Editor’s Note:
Top Gear Seasons 11 and 12 were released on DVD in the US and Canada on January 12 by Warner Brothers. You can help Toronto Screen Shots by buying from
Amazon.ca or
Amazon.com.
I don’t own a car. In fact, I don’t even drive. That hasn’t diminished in the slightest my passion for this show. Broadcast originally on BBC, and now a hit on this side of the pond on BBC America and BBC Canada, this show about cars might possibly be the best thing on television.
On the air since 1978, it’s been hosted since 1988 by the curmudgeonly Jeremy Clarkson. He’s ably assisted by tall hippie James May (often called “Captain Slow” by his colleagues) and the diminutive Richard Hammond (occasionally referred to as “Hamster”). The chemistry between the hosts is about 80% of the secret to the show’s success, with the centrepiece of each episode consisting of a series of vehicle-related challenges in which the trio can compete against each other. Some highlights include the three racing each other in trucks and city buses.
Other popular segments are the “Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car” (in which a celebrity is interviewed after completing a lap of the racetrack in a “regular” car) and those involving the masked race driver known only as The Stig. This anonymous pro takes out an endless procession of fancy cars week after week and tries to complete the fastest lap of the Top Gear track. In this way, models are rated against each other and argued about endlessly by the hosts.
Perhaps the best thing about the show is that it makes not a bit of difference that none of the models featured on the show are even for sale in North America. Nobody in Britain can afford these cars, anyway. Top Gear is the ultimate vicarious thrill show. We can watch a crew of foul-mouthed wisecracking lunatics tear around a race track in ludicrously expensive cars and we’re satisfied. The camerawork is dazzling, and the descriptions of the cars are over the top, which is also part of the fun.
It’s simply a joy to see these guys having so much fun at their jobs. The interviews are also great, because they put the celebrities into unfamiliar territory. Behind the wheel of a car and racing around a track, they don’t seem that much different to us after all. Well, except for me. I can’t drive.
Season 11 Details:
- 6 episodes on 2 DVDs
- 364 minutes
Season 12 Details:
- 8 episodes on 4 DVDs
- 500 minutes
- Special Features include commentary on certain episodes, the director’s cut of the Botswana Special from Season 10, deleted scenes and more.
Official web site on BBC America
Complete episode guide from Wikipedia
Tagged as:
bbc,
cars
Maelström (Director: Denis Villeneuve): My first exposure to Villeneuve’s work was his wickedly funny and stylish short Next Floor, and his latest feature Polytechnique just won the award for Best Canadian Film of 2009 from the Toronto Film Critics Association, so I was eager to watch this film, which originally played to considerable buzz at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival. I’m sorry that it took me so long to catch up with this unique film, and I can tell you that I’m going to be watching Polytechnique and every other bit of film Villeneuve has had a hand in creating as soon as I can.
Maelström is the sort of audacious filmmaking that begins its tale with an untranslated title card in Norwegian, continues with a talking fish as narrator, and then assaults you with the strains of “Good Morning Starshine” (from the musical Hair) over scenes of a woman having an abortion. And that’s just the first five minutes.
Bibiane Champagne (Marie-Josée Croze) is a successful young entrepreneur, running a fashionable boutique with her brother. They are the children of a famous designer, and this seems to weigh heavily on her. Weighing more heavily is the guilt she feels for the abortion she’s just had. After a night of partying to forget her pain, she drives drunk, hitting a pedestrian on her way home. She finds out a few days later in the newspaper that the man dragged himself out of the road, staggered home, and died sitting at his kitchen table. With her guilt now doubled, she’s disconnected even further from her work and ponders suicide. Planning to ditch her car in the river, she almost drowns, but emerges from the water hoping for a second chance at life.
Her second chance arrives in the form of the son of the man she’s killed. While his father was a Norwegian fisherman, Evian (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) is a scuba diver (or charmingly referred to in the subtitles, a “frogman”), working for Hydro Quebec in the remote northern part of the province. When Bibiane is drawn to the morgue at the same time as Evian, they begin an enigmatic relationship in which Bibiane pretends to be his father’s neighbour. Eventually the truth will come out and these two people will have to decide how to move forward with their lives.
Maelström has the sumptuous visual style and morbidity of Peter Greenaway and the obsession with coincidence and weighty philosophical themes as Krzysztof Kieslowski. While that might not appeal to everyone, it’s a dream match for me, and while I caught myself a few times thinking the film was just a bit too pretty, I was solidly engrossed throughout and satisfied by the conclusion.
Bold filmmakers like Villeneuve are rare, and they can often make terrible mistakes in judgement. Witness Julio Medem’s most recent film Caótica Ana (review), or Jaco van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody, both huge personal disappointments after I’d enjoyed their earlier work. But I’m always willing to give filmmakers like these another chance, hoping that failure doesn’t blunt their appetite for risk-taking. Or mine.
(9/10)
Tagged as:
canada,
quebec
Editor’s Note:
Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at
Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.
Last Train Home (Director: Lixin Fan): China is arguably the world’s most important economy at the moment and the past fifty years have seen incredible changes, politically, economically and socially. Many filmmakers have emerged from the country, including a number of excellent documentarians. Chinese-Canadian Lixin Fan can proudly stand among them with Last Train Home, just his first feature film as director.
In my limited experience, to make a great film about China, you must encompass the country’s vastness, both in terms of geography and of population, but also be able to focus in on individual stories. In this case, we are introduced to the Zhangs, a family of migrant workers, just as the parents are about to make their yearly journey home to their village to celebrate Chinese New Year. Along with 140 million other migrant workers, this is often the only occasion they get to spend time with their children and parents. Making their way from the industrial city in which they work to their village in the countryside is an exhausting and stressful multi-day journey of more than 2,000 kilometres. Traveling by train, bus and ferry boat, they arrive exhausted and are able to spend only a few days with their son Yang (10) and daughter Qin (17), who have grown up under the care of their grandparents.
Despite the economic realities which make it necessary for families to be divided this way, the Zhangs feel they are doing it so that their children will have better lives. They constantly badger their children about their grades, perhaps because they really have nothing else to talk about. Daughter Qin is reaching the stage of adolescence where she begins to rebel against her parents. She complains that they’ve essentially abandoned her and her brother and a few months after they’ve returned to the city, she drops out of school to become a migrant worker herself. The boredom of rural life for a teenager looks very different from the perspective of her parents who have been away for 16 years working in horrific conditions just to provide their kids with this protected upbringing, but that’s lost on Qin, who wants the “freedom” of working in a factory.
While this is a crushing blow for her parents, who wanted to see her finish her studies, by the next year, they’re ready to travel home again for the New Year holiday. They’ve been pressuring Qin to return to school, and it looks as though she’s reluctantly agreed. But this year’s migration is affected by a snowstorm which knocks out the electrical grid and delays the trains for days. The scenes of huge crowds pushing each other are harrowing. While the trip home is a huge hassle at the best of times, it become a terrifying ordeal when schedules don’t run smoothly. When they finally board their train, it’s clear that Qin is not speaking with her parents, and she spends the whole trip in sullen silence.
Things come to a head during the holiday, and Qin’s insolence leads to a physical confrontation with her father. Eventually, like all parents, they resign themselves to letting Qin go her own way, hoping that son Yang can finish school and support the family. In the meantime, they return to the city again, back to their monotonous factory jobs.
My synopsis makes this sound like a fiction feature, and for all the intimacy the filmmakers achieve, it might as well be. It’s helped tremendously by some very crisp editing, as well as some sweeping cinematography of the lush Chinese countryside. Last Train Home succeeds in capturing both the epic scale of the changes sweeping today’s China and their impact on the individual families struggling with them.
Two additional notes. First the disclaimer: my company (Kinosmith) is the Canadian distributor for this film. And second, the film is headed to the Sundance Film Festival, where it will compete in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.
Here is the Q&A with director Lixin Fan 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: 15:48
Official site of the film
(9/10)
Tagged as:
china,
family,
globalization
Celebrating the one year anniversary of their online screening room, and following the success of such 3D titles as Avatar and Up, Canada’s National Film Board has continued to innovate by making some of the films in its online screening room available in 3D. Short films Drux Flux by Theodore Ushev and the Genie Award-winning Falling in Love Again by Munro Ferguson are available now, as well as excerpts from Facing Champlain, a stereoscopic production created for the 400th anniversary celebrations in Quebec City. The films will be viewable both in the online screening room and on the iPhone application using 3D glasses, which can either be ordered from the NFB web site, or picked up for free at their Toronto Mediatheque (150 John Street).
Visit the NFB 3D portal for more information.
In addition, they are making 26 of their films available in HD, including celebrated shorts like Madame Tutli-Putli, Ryan, and The Cat Came Back. No glasses required for these, just head to their HD portal and enjoy.
Tagged as:
3d,
nfb
Mine was the December 2009 selection of
Film Movement Canada, a subscription service that brings the best of independent cinema to your door each month. Though it’s only recently launched here,
Film Movement has operated in the US for several years, and has long been one of my favourite sources of great films.
Mine is screening theatrically around the US until the end of March 2010 (
more information) and will be available through iTunes this month, too.
Mine (Director: Geralyn Pezanoski): Winner of the Audience Award at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, Mine is a gut-wrenching look at some of the forgotten victims of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina: pets and their owners. My wife and I are thinking of becoming dog owners, and after watching this film, I’m more convinced than ever that pets really do become part of the family.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of evacuees were forced to leave their cats and dogs behind. Shelters wouldn’t accept animals, and in some cases, people left their pets thinking they’d be gone just a few days. We all know what happened. Many people still haven’t returned to the city, and those who did had to wait months. In the meantime, more than 150,000 animals died. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers, several thousand were rescued, but many were shipped to other states, and when their owners didn’t claim them within a few days, some were adopted out to new families. This is where the film gets really interesting.
The failure of the government to adequately respond to the catastrophe has been the subject of many fine documentary films, but in this case, ordinary people around the country stepped in to do all they could to rescue these pets who’d been left behind. Unfortunately, there is a political edge to some of these “rescue” organizations, as some of the former owners soon found out. For instance, many dog owners in New Orleans don’t have their dogs spayed or neutered, whether for financial or cultural reasons. Among the rescue community, this is considered irresponsible. As well, many of the rescued animals turned out to have heartworm infections, something that can be prevented with medication. Again, probably due to financial hardship or simply ignorance, many New Orleans residents hadn’t treated their pets for heartworm.
The end result was that many of the rescue organizations saw the original owners as negligent, and after treating the animals for sickness, they would spay or neuter them and then adopt them out to more “suitable” families in their areas. When the original owners were finally able to track their pets down, the rescue organizations would tell them that their pet had a new family, and the new family didn’t want to give it up.
We follow several of these heartbreaking custody battles throughout the course of the film. Though it’s only hinted at, race and class are central to how the stories are played out. Since pets are considered property under the law, it should simply be a matter of having one’s property returned, but in the emotional battlefield of pet ownership, things are rarely that simple. Having already survived the hurricane and the loss of their homes and possessions, the residents of New Orleans have no money to hire lawyers to pursue their missing pets, so a number of volunteers help them to find lawyers who are willing to work pro bono on the cases. It’s an ugly process, and one particular phone conversation (part of which appears in the trailer embedded below) between the owner of a missing dog and the head of the rescue organization who got him out of New Orleans sums up the film in a nutshell. People who love animals can often forget that there is a person attached to that animal. If you care about animals, you cannot pretend that that relationship never existed.
You don’t have to be a dog lover to enjoy Mine. And even if you think you’ve seen all there is to see about Hurricane Katrina, don’t let that keep you away from this insightful film, which has exposed the class divisions of our society more clearly than anything I’ve seen in a long time.
Official site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
class,
hurricanekatrina,
pets,
race
