of wealth.
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Samsara

2011-09-13T19:29:00.001-04:00

"Samsara" is a documentary by many of the principals who worked on the film "Baraka" from a few years back.

Like its predecessor, it's a collage of imagery from around the world, combining natural wonders and exotic culture (both traditional and modern), set to a world-beat soundtrack, this time composed by Lisa Gerrard and Michael Stern. Advances in technology allowed the film to be shot in 65 mm and projected as a 4K image -- the colour saturation is, as a result, intense.
Due to a late start and a tight schedule this afternoon, I only saw about 3/4 of it. What I did see was a collection of impressive images but without any overall cohesion. It made for a somewhat disconnected experience. As many of the images did not include movement, it felt like flipping through a high-definition National Geographic without words; in effect, it was a coffee table film. I suspect it will do well as a Blu-Ray release or as a demo disk for hi-end TVs.
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Heard on the street

2011-09-13T19:22:00.001-04:00

I passed a guy on a cell. As I passed by him, I heard him say...

"This has nothing to do with common sense. This is cable!"

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The Story of Film

2011-09-12T22:21:00.000-04:00

Once again, one of the better films this year is a documentary. "The Story of Film" is a 15-hour "odyssey" across the length and breadth of film history.

TIFF is showing the entire piece in chunks during the festival and I saw the first three hours of it Monday morning. Although it's not strictly speaking a chronological history, the segments I saw took the story from the beginning work of Edison and the Lumiere Brothers up to the end of the silent era.

The creator is Mark Cousins, a film professor from Scotland and is based on a book by the same name. His intent is to give credit to the innovative work down across the globe and the portion I saw this morning provided several examples where a new approach in, say, editing, appeared in a country many years before it was adopted by the Hollywood studios.

If the first three hours is any indication, it's an engaging journey through cinema, suitable for the casual film goer as well as the hard-core cinephile. It's hard to say what form it will take, but it could appear as either a series of episodes on TVO or PBS or as a DVD set. During the Q&A, Cousins also spoke about developing material for the web to expand on the examples shown in the film.

Highly recommended.

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Monsters Club

2011-09-11T18:07:00.001-04:00

A rather odd little film "inspired" by the Unabomber's published manifesto.

A young Japanese man, obsessed by the failure of modern society, sends mail bombs to the heads of various corporations from a remote cabin in the forests of Japan. He discovers that he is not alone and is visited by creatures who challenge his ideas and philosophies.

The film had a bit of a Twilight Zone quality about it but was better at setting up the story than ending it.
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Wuthering Heights

2011-09-11T17:45:00.001-04:00

Normally this would be the kind of period film that might make my long list for TIFF but would very rarely make the final cut.

What made the difference for me was the director. Andrea Arnold had previously shown her films "Red Road" and "Fish Tank" at TIFF and her visceral style of film-making seemed perfect for modern, kitchen sink dramas, but how she would approach the story of Catherine and Heathcliff was a mystery that had to be solved. I should also note that my knowledge of the source material and its many adaptations was slight at best, so it represented an opportunity to see a classic work with open eyes.

The film emphasized the brutal beauty of the Yorkshire moors in a way that mirrored the emotional brutality and cruelty of the story. She applied the same approach to selecting images and editing them into the story that was consistent with her earlier work which worked very effectively with the story of the protagonists. Using mostly non-professional actors, they provided a grittiness that a more seasoned group might have abandoned.

The problem for me was the story as the plot advanced, the actions of the characters made less and less sense. This may have been my issue but In the Q&A following the film, Arnold mentioned that certain things in the novel "confounded" her. I felt the same way when it ended.

That said, my overall impression of the film was positive. I thought she brought a fresh perspective to the story that a more traditional approach would have missed. Worth a look.

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Goon

2011-09-10T20:02:00.001-04:00

It's not uncommon for multiple films on the same subject to appear on the schedule at TIFF. We have a couple of these this year -- there are four rock documentaries (on U2, Pearl Jam, Neil Young and Paul McCartney) as well as three or four films about hockey.

"Goon" is one of those four, a comedy about a good-hearted but terribly dim bouncer who finds himself hired as an enforcer to protect a minor league team's flamboyant yet fragile star player.

A film like this should offer great opportunities for character actors to go to town on, but too many of the roles are one-dimensional. Most of the humour comes from the gleefully profane dialogue, but it's really not enough to sustain a feature.
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The Hunter

2011-09-10T09:18:00.001-04:00

A film that looked more promising in the catalogue than it was in its execution.

Willem Dafoe receives a contract by a mysterious biotech/military company to hunt, kill and collect samples from the last known specimen of a Tasmanian Tiger. Most of the film takes place in the remote Tasmanian jungle.

The film never built any kind of momentum and, as a result, any problems in the screenplay were magnified (and there were a few). An average film at best.
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Urbanized

2011-09-10T08:23:00.000-04:00

2011 has started with an emphasis on documentaries and Friday afternoon brought another terrific one to the table.

"Urbanized", directed by Greg Hustwit, is a survey of current thinking on urban planning and design around the globe. Given that it is estimated that 75% of the world's population will reside in urban environments by 2050, it's a very timely film on an important subject.

The examples provided span every continent except for Australia and Antarctica, highlighting cities ranging in size from 200,000 up to 36 million (the latter is Mumbai, whose slums have a population the size of New York City).

For the most part, it was a terrific film, offering some examples of some of the forward thinking at play in cities like New York, Capetown and Bogota (the mayor of Bogota talked at length about their approach to public transit and cycling infrastructure to which the audience responded enthusiastically). The tone was mostly positive, although they did touch on some of the "mistakes" of urban planning (for example, the stunning architecture of Brasilia was contrasted with its terrible transportation infrastructure). One of the striking visuals was an elevated train ride through downtown Detroit. Detroit's population has plummeted over the past few years and it is some time in the sequence before you see a single person on foot -- it's a modern ghost town.

The only flat point of the film involved a transportation project called Stuttgart 21 that involved pitched confrontations between the city government, developers and citizens over a transit project. It was the one time when it felt like there wasn't enough context to the story to understand the visuals.

In the Q&A that followed the film, the director was well aware of the controversies on urban issues at play in Toronto. Both his responses as well as the examples provided in the film demonstrated the degree to which our mayor is completely out of touch on current thinking.

Highly recommended.
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This is Not a Film

2011-09-09T10:33:00.001-04:00

The story behind the film…

Jafar Panahi is a renowned Iranian director who has frequently irked the government in Iran. For his “crimes”, he has been banned by the government from making a film for 20 years and, during the time period of this film, he was also facing a possible prison sentence of upwards of six years.

Last year, a colleague (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) came to his apartment and Panahi described the film that he would have made if he was able, reading sections from a produced screenplay, mapping out how the film would be set and illustrating some of the themes using sections of his previous films, which he projected on his flat screen TV. The resulting film was shot on digital video as well as with an iPhone and was eventually smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick baked in a loaf of bread. The film, co-directed by the two men, was shown at Cannes and, subsequently, Mirtahmasb was also placed under similar restrictions by the Iranian government.

TIFF is making available the film as a free screening this week, a political as well as a cultural act. While the final product is very rough, there are many echoes between Panahi’s situation, the plot of the proposed film (which is a story of a young girl being prevented by going to university by being kept under house arrest by her family) and ambient sound from the street outside his building which apparently includes gun fire and, at the end, fireworks. It was quite compelling.

Pina

2011-09-08T21:46:00.000-04:00

A beautiful start to TIFF '11, Pina creates a portrait through four of her dance pieces combined with short clips of her dancers describing their experiences working with her.

The 3-D was fairly unobtrusive although it sometimes reinforced the spatial relationships between the dancers, at other times it simply added a hyper-real quality to the film. It'd be interesting to see how this would work in 2-D. This was only the third digital 3-D film I've seen and, unfortunately, I still find the combination of my progressive lenses and the 3-D glasses a bad combination -- towards the end I was starting to experience the headaches I'd had in "Avatar" and "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". Either the technology will have to improve or I do.

The film boasted a wonderful score as well as some striking locations from the Wuppertal area where Bausch's dance company makes its home.

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Show Time!

2011-09-08T18:20:00.000-04:00

And so it begins.

The opening film this year is "Pina", directed by Wim Wenders, a tribute to the legendary German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. And it's in 3-D!

In line at the Lightbox right now, waiting for the theatre to open. It's the first time this year that the crowds have really come together in any significant way. Lots of buzz right now and enthusiasm.

While I was standing here, Roger Ebert walked by, as the crowd left from the real first film of the festival, a 5-hour German film called "Dreileben" (actually a trilogy of inter-connected films). It sounded interesting, although I couldn't make it fit in the schedule.

A block away, the crowds are starting to come together for the opening gala, a rock documentary on U2. That will be loud.

With TIFF 2011, the festival has almost completely severed its ties to the Bloor-Yorkville area (only one theatre is in use up there this year). The Entertainment District and Yonge between Gerrard and Queen are now the focal points.

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And so it begins

2011-08-23T20:25:00.000-04:00

The catalogue for TIFF 2011 (#36) was released this morning. A beautiful late summer day in Toronto -- cool in the morning, no humidity and lots of sun. Perfect for planning 10 days in darkened rooms, (hopefully) lit only by the light of film projectors and not by assorted iPhones, iPods, iPads, BBs and the like.

I've got about a quarter of the schedule in place right now. Will drop off my picks by the weekend and put my faith in hands of the box office staff. The fun begins on Sept. 8.

Two Questions

2010-09-27T22:16:00.002-04:00

Inevitably, post-TIFF conversations involve being asked two questions:

- What did you see? (this blog is primarily an attempt to provide an answer to this question)
- Who did you see? (although given my interests, providing a list of who I saw would produce little in the way of recognition and many more questions. The biggest "star" I saw this year was probably Steve Coogan).

I was thinking about the latter on the weekend while reading the obituary of the actor Jackie Burroughs, who died earlier this month. Aside from appearing in a number of films that made an appearance at TIFF, Burroughs was a near constant presence in lines and theatres for many years.

In my early pilgrimages to the festival, it wasn't unusual to see several Canadian celebrities lining up to see films. Besides Burroughs, I remember seeing Geddy Lee and Bruce McCulloch at TIFF screenings.

That seems to happen a lot less now, although for what reason(s) I have no idea.

Back to Porridge*

2010-09-20T22:26:00.003-04:00

TIFF 2010 ended yesterday with a full slate of screenings (this is something they used to do in the "old days", although at that time, the last day's schedule was released on the final "official" day of the festival. The idea was that the last Sunday represented a collection of fan favourites). For me, it was a day for resetting myself and getting ready for the return to work.

Sunday was also the day when various awards were handed out at a end-of-TIFF luncheon. The People's Choice award for feature was "The King's Speech"; as in most years, I did not have this on my list of films, so I can offer no comment, nor did I hear any comments about it in the lines).

The best documentary was "Force of Nature: The David Suzuki Movie" and the People's Choice in the Midnight Madness program was "Stake Land". I was three-for-three, not having seen any of them.

However, I did see "Incendies", which was given the award for Best Canadian film, an excellent choice and easily the best of the few Canadian films that I did see.

The last couple of days of the festival were full of a number of interesting films, including two of the best that I saw this year. Over the next few days, I'll provide a few comments on some of the more notable films.

(* a favourite expression of my father's, meaning the special time has ended and it's back to the daily grind)

Rare Exports

2010-09-18T20:51:00.001-04:00

A unique Christmas story from Finland, less Miracle in 34th Street than Lord of the Rings.

In the lead-up to Christmas, a mining expedition in Lapland determines that a mountain is actually a large burial mound. Their attempt to extract an object from the mound creates havoc on the nearby village and especially the children.

Although it has an engaging performance from a young actor, this is not a film for young children. That said, it was good fun for the audience.
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Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2010-09-17T20:16:00.001-04:00

Werner Herzog has produced a number of excellent documentaries over the years (his doc on Antarctica, "Encounters at the End of the World", was a highlight for me at TIFF from a couple of years ago).

His latest is a voyage into the Chauvet caves in France, a treasure trove of cave art from 30,000 years ago). The trip into the caves is enhanced by the use of 3D camera equipment.

The use of 3D accentuates the confines of the cave and its features -- the stalagtites and stalagmites; the ridges formed by the accretion of calcite on the cave floor -- as well as how the artists placed their work to take best advantage of the contours of the cave walls. Parts of it work very well to provide the immersive experience sought by many directors of 3D films.

The narration is provided by Herzog along with commentary from a number of the research scientists who work on and in the caves.

I was fortunate and was able to get a seat dead centre in the theatre, which should have been in the "sweet spot" for viewing.

Unfortunately, I had the same experience that I had with Avatar -- at its best, 3D is a novel viewing experience but the combination of the 3D glasses and my own induced a pretty nasty headache by the end of the film. It appears that barring any improvement in the technology (or my brain chemistry (:->)), I will be sticking with 2D.

That said, the documentary is recommended -- worth a look in 3D is available, but I think it would still be entertaining with only two dimensions.
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Monsters

2010-09-17T20:12:00.001-04:00

Every so often, a film comes along that really demonstrates the principle that good work does not require a budget of nine figures or A-list stars.

It's striking, though, when the subject matter requires the significant use of special effects. "Monsters" by Gareth Edwards is an example of such a film.

The premise is quite simple. Six years after a space probe containing evidence of extra-terrestrial life crash lands in Central America, the northern half of Mexico is a quarantined "infected zone". Two Americans must cross the zone to get home.

Using a mostly non-professional cast and an economical use of effects, the story focuses on the couple rather than unleashing the weaponry. Interestingly enough, the film breaks one of the cardinal rules of monster movies by showing the creature in the opening scenes of the film.

The film has a Canadian release date (Nov 5), so it will get a chance to be seen by a wider audience.

One other side note - while we were waiting outside the Ryerson theatre, a couple of people cam round and handed out T-shirts to the people in line. It's been a while since I've been at a TIFF where "stuff" ha been handed out. A pleasany surprise (especially since it provided an extra layer on a cool and breezy evening!)
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Potiche

2010-09-16T13:36:00.001-04:00

"Poriche" was this year's version of the "odd man out" film for me -- a film where the response of the audience is overwhelmingly positive and which never came together for me in any satsifying way.

It's a French farce about a trophy wife (Catherine Deneuve) who takes over her family's umbrella factory when her husband/CEO falls ill. She discovers her passion and her spine and a battle of the sexes ensues when her husband tries to take control back.

Deneuve is the centre of the film about which everything and everyone revolves, surrounded by cliched characters and situations. A film for Deneuve. And Gerard Depardieu completists only.
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Back into the Lightbox

2010-09-16T13:23:00.001-04:00

This is the reverse angle of a photo I shot a couple of days ago (in that photo, I was just to the right of the "Essential Cinema" neon sign I'm standing where the line of patrons crossed the frame of the first shot).

The red box is a control room for both the audio-visual presentations in the building (for example, the swirling projection on the right of the photo) as well as security. It gives the impression that it's floating in space.
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Ghosts of Toronto's Past

2010-09-15T19:32:00.001-04:00

Used to be in the old days of the Festival of Festivals that the record stores on Yonge Street were open for extended hours during the festival. Sam's and HMV were great places to kill time between screenings.

No more. HMV's flagship is a shell of its former self (it used to have a decent inventory of music but those says are long gone) and Sam's is literally a shell...
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Buried

2010-09-15T19:08:00.001-04:00

Probably the most commercial studio film I'll see this year, "Buried" stars Ryan Reynolds as an American worker in Iraq who wakes to find himself trapped in a coffin below ground. With a minimum of props (a lighter, a pen and a BlackBerry with a dwindling battery), the entire movie takes place within the confines of the box.

From the opening credits (a homage to the great Saul Bass credits of the past), the film is a technical tour de force, not just for the camera work in the right space but also for its sound design. Reynolds is, with one exception, the only actor on screen, with other characters appearing only as voices on the phone.

Ironically, this is a film that needs to be seen on the big screen -- I doubt that the intensity of the film would survive a viewing in a living room.

Recommended.
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Stage & Screen

2010-09-14T16:45:00.001-04:00

Last night I saw "Incendies" by Denis Villeneuve and "Of Gods and Men" by Xavier Beauvois. There's a link between the two that I'll get to in a moment, so I'll combine in a single entry.

The former had its genesis in a critically-acclaimed play by Wajdi Mouawad, also called "Incendies" in its original French version and "Scorched" in an English translation. The English version had two very successful runs at Tarragon here in Toronto.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the story opens the reading of the last will and testament of a mother of twins. In it, she directs the twins to find the brother and father they never knew.

The bulk of the story is set in Lebanon, both in the present and during the war of the 1970's..

It's a powerful story of uncovering and confronting the past. I had never seen the play, so the reveal at the end was a complete surprise.

As an adaptation, the director was given free reign to develop the story and he did a masterful job, aided by a strong cast. It didn't have the feel of a play that was adapted for film by adding a few exterior scenes; it was a film that used the medium to full effect.

"Of Gods and Men" won the Grand Prix and Ecumenical prizes at Cannes this year. It's about a monastery of French monks in Algeria who serve a small community. When Islamic extremists arrive, they are faced with a decision to either remain and face the potential of death at the hands of the extremists or flee. The film is based on actual events -- they chose the former and most were killed.

This is a film of small details. Each of the eight monks is allowed the space to establish themselves as people, through their words and actions. It's a good film that rewards the viewer, if you give the story time.

At the same time though, I felt that it would have been stronger as a play. The constraints of the stage would have heightened the isolation of the men and would have provided a stronger focus to their debates and characters. In some respects, the approach would have been similar to what David Young did with his play "Inexpressible Island", about the Shackleton expedition.

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Not sure this was what was intended

2010-09-14T14:17:00.001-04:00

Before each screening a number of short ads are played, promoting TIFF and the role of some of its major sponsors (RBC, Bell, RIM et al).

Cadillac has been a sponsor for a few years now of the People's Choice (this is the biggest award at TIFF and will be announced on Saturday).

The Cadillac ad is a model of brevity. A black screen appears with the words "Some things you see once and remember forever"; followed by an iconic screen image; and then finally a short sequence of their CTS model racing along a tunnel.

They've created three of these -- in one, a smiling face of Peter Sellers as the mad doctor of "Dr Strangelove"; a head shot of the metal skeleton of "Terminator" and a screaming Janet Leigh from "Psycho").

As I've seen this about 20 times so far this year, I've had way too much time to think about whether this a successful ad for marketing the car and the answer is probably "no".

Usually when it appears there are a handful of derisive snorts from the audience (on the bright side, though, the snorts have not yet turned into loud comments; the sure sign that an ad has failed for a TIFF audience).

It does raise an interesting question of why they only chose images of a frightening nature, rather than similar more positive images (for example, a joyous Gene Kelly swinging off the lamppost in "Singing in the Rain"; Audrey Tautoo's smiling face in "Amelie", etc.). Are they suggesting that only images that frighten are instantly and permanently memorable and, if so, are they trying to link their car to this notion?
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The Atrium at the Lightbox

2010-09-13T20:59:00.000-04:00

Taken from the ground floor of the new place looking up. Waiting for "Of Gods and Men".
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The Illusionist

2010-09-13T17:41:00.001-04:00

Based on an never-filmed screenplay by Jacques Tati, this is Sylvain Chomet's follow-up to his "The Triplets of Belleville".

Like Triplets, this is a very traditional, hand-drawn animated film, set in the Edinburgh of the 1950's. A French magician ends up in Scotland to find work in a world where his craft is being superceded by the new media of rocknroll and television.

As a film about the dying of an age, it's terribly bittersweet. Consistent with Tati and Triplets, there is almost no intelligible dialogue in the film, but the quality of the drawings and an evocative soundtrack give you all the information you need.

Although I enjoyed it, I wonder how it will survive in the current movie distribution environment. It will be interesting to see how this film is marketed. It's probably too quiet to be a film for kids. It may be destined to be a film that will rely on word-of-mouth to succeed.

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The Trip

2010-09-13T15:52:00.001-04:00

"The Trip" is a mostly improvised road trip through the north of England, featuring several inns, some mind-blowing geography and the comic talents of Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden, directed by Michael Winterbottom.

The three were also involved in Winterbottom's adaptation and the two films share a common spirit, although "The Trip" is more comic.

Easily the funniest movie I've seen at the Festival so far. It's the kind of film where good portions of the dialogue are obliterated by the laughter of the audience. A sequence where the two riff on a sort of Agincourt speech from Henry V is a standout. Many in the audience were in tears by the end of it.

A beautiful soundtrack by Michael Nyman complemented the scenery and a few more melancholic scenes which were interspersed through the film.
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Tabloid

2010-09-13T11:56:00.001-04:00

The latest documentary by Errol Morris ("The Thin Blue Line", "The Fog of War", et al) is about Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who became famous for two events in her life -- an incident in the UK in the late 70's known as "The Case of the Manacled Mormon" and a more recent event in which she paid a Korean company $150,000 to clone her deceased pit bull, Booger.

it's the first story that is the main subject of the film and which provides the title -- it prompted a battle in England between the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express on who could dig up the juiciest stuff.

In classic Morris fashion, she is the key and very willing participant in telling her story. What emerges is a portrait of a woman whose sense of romantic entitlement drove her to extreme actions. The first story including a kidnapping of her intended, a Mormon missionary, a sex-filled weekend in a cottage in Devon to deprogram him, flights from justice and a host of other details.

Each sequence of the film serves to add more detail of a woman who is, in the words of the Daily Express reporter who followed her story, "barking mad". Although this is arguably correct, it's also interesting to see the degree to which they were complicit in the legend.

Good fun and recommended.
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There's another world out there

2010-09-12T21:00:00.001-04:00

A local backdrop to TIFF this year is the municipal election. Traditionally, the Labour Day weekend is the official start of the campaign, although candidates can file papers as soon as Jan 1.

This particular election will produce a new mayor, as the incumbent, David Miller, announced that he would not run. Five "serious" candidates are in the running at this time, long with the usual plethora of fringe candidates.

I had to get from the AMC to the Scotiabank yesterday afternoon, so set out along Dundas for the first leg.

At the Ryerson School of Management, I passed through milling clumps of supporters for each of the five, carrying signs and wearing the colours of their favourite -- purple for George Smitherman, red for Rocco Rossi, white for Rob Ford, etc.

I presume that there was a debate on when I passed, but hopefully there was more energy and passion in the room because there was neither on the street. There weren't that many non-supporters on the street, so they were spending most of their time circling each other without intent of any kind.

As I continued my journey westward, I saw a large purple Smitherman cube van coming south on Bay and a white Ford cube van coming along Chestnut behind City Hall. They were the only vehicles on the street at the time, odd for a Saturday afternoon. Add some minor chords and some good editing and a battle could have been arranged at the point where they would have met. (we weren't so lucky. The election grinds along)

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Lightbox Red Carpet for Trigger

2010-09-12T18:59:00.003-04:00

Callum Keith Rennie works the red carpet.

Bruce McDonald, his wife Dani and daughter Charlie Yoko

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The Lightbox opens...

2010-09-12T18:32:00.002-04:00

Today is the official opening of TIFF's new home at King & John. The Bell Lightbox features five new theatres and will greatly expand the capacity of the Cinematheque and provide a focal point for film in the city.

They shut down the street for a block party this afternoon. I arrived in time to see the red carpet for the first film at the Lightbox -- Bruce McDonald's "Trigger". I'll be seeing Trigger next weekend and will have more on that later. I'll post a couple of snaps from the red carpet next.

If the proverbial bomb had gone off here this evening, it would have wiped out an entire generation of Canadian filmmakers -- besides Bruce, some of the folks at Trigger were Atom Egoyan, Patricia Roszema, Peter Mettler, Don McKellar and several others.
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A Piano in the Factory

2010-09-11T21:45:00.001-04:00

A Chinese film about a soon-to-be-divorced father who enlists his friends in a series of schemes to provide his daughter with a piano.

There were some nicely played scenes between the characters but the overriding problem was that there was too little story to sustain its 2 hour running time. The last 20 minutes in particular were a mess -- while the necessary (and some unnecessary) plot points were addressed, the editing was so messy that it felt at times like the reels were out of order.

Could easily have lost a half hour without losing anything critical.
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The Edge

2010-09-11T16:01:00.001-04:00

Another northern film (I've seen more snow in the past 24 hours than I saw in February in Toronto this year), set in a work camp in Siberia after the war.

An engineer arrives at the camp to work on one of two aging steam locomotives. The inmates of the camp were Soviet nationals who were captured by the Germans during the war; under the Stalin regime, they are viewed as collaborators with the Nazis and restricted to the camps.

A third train is discovered on an isolated island near the camp, along with a German woman who has newn trapped there for years and has become almost feral.

The middle section of the film is the rescue of the train and the woman by the engineer (note the order), culminating in a train chase that forms the climax.

The attention paid to the production values (and, in particular the three steam trains) is excellent; unfortunately the story never rose above the mediocre.

We were told at the beginning of the screening that this will be the official Russian entry for best foreign film at the Oscars. While visually impressive, I think it would be surprising if this made the short list of nominees. The story and characters are too under-developed to compete with the calibre of films that usually end up on the short list.
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Toronto is a big tent

2010-09-11T09:37:00.001-04:00

On the way home on the subway last night, the car filled at St George with dozens of kids and a few adults. The kids were clutching programs and wearing the paraphrenalia of some kind of "wrestlemania" event somewhere downtown. They made quite a contrast to the crowds of people I spent my day with.

Just before I left the office, I was asked what people wore to TIFF. In some respects it depends on how much time people spend going to movies. The "frequent fliers" tend to favour comfort over style, careting their supplies and provisions in canvas bags and back packs.

On the other hand, those who tend to come for one film (these folks are more visibly on evenings and weekends tend to dress up more, even for the screenings in the regular cinemas (I have no direct experience with the Gala crowds; I can only imagine what that might be like!). The tendency here is a hybrid of high school prom and cluvland attire.

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Marimbas from Hell

2010-09-11T09:28:00.001-04:00

Finished Friday with a bit of a shaggy dog movie from Guatemala about a marimba player who, in order to pay an unspecified extortion fee to someone else, decides that the route to freedom involves hitching himself to a heavy metal band.

It was an odd little film very underplayed by its non-professional cast but it did have some moments of sublime comedy. If anything, they stayed away from pushing the incongruity of the marimba and a traditional metal band -- if this was a Hollywood film, this would have probably ended up at a festival with thousands of screaming fans and pyrotechnics of KISS army proportions (I think I prefer the Central American approach.
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The Legend of the Fist

2010-09-10T21:18:00.001-04:00

We started today's slate of screenings with "The Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen", directed by Andrew Lau.

It was anything but opaque -- a full-blown martial arts extravaganza set in a divided Shanghai in 1925. As Chinese nationals, a Japanese occupying army and assorted Brits and Yanks vie for control of the city, one man fights for his people.

The best part of the film were the fight scenes, which were brilliantly staged to give a clear sense of where bodies were in space (as opposed to presenting a blizzard of rapid-fire edits that serve only to confuse the viewer.

Unfortunately, the film faltered outside of these scenes. Only a few of the characters were fully developed and the relationship between Chen Zhen and Kiki, the singer at the Casablanca night club was played badly.

Worth seeing for the fight scenes and an interesting prologue showing the role of Chinese labourers in the first world war.
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There's always something new (bureaucracy edition)

2010-09-10T20:57:00.001-04:00

One of the challenges for the TIFF theatres is managing the line-ups for films yet to be shown. At the AMC theatre at Yonge and Dundaa' there are often helf a dozen discrete lines vying for space in the common area of the theatre. At its worst, it's like the old Ottawa airport on a Friday afternoon.

Tonight the line for "Marimbas from Hell" was put in one of the vacant theatres. We trooped into the theatre, some grabbing seats; others standing or leaning on the railing.

After about 15 minutes of this, a very perky volunteer captain came in and tried to organize us in the order in which we had entered it. It was probably only her sunny disposition that prevented people from unceremoniously throwing her out and locking the door.

The "real" theatre opened up after about five minutes of this and we all happily swarmed out of the staging area to find our seats.
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Life imitating Film

2010-09-09T21:56:00.003-04:00

On the way home on the subway from the Godard film, I was struck by one of those little perfect moments that only seem to happen in film.

I was standing in the car as we moved north to Bloor. My iPod was on and, at that time, was playing Massive Attack's "Protection", featuring the sultry vocals of Tracey Thorn.

A couple of seats south of me, a young couple sat, turned in the seat so that their eyes were locked on the other's. They were holding hands but also executing something of a pas de deux with their fingers, gently stroking the other. The combination of a chemistry that was palpable three metres away, the slow, balletic movement of the hand, and a song that was beautifully synced to that motion was quite lovely.

Sometimes there is magic even on the TTC.

And so it begins...

2010-09-09T21:43:00.002-04:00

TIFF 2010 began with a screening of Jean-Luc Godard's latest film "Film Socialism" at the Ryerson Theatre.

I arrived about 20 minutes before the screening and ended up following the line from Gerrard, down Church and on to Gould. Around us were many many students settling into Ryerson and a loud power trio tried gamely to entertain the crowds on Church (what they lacked in rhythm, they made up in volume).

The film started about an hour late. Fortunately, I had nothing else on the schedule, so it was simply a matter of soaking up the sights and sounds of a somewhat cool late summer's night.

But what about the film...?

According to the catalog, the film is Godard's "most dense, opaque and troubling film in years" (nothing like starting the festival with the easy stuff). Structured in three parts, the film is a mix of languages (English, French, German, Russian and a few others), film stocks (everything from high def digital down to cell phone cameras), obscure inter-titles and references to classic film like "The Battleship Potemkin". There were deliberate variations in the sound mix (from crystal clear to muddy) and no subtitles.

About a quarter of the audience bailed before the end. I decided to stick with it and let it wash over me. It was worth it for some of the visuals and for raising questions like "what is the llama doing at the gas station and why is no one paying attention to it?"

Tomorrow promises to be a little less opaque.

T-7 and counting

2010-09-02T20:58:00.002-04:00

Just under a week to go before the launch of TIFF 2010 (by this time next week, I will likely be leaving the theatre after film #1 -- Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialism".

I went down to the box office tonight and picked up my stack of tickets. Of 48 selections, I received 47 (the only reject was Mike Leigh's new film, "Another Year". I'll figure out what to do with the hole in my schedule in the next few days.

This week was a good demonstration of the power of social media. A single tweet about bedbugs at the Scotiabank theatre turned into a media storm. From all the articles, one would have thought the theatres were over-run with 6' tall, bloodthirsty insects (on second thought, that might make for a good Midnight Madness film one day).

Turns out the whole thing was a mistake, but in the interim the 2010 edition of TIFF has its symbol for the week. I'm expecting lots of commentary on bedbugs in the screenings to come.

Another Turn of the Wheel

2010-08-24T20:30:00.004-04:00

As we approach the end of a long, hot summer, we're presently simultaneously with the release of films that were shown at last year's TIFF ("Soul Kitchen" opened last weekend, a feel-good film from 2009) and the catalogue for this year.

I picked up the 2010 edition this morning and have been through it once to generate my traditional "long list" of possible titles for viewing. At this point, I've whittled down the 300-odd films to something like 100+. Next stage is to contemplate calendars for each of the 11 days of the festival to generate a reasonable schedule (so far, I've got 2 of a possible 50 films slotted in).

What's new this year?

Well, for starters, the festival is 11 days long again. In olden times, the Sunday after the closing gala was reserved for films that were well-received by audiences. This year, they've programmed a full day's worth of films on the 19th.

The new home of the Toronto International Film Festival Group is poised to move into it's new home at King & John Streets on the 12th of September. The Bell Lightbox will be a permanent home for the Cinematheque as well as providing museum space, the Film Reference Library and restaurant space. Programming for the Lightbox for the fall is starting to come out and they've got some exciting events planned. I may be spending a few evenings down there.

With the opening of the Lightbox, the shift of centre of the TIFF universe moves further south. The Cumberland has dropped off the list of theatres on the programme. While the Cumberland has some pretty programming during the year, it's showing its age as a venue and I don't think will be missed by TIFF patrons. That leaves the Varsity as the sole remnant of the "classic" TIFF theatre line-up.

WRT the films this year, early impressions are that this is a year for many veteran directors who have found a willing host in TIFF, for example Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Woody Allen, Francois Ozon, Takashi Miike and John Sayles. As my own schedule takes shape, other themes and trends may emerge. Stay tuned...

Symbol

2009-09-21T07:52:00.001-04:00

Colin Geddes, the programmer for TIFF's Midnight Madness series, described "Symbol" as the "what the fuck" movie of the festival. He wasn't exaggerating.

A man wakes up in a large, totally white room without any visible windows or doors. He is wearing green pyjamas with large polka dots. Out of the walls appear hundreds of white cherubs. After a moment, they recede back into the walls, the only remnant of their presence being their genitals, which protrude from the wall. The man discovers that when a penis is depressed, an object will appear in the room. The objects appear to be chosen at random.

In simple terms, the film is about the man's attempt to escape his prison, but things quickly expand beyond that simple premise, adding angels, Mexican wrestlers and a host of connections between the white room and the real world.

It's a very odd film, performed mostly without dialogue. Parts of it are very funny and there's an absurdist feel that reminded me of an illustrator named Revillo. Very entertaining though and worth a look if it ever appears on DVD.
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Curtain falls

2009-09-21T07:43:00.001-04:00

TIFF 09 ended (for me) around 2 am Sunday morning with the Midnight Madness screening of "Ong Bak 2: The Beginning".

Overall, it was a good TIFF for me. I made it to 46 screenings and can only think of 2 or 3 films that really didn't work for me.

The festival had its awards luncheon on Saturday, with "Precious" winning the People's Choice award and "Cairo Time" the Best Canadian feature. I didn't make it to either and didn't hear any comments from others about them. To be honest, though, it wasn't a year where there was much in the way of buzz about any particular film or films.

I have a few loose ends to tie off for this year's effort (a handful of reviews for the last couple of days, cleaning up previous blog entries to add additional detail and correct minor errors) which I will try to take care of this week.
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Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands

2009-09-19T20:46:00.001-04:00

After seeing a number of films which attempted to depict otherworldly landscapes, it took a documentary to capture a reality that transcended any imagined locations.

Peter Mettler is a Canadian filmmaker with a well-deserved reputation for making thoughtful films with commanding visuals (his previous work includes "Visions of Light" and "Gambling, Gods and LSD").

Petropolis is a short (43-minute) aerial trip across the Alberta Tar Sands, starting in the nearby boreal forests and proceeding to the alien landscapes of the Tar Sands. Aside from some text at the beginning and a short piece of voiceover at the end, the only sound is an electro-acoustic score that hovers on the edge of being audible.

The images are enough. Shot from a helicopter hovering over the terrain, the scale of the devastation of the open-pit mining and the tailing ponds is incomprehensible (in fact the only way to establish scale is through the occasional shot of a car or truck; there is only one image of a man outside a vehicle, on the top of a gigantic sulphur platform).

Given the length, a theatrical run seems doubtful, although I expect that it will receive some promotion from Greenpeace (it was commissioned by them).

There is also a companion web site at http://www.petropolis-film.com.
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Triage

2009-09-18T20:15:00.001-04:00

The follow-up by ..., the director of "No Man's Land", the film stars Colin Farrell as a war zone photographer trying to deal with the aftermath of a photo shoot in Kurdistan around the time of Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds. Following his return home, his inability to deal with the memory of the experience threatens to destroy him.

The film is strongest in the scenes set in Kurdistan, with a strong performance by ... as the doctor who must decide who lives or dies from their injuries.

Unfortunately, the scenes in Ireland don't have the same impact. I was left with a feeling of the film being a bit off-balance, although there is good cameo work by Christopher Lee, as a Spanish therapist with a penchant for rehabilitating criminals of the Franco era.
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Videocracy

2009-09-18T19:55:00.001-04:00

A documentary which looks primarily at the state of television in Italy and its intense focus on lowest common denominator entertainment, but also explores questions about gender equality, media concentration and links between the media and the Italian President, Silvio Berlusconi.

The film follows four individuals -- a body-building, singing, dancing, karate black belt named Ricky Carnevale, an "agent" to the stars and unabashed fascist named Lele Moro, the head of a team of paparazzi with his own dreams of celebrity (Fabrizio Corona) and Berlusconi himself.

If there's a connecting thread in the documentary, it's this notion of the obsession with celebrity and its corrosive effect on Italian society.

The film is certainly successful at depicting this, but it's done on a purely emotional level. There is little in the way of analysis and, for me, it felt like I was just channel surfing. As it turned out, the director mentioned in the Q&A that it was his intention to make the film this way, as it was representative of the way that Berlusconi communicated with the Italian people. I think I would have preferred if he had tightened the focus and gone deeper with the subject matter.

That said, there are some truly surreal scenes from the movie, from the agent proudly playing the Mussolini hymns he has on his smart phone to a Berlusconi political ad that ends with the tag line "Thank God Silvio Exists".

Worth a look if it makes its way to TV.

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Micmacs à Tire-Larigot

2009-09-18T17:42:00.001-04:00

"Micmacs" is the latest film from Jean-Pierre Jeunot, the director or co-director of films such as "Delicatessen", "City of Lost Children" and "Amelie".

It's a film about rival arms dealers and a ragtag mob of eccentrics who are determined to put them out of business. To get an idea of what's like, try imagining an episode of the old "Mission Impossible" series directed by Tex Avery or Mack Sennett.

It combined the whimsy of "Amelie" with some wonderfully wild gadgetry, though less James Bond than Rube Goldberg. The audience ate it up and it certainly had the most enthusiastic applause of any film I've seen this year at TIFF.

It's a lot of fun and one I'd recommend heartily. The only caveat I would have would be based on someone's opinion of "Amelie" -- that film seemed to split audiences down the middle. If you loved "Amelie", than "Micmacs" is a safe bet; if you didn't, perhaps exploring other options would be the best approach.
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Les derniers jours du monde

2009-09-18T17:23:00.001-04:00

The English title for the third post-apocalyptic film of the festival was shown as "Happy End The Apocalypse is Near", rather than "The Last Days of the Earth". It's actually a better representation.

About the only thing this shares with "The Road" is a narrative based on a journey of the lead character (Mathieu Almaric), although the grey, ash-covered landscapes of Cormac McCarthy are exchanged for the sun and sand of Biarritz and the south of France.

It's probably the most fashionable depiction of the end committed to film, with the main character experiencing events indirectly (for the most part, the bad things happen to other people).

At one point, he ends up in Pamploma, for the running of the bulls. Perhaps this event was intended as symbolic of the developing chaos, but it came across more as footage shot for the Discovery Channel.

I'm still not sure what to make of this of this one! Some further research is required.
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The Damned United

2009-09-17T14:59:00.001-04:00

The latest screenplay from Peter Morgan ("The Queen", "Frost/Nixon"), the story is about Brian Clough, a young English soccer manager who had a spectacularly short and unsuccessful stint as the manager for Leeds United in 1974.

At the time, Leeds United had dominated the English soccer world for many years. Their manager, Don Revie, had just taken a job as the manager of the English national team and Clough was offered the job.

The team went from the top of their division to the bottom immediately and Clough was canned in 44 days. In some respects, this is the antithesis of the sport film, as it shows defeat, rather than victory..

That said, it's really a story about ambition and relationships -- the two key relationships being that between Clough (played by Michael Sheen) and his assistant (Timothy Spall) and the one between Clough and Revie (Colm Meaney), although the latter mostly exists in Clough's head.

Sheen provided one of the most striking performances I've seen at TIFF this year, a creature possessing both unstoppable ambition and a complete lack of self-awareness.

Highly recommended.

As a sidenote, there was a line in the credits about "crowd hair supervisor". Given the time period (1968-1974), the film is full of some of the most remarkablely awful hairstyles captured on film.
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Cell 211

2009-09-17T11:33:00.001-04:00

"Cell 211" is a Spanish prison drama about a new guard who, hile on an orientation visit, finds himself trapped during a prison riot. To protect himself, he must convince the other prisoners that he is an inmate, while desperately searching for a way to escape and get back to his pregnant wife.

The film was a taut thriller, with a strong ensemble cast and direction that brought you right into the middle of the chaos.

It strikes me that this is the kind of story that would appeal to a Hollywood studio as a remake for the North American audience, with an American A-list cast. Aside from a sub-plot involving a trio of convicted ETA terrorists, the story could easily be transplanted to another location. Note that this would not be my preference -- the film is strong enough to stand on its own and deserves the opportunity to find a wider audience.
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The Road

2009-09-16T21:05:00.001-04:00

One of the more commercial films that I saw this year, "The Road" is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzker prize winning novel.

Set in a post-apocalyptic America, the film tracks the journey of an unnamed father and his son south towards the coast.

Visually, the film captures the devastation of the novel beautifully, although there's an attempt to open up the novel by showing larger scale destruction that feels a little superfluous.

As it turned out, I had finished reading the novel a couple of weeks earlier and McCarthy's prose was still very much alive in my memory.

Although the performances of the two leads (Viggo Mortensen and Cody ...) were great and there are a small number of very effective cameos, the impact of knowing the source material ultimately diminished the film to being a good adaptation of a great book, rather than being an exceptional film.

There's a poetic quality to McCarthy's style that the film is unable to capture. One of the best reviews I've seen was Rick Groen's in the Globe. He suggested (correctly, in my view) that the book represented an odyssey, while the film was simply a journey.

As a result, I'm a little conflicted about recommending the film. It may be best to see it without reading the novel, though I'd recommend the novel without hesitation.
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Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

2009-09-16T20:50:00.001-04:00

Directed by Peter Raymont and Michèle Hozer, this is a decent docimentary on the life of Gould, but not a great one.

The centre of the film are interviews conducted with the American painter Cornelia Foss and her two children. Foss lived with Gould for almost four years, following a separation from her husband, the pianist Lukas Foss (a contemporary of Gould's).

Listening to the audio recordings of Gould's voice, I was struck by how well Colm Feore nailed his voice in "32 Short Films About Glenn Gould" and, on reflection, how that film, although a work of fiction, was probably more successful at depicting his "inner life".
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Soul Kitchen

2009-09-16T19:44:00.001-04:00

Set in a restaurant in an industrial section of Hamburg, "Soul Kitchen" is a melange of different cultural flavours (German, Greek and Turkish), all whipped together into a light farce.

There's really nothing new here, but it throws all of its ingredients together with such style and fun that it's impossible to ignore. It also had the best music soundtrack of the festival so far -- a mix of R&B, funk, techno and punk.
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Memories of Toronto

2009-09-16T17:00:00.001-04:00

As part of the slew of pre-screening ads & thank you shorts, TIFF has been showing a series of short films highlighting the modern history of Toronto.

The clips (with the exception of a scene from Don Shebib's "Goin' Down the Road") show iconic moments -- from footage of the great fire of 1904 to the V-E celebrations on Bay Street to a sit-in on Yorkville Avenue in the 60's. There's a clip of the 1920 Santa Claus Parade, where in one brief shot, there appears to be a clown on the street smoking a cigarette.

Another parade is from 1967, with the Maple Leafs celebrating their last Stanley Cup. A convertible is shown with three men and the cup. According to the credits, they are Punch Imlach, George Armstrong and Stafford Smythe, although the first man on the left beside Armstrong seems to be Harold Ballard.

Was it a clerical error, historical revisionism or an attempt to exorcise the curse of the Maple Leafs...
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Daybreakers

2009-09-16T08:56:00.001-04:00

The first of this year's Midnight Madness films I've seen this year, "Daybreakers" is the second film by two Australian brothers.

The Spherig Brothers hold the distinction of having the very last film screened at the late, lamented Uptown 1 Theatre. I was at that screening and "Undead" was a perfect way to close the theatre -- a relentless rocknroll, zombie, alien abduction comedy thriller.

Six years later, "Daybreakers" shows that the brothers are in a bit of a transition. While the film had many of the more graphic elements of "Undead" (gallons of blood and entrails, monsters and thrills), there was clearly an interest to moving closer to the mainstream.

The film posits a world where almost the entire human population has "turned" into vampires. Society has adapted to a world confined to the night -- business hours have shifted 12 hours, cars come equipped with heavily tinted windows for daytime driving and blood is used as a flavouring for coffee. The imagining of this post-human world is quite clever and fully realized.

The remaining humans are being harvested for their blood supply. Unfortunately, the supply is dwindling and blood riots have begun to break out. Blood deprivation also has the additional effect of mutating vampires into ravenous beasts. While "vampire" society is civilized, the "sub-siders" look more like the Nosferatu style of vampire.

A haemotologist (Ethan Hawke) struggles to find a solution to the emerging crisis. He works in a mega-corporation in control of the blood supply, a corporation headed up by Sam Neill. Eventually, he connects with a ragtag group of human survivors, led by Willem Dafoe.

It's here that the tension between B-movie excess and the mainstream became apparent. There are scenes that would not be out of place in any number of trashy 70's sci-fi or horror films. But the presence of the A-list actors gave it a gravitas that it couldn't sustain. The end result felt that a film that tried to straddle the whole spectrum and landed somewhere in the mushy middle.

It reminded me a bit of Peter Jackson's work, from his early gore films like "Bad Taste" or "Meet the Feebles" to his later work on the "Lord of the Rings". The Spherigs seem to be following the same path, but at a much faster rate.
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The Good Heart

2009-09-15T14:32:00.000-04:00

Sunday was a day for fairy tales, with two films using a modern setting and characters to tell stories that were not too far removed from the world of Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm.

The first of the two was "The Good Heart", directed by an Icelandic director named Dagur Kuri.

A curmudgeony bar owner (Brian Cox) "adopts" a homeless man (Paul Dano), determined to make him into his successor. Imagine Pygmalion, if Henry Higgins was an alcoholic, chain-smoking misanthrope and you're part of the way to understanding Cox's character.

The film is very funny and succeeds on the ability of the two leads and a talented troup of actors to create believable, three-dimensional characters. Even the bar itself (a confined, smoky, dirty, tall box stuffed with bric-a-brac) becomes something of a character in the film.

Although the twist could be predicted fairly early on, it wasn't fatal to the enjoyment of the film.

Apparently there is no distribution deal for North America yet, but I suspect one may be closed this week, based on the very strong response of the audience.

Recommended.
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Breakfast of Champions

2009-09-15T08:58:00.001-04:00

It's the start of day 6 at the festival and, as usual, I'm starting the day down at the Scotiabank Theatre at John and Richmond.

And, also as usual, someone just walked past me on the stairs of the theatre carrying their breakfast of "choice" -- a plastic tray piled with stale nacho chips and chemical goop aspiring to be cheese.

The G&M also started the morning with a lead story on the "salt crisis" affecting Canadian youth... They should have a look at some of this audience.
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Nora / Un transport en commun (Saint Louis Blues)

2009-09-14T12:11:00.001-04:00

After the tightly controlled, black-and-white world of "The White Ribbon", it was great to move south to Africa for two short films from Africa.

"Nora" was an autobiography of Nora C... (Will update her name when I get a chance), a Zimbabwean dancer now living and dancing in the US.

Shot in stunning high definition, it's been the most striking film from a photographic perspective.

Nora plays a number of parts in the film, including her mother, father and herself. Physically, she's slightly on the masculine side of androgynous and her intensely physical choreography (a blend of traditional African and modern dance styles) adapts well to either gender.

The second film in this screening was "un transport en commun" (or, "Saint Louis Blues" as its English title, depicts a mini-cab ride from Dakar to Saint Louis in Senegal.

Actually the cab is a battered old station wagon, piled high with luggage and stuffed with a driver and seven passengers.

During the course of an often interrupted journey, various characters break out into song, in the style (both cinematic and musical) of the classic American movies of the 30's and 40's). Most of the cast were non-professionals, lending a charmingly amateurish quality to the proceedings.

The director (Dyana Baye) of the second film was in the theatre. Although her English seemed quite strong, she apologized for the lack of an interpreter. As it turned out, it wasn't a problem -- the audience adapted by posing almost every question en français.

Q&a in french
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The White Ribbon

2009-09-14T11:58:00.002-04:00

In the old days of the "Festival" (ie, before it became TIFF), they used to run a special spotlight program, each year focussing on a single director. One of the first ones I saw was on the work of an Austrian director named Michael Haneke.

I still remember seeing a film called "Benny's Video" in that spotlight in 1992 and being completely floored by the story about a teenage boy who kills a girl with a cattle prod. It's typical of both his early as well as his most recent work, posing difficult moral dilemmas within a fictional story, but the strength of his directing has made the journeys worthwhile .

Since then, he's gone on to produce a number of well-received, if no less disturbing, films like "The Piano Teacher", "Funny Games" and "Caché".

"The White Ribbon" won the Palme d'or" at Cannes earlier this year. It's as meticulous as any of his previous work, although it involves a much larger cast and a more intricate plot than his other films.

Set on the eve of the First World War, the action takes place in a small Austrian village called Eichwald. The lives of the villagers are tightly governed by the rules (economic, social and moral) set forth by the Baron who owns the land and the pastor of the local church.

A series of incidents (an attempt to kill the local doctor, the death of the wife of a farmhand) set in motion a crumbling of the social order of the village. The local music teacher serves as our witness to the changes taking place. Interestingly enough, it is the children of the village that are as much the instigators of the changes, as well as it's victims.

A quietly powerful film. Recommended.

Because you ask...

2009-09-14T11:53:00.002-04:00

Been a little light on the ground (well, at least the ground I've been walking on), but I started the day today with two close encounters with celebrities.

First up was Colin Farrell who I saw in a film called "Triage" (more on that to come). He participated in the post-film Q&A. Funny, charming and on his best behaviour (ie no photographers or members of the audience were harmed during his appearance).

On my way out of the Scotiabank Theatre to see what a beautiful September day looks like, I passed by Sam Neill on the sidewalk. Taller and thinner than I had expected.

Fish Tank

2009-09-13T17:20:00.002-04:00

I saw Andrea Arnold's first film "Red Road" at TIFF a few years back and was struck by how well she evoked the lives of people living difficult lives in the Scottish "projects".

To some extent, "Fish Tank" revisits the same milieu, but the story is entirely its own.

A young teenager (an intense performance by Katie Jarvis) deals with the pressures of her own life, which include contending with conflict with her mother and her younger sister. Things take a turn for the worse when her mother's new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) appears on the scene.

Arnold's work has been compared to Ken Loach's work. There are parallels -- they both have a gift for depicting the lives of a British under class, but Arnold's work makes its political points implicitly, without the polemicism that sometimes derails Loach's best intentions. She also has a terrific way with actors and a facility with imagery that's comparable to Lynne Ramsay's work on "Ratcatcher" and "Morvern Callar".

It's not an easy film to watch (particularly in the last third of the film), but it was very compelling.

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Nymph

2009-09-13T12:01:00.002-04:00

Back to Thailand for the first screening on Saturday.

"Nymph" was an entertaining, if not terribly scary, ghost story about a possessive wood sprite in the Thai forest. The film made very effective use of its sound design and camera work to make the scenes in the forest a surprisingly immersive experience.

Friday roundup

2009-09-12T14:57:00.002-04:00

After the talking heads of the Israeli film documentary, Friday moved east to Asia and, eventually, north to Sweden. While none of the films was completely successful, there were elements which made the day worthwhile.

Tsai Ming-Liang has been a favourite of TIFF for many years. His "Face" is nominally about a performance of "Salome", although this is a small part of what seemed like a very long film (the pacing is glacial).

That said, there are visuals (notably a scene with mirrors set in a snow-covered forest, the final dance of Salome and a final scene shot at an outdoor fountain) that are absolutely stunning.

"She, A Chinese" is a gritty film about a young Chinese girl's path to adulthood. The path is not an easy one, taking her from a local village in China to a nearby city and eventually London. Her ability to form lasting relationships is seriously impaired and usually collapse for one reason or another.

The lead actress delivers a fairly compelling performance and there is an aggressive electric guitar soundtrack provided by John Parish (a frequent collaborator of PJ Harvey). After the quiet of "Face", it made for a perfect wake-up call.

"Sawasdee Bangkok" was the light snack of the day. A collection of four short films set in Bangkok (selected from a group of nine originaly produced for the Thai Public Broadcasting System), it provided the right mix of romance tinged with a little comedy as well as melancholy.

The four shorts were uniformly good and, overall, succeeded in a way that a film like "Paris, je t'aime" did not.

Finishing the day was a taut thriller called "The Ape". While the lead character is clearly wound several turns too tight, the film rarely showed the explosive rage he is clearly capable of in action. The implications of his rage, however, are shown, which adds to the tension of the film.

It was certainly successful at establishing and intensifying the tension over the 80 or 90 minutes of the film, but the lack of any release or catharsis made it ultimately an unsatisfying experience.

History lessons

2009-09-11T12:16:00.002-04:00

The first film this morning was the first part of "The History of Israeli Cinema", a documentary covering the years from 1932 to 1978 (pt 2 covers the time to the present day and is also being screened this week).

It was a fascinating documentary, though more as a result of how political, theological and social movements were reflected through film, than in the clips from the actual films themselves.

Initial conflicts between Judaism and Zionism as frameworks for the stories gave way in the 60's to the rise of the individual (mirroring the rise of the counterculture in the West).

There was a discussion about how the mosaic of contemporary Israeli culture seemed to defy the creation of a true mass market indigenous film culture. A possible reaction to this would seem to have been the creation of a genre known as "Bourekas" films, which achieved success by pandering to the lowest common denominator.

I left Pt 2 off my initial list, until I had a chance to see Pt 1. At this point, this will likely remain as a future rental, if the opportunity arises.

Product Placement 2

2009-09-11T12:06:00.002-04:00

Given the media and audience attention to film this week, everyone is trying to get their moment in the sun.

I was on my way to the Scotiabank Theatre this morning and passed a vacant storefront on the corner of Queen and McCaul. It was in the process of being "dressed" as an exhibit for a new film called "Whiteout", with Kate Beckinsale.

The film is about the hunt for a killer at an Antarctic research station, with Beckinsale as the Marshal assigned to catch the criminal.

Along the sidewalk, the crew had deposited piles of shaved ice. Inside I saw a man with a chain saw, working on an ice sculpture.

Must remember to pack my camera for moments like that.

Sign of the Times?

2009-09-11T07:57:00.002-04:00

Before each screening, TIFF audiences are treated to a series of (hopefully) short thank you messages and advertising by key festival sponsors.

At the screening last night, I noticed that several were recycling material from previous TIFFs. An expression of the "remix" culture that has emerged, or a reflection of reduced marketing budgets?

Into the Inferno...

2009-09-10T21:49:00.002-04:00

And so it begins...

The first film this year was Serge Bromberg's "L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot", a documentary about Clouzot's aborted attempt to make a film ("L'Enfer", or "Inferno") in 1964.

After making a number of now-classic films, including "The Wages of Fear" and "Diabolique", Clouzot secured a huge budget to make a film starring Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani about a husband's obsessive love of his wife turning to jealousy and, eventually, madness.

It became an exercise in obsession for Clouzot, an obsession much greater than that experienced by the husband played by Reggiani. Over 180 cans of film were shot before the production collapsed (Reggiani and other key personnel fled the set and Clouzot eventually had a heart attack).

Bromberg used the extant footage to construct a document of a doomed production. Included in the footage were test sequences heavily influenced by the psychedelic art of the 60's (the intent was to represent the husband's instability through visual and aural distortions). Given that the effects were done mostly with physical means (lens, lighting, makeup and colour treatments), the effects are still exhilarating.

As I watched it, it reminded me of three other films that I'd seen at previous festivals.

Clouzot was provided with what was essentially an "unlimited" budget for a film in 1964. It resulted in a freedom that contributed to endless numbers of test shots and retakes. In "Hearts of Darkness" (Fax Bahr's and George Hickenlooper's doc about the making of "Apocalypse Now"), one of the principals makes a statement about having too much money, then going into the jungle and slowly going mad).

"Lost in La Mancha" concerned the attempt by Terry Gilliam to film an adaptation of Don Quixote. While no less obsessed than Clouzot, Gilliam's production crashed as a result of a host of external factors (financial, medical and meteorological!).

A more direct link is to a film by Claude Chabrol based on the original script. I saw that version of "L'Enfer" in '94. It stripped the surrealist touches from the script and, unfortunately, what was left was a fairly pedestrian melodrama and a mediocre effect by another great director.

Bromberg's "L'Enfer" is a fascinating document of the collapse of a production. While it's impossible to tell whether the final product would have been successful, we are left with some stunning imagery.

During the post-film Q&A, Bromberg mentioned a web site called Europa Film Treasures, which is an umbrella site for the preservation of European film. Definitely worth a look.

Product Placement

2009-09-06T21:33:00.002-04:00

A completely glorious end to summer this weekend in Toronto, with lots of sun and highs in the mid-20's. Any clouds on the horizon are scheduled for later this week, when the festival starts. Good thing I'll be inside...

I collected my stack of printed tickets for TIFF this afternoon. The fun starts on Thursday night with two films of (hopefully not "from") hell -- a documentary on Henri-Georges Cluzot ("L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Cluzot") and Lars von Trier's "Antichrist".

Of course, there is a world of film outside the festival. I was out for a bike ride yesterday morning, travelling westbound on Queen East. As I pulled up to Broadview, I looked over at a bus shelter and saw a poster for a new Bruce Willis film called "Surrogates").

Apparently the film is about a world where people have robotic surrogates who live their lives for them. There are two posters (one male, one female), each with a buff person pulling their top off. At the point between the top of their pants and the bottom of their top, the exposed torso stops at a certain point and a mechanical spine is visible.

The poster I saw was the female version. The bus shelter was just outside an old strip club in Toronto called "Jilly's", offering an interesting juxtaposition between the posters of the "fantasy" women on the outside of the club and the one on the bus shelter.

And so it begins again...

2009-08-25T08:35:00.001-04:00

The wheel makes another revolution and I'm back in line for another film festival, waiting for the box office to open and to collect the catalog and forms (we're Canadian, so there must be lines and forms!) for my annual end-of-summer ritual.

This morning is beautiful. We're camped out on the western edge of Nathan Phillips Square (the main box office has moved from the labyrinth of the Toronto Life Building to here -- a good choice if the weather is good).

Many familiar faces in line (the transient community reforms for another year).

Given that this is Nathan Phillips, the "locals" are wondering what the hell just landed on them. A well-dressed black man in a suit just appeared, hammering the hell out of one of the metal garbage cans with a wooden cane, yelling something about tornados, food, the law and hellfire, before wandering off to browbeat someone else. I think I'm awake now...

I've decided to use the existing blog this year for TIFF 09, rather than create a new one. As with last year, I'll be posting comments and other items from lines and other locations.

More to come...
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After the deluge

2008-09-18T21:45:00.002-04:00

I've had a few days to catch my breath, think about what I saw and to also see a few of the post-mortem articles in various publications.

One of the common themes in the post-TIFF media has been that "Hollywood" has been holding films back from festivals like TIFF and, as a result, that TIFF was smaller and less glitzy than previous years.

It reminded me that the festival I experience is quite different from the one that the media reports. While they do try to cover the breadth of the festival, their focus tends to be on the galas and high-profile "Special Presentation" screenings.

My focus was, needless to say, highly personal and in many cases, given a choice between a commercial film and something that wasn't, I went with the latter. As a result, I saw very good films like "33 Scenes from Life" and "http://tiff08.ca/filmsandschedules/films/threemonkeys" rather than "Appaloosa" or "Burn After Reading" (both of which are in theatres now and which have received only fair to middling reviews).

In thinking about TIFF 2008, I wouldn't say that there were any transcendent experiences in the theatre this year, but most of the films were technically accomplished, well acted and interesting. I only saw two films which weren't very good --> "Vinyan" and "Cooper's Camera".

One of the highlights at TIFF were the post-film Q&As. Generally the best Q&As come from the directors, rather than actors, but the post-film Q&A for "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" was incredibly rude and great fun. I was in the audience for appearances by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge and The White Stripes Jack White at "It Might Get Loud" and visual artists Chuck Close and Julian Schnabel at "Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies", an interesting documentary which suggests that the earlier films of Melies were major influences on the cubist work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Of the 43 screenings, that I attended, there were several very good films I saw. Besides some of the titles I've already mentioned, I would put "Ashes of Time Redux" and "Chocolate" at the top of the list. As it turns out, both are martial arts films, but the former is a beautifully poetic, mythic film while the latter is an explosion of stunningly rendered fight scenes. Both are highly recommended.

In previous years, I haven't necessarily had a "best" film. This year, though, "Hunger" was that film. I had commented on the film earlier, but the debate between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest in the middle section and the final section detailing his slow deterioration as a result of his hunger strike made the film what it was.

The official list of prizes for the 2008 edition of TIFF can be found here.

It's a Wrap

2008-09-13T21:45:00.002-04:00

A little obvious as a title line, but what the hell.

The 2008 edition of TIFF ended with a little bit of craziness called "Eden Log", yet another Midnight Madness programme offering.

Visually quite inventive (they made a virtue of necessity by maximizing their miniscule budget through finding some terrific locations and shooting the entire film with minimal lighting), the movie concerns an amnesiac hero trying to find his way through a mysterious underground complex while battling strange, feral mutants. The journey ends with the discovery of the role of a giant tree connected to the complex.

Not exactly Shakespeare (:->). The narrative is structured like a video game, with the player moving through different levels of the complex. It's also very reminiscent of the type of stories featured in the 70's era comic "Heavy Metal" ("Metal Hurlant" in France) and both were cited by the director in his Q&A.

Music for the film was provided by Seppuku Paradigm, a French industrial music group.

Distribution for the North American market has been sold, so this should become available at some point.

With the end of the festival, I'll be reworking some of the earlier blog posts to add hyperlinks, correct typos and grammatical errors. I'll also be putting together some post-mortem material, once I've had a chance to think a bit more about the past 10 days.

Chocolate

2008-09-13T15:16:00.002-04:00

Set in Bangkok, it's a heart-warming tale of a young special-needs girl who teams up with her happy-go-lucky friend to raise the money to pay for her mother's cancer treatments.

As two elections grind on, it's somewhat appropriate that the above description is completely true. But it doesn't tell the whole story.

The mother, Zin, was involved with Thai organized crime and has made many enemies.
The daughter has made up for her stunted intellectual growth by developing her physical abilities dar beyond the norm.

"Chocolate" is a true popcorn movie, a fast-paced chain of muay thai kick-boxing set pieces by #
Prachya Pinkaew, the same director who did "Ong-Bak". It's the closing night film for this year's Midnight Madness programme and a fine way to close out the 2008 edition.

Unbelievably silly and highly recommended. I don't believe that it has distribution yet, but that is likely to come. I saw it at an afternoon screening and the audience roared and cheered with every foot to a groin or kneecap to ahead.

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Je veux voir

2008-09-13T12:38:00.001-04:00

The premise of this documentary is very simple -- take one famous actress (Catherine Deneuve) and take her on a road trip from Beirut to just north of the Israeli border and back again, talk and film her reactions to the landscape.

Perhaps a little too simplistic. While the countryside is beautiful and the devastation shocking, there isn't enough drama in the movie to sustain its feature length.

During a Q&A with one of the co-directors, he tried to make the case that the film could only work with Deneuve as the observer. That struck me as a bit of a rationalization -- she was in Beirut for a festival so the opportunity presented itself.

Except for the scenery, it was a journey not really worth taking.
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The Ghost

2008-09-13T12:09:00.001-04:00

Saturday morning. I'm finishing up 2008 with three action films, a bit of. a switch from the quietly intense fare earlier in the week.

It was breakfast with "The Ghost" this morning, a Russian thriller about a writer who is drawn into the orbit of a hitman. Though it's quite predictable, the film is shot with a lot of style by the director, ...

No word on a distributor but this struck me as a film that could easily be picked up by an American studio and remade with a pair of Hollywood stars as the leads.
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Days of TIFFs Past

2008-09-13T09:50:00.001-04:00

Seems to be a bit of a flurry out in media-land about a piece that Rex Reed wrote in the NY Observer this week [I'll add the link when I get a chance] bemoaning the fact that TIFF has become too big, too loud and too "populist" for its own good.

The piece generated a fair bit of knee-jerk rebuttal (as is somewhat typical, I learned about the piece through the responses to it). I had a bit of time this morning and was able to give it a read.

Although it's full of bile, some of what he wrote are sentiments that I've heard from people "on the ground" over the past few years.

Certainly there are frustrations with a festival that has grown over the years, although the growth is more a geographic shift than an increase in the number of films. As I wrote earlier, TIFF used to be a creature of the Bloor-Yorkville neighbourhood and now stretches from there to Roy Thomson Hall in the south.

Although Reed makes a remark about "unwashed masses with empty wallets" in reference to the folks who took advantage of free outdoor screenings at Yonge-Dundas Square, the complaint most often heard in lines is not that the festival is going down-market, but that the increasing cost and number of restricted access venues are threatening to eliminate the character of TIFF as a festival for the public. The change this year of the Elgin Theatre to a pseudo-Gala location (ie removing the Elgin from the list of theatres which are accessible to passholders and increasing the single ticket price there to $40) is a sign for many of the creeping elitism of the event.

On the plus side, many films now have three screenings, rather than two. And the addition of many free public events like the outdoor screenings is a great way to connect the city to the festival that shares its name.

Perhaps the days of chatting with Clint Eastwood at Bistro 990 are gone (I wouldn't know, he never returns my calls), but TIFF still provides a wealth of opportunities to see great films that would otherwise not be available. It's been a regular feature of my fall for over 20 years now and I see no reason to end the ritual.
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A Difference of Opinion

2008-09-12T17:44:00.001-04:00

An earlier post of mine about "Cooper's Camera" called it shrill and unfunny. Sitting in the theatre this morning, I saw a review by Jennie Punter in the Globe giving it 3.5 stars out of 4, suggesting it was destined to "become a Christmas classic".

I wonder if we saw the same film...

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Short Cuts

2008-09-12T17:39:00.001-04:00

A significant number of Canadian films are represented in a series of short programmes, each one offering about 90 minutes of film.

It's a good opportunity to check out student work as well as work by established filmmakers.

I caught one programme on Thursday afternoon. Of the seven films I saw, three were very good, one wasn't and the rest were enjoyable.

The three that I liked the most were "106", a comedy about revenge and the second-oldest woman in Ontario, "Notes on a Boreal", a pen-and-ink animation on the boreal forest and "Machine from Wishbone", a quite lovely series of mechanical animations.

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Tokyo Sonata

2008-09-12T17:33:00.001-04:00

There are directors who seem quite comfortable with shifting gears with each film. Howard Hawks is a classic example of this, while contemporary equivalents would be folks like Jonathan Demme or Michael Winterbotham.

And then there are the directors who have found a niche, whether it be quiet comedies (Mike Leigh) or cinema verité (Abbas Kiarostami).

It can be quite exciting when a director moves beyond their niche into something different. David Cronenberg is an example of someone who has moved from horror films to drama with great success.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a Japanese director. He cut his teeth on a series of atmsopheric horror films ("Cure" and "Pulse" are two particularly good examples of his work). I've been following his work since TIFF did a spotlight on him several years ago,

With "Tokyo Sonata", he moves to a Japanese version of a kitchen-sink drama. A salariman in modern Japan is let go when his company outsources his job to Dalian, China. Unable to tell his wife and two young sons about his change in fortune, he maintains an elaborate facade to hide the truth.

This indirectly sets in motion a series of acts which threaten to take the family apart.

The film succeeds in showing a vision of Japan quite different from its usual depiction in film. Kurowsawa gets good performances from his cast. The only criticism I'd have is that there is a section about 3/4 of the way in where several things happen which shift the film abruptly, but which didn't make sense to me dramatically.

Overall, it was a good film but not nearly as powerful as some of his previous films.
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Clowning and the Holocaust

2008-09-12T12:18:00.001-04:00

It seems like a strange combination, but the notion of clowns and the Holocaust is practically a mini-genre on its own.

There's the story of a Jerry Lewis project on this subject and a few years back Roberto Beningi had great success with "Life is Beautiful".

Balancing the comic and tragic (if not horrific is a challebge that several have tried and few have succeeded at. Although "Life is Beautiful" was well-received, I thought it was horrendous.

Latest in the string is "Adam Resurrected", directed by Paul Schrader and starring Jeff Goldblum as the clown and Willam Dafoe as his nemesis, a commandant at the Strelling camp.

The timeline is split between the period leading up to and through WWII and recent history, where Adam Stein (Goldblum) is an inmate at a sanitorium for Holocaust survivors in the Israeli desert. The arrival of a young feral boy awakens memories in Stein that must be confronted for the last time.

I've liked both Goldblum's and Dafoe's work in the past (along with Derek Jacobi as the sanitorium director), but this movie escaped them. It's one of those movies where accents shift like the sands outside the sanitorium. The actors try their best (Dafoe, I think, most successfully), but they are ultimately defeated by a screenplay that feels awkward.

Despite the pedigree of the folks involved, this film does not appear to have distribution.

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Finding the Right Tone

2008-09-11T19:15:00.001-04:00

I saw "The Brothers Bloom" this afternoon, a film that I suspect will get a fair bit of promotion when its theatrical release comes up. Written and directed by Rian Johnston, it's the tale of two brothers (Mark Ruffalo & Adrien Brody) who have had a successful career as con men and are planning one last job, with a young, very eccentric woman (Rachel Weisz) as the "mark".

The film has a very distinctive visual style, full of odd details (floating inter-titles, a one-legged cat, to name a couple). The visuals, music and most of the performances are pitched towards light, whimsical comedy, except for Brody, an actor who doesn't seem wired for happiness.

This was one of those films where the overall consensus was positive, at least based on the laughter I heard during the screening. For me, though, the plot felt a bit too predictable.

A footnote:

After the screening, I walked through the quadrangle to the south of the Ryerson Theatre (a lovely oasis in the middle of the campus). As I walked, I heard a couple discuss this film. He felt it was in his top three; she was inclined to put it in her worst three for the festival.
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Indelible Images II -- Ashes of Time Redux

2008-09-10T21:11:00.002-04:00

One of Wong Kar Wai's first films, "Ashes of Time Redux" is a reconstruction of his martial arts fable from 1994 (the film has appeared in multiple versions over the years; "Redux" features a reworking of the narrative arc, reprocessing of the cinematography and a new score, including cello solos by Yo Yo Ma.

It's easily the most impressive film visually that I've seen this year and deserves to be seen on a large screen. The cinematography of Christopher Doyle is stunning and beautifully complements the story.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

2008-09-10T20:49:00.004-04:00

I've mentioned this following previous TIFFs, but sometimes little thematic groupings appear out of the schedule for a given year.

Earlier, I'd talked about "Three Wise Men". Turns out I saw the second and third Christmas films of the year back-to-back and they were truly a study in contrast.

"Un Conte de Noel" is an accomplished film about a French family brought together by both the holidays and the urgent need to find a bone marrow donor for the family's matriarch, played by Catherine Deneuve. A large cast do a great job of creating three-dimensional characters. The direction is by Arnaud Desplechin. I'm not familiar with his work, but his film "Rois et Reine (Kings and Queen)" got great reviews when it came out a few years ago. A DVD I'll definitely want to hunt for.

In contrast, "Cooper's Camera" is a shrill, woeful attempt at farce, starring Jason Jones and Samantha Bee from "The Daily Show". The Coopers celebrate the arrival of a new video camera (it's set in 1985, so the camera is the size of a medium-sized microwave) by showing all the skeletons (past and present) in the family closet.

This mini-genre of families getting together for a holiday celebration normally includes lots of tears; secrets revealed; grudges maintained and, eventually (hopefully) resolved; and some laughter. Both films follow this trajectory, but "Un Conte de Noel" does it in a way that respected its family rather than used them for target practice.

Not sure if either film has distribution yet. I'd recommend the former without hesitation; the latter should be avoided like the 80s fashions it so gleefully displays.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

2008-09-10T09:26:00.004-04:00

Finished last night with a mindfuck of a movie -- Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York".

Kaufman has a well-deserved reputation as an intelligent, playful screenwriter. If you've seen "Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation" or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", you'll have a strong sense of his style.

Synecdoche is his directorial debut (he also wrote the screenplay). It features an A-list cast (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh) and crew (Fred Elmes was the DOP; Jon Brion provided the music) to tell a story of a theatre director (Hoffman) who combines a MacArthur "genius" grant and a severe mid-life crisis into a simulcra of his life.

In the process of creating this play, the "fourth wall" becomes entirely porous. The scripted life starts to intrude and interact with the real one. Characters are doubled and tripled. Wordplay and visual games abound.

This may be a factor of seeing the film at the end of a long, full day, but it seemed full of detail but a little light on substance. Given the strength of the cast, it's not really an actor's film. There's lots of business that's fun to watch, but overall I left filling a bit unfulfilled.

That said, I'm curious enough about it to give it a second chance, once I've had a chance to get some sleep (:->).

Note: Here's a definition of synecdoche.

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Southern Cross

2008-09-09T20:11:00.001-04:00

As it turns out, I saw two Aussie films today, representing the present and past of their cinema.

"Three Blind Mice" is a new film about three Australian sailors on their last night before shipping out to Iraq. It's a smart, low-budget, indie effort with very strong performances by the entire cast. It doesn't look like they have distribution yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they get it by the end of the week.

By way of contrast, "Not Quite Hollywood" is a history of Australian genre films, mostly from the 70s and 80s. There are about 100 clips of the best and trashiest films that the Aussies produced during this time, with interviews with many of the folks who put them together. Quentin Tarantino plays a huge role in the doc as a cheerleader for these flicks.

An argument presented during the film is that these films helped to create an industry that is exemplified in most people's minds by films such as "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Breaker Morant" and others. It's not an unreasonable argument, certainly so from the perspective of building technically competent crews.

Interestingly enough, the Australian film industry evolved in a way that is similar to ours. They had periods of questionable tax credit policies on the part of the government as well as a period when C-list American actors were imported to boost the box office potential of films. 'Course, we don't have equivalents to "The Howling III: The Marsupials" or "Razorback".

This is a film probably best appreciated on DVD, with copies of the companion book or the web site (http://www.notquitehollywood.com.au) close at hand.
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Raise the Jolly Roger

2008-09-09T16:55:00.001-04:00

As a community that exists for a short time, TIFF goers adopt strange little rituals.

Before each screening, there are a number of small ads for the Festival, sponsors, awards, etc. These are kept failrly short, as the ads which don't work become the targets of audience comments.

For the past two or three years, one of the ads has been a single screen image laying out a prohibition against recording screenings in any manner. These "anti-piracy" ads have become one of the most popular targets.

As soon as any reference to anti-piracy measures is shown or spoken, a chorus of "Arrrrr"'s erupts in each audience. I suspect this started during the Midnight Madness screenings (there is an entirely different audience for these films) and then moved out to the other programmes.

As a side-note, it's been amazing to see the large number of iPhones in use in the audience (esp being used as cameras before and after screenings). If Rogers has any brains, they'd get involved in TIFF. They've got a significant customer-base here.
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Art and Commerce

2008-09-09T11:51:00.001-04:00

TIFF (indeed any film festival) is a sometimes uneasy tango between art and commerce. The medium is inherently expensive to produce, so the objective of many of the productions here during these 10 days is to sell a product.

At times the balance tips too far in one direction. An interesting example of this is a documentary called "Paris Not France".

A "study" of all that is Paris Hilton, the doc was originally scheduled to be shown three times during TIFF (most features have two or three screenings). It didn't interest me, so it didn't make my long list of films.

Over the weekend, there were reports that Hilton was trying to have the doc cancelled due to a dispute with the director over the content (I heard this from a friend who has scheduled it).

Interestingly enough, two of the three screenings were shelved, but the third remained. It seemed an odd result to me and I wondered if there was more to the story than was available. It struck me that there might be a strategy in place, ie reduce the supply of screenings -> increase the demand of the remaining one -> boost the potential buzz!

Two interesting e-mails appeared in my inbox this morning. Each night, TIFF issues a list of "Best Bets", which are films that have a significant number of tickets still available. On the list of films for today was PNF (it's in the Ryerson Theatre, which can seat 1200 people. One of the bigger halls in the system).

The second e-mail was a specific promotion for PNF, indicating that "Paris Hilton would be in attendance".

It will be interesting to see how the rest of this story plays out, later today.
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Reflections

2008-09-08T15:39:00.001-04:00

Most of the comments I've been providing on films this week have been written fairly quickly -- I've liked "x" for these reasons; didn't care for "y" because ...

Yesterday I saw a film called "Yes Madam Sir" which defies easy categorization.

The film is a documentary on Kiran Bedi, shot by a first-time film-maker (Margaret Doneman) from Australia.

Bedi is notorious in her native India. The first female police officer in Delhi, she has accomplished much in the face of an openly obstructive police, legal and legislative bureaucracy. She has been denied promotions, been given "suicide mission" assignments and, through it all has succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation.

In some respects, this is a "triumph over adversity" doc where the film-maker has been given extra-ordinary access to Bedi's public and private life. It's inspirational, shot from the point-of-view of someone prepared to fight the status quo.

And yet...

While the film itself is well put-together, blending interviews, news segments and footage of Bedi at work, it's her character that raised questions for me.

In a world that is positioned somewhere between the past of feudal or colonial India and a modern, democratic state (or, at least, a state in transition to a fully democratic system), she added a further dimension of using the media to illuminate the things others tried to keep hidden. In doing so, she has created a public persona that seems to exist, if not in opposition, but in a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with the things she is trying to achieve.

One of the principal interview subjects is her daughter Saina, who frequently refers to her as the persona "Kiran Bedi", rather than as her mother. That separation between the public and personal worlds comes up several times.

If there's a fault in the documentary, it focuses so much on the public persona that any kind of objective analysis of the impact of the changes she wrought are not addressed. What remains is a slight tone of bitterness in that there is a repeated cycle of "Kiran Bedi went to 'x' and made the following changes. After a time, she was transferred/dumped/left and her successor proceeded to unravel all the things she'd done". We have to take it on faith that this was a bad thing.

As a first-time film director, Doneman may have made the mistake of getting too close to her subject and losing the benefit of distance.

Following the screening, Ms Bedi emerged with the director and participated in the Q&A. That same tone of bitterness persisted. She talked about being passed over as the Delhi Police Commissioner, a position she felt was rightly hers. Ironically, her sense of entitlement was a reflection of the same status quo that the documentary had tried to challenge over the previous 90 minutes.

Bedi has an international reputation, so I suspect that this film will find a distributor, if only for viewing on Newsworld, TVO or the Documentary Channel.
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Audiences shift

2008-09-08T15:11:00.000-04:00

Monday morning usually shows a fairly dramatic shift in the size of audiences. As the workweek starts, they shrink a little bit to a core of industry types, retirees, students and folks like me.

This year is no exception. Screenings were quite full over the weekend. There was a more relaxed vibe as the day started today and, whereas tickets for weekend screenings were rarer than hen's teeth, there seems to be a good number available for screenings.

This is the best part of the festival for me. I'm not rushing around as much, it's easier to get decent seats and it's generally much easier to concentrate on what is being shown.

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Clerks reloaded

2008-09-08T14:19:00.001-04:00

Several (many?) years ago, I sat in a mid-week 9:00 am screening to watch a little black-and-white comedy called "Clerks", reputedly made for $27000 by the director (mostly by maxing out his credit cards).

Since then, Kevin Smith has both implicitly and explicitly gone back to the same source. He's amassed quite a big reputation as a chronicler of the life of the American slacker.

Last night they premiered his latest -- "Zack and Miri Make a Porno". Like his earlier work, it's stuffed with lots of crude, sometimes scatalogical, humour along with vicious comments on pop culture (a staple of his films is an attack on all that is "Star Wars").

At the same time, he's also a pretty sentimental sort, trying to shoehorn a fairly traditional romance into the rest of the noise. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.

When it works at all in "Zack...", it's mostly because of the lead actress, Elizabeth Banks, who successfully navigated the plot and created a living, breathing character. The lead actor, Seth Rogan, never really transcends a fairly cliched character of a man-child.

The highlight of the screening was the Q&A afterwards. With most of the cast on stage afterwards, the responses to questions snapped with an energy intermittently present in the film.

The film has already locked up distribution.
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Best Film (so far)

2008-09-08T11:33:00.003-04:00

It's been typical to start the day off with an intense drama (ref: "Three Monkeys" on Friday and "33 Scenes from Life" on Saturday.

The trend continued this morning with Steve McQueen's "Hunger", a dramatization of the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, specifically the hunger strike that took the lives of 10 IRA prisoners in the early 80's. Many of you will remember Bobby Sands, the first of the men to die.

It's a brilliant first film by McQueen and was recognized by winning the Camera D'Or at Cannes this year.

The film opens with many scenes showing the brutal conditions (and brutality of the guards) in the Maze. For many in the audience, these scenes are uncomfortably reminiscent of American actions in Gitmo.

Sands is actually only introduced well into this section, but he quickly becomes the centre of the drama.

A middle section introduces the idea of the hunger strike through a late-night conversation between Sands and a Catholic priest. It's an electric scene and the two actors (Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham) played off each other beautifully.

The final section focuses on the remaining days of Sands' life. Whereas the middle section is dense conversation, the final scenes are delivered almost entirely without dialogue. The brutality of the State in the early scenes is transformed into the slow destruction of the self.

"Hunger" has distribution. It's in no way an easy journey, but is strongly recommended.

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Two Shades of Black

2008-09-07T09:20:00.001-04:00

I had the opportunity yesterday to see two horror films -- "Vinyan" and "Pontypool".

I can't say that this is a genre that I actively search out but there are a few this year that caught my eye (more, perhaps, on the others later).
It was interesting study in contrast.

"Vinyan" is set in Thailand and Burma and follows a young couple (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart) who lost their young son in the tsumani and now believe that he was actually abducted and carried off to the Burmese coastal jungle. As they embark on an increasingly frantic search, they are stripped of any veneer of civilization. Most of the film is set in the jungle. If you recall the scene with the tiger in "Apocalypse Now" or the village at the end of that film, you have an idea of the setting.

"Pontypool" is its polar opposite -- set almost entirely in a talk radio radio station in the basement of an old building, the film is about a plague that quickly infects the population of a small town, turning them into crazed, cannibals. The morning show host (Stephen McHattie) and his producer serve as the last hope for the town.

Besides the obvious differences (one is completely exterior; the other confined), the strongest difference between the two (and the reason, I thought one was an incoherent mess and the other a lot of fun) was how they dealt with the characters.

In both cases, the narrative revolves around two main characters surrounded by bit players and a large mob of feral attackers. "Vinyan" takes no time to establish its leads -- Beart & Sewell start the film unhinged and proceed to unravel -- while "Pontypool" invests the time to establish its characters.

In my opinion, horror works when you feel an emotional connection to the protagonists. I felt no connection to the characters in "Vinyan", so the film degraded to an exercise in mechanics.

"Pontypool" has a distributor in place (don't recall if "Vinyan" does). It's also Canadian, directed by Bruce McDonald and based on the book "Pontypool Changes Everything" by Tony Burgess [full disclosure: Bruce is an old family friend. I think it's one of his better efforts and there have been films of his that I didn't think worked at all]. Burgess also wrote the screenplay, which suggests to me that the book is also worth picking up, although I suspect that it be hard for me to hear the main character using anything but McHattie's after seeing the film.

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Indelible Images I -- The House of Cards

2008-09-07T08:56:00.001-04:00

To state the obvious, film is a visual medium. Still, in the wealth of imagery that I will see this week, there are images that stand out above the others.

In "Three Monkeys" (see earlier entry), the family lives in an apartment block beside an arterial road and a rail line. The building follows the gentle curve of the road.

What made it so memorable was that there was a pit behind it where a previous building had stood. The apartment is extremely narrow (at most two apartments wide) and the establishing shot shows it edge-on, creating an impression of a building about to topple. It's a powerful visualization of a family that is living in a metaphorical house of cards.
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Knowing When to End...

2008-09-07T08:49:00.001-04:00

Friday, I talked about how well the ending of "Three Wise Men" proceeded from the events of the film.

Yesterday, I saw the opposite in O'Horten, a gentle Norwegian dramedy about a train engineer who retires at the opening of the film.

The film actually has two endings -- one ambiguous; the other explicit. To my mind, the former was the better ending and was consistent with the overall tone, while the other felt forced.

During the Q&A, the director, Bent Hamer, admitted that he debated which ending to use and in his younger days would likely have chosen the first ending.

Hamer also directed a film from a few years back called "Kitchen Stories", available on DVD. If you saw that film and enjoyed it, this would probably work for you.
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First Christmas film of 2008

2008-09-06T09:28:00.001-04:00

... 'Course it was a film by the Finnish director Mika Kaurismaki, which means lots of dour Finns drinking excessively in badly over-lit seedy bars.

Mostly improvised (a deliberate hommage to John Cassavetes), this story of three middle-aged friends coping with death, birth, infidelity and their own frustrations in life starts bleak but manages to end on a hopeful note that feels true to the rest of the narrative.

I don't believe this has a commercial release at this time, but Kaurismaki has a well-established track record and a DVD release in North America would be likely.
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It Did Get Loud

2008-09-05T23:58:00.001-04:00

First documentary of TIFF was a piece on the electric guitar by Davis Guggenheim (the director of "An Inconvenient Truth").

The hook (for what is a guitar without a hook) of "It Might Get Loud" was that the film was built around the thoughts, history and creative output of Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White and included a section known as "The Summit" where the three played together on a soundstage in LA).

The film succeeded in providing a condensed history lesson of the three and gave some insight into their characters. Ironically, the youngest (White) is the traditionalist of the group. The Edge was the sonic architect who used all manner of effects pedals to augment the sound of his guitar. Page came across as a good-natured student of all sorts of musical genres, but overall, he had less presence than the other two.

The screening turned into a bit of a madhouse Friday night as all the principals showed up for the screening. It added a rock concert atmosphere to the screening and, if truth be told, they showed more chemistry together in the Q&A than in the movie.

I suspect this will be released, if only through one of the documentary channels. The music really needs to be heard through a kick-ass sound system. As a film though, it was an interesting idea competently rendered but not very compelling.
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Slippery Slope

2008-09-05T23:53:00.001-04:00

When I first started going to the "festival", the event was centred on Bay & Bloor, with all the theatres in that area.

Over time, as theatres disappeared in the area (the late, lamented University & Uptown Theatres, the Towne, etc.) along with the emergence of Roy Thomson Hall & the Elgin, the Paramount / Scotiabank and, most recently, the AMC Theatres at Yonge & Dundas, the heart of the Festival is now several blocks south.

I'd commented earlier on the monster that is the building housing the AMC Theatres. As we near the end of Day 2, the deficiencies of the monolith have become quickly apparent. While the theatres (and washrooms!) are quite good, it's a building that is not designed to move people quickly into or out of spaces. It will be interesting to see what impact this has on getting to theatres this week.

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Altered States

2008-09-05T14:57:00.001-04:00

One of the things I've found over 20 years of attending film festivals is that it exists in a separate reality from the rest of the world. I'm sure this applies to the celebrity-filled world of the Galas, but it applies as much to the "other" festival that I spend my time in.

While I try to keep up on ehat's going on "out there", often it's done through scanning newspaper boxes on the street.

As an example, those masters of understatement, the Toronto Sun, had the folllowing headline this morning: Terror in the Heart of TO. Much as I've tried to stay informed, I think I've missed the terror -- was there an act of violence, did Mr Harper finally go postal or did they run out of swag at Roy Thomson Hall last night?

An enquiring mind wants to know!
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