You can't see 'em all. Here's some TIFF 2008 screenings I missed, but I will be watching theatre schedules and DVD shelves for them in the future:
From the Star's capsule reviews:
EXAMINED LIFE "The unexamined life is not worth living." Filmmaker Astra Taylor lets some very bright minds elaborate on Socrates' ancient maxim, including intellectuals such as Cornel West, Peter Simpson, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum, all in motion (sitting in a cab, rowing a boat, walking through parks, etc., some in New York, some in Toronto) It's tasty, highly digestible brain food of the celluloid variety touching on ethics, ecology, revolution, human dignity and more. (Sept. 5, 5:15 p.m.; Sept. 7, 3:30 p.m.; Sept. 13, 9:15 a.m., AMC.) BD
LA FILLE DE MONACO (The Girl from Monaco) French writer-director Anne Fontaine has crafted a lovely romp with a dark side with the story of a respected, uptight Paris lawyer (Fabrice Luchini) who ends up on a mob murder case in Monaco where he falls for a much-younger TV weather girl (the gorgeous Louise Bourgoin). Her sexual prowess leaves him reeling, but his bodyguard (Roschdy Zem) seems to have some inside intel on the flighty lass who has bewitched the stuffy litigator, threatening his reputation and his sanity. (Sept. 6, 9:30 p.m., RTH; Sept. 7, 12:15 p.m., Scotiabank.) LB
GOMORRAH The daily dirty doings of crooks big and small are the subject but not the focus of this sprawling drama of Italian crime, in which high fashion and filthy sewage compete for chicanery. Resembling City of God in form but lacking that film's stronger sense of character, it's a dispiriting look at the reality of crime in Italy, which seems to seep into every aspect of life. (Sept. 7, 9 p.m.; Sept. 11, 9 a.m., Scotiabank.) PH
THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD Spaghetti meets kimchi in this Korean take on the kind of westerns that Clint Eastwood used to make, back when he was a starving artist. It's the 1930s in the Manchurian desert, where a bounty hunter called the Good (Jung Woo-sung), a gang leader called the Bad (Lee Byung-hun) and scooter-riding train robber called the Weird (Song Kang-ho) are drawing lines in the sand, with the Japanese army ready to cross them. Imagine the sparseness of classic oaters matched with the energy of martial arts movies and you've got what Kim Jee-won has wrought. (Sept. 12, 9:30 p.m., RTH; Sept. 13, 2:30 p.m., Elgin.) PH
COOPER'S CAMERA Hoser humour reigns again in a gross-out Christmas holiday farce starring Jason Jones as the hapless husband whose pregnant wife Nancy (Samantha Bee) gives him cuckold's horns as she gets it on with his brother Tim (Peter Keleghan). The whole sordid adventure takes place in a perfectly replicated 1985 setting and is captured as a VHS home movie. A bare-assed Dave Foley and chain-smoking decrepit Jayne Eastwood add to the cringe-making mix. (Sept. 7, 8:15 p.m., Varsity; Sept.10, 2:45 p.m., AMC; Sept. 12, 6 p.m., AMC.) SW
APPALOOSA The dust clouds swirl like the wrath of God in the New Mexico hamlet big-saddled enough to call itself the City of Appaloosa, but hired guns Virgil (Ed Harris) and Everett (Viggo Mortensen) don't pay them any mind. They've come to restore order and bring justice to the murderer Bragg (Jeremy Irons), a vile rancher who treats Appaloosa like his private preserve. There's further vexation in the liberal mores of flirtatious newcomer Allison (Renée Zellweger), who swears she's no whore. Harris also directs (and co-writes), following up his helming debut Pollock with a grand contribution to the western movie revival. (Sept. 5, 6 p.m, Elgin; Sept. 6, 9 a.m., Scotiabank.) PH
24 CITY In theme and mood, 24 City is closely linked to director Jia Zhangke's 2006 film Still Life, about people displaced by the Three Gorges dam project in China. This time it is the destruction of the Chengdu state-owned military Factory 420, where thousands of workers lived and worked. It is being demolished to make way for a complex of apartments to be known as 24 City. Non-fiction and fiction are seamlessly employed in a story of historical shifts starring Joan Chen, Lu Liping and Zhao Tao. (Sept. 7, 8:30 p.m.; Sept. 9, 3:15 p.m.; Sept. 11, 6:15 p.m., AMC.)
HUNGER The last days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands during the 1981 protests at Ireland's notorious Maze Prison are presented in striking if not completely illuminating fashion in this filmmaking debut by British artist Steve McQueen. What makes the movie is a powerhouse performance by Michael Fassbender as Sands, whose death is either sacrifice or suicide, depending on your politics. (Sept. 6, 9:30 p.m., Sept. 8, 9 a.m., Scotiabank.) PH
IT MIGHT GET LOUD The electric guitar as perceived through the eyes – and nimble fingers – of three generations of rock royalty: Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page; U2's Edge and The White Stripes' Jack White. Though they don't spend nearly enough time together, their individual intimate observations are enough – Page's face lighting up as he listens to Link Wray's "Rumble;" Edge waxing nostalgic revisiting old high-school haunts; White musically tutoring his 9-year-old "self." Directed by An Inconvenient Truth's Davis Guggenheim. (Sept. 5, 9:15 p.m., Ryerson; Sept. 7, 10 a.m., AMC; Sept. 13, Noon, AMC.) RS
O'HORTEN It's not very often than an entire film can be summed up in a single visual pun. That's the capper to a singularly fascinating stroll through the life of newly retired train engineer Odd Horten (Bård Owe), who finds himself going off the rails as soon as he leaves the tracks. Norway's Bent Hamer writes and directs with the wry sense of humour he brings to all of his finely tuned constructions. (Sept. 4, 8:45 p.m., Varsity; Sept. 6, 12:15 p.m., Scotiabank.) PH.
ONLY Bored pre-teens Daniel (Jacob Switzer) and Vera (Elena Hudgins Lyle) are living in a Northern Ontario town where their parents are too distracted to parent. The kids are essentially raising themselves. Vera says her mother may move her to Brampton to start over, but "I just know my mom will screw it up." Veninger and Simon Reynolds co-direct and co-write with a keen eye and ear for youthful ennui. (Sept. 9, 6:45 p.m., Sept. 12, 3:30 p.m., Sept. 13, 3:15 p.m., AMC.) PH
PARC Inspired by John Cheever's 1969 novel Bullet Park, Arnaud des Pallières sets his disturbing and discombobulating film in a gated community in contemporary France. The Clous have a son who refuses to get out of bed and seems to be suffering from some reaction to his bourgeois environment. On the news, cars are burning in Paris's immigrant districts. When a mysterious middle-aged man with a murderous obsession moves into the neighbourhood, trouble spreads to the well-to-do enclave. (Sept. 11, 6 p.m., Scotiabank; Sept. 12, 7:30 p.m., Varsity; Sept. 13, 1:15 p.m., Cumberland.) SW
PASSCHENDAELE Unabashedly romantic while also unstinting in its horrific images of World War I, this ambitious gala opener by actor/writer/director Paul Gross pulls no punches in either the drama or history departments. Harking back to war films of decades past, when patriotism, valour and integrity were presented without irony, it may appeal more to older audiences. But it's exactly the type of movie that younger people should see, since it illuminates an important chapter of Canadian history that has sadly faded from modern minds. (Sept. 4, 6:30 p.m., Elgin; Sept. 4, 8 p.m., RTH; Sept. 5, 8:45 a.m., Ryerson.) PH Full review
RELIGULOUS Professional cynic Bill Maher puts aside politics (sort of) to take on the other subject one doesn't address in polite company. He does not shy away from controversy – indeed, he seems to thrive on it. But unlike Michael Moore, whose stridently crusading topical docs Religulous only superficially recalls, Maher feels no need to massage or manipulate his interviews and images. He has no agenda other than to ask the obvious questions others dare not broach, or even consider, much less try to answer. He and Borat director Larry Charles bounce from the Bible belt to the Vatican to the Wailing Wall, seeking truth and finding mostly blind, unchallenged rhetoric. (Sept. 6, 9 p.m., Ryerson; Sept. 8, 1 p.m., Winter.) RS
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK Charlie Kaufman, the writer who went inside John Malkovich's head, goes inside his own for a directorial debut that defies description – but it's somewhere between Schenectady and synapse. The punningly titled film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a small-town theatre director mounting an epic play. Mind games ensue when the stage begins to resemble the director's life, literally and metaphorically. A who's who of indie players assists in the psychic shenanigans. Have the Advil handy. (Sept. 9, 8:30 p.m, Winter; Sept. 11, 12:15 p.m., Scotiabank.) PH
TORONTO STORIES Four short stories from four Canadian filmmakers make Toronto look splendid, funky, gritty, cosmopolitan, harrowing and possibly even cool. Not all of them work as well as the final piece, Lost Boys, starring Gil Bellows as a homeless crack addict who comes to the rescue of a mysterious African boy who weaves his way almost ghost-like through all four tales. Original music by E.C. Woodley is moody and memorable. (Sept. 9, 6 p.m.; Sept. 11, 3:30 p.m., AMC.) BD
Rachel Getting Married
Jonathan Demme (U.S.)
Many films have used the ritual of a wedding to peer into the dysfunctions of a troubled family, but none better than this. In its raw honesty and emotional grit, Demme's work here is unsurpassed. Borrowing a little from Robert Altman, and a little more from the Dogme directors, Demme brings a probing camera to the gathering of a Connecticut clan, digging beneath the surface of the rehearsal party chatter — the gaiety real and forced, the speeches graceful and cringe-making — to examine some very large themes at a very intimate level, themes like sin and atonement and the blood that sometimes runs thinner than water. As the sister who gets checked out of rehab long enough to attend the wedding, Anne Hathaway delivers a nuanced and revelatory performance (expect Oscar to call). But so does Rosemarie DeWitt in the title role. The love/hate tension between them, filtered through the crowd around them, is almost voyeuristic in its intensity. Normally reserved for action flicks, that edge-of-your-seat cliché has a new home here — the rawness will have you leaning into the screen, often uncomfortable but always entranced. R.G.
RR
James Benning (USA)
Barring a change of mind or circumstance, RR will be the last of James Benning's films shot on 16 mm, and it ends with a locomotive, pointedly stopped in front of a wind farm outside Palm Springs, Calif. It's the last in a line of 43 trains shot across the U.S., each one a witness to America's overconsumption. Those familiar with Benning's recent landscape films will be comforted by the fixed camera and the film's continental scope, but in RR the signified (the train) takes over from the signifier (the camera), each shot lasting as long as it takes for a train to traverse the frame; this is both an aesthetic and a political choice. Each shot comes as a surprise, and every one is mesmerizing (yet unspectacular), yet RR acquires a cumulative power over its running time, as the simplicity of the structure gives way to infinite experiences. A masterpiece of structural filmmaking. M. Peranson
C'est pas moi, je le jure! (It's Not Me, I Swear!)
Philippe Falardeau (Canada)
This hilarious, wonderfully detailed and sometimes heart-breaking story of a family's disintegration in late-1960s suburban Quebec focuses on Léon (Antoine L'Ecuyer), a precocious 10-year-old misfit who wreaks secret havoc on the vacationing neighbours' house, experiments with suicide and falls in love with the smarty-pants girl next door — all in one summer. Based on two semi-autobiographical novels by the son of the late statesman Jacques Hébert, the pic has the eccentric energy of Falardeau's previous TIFF fave Congorama (2006), but with its tight storytelling and emotional depth, this talented filmmaker has hit a world-class stride. J.P.
Tulpan
Sergey Dvortsevoy (Germany/Switzerland/Kazakhstan/Russia/Poland)
Weird winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, Tulpan is Sergey Dvortsevoy's first "fiction" feature after a number of equally immersive award-winning documentaries. The film finds young Asa coming back from naval service and being rejected as a suitor by Tulpan because his ears are humongous. Despite this humorous synopsis, it would be a mistake to typify Tulpan, as per the TIFF program guide, as a warmly accessible film for all audiences: This is serious filmmaking. What gives the animal-heavy Tulpan its real kick — and elevates it beyond the Weeping Camels of the ethnographic film world — is the way Dvortsevoy integrates non-fictional elements into a developed plotline. It's an extension of what he calls "life cinema," showing the simplicity and warmth of the world by mixing naturalism and poetry. The strategy comes to a head with the filmic moment of the year, perhaps the greatest on-camera animal birth in cinema history. M. Peranson
Tony Manero
Pablo Larrain (Chile/Brazil)
Raul is a small-time thug in Santiago, Chile, circa 1978 — five years after the fascist military coup that deposed Salvador Allende's democratically elected Marxist regime. He's also obsessed with/possessed by Tony Manero, the disco-dancing fool played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Raul (superbly played by the veteran Alfredo Castro, who also co-wrote the screenplay) has mastered all of Travolta's moves, thanks to repeat viewings of SNF at a local repertory house, and now he's keen to enter a televised Travolta look-alike contest. It sounds charming, but it's not: In fact, Raul's quest for disco perfection is downright murderous, pursued with an intensity reminiscent of Al Pacino in The Godfather, Part Two. Larrain's film, his second full-lengther, is a tough, multilayered near-masterpiece, expertly exploring the ways an authoritarian regime warps the personal and the political. J.A.
Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman (Israel/Germany/France)
Persepolis meets Full Metal Jacket in Ari Folman's powerful and original animated war film, an "animated-documentary" investigation into the filmmaker's experiences as an 18-year-old soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982. Folman was present at the most notorious episode of that war, the massacres of hundreds of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon, conducted by Christian Phalangists, in an area of Israeli control. The film is presented as the filmmaker's quest to recover his own blocked memories of the event; it involves a series of intersecting stories that eventually converge on the three days of the massacre. The film uses a detailed realistic animation technique. The stories, often based on the soldiers' recurring nightmares, add sequences of surreal horror to the depictions of actual fighting. Ultimately, Folman's film reaches its climax when the technique switches from animation to stark archival footage of the aftermath of the killings. L.L.
Last Stop 174
Bruno Baretto (Brazil)
Director Bruno Baretto (Four Days in September) and writer Braulio Mantovani (City of God) weave a tapestry of social cause and effect that ripples through the slums of Rio de Janeiro and obliterates the line between criminal and victim. His gritty and grimy portrait of two troubled and orphaned young men, culminating in a real-life bus hijacking that rocked Brazil in 2000, gives a voyeuristic view of the seedy back streets ruled by guns and drugs as well as main thoroughfares where stoplight robberies are commonplace. Huddled beneath the threat of violence are quietly flourishing religious devotion, broken families struggling to mend themselves and non-governmental organization workers offering oft-abused altruism. The film's almost documentary-style realism and emotional force are spurred by the central actors, all of whom were chosen from theatre groups in those very same Rio slums. J.B.
The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow (USA)
Bigelow's latest is mostly a series of set pieces. But what set pieces! Always a master kineticist, Bigelow outdoes herself in this 130-minute epic centred on a company of U.S. grunts charged with defusing one improvised explosive device after another in and around pre-surge Baghdad. The company has only 38 days left in its tour of duty when a swaggering Jeremy Renner joins the unit as its hot-shot bomb-disposal technician. Are his smarts and adrenalin-addiction going to keep them safe — or get them all killed? Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd crank up the tension to nail-biting, gut-churning extremes and the mayhem is powerfully visceral. Some may chafe at the film's lack of context, but haven't 5 1/2 years of war given us all the context we need? J.A.
Tokyo Sonata
Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Japan/Netherlands/Hong Kong/China)
Known primarily in these parts as a genre filmmaker, Kiyoshi Kurosawa proved he had just as much to say about the disintegration of a Japanese postnuclear family in 2003's Bright Future. Tokyo Sonata starts even gentler, as a look at an increasingly common phenomenon, earlier enshrined in Laurent Cantet's Time Out: the laid-off worker who pretends to still have gainful employment. In Japan, the shame of such circumstance is toxic — it sickens the Sasaki family, and Kurosawa's film as a whole. To ruin any of the plot would be criminal (suffice to say, criminal elements do, in fact, intrude), as this ordinary family deals with ordinary circumstances in arguably extraordinary ways, especially in the film's raucous second half. Though far from flawless, it's an adventurous work that is both disturbing and ultimately moving. M. Peranson
At the Edge of the World
Dan Stone (U.S.)
Armchair activists can take a virtual trip to the stunning, ice-bound South Sea as the crusty Canadian-born sea captain Paul Watson and a ragtag crew of volunteers with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society scour Antarctica for a Japanese whaling fleet. Their goal is to enforce — through harassment, obstruction and intervention — an international ban on whaling, which is supported in law but not in practice by governments around the world. In Stone's intermittently engaging David-and-Goliath documentary, speckled with gorgeous footage of ice-bound Antarctica, activism is like war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by bursts of frenzied chaos that can, with one wrong move, be fatal. S.H.
Afterwards Director(s): Gilles Bourdos
Country: France/Canada/Germany
Starring: John Malkovich, Romain Duris
Program: VAN
Rating:
Review
He plays a doctor who claims to be able to "see" when people are about to die, but when he confronts Duris's tightly wound lawyer, presumably to warn him, things take an unexpected turn that's both unsettling and comforting. Suddenly death seems to lurk in every frame, in every face.
Beautifully composed and shot, and wonderfully acted, this is a film that stays with you for a long time afterwards.
Ashes Of Time Redux Country: Hong Kong/China
Starring: Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung
Program: SPEC
Rating:
Review
It's a miasma of action sequences and philosophical debates between Leslie Cheung's amnesiac warrior and the people whose paths he crosses. If you've only seen the movie in a scratchy old 35mm print, this new presentation is eye-opening; advances in digital remastering mean it's brighter (and louder) than ever before.
Dean Spanley Country: New Zealand/UK
Starring: Peter O'Toole, Sam Neill
Program: GALA
Rating:
Review
It's also an impossible film to market. To discuss the plot is to make it sound utterly ridiculous (which it is), and even when you're watching it unfold there's a moment when you think the movie might need to lie down until it feels better.
But director Fraser is daring enough to play it straight, and his actors, particularly Neill and the magnificent O'Toole, are similarly up to the challenge. The result is a singular and deeply moving delight, if you're in the right frame of mind.