Sunday, September 11, 2005

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire)

by James McNally on September 11, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire)

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire) (France, dir­ector Alain Tasma): Another gut-wrenching por­trayal of some of the shameful events per­pet­rated during the Algerian war, this film is an important doc­u­ment of the legacy of French colonialism.

On the night of October 17, 1961, more than 20,000 Algerians gathered in Paris for a peaceful demon­stra­tion against French rule of their home­land. It wasn’t entirely spon­tan­eous. In fact, the FLN (the main group advoc­ating for Algerian inde­pend­ence) required all Algerian men to par­ti­cipate. It was to be a show of solid­arity to bol­ster the ongoing nego­ti­ations between the FLN and the French gov­ern­ment. Instead, it turned into a mas­sacre. The police were already living in a cli­mate of fear and repressed anger due to the ongoing cam­paign of random assas­sin­a­tions of police officers. And the police lead­er­ship were eager for a crack­down to avoid fur­ther humi­li­ation. As the demon­strators gathered in various dis­tricts, police imme­di­ately moved in to arrest thou­sands, and after some con­fusing reports of being fired upon, them­selves fired upon and then charged the crowds. There is no offi­cial report on the number of dead, but it was some­where between 50 and 200. More than 40 years later, there has never been an offi­cial acknow­ledge­ment of the events of that night.

Noted tele­vi­sion dir­ector Alain Tasma spent two years gath­ering evid­ence and recon­structing the events leading up to the mas­sacre, and he presents a straight­for­ward account that man­ages to cap­ture the rising ten­sion keenly. The film is a sort of par­allel to the events por­trayed in the classic film The Battle of Algiers, and Tasma owes a lot to the tech­niques and pacing of that forty-year-old mas­ter­piece. With the excep­tion of that film, most “issue” films rarely rise above their sense of moral out­rage, and October 17, 1961 (more evoc­at­ively entitled “Nuit Noire” in its native France) is not a mas­ter­piece. But it does cap­ture the feeling of a time not so long ago, a feeling which is eerily present again in the rising Islamophobia of many Western democracies.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: algeria, france, TIFF

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Thank You For Smoking

by James McNally on September 11, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Thank You For Smoking

Thank You For Smoking (UK, dir­ector Jason Reitman): At the film fest­ival a few years back, I saw an incred­ibly accom­plished short film called In God We Trust, and I vowed that if young Jason Reitman (son of Canadian dir­ector Ivan Reitman) ever made a fea­ture film, I’d run out and see it. I kept my promise, and Reitman delivers on his.

Aaron Eckhart is Nick Naylor, the tobacco industry’s spin doctor. He is very good at what he does, and man­ages to be likable while saying and doing despic­able things. In this biting satire, Eckhart doesn’t really have any epi­phanies, but he thinks he does. After an ill-advised affair with the reporter doing a pro­file on him, his secrets get out and he loses his job. But after a bravura per­form­ance at some Senate hear­ings, Big Tobacco wants him back. Claiming to have a “respons­ib­ility” to his young son, he refuses the job. Instead, by the end, he’s set him­self up in busi­ness advising all sorts of other icky corporations.

The film is stuffed with very smart laughs, and I liked the fact that Nick emerges unre­pentant at the end. It just sharpens the satire, that this man actu­ally thinks he’s now a better person. The tone of the film reminded me quite a bit of Alexander Payne’s Election, though the comedy is much broader.

Reitman loses his deft touch slightly near the end of the film. Up to this point, no one has been seen actu­ally smoking in the film. After a bizarre attempt on his life, Nick is told that he has to quit smoking. It’s a bit incon­gruous and it’s never men­tioned again. I sus­pect that this is much fun­nier in the novel by Christopher Buckley on which the film is based.

I would def­in­itely recom­mend this film, not only for its skew­ering of the tobacco industry (standing in for all cor­por­a­tions, really), but also for its jabs at Washington and Hollywood as well. No one is spared. You’ll even get to see Rob Lowe in a kimono!

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: politics, TIFF

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Brothers Of The Head

by James McNally on September 11, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Brothers Of The Head

Brothers Of The Head (UK, dir­ectors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe): Based on a novella by science-fiction author Brian Aldiss, this film attempts to tell the story of Tom and Barry Howe, con­joined twins who are plucked from their family by an impres­ario in order to form a rock band.

Almost delib­er­ately gim­micky, the film is also too clever by half (if you’ll pardon the pun). By mixing genres, styles and moods, the dir­ectors (whose pre­vious film was the excel­lent doc­u­mentary Lost In La Mancha) lose their way pretty quickly. I was never sure whether I was meant to take it all ser­i­ously or not. Flashbacks, dream sequences, it was all just a bit much. Plus, the prom­ised rock and roll just didn’t move me. I was reminded a bit too much at times of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a film I found ori­ginal and moving. But in this case, the songs just weren’t as good, nor were the main char­ac­ters sym­path­etic. A more unfa­vour­able com­par­ison would be the sim­il­arly dis­ap­pointing Velvet Goldmine.

4/10(4/10)

Tagged as: music, TIFF

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

We Feed The World

by James McNally on September 11, 2005 · 1 comment

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

We Feed The World

We Feed The World (Austria, dir­ector Erwin Wagenhofer): I would call this film a Mondovino for food. By which I mean it is an exam­in­a­tion of how glob­al­iz­a­tion and the growth of the power of cor­por­a­tions has affected the pro­duc­tion of food. The dir­ector dis­pas­sion­ately takes us to farms in Romania and Brazil, a fishing boat in Brittany, a green­house in southern Spain, and a chicken pro­cessing plant in Austria.

In all these places, we see tra­di­tional prac­tices being aban­doned in favour of giant factory oper­a­tions. In each place, someone on camera asserts that fla­vour is not as important as price or appear­ance. So we see hot­house toma­toes being driven 2500 kilo­metres to be sold, we see rain­forest cleared to grow soy­beans, even though the soil is unsuit­able, and we see the entire eight-week life cycle of thou­sands of chickens, raised to supply the incessant demands of the world for cheap food. Watching factory-farmed chickens being “pro­cessed” might be enough to turn some people into veget­arians. Except for the fact that our veget­ables are really no better.

There is some inter­esting inform­a­tion about GM (genet­ic­ally mod­i­fied) crops which are res­istant to herb­i­cides like Monsanto’s Roundup and the growing use of hybrid seed. Unlike reg­ular seed, which farmers used to save from year to year, hybrid seed cannot be used to raise a second crop, for­cing farmers to keep buying seed from large seed firms like Pioneer. This raises all kinds of issues, and I really think the film could have spent more time here.

The film ends with an inter­view with the CEO of Nestlé, the largest food man­u­fac­turer in the world, who muses on “attaching a value” to water, and calls the pos­i­tion of the NGOs, that access to clean water is a human right, “extreme”. After brag­ging how many jobs his cor­por­a­tion is cre­ating, and how many fam­ilies it is sup­porting, he glances at an inform­a­tional video of one of Nestlé’s Japanese factories, and mar­vels how it is so roboti­cized. “Hardly any people,” he crows.

The only sig­ni­ficant weak­ness to this doc­u­mentary was its unre­lenting gloom. I would have liked to have been given some ammuni­tion or to have seen some suc­cess stories, or at least some rebel­lion. But there wasn’t any. Since I have an interest in this area, I can point you to the Slow Food organ­iz­a­tion, which is trying to encourage more con­sump­tion of local products and the pre­ser­va­tion of dis­ap­pearing food­stuffs. But I really wish the dir­ector had done it instead.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: Documentaries, globalization, TIFF

{ 1 comment }

Capote

by James McNally on September 11, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Capote

Capote (USA, dir­ector Bennett Miller): Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of my favourite actors, period. But he’s usu­ally known for char­acter roles, and so he’s not quite the house­hold name he deserves to be. And sadly, because this film prob­ably won’t have wide appeal, he might remain that way. The truth is that he’s one of the finest actors working today, and this film is a tour de force. Hoffman inhabits the role of Truman Capote, nailing everything from his child­like voice to his fey man­ner­isms, even down to his facial tics. He’s almost too good, which may dis­tract a bit from the other charms of this film.

If focusses rather nar­rowly on the time Truman Capote spent writing his most famous book, In Cold Blood. After a family of four is murdered in their remote farm­house in Kansas, Capote decides to write an art­icle for The New Yorker. After the two mur­derers are appre­hended, Capote begins to form a bond with one of the men, Perry Smith (por­trayed with amazing sub­tlety by Clifton Collins Jr.), drawing par­al­lels between his own troubled child­hood and that of the career crim­inal. The pro­posed art­icle is aban­doned, as Capote real­izes he has the material for a book. And not just any kind of book, but a whole new kind of writing, what Capote calls “the non­fic­tion novel.”

As the months drag on after the men’s con­vic­tions, Capote keeps trying to draw Smith out, asking him to tell him about the night of the killings. When he finally does, it’s uncom­fort­able to watch, not only for the bru­tality of the murders, but also for the way that Capote uses Smith for his own ends. It’s clear that there is an inner con­flict going on in Capote’s mind. On one level, he really does befriend this killer. But he also uses him for material so he can feed his huge ambi­tion and ego. His dupli­citous nature is just another thing he has in common with Smith.

But after sev­eral years of research, at the end of all the legal appeals to spare the killers’ lives, Capote is relieved to hear they’ll finally be hanged. It’s the only way he can finish his book. However, the exper­i­ence of actu­ally watching the exe­cu­tions shakes him deeply. His jumbled mix­ture of feel­ings and motiv­a­tions went on to have a pro­found effect on Capote, and although the book does go on to become his most suc­cessful, he never fin­ishes another. The film ends by quoting the epi­graph to his final, unfin­ished manu­script, Unanswered Prayers. It was Christian mystic Teresa of Avila who said that “answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.”

Film’s Web Site: http://www.sonyclassics.com/capote/

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: TIFF

{ Comments on this entry are closed }