Covering film in Toronto
Cinéfranco is Toronto’s festival of films in the French language. The 12th edition is running from tomorrow, March 27th, through April 5th at the Royal Cinema at 608 College Street West, featuring films from all over the French-speaking world, with films from France, Québec, Morocco, Belgium, and Switzerland. All films are subtitled in English, and tickets are available at the cinema for $10 each.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Hansel and Gretel (Director: Yim Pil-Sung): I’m certainly no expert on horror films, never mind Asian horror films, but Yim Pil-Sung’s Hansel and Gretel has more in common with a film like Pan’s Labyrinth than, for instance, Ringu. That is to say, this film functions as much more than a simple scary movie.
Eun-Soo is on his way to visit his sick mother and on the phone with his pregnant girlfriend when he swerves to avoid something in the road. When he wakes up, he is able to crawl from his wrecked car before passing out again. When he wakes again, it is nighttime and a young girl with a lantern is there to guide him to her house deep in the forest. Even before we arrive at the strange house, we know we’re in archetypal fairytale country. Eun-soo is a young man with some family issues. His girlfriend accuses him of not caring about the impending responsibilities of fatherhood, and he reveals a bit later that he and his mother are not particularly close. When the angelic girl introduces him to her siblings and parents, there is clearly something amiss. The adults seem fearful and defer constantly to the children, especially brother Man-Bok. The house seems like something out of an American sitcom from the 50s, filled with candy and toys and garish colours. Eun-Soo is convinced to spend the night, but when he sets out the next day to return to his car, he finds himself back at the house again. So begins a multi-day ordeal and one creepy story.
The film does a masterful job of creating an atmosphere of unease, combining cinematography, score and art direction to convincingly portray this strangely sinister child-centred world. It slowly becomes clear after the “parents” disappear that these kids have no real mother and father, and that they have been luring substitute parents here for many years and trying to convince them to stay. What happens to these luckless surrogates is only partially revealed, but Eun-Soo is soon desperate to return to the family he thought he didn’t need.
Strangely enough, these love-starved “children” end up teaching Eun-Soo a lot about fatherhood, especially when he has to protect them from a malevolent preacher. Like Eun-Soo, the plot does get a little tangled in the woods in the middle section, but the ending is surprisingly moving, and the performances of the three child actors are universally excellent.
Note: Hansel and Gretel is the second theatrical release of Evokative Films, whose founder Stéphanie Trépanier I interviewed recently.
Hansel and Gretel opens in Toronto on Friday March 27 for an exclusive run at the AMC Yonge-Dundas theatre.
(8/10)
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
I’ve been dipping into Pauline Kael’s Deeper Into Movies lately and came across this delicious quote:
There’s a good deal to be said for finding your way to moviemaking—as most of the early directors did—after living for some years in the world and gaining some knowledge of life outside show business. We are beginning to spawn teen-age filmmakers who at twenty-five may have a brilliant technique but are as empty-headed as a Hollywood hack, and they will become the next generation of hacks, because they don’t know anything except moviemaking.
She said that in 1969 in the context of reviewing documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s High School. Wiseman had come to film after a career as a law professor and urban planner, and definitely came to his films with some ideas about the world. Kael would probably have a lot to say about some of today’s young directors, many of whom grew up comfortable with the tools of filmmaking but who have yet to find anything distinctive to actually say about anything.
What do you think? Can you give me some examples and counter-examples of young filmmakers with nothing (or something) to say?
UPDATE: Oh wait, there’s more! From a rather unfavourable review of Canada’s own Alan King’s A Married Couple:
[Y]oung filmmakers, who are rarely writers but are hooked on technology, love an approach in which the thinking out in advance is minimal—an approach in which you shoot a lot of footage and then try to find your film in it. Young filmmakers generally know almost nothing about how to handle actors, but probably all filmmakers have unhappy or “unfulfilled” friends eager to have a movie made of their lives; fame is probably the cure they seek.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Bomber (Director: Paul Cotter): A well-edited trailer and an interesting premise drew me to this film, and I have to say up front that Bomber didn’t quite live up to expectations. It’s a film I wanted to like. Ross is an underemployed art school graduate with an extremely possessive girlfriend. To make things worse, he’s been dragged unwillingly along on a road trip with his parents. His father, Alistar, was a teenage bomber pilot for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War and wants to return to the small village in Germany he accidentally bombed in order to apologize. Director Cotter used only three actors and seven crew, picking the rest of his cast from among the local townspeople. So far, so good. There is actually a lot to like about Bomber: it’s beautifully shot in high-definition, there’s a wonderful soundtrack (especially the songs by Sweden’s Marching Band), and the performances are generally good. Where the film let me down was in its weak script. Hackneyed dialogue and crude attempts at humour didn’t bother most of the audience, but they did grate with this reviewer. The pacing could have been tightened up a bit too. The bits I enjoyed the most were actually the dialogue-free shots of the family van driving through the Dutch and German landscapes, accompanied by the excellent soundtrack music. Unfortunately, those shots could very well have occurred in a car commercial.
Most frustrating for me was the way son Ross progresses from a total emotional meltdown in one scene, trying to attack his parents from outside the van, to later giving them lectures filled with psychobabble like “you just have to express what you’re feeling.” Normally, comedies are full of characters this inconsistent, but the problem is that Bomber isn’t strictly a comedy, and when it went for any sort of emotional payoff, I was unmoved because these characters hadn’t really been developed beyond sketches.
I suspect that Cotter fell prey to the misconception that he needed to be an auteur, both writing and directing his first feature film. Though the idea germinated with him and his own family history (and in fact he has also written a radio play called Dropping Bombs essentially covering the same ground), I think the story would have been better served by bringing in a more experienced scriptwriter, who could have polished Bomber into a much better film.
Page for the film on the director’s web site
(6/10)
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
This morning, Hot Docs announced the full lineup for the 16th edition of this internationally-renowned documentary film festival, running this year from April 30 — May 10. From the press release, I learned that there were almost 2,000 films submitted, and from that huge number, 171 films from 39 countries were selected for screening.
My involvement this year started a number of weeks ago, when I was invited to help screen submissions as an Associate Programmer. Now my role shifts back to being a member of the online media. I’m hoping to watch and review as many of these carefully-chosen documentaries as I can fit into my schedule. Just having a look over some of the selections, I’m excited and looking forward to my sixth year of attending what is probably my favourite local film festival. Here are just a few of the highlights I’m anticipating:
Tickets and passes are already on sale, and I can assure you that Hot Docs is one of the best bargains for film lovers in this city.
Here’s a link to the full schedule.
P.S. Looking over the final lineup, I realize that none of the 61 documentaries I watched in February made it in. And I saw some very good films.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
