September 2008

Off to Reykjavik

by James McNally on September 21, 2008 · 5 comments

in Film Festivals,Travel

Reykjavik International Film Festival 2008

On Wednesday, my wife Brooke and I will be flying to Iceland for the fifth edi­tion of the Reykjavik International Film Festival. We’re staying for the entire dur­a­tion of the fest­ival, which runs from September 25th through October 5th, and in addi­tion to seeing films, we’ll be doing some sight­seeing. We’ve rented a car for the entire time, and are hoping to see as much as we can, including the Golden Circle (the geyser at Geysir, the water­fall at Gullfoss and the site of the world’s oldest par­lia­ment at Þhingv­ellir National Park), the Blue Lagoon geo­thermal spa, and pos­sibly an overnight stay on Vestmannaeyjar, the Westman Islands. Other planned activ­ities include whale-watching and horse­back riding, depending on the weather.

All that to say that I haven’t quite decided how I’m going to cover the film fest­ival yet. Ideally, I’ll be able to blog as usual, posting reviews shortly after seeing the films, but because it’s a vaca­tion, I might just be having too much fun to post right away.

Though the entire schedule hasn’t yet been posted, the main pro­gram (Open Seas) fea­tures the fol­lowing 18 films:

Some of these played at TIFF this year and some others were released earlier, but I haven’t seen any of them. So far, I’m plan­ning on seeing the ones marked with aster­isks based on either recom­mend­a­tions from friends or just my own interest. If you have any recom­mend­a­tions I haven’t marked, please com­ment and let me know why I should see them.

Tagged as: iceland, reykjavik, RIFF

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American Dreamers

by James McNally on September 17, 2008

in Documentaries,Web Sites

Michael Jacobs, who dir­ected the unique story of Pentecostal pastor Richard Gazowsky in Audience of One (review), has a new web series that looks very prom­ising. American Dreamers focuses on a dif­ferent indi­vidual each week, telling stories about eccentric or unusual pur­suits. I’ve embedded the first episode below, about Jim Bishop, who’s been building a castle single-handedly in Beulah, Colorado for almost 40 years. I think you’ll agree that Jacobs has a gift for finding inter­esting stories and telling them well. The series runs for ten epis­odes, with new epis­odes released each Wednesday.

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Tears for Sale (Carlston za Ognjenku)

by James McNally on September 14, 2008 · 2 comments

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Tears for Sale (Carlston za Ognjenku)

Tears for Sale (Carlston za Ognjenku) (2008, Director: Uroš Stojanovic): Reportedly the most expensive Serbian film ever made, Tears for Sale is a visual spec­tacle com­bining Balkan folk­lore with modern CGI to create a hugely enjoy­able exper­i­ence. Toronto critic Norman Wilner called it “bat­shit crazy,” and he’s not wrong, but I saw that as a pos­itive going in, and I was not dis­ap­pointed at all.

The film is set in a Serbian vil­lage in 1918, at the end of the Great War, and the women of the vil­lage are mourning the deaths of all their men in battle. We meet a pair of sis­ters, Little Boginja and Ognjenka, who work as pro­fes­sional mourners at the many funerals held in the vil­lage. They’re kept even busier due to the fact that the village’s sole source of income, its vine­yard, is a mine­field. The sis­ters are des­perate to lose their vir­ginity but when the women of the vil­lage bring Ognjenka to the town’s only remaining man, a repulsive old creature named Grandpa Bisa, her scream kills him. To avoid being burned at the stake for this crime, the sis­ters promise to bring back a virile young man within three days. They’re bound by the vil­lage witch’s curse on the spirit of their beloved grandmother.

They set out on this adven­ture and encounter other vil­lages in their situ­ation, bringing home the gravity of the region’s his­tory of inter­min­able war­fare. Though much of the film is played for laughs, there is a very real Balkan sad­ness just under the sur­face. Finally, in a larger town, they meet a pair of trav­eling per­formers: Arsa is a suave enter­tainer who can dance the Charleston, and Dragoljub calls him­self the Man of Steel and goes around shooting him­self out of a cannon. The two sis­ters pair off and sep­arate, each hoping to escape to the big city of Belgrade with their new love. Each hopes the other will bring the man back to their vil­lage, but in the end, both return, with tragic results.

The plot is really more of a fairytale, and the visual effects are fant­astic, very much like some­thing from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, Amelie, A Very Long Engagement). Additionally, the art dir­ec­tion and cos­tumes are sump­tuous and over-the-top, and it doesn’t hurt that the whole film is also incred­ibly sexy. Though I’m doubtful this will get any sort of North American the­at­rical release, I’m already waiting for the DVD.

P.S. The Serbian title trans­lates to “Charleston and Vendetta” (Vendetta appar­ently being the trans­la­tion of the older sister Ognjenka’s name).

Official site of the film (Serbian)
Trailer

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, serbia

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Patrik 1,5

by James McNally on September 14, 2008

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Patrik 1,5

Patrik 1,5 (2008, Director: Ella Lemhagen): Goran and Sven are a gay mar­ried couple who’ve just moved to the sub­urbs. They’re in the pro­cess of adopting and when they get the news that Patrik (“aged 1.5″) will be arriving soon, they’re ecstatic. But when the Patrik who shows up is a 15-year-old homo­phobic delin­quent, things quickly go off the rails. Though their neigh­bours seem tol­erant, it’s obvous they’re not com­pletely com­fort­able with this unusual family. To make things worse, Patrik’s arrival throws a wrench into the couple’s rela­tion­ship, too. Sven had pre­vi­ously been mar­ried to a woman and fathered a child and seems uncom­fort­able that his life seems to be resuming a sim­ilar shape. Will Goran’s dream of being a hus­band and father and having a house in the sub­urbs sur­vive the arrival of this sullen teen­ager? Well, of course it will.

Though I found this romantic comedy quite touching, it was just a bit too sen­ti­mental to make it really great. Patrik’s delin­quency never seems to become apparent, and I could see the happy ending coming from a mile away. Still, it was refreshing to see a film about a gay couple strug­gling with some of the same issues as me and my wife do.

Official site of the film
Trailer

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, adoption, homosexuality, sweden

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Adam Resurrected

by James McNally on September 11, 2008 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Adam Resurrected

Adam Resurrected (2008, Director: Paul Schrader): Let me begin by saying I have a lot of respect for the work of Paul Schrader. Anyone who has been both a screen­writer and a critic before becoming a dir­ector is bound to have my respect. Which is why I felt so miser­able leaving the screening last night. Adam Resurrected is an out-and-out stinker, and I’m sorry to say it.

To be com­pletely honest, I was a bit nervous going in. Films that try to see the comedy (black or oth­er­wise) in the Holocaust have rarely fared well. Jerry Lewis shelved his film The Day The Clown Cried (1972) after crit­ical out­rage, and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), des­pite a rap­turous recep­tion here at TIFF (one I wit­nessed in person) fell out of favour pretty quickly as well. Schrader’s film dif­fers in that he presents the “clown” char­acter, Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum) as insane. When we meet him, it’s 1961 and he’s being escorted back (after an unsuc­cessful dis­charge) to a “pro­gressive” asylum in the Israeli desert spe­cific­ally for sur­vivors of the camps. He’s clearly the star patient, enter­taining the other patients and even the staff with his quick wit, and car­rying on a love affair with a gor­geous nurse. The head doctor (Derek Jacobi) indulges him endlessly.

Through flash­backs, we dis­cover that he lost his wife and daugh­ters in a con­cen­tra­tion camp while he him­self was spared. The camp com­mandant (Willem Defoe) recog­nizes him from his nightclub act and decides to keep him as his pet. And I mean this quite lit­er­ally. He forces Adam to act as his dog, barking and walking around on all fours. Since he’s also a tal­ented musi­cian, he’s also used to soothe the inmates with violin music on their way to the gas chambers.

The plot becomes even more bizarre when a boy shows up at the asylum thinking he’s a dog. Adam gradu­ally reaches out to him, based on his own memories, and brings both the boy and him­self back to life (hence the portentous title). That’s the psy­cho­lo­gical resur­rec­tion, anyway. Physically, Adam appears to be invul­ner­able. He seems to be able to bleed at will, and to heal him­self of tumours. It’s no wonder that one of the inmates con­siders him the Messiah.

The film is based on a famous and rather con­tro­ver­sial Israeli novel by Yoram Kaniuk, pub­lished in 1971. Significantly, Schrader said the book came out in the same gen­eral era as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), two other chal­lenges to the typ­ical depic­tion of war­time exper­i­ences. Famously, both of those novels were called unfil­mable, and the films made from them have never really been con­sidered successful.

Goldblum, as always, jumps in with both feet, but his strange accent and tend­ency to mutter left much of his dia­logue inde­cipher­able. Defoe and Jacobi are just wasted in paper-thin roles, and the film is fur­ther marred by an abund­ance of shaky hand­held cam­er­a­work. In the end, I just didn’t care about this strange char­acter, and I found myself rolling my eyes more than once at the ham­fisted metaphors.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Paul Schrader, actor Jeff Goldblum, screen­writer Noah Stollman and pro­ducer Ehud Bleiberg from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 15:56

4/10(4/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, holocaust, israel, worldwar2

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