Drew Kerr

The Last Gladiators

by Drew Kerr on November 2, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

The Last Gladiators

The Last Gladiators (Director: Alex Gibney): Filmmaker Alex Gibney is clearly a very busy man. The Last Gladiators, in which he exam­ines the world of National Hockey League pugil­ists, focus­sing in on the story of former Montreal Canadiens enforcer Chris “Knuckles” Nilan, is his tenth fea­ture film since 2005, an unusu­ally pro­lific output for a doc­u­ment­arian. And you can add in a couple of shorter seg­ments he con­trib­uted to some other col­lab­or­ative doc­u­mentary pro­jects during that period. Gibney has a track record for matching the quantity with quality, as his latest film proves, even if it’s a depar­ture from the kind of politically-charged topics he’s best known for, such as the down­fall of politi­cians (Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer and Casino Jack and the United States of Money), cor­porate mal­feas­ance (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and American mil­itary tor­ture (Taxi to the Dark Side, which won an Oscar in 2008 for best doc­u­mentary fea­ture). But as a lifelong hockey fan, Gibney, an American, saw rich source material in examining the sub­cul­ture of one of the most con­tro­ver­sial aspect of Canada’s game, with Nilan’s own intriguing story providing about 75% of the film’s content.

Retiring in 1992 after being plagued by injuries (he’s under­gone 26 sur­geries), Nilan’s most not­able achieve­ments from his 13 year NHL career are more than 3,000 pen­alty minutes, a Stanley Cup win with the Canadiens in 1986, and a selec­tion to Team USA for the 1987 Canada Cup series. After being drafted by Montreal, he played nine sea­sons for them before being traded to the New York Rangers and even­tu­ally his hometown Boston Bruins, before ending his career back with Montreal. Nilan’s pride and love for the Canadiens still runs deep and it seems as if he never got over the dev­ast­a­tion of being traded away from them. His troubled post-NHL his­tory, which proves to be the most sub­stantive part of the film, could make Nilan the poster child for pro ath­letes who struggle with their post-playing lives. A toxic com­bin­a­tion of sub­stance abuse (alcohol, pre­scrip­tion paink­illers, and heroin), employ­ment prob­lems (Nilan hated the insur­ance job he worked at), and legal troubles (including a 2009 arrest for shoplifting) des­troyed his rela­tion­ship with his wife and child and nearly killed him. Nilan, who has a very dark and intense side, may be a rough-around-the-edges char­acter, but he’s still a like­able one. Part of his appeal is his blunt hon­esty, open­ness, and a will­ing­ness to take full respons­ib­ility for his fail­ings. Interviews with his father who, like his son, pro­jects a hard-ass demeanour and speaks with that always-fascinating thick Boston accent, add real emo­tional depth to the film, as the senior Nilan holds little back in con­veying the pro­found heartache and shame he felt (and still feels) over his son’s struggles.

The non-Nilan por­tions of the film find Gibney tra­cing the evol­u­tion of the enforcer’s role in the game from its mid-70s heyday with the Philadelphia Flyers’ “Broad Street Bullies” through to its greatly dimin­ished need in the cur­rent game. Numerous inter­views with the most prom­inent fighters over the past couple of dec­ades provide insight into the enforcer mindset, with players like Marty McSorley, Tony Twist, Donald Brashear, and the late Bob Probert weighing in (Probert’s inter­views, con­ducted shortly before his death, are sad to watch). The scenes with Brashear are sad for a dif­ferent reason, as we see the former fan favourite playing in D-list hockey league games and still itching to drop his gloves.

The Last Gladiators is a timely piece in light of the recent deaths of three NHL enfor­cers that called into ques­tion the pos­sible link between their occu­pa­tions and its neg­ative residual effects on their lives. Nilan, who I heard give an inter­view on Toronto’s Prime Time Sports radio show the week before The Last Gladiators’ TIFF premiere, dis­counted the con­nec­tion. Nilan’s stance appar­ently escaped the atten­tion of TV’s Hockey Night in Canada neander­thal Don Cherry, who cri­ti­cized him and two other former fighters (also without basis) on the tele­cast for sup­porting the sup­posed theory.

Gibney, who began filming a gen­eral por­trait of hockey fighters, chose wisely in deciding to make Nilan the central sub­ject. The Last Gladiators is con­sist­ently grip­ping and only mis­fires when the dir­ector chooses some dis­ap­point­ingly obvious music on the soundtrack (Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild”) or engages in unne­ces­sary scene re-enactments to advance his nar­rative, drag­ging the doc­u­mentary into cheesy E! True Hollywood Story ter­ritory. Being a hockey fan isn’t even a neces­sary com­ponent in appre­ci­ating the film, as I haven’t given a toss about the NHL since the inept Toronto Maple Leafs killed my love for the game in the mid-90s.

Tagged as: #tiff11, hockey, sports

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From the Sky Down

by Drew Kerr on October 19, 2011

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

From the Sky Down

From the Sky Down (Director: Davis Guggenheim): When asked to choose the best two albums in U2’s cata­logue, most fans and music critics will pick 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby. That the band’s strongest work is on albums that sound so rad­ic­ally dif­ferent from one another is, even two dec­ades later, fairly astounding, and points emphat­ic­ally to the group’s renowned dis­dain for cre­ative passivity. As frontman Bono has fam­ously said, Achtung Baby was “the sound of four men cut­ting down The Joshua Tree”, as U2 struggled to cope with super­stardom and needed to “go away and dream it all up again.” That hard-fought musical and per­sonal journey for the band forms the found­a­tion of From the Sky Down, dir­ected by Davis Guggenheim (best known for An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman). Guggenheim, who had pre­vi­ously dir­ected U2 gui­tarist The Edge in his under­seen 2008 film It Might Get Loud, was approached by the band to put together some sort of visual doc­u­ment to tie in with the upcoming 20th anniversary reissue of Achtung Baby.

From the Sky Down takes a sur­pris­ingly brief glimpse at the band’s overall his­tory and I was also some­what taken aback by the com­plete absence of any men­tion of what they might have up their sleeve for the future. No, the focus here is almost entirely on the late 80s-early 90s era of the group, a refreshing approach from a rock doc­u­mentary format that tra­di­tion­ally only offers a quickly moving bio­graph­ical sum­mary, with little allow­ance for a truly in-depth exam­in­a­tion of par­tic­ular periods or albums. Perhaps the band was inspired by The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, another high pro­file doc that decon­structed the making of a classic album from their friend and peer, Bruce Springsteen. From the Sky Down fea­tures extensive one-on-one inter­views with each member of the band (they’re rounded out by drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton) that provide a com­pre­hensive revis­iting of a period that began just after the band’s explo­sion in pop­ularity with the release of The Joshua Tree, through to the begin­ning of their land­mark Zoo TV Tour in 1992. Not sur­pris­ingly, the inter­views with the sharp-witted Bono are the most rev­el­atory and enter­taining. Special atten­tion is paid to 1988’s Rattle and Hum, the much-derided and mis­un­der­stood doc­u­mentary (with a com­panion album) that chron­icled U2’s bur­geoning interest in American roots music. Personally, I’m a huge fan of the film, but the band admits their mes­sage was mis­in­ter­preted and only rein­forced many people’s opinion of the Irish quartet as self-important and insuf­fer­able per­son­al­ities. Guggenheim makes good use of some pre­vi­ously unseen Rattle and Hum out­takes, including one that shows an irate Bono rip­ping on some incom­petent stage workers.

Achtung Baby’s dif­fi­cult recording ses­sions form the heart of the film, with addi­tional per­spective provided by the album’s pro­du­cers (Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno), engineer (Flood), and long­time pho­to­grapher (Anton Corbijn). Guggenheim recon­venes the group at Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where recording began, but where little res­ults were pro­duced due to cre­ative fric­tion and road­b­locks. Bono and The Edge wanted to take U2’s sound in a more elec­tronic, exper­i­mental dir­ec­tion, with which Mullen Jr. and Clayton couldn’t come to terms. The occa­sional anim­a­tion sequences that Guggenheim employs (accom­panied by band member voi­ceovers taken from their inter­views) are used to best effect here, with one sequence showing meta­phor­ical walls being erected between the four band­mates. The visual takes on even more sym­bolic meaning, con­sid­ering they were in the city during the fall of the Berlin Wall. The band digs out and reflects on old demos, and talks about their song­writing pro­cess, which fre­quently fea­tures Bono using gib­berish (dubbed “Bongolese”) in place of unwritten lyrics. Two songs get the most atten­tion: “Mysterious Ways” and “One.” The former, ori­gin­ally titled “Sick Puppy,” helped the band turn a corner from their cre­ative dif­fi­culties and even­tu­ally led to the cre­ation of “One,” which sprang from an idea used in the ori­ginal bridge in “Mysterious Ways.” The two tracks were the only ones from the album that were com­pleted in Berlin, with the rest fin­ished back home in Dublin.

Guggenheim’s decision to bookend the film with scenes from the group’s much-hyped appear­ance at this past summer’s Glastonbury Festival is only mod­er­ately effective, but he cap­tures some great footage of the band rehearsing various Achtung Baby songs in pre­par­a­tion for the big gig (one of the filming loc­a­tions is Winnipeg’s Burton Cummings Theatre, during a tour stop in the city this past spring). The standouts include a rough run-through of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” which really jumped out of the speakers of the Ryerson Theatre’s sound system, and a rare solo vocal per­form­ance from The Edge of the album’s haunting closing song, “Love Is Blindness.” U2 has always been a band that has been quite pro­tective of their cre­ative pro­cess, and judging by the loose­ness and candour demon­strated by the band as we see them revisit old songs and exper­i­ment with arrange­ments (we see Bono yelling out upcoming chord changes to the rest of the group), it’s clear that Guggenheim was able to cul­tivate an intimate level of trust with his subjects.

Shot over the course of six months earlier this year and com­pleted just a week before its world premiere last month at TIFF, Guggenheim’s doc­u­mentary digs deep down into the inner work­ings of a band at a pivotal and tumul­tuous phase in their career. My only com­plaint about From the Sky Down would be that the dir­ector doesn’t quite dig deep enough when it comes to looking at the whole of Achtung Baby, an album that Bono says in the film “is the reason we’re still here now.” An inor­dinate amount of atten­tion is paid to the cre­ation of “Mysterious Ways” and “One” (which are important songs, to be sure), while other not­able tracks such as “The Fly,” “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” and “Until the End of the World” are included only as per­form­ances or over the soundtrack, with little or no detail or insight into their ori­gins. One of the album’s best songs, “Ultraviolet (Light My Way),” isn’t men­tioned at all, nor can I recall even hearing a snippet of it in the film. Despite this rel­at­ively minor neg­ative, From the Sky Down is loaded with pos­it­ives that make it essen­tial viewing for any U2 fan.

Tagged as: music, U2

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Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan’s Hope

by Drew Kerr on October 6, 2011 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan's Hope

Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan’s Hope (Director: Morgan Spurlock): Considering the treasure trove of weird­ness and fas­cin­ating material that a massive event like San Diego’s annual Comic-Con offers up, it’s sur­prising the con­ven­tion hasn’t received the feature-length doc­u­mentary treat­ment until now. Director Morgan Spurlock’s Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope revolves around the 2010 con­ven­tion, exploring the evol­u­tion of Comic-Con from its origin as an event for hard­core comic book enthu­si­asts to one that now releg­ates the actual comic book aspect to the back­ground, with much more of an emphasis put on gen­eral pop cul­ture con­tent such as movies, TV, books, toys, and video games. Along with some of the film’s high pro­file pro­du­cers (Joss Whedon, Harry Knowles, and the unfail­ingly cheerful Stan Lee), numerous other celebs and artists like Frank Miller, Matt Groening, Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith, and Kenneth Branagh weigh in with their take on the con­ven­tion. The doc­u­mentary had a com­panion coffee table book released in July and is Spurlock’s second fea­ture this year after The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

Incorporated into the probing of the convention’s his­tory and rel­ev­ance are the indi­vidual stories of a handful of Comic-Con attendees. There’s the two ama­teur comic book artists looking for their big break into the busi­ness, who are willing to endure harsh cri­ti­cism of their port­fo­lios from pro­fes­sionals and the sting of rejec­tion. Then there’s the couple who met at the pre­vious year’s con­ven­tion, with the boy­friend hil­ari­ously attempting to break free from the clingy grip of his girl­friend in order to pick up the engage­ment ring (Lord Of The Rings themed, nat­ur­ally) he’ll present to her when he pro­poses during the con­ven­tion panel fea­turing Kevin Smith. Chuck, the crusty owner of America’s largest comics retailer, Mile High Comics, struggles with a decision to sell one of his ultra-rare issues to pay off some debts and gen­er­ally frets about how his sales at the con­ven­tion are going. Another man seeks the Holy Grail of toys for his col­lec­tion, a lim­ited edi­tion figure of Marvel Comics’ Galactus char­acter. Finally, there’s Holly, an aspiring cos­tume designer for whom a two minute appear­ance on stage at the Comic-Con mas­querade event is the biggest moment of the year. She and a small group of friends dress up as char­ac­ters from the Mass Effect video game.

Clearly, with so many examples of arrested devel­op­ment from these folks, there’s plenty of oppor­tunity for ridicule here. I mean, what’s not to laugh at in a scen­ario involving a grown mar­ried man who pur­sues a toy with unwavering con­vic­tion? Laughing at, and not with, these people is an inev­it­able by-product of such fan­at­ical beha­viour, but the viewer also can’t help but develop some level of respect for the pas­sion and focus the char­ac­ters demon­strate toward their obses­sions, des­pite the pum­mel­ling their indi­vidual levels of cool take. As a hard­core fan of U2 and Bruce Springsteen who has, on a number of occa­sions, spent any­where from twelve to six­teen hours at a time waiting in gen­eral admis­sion lineups at their con­certs and gotten puzzled looks from most people when I tell them about it, let me just say that on some level, I can relate to these Comic-Con eccentrics.

Despite the inter­esting sub­ject matter, Spurlock’s doc­u­mentary feels flat and just never achieves liftoff. He juggles a lot of dif­ferent storylines, but many of them lead to unful­filling con­clu­sions and to an uneven movie overall. I’ve seen nearly all of his pre­vious film and tele­vi­sion work and thor­oughly enjoyed every one, and Spurlock, like fellow doc­u­ment­arians Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield, has always taken an active onscreen and nar­rative role in his pro­jects. Here, the cha­ris­matic film­maker barely appears in the film and provides no nar­ra­tion. Perhaps there’s a con­nec­tion, per­haps not.

Tagged as: #tiff11, comics, geeks, nerds

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Your Sister’s Sister

by Drew Kerr on October 4, 2011

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Your Sister's Sister

Your Sister’s Sister (Director: Lynn Shelton): “Lynn Shelton”. Get used to hearing the name of the Seattle-based writer/director/producer/actor, because if her newest work is any indic­a­tion, she’s got a very bright film­making career ahead of her. Her fourth fea­ture and the follow-up to 2009’s acclaimed Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister is one of the smartest, most enga­ging rela­tion­ship dramas (laced with charming humour) I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s that good.

The story doesn’t exactly jump off the page, per­haps reading as the type of standard chick flick material that audi­ences have seen over and over again, with a sub­dued tone and pace that some viewers might find chal­len­ging. The magic in the film lies with the hon­esty and nat­ur­alism that Shelton derives from her char­ac­ters and their inter­play, delivered by equally out­standing per­form­ances from the three leads, who impro­vised about 75% of their words. Emily Blunt plays Iris, the best friend of Jack (played by Mark Duplass) and the former girl­friend of Jack’s brother, who died roughly a year before the movie begins. Jack, who’s unem­ployed, just can’t seem to get out of his mourning funk, so Iris encour­ages him (prac­tic­ally forces him, actu­ally) to spend some time at her father’s cabin on an island in Puget Sound. Jack takes her up on the offer and, upon arriving at the remote cabin, finds a house­guest already there. That would be Hannah, Iris’ sister (played by Rosemary DeWitt), who is also seeking a little solitude to clear her head after just ending a seven year long les­bian rela­tion­ship. Mix a bottle of tequila with some bad judge­ment and the pair end up having awk­ward sex. The fol­lowing day, Iris unex­pec­tedly shows up, thus set­ting in motion the com­plex tri­an­gular dynamic that forms the core of the film.

Blunt, DeWitt, and Duplass have an imme­diate, win­ning chem­istry with each other and they’d better. Aside from its first fif­teen or so minutes, the film almost exclus­ively fea­tures just the three actors on screen and most of that time is spent within the four cabin walls, which gives the film a very intimate the­at­rical feel. DeWitt and Blunt, in par­tic­ular, find a famili­arity and com­fort with one another that suc­cess­fully sells us on their sis­ter­hood, des­pite the curious fact that Iris has an English accent and Hannah an American one. I loved that Shelton holds off on revealing the reason for the accent dis­crep­ancy until well into the film, as the puzz­ling detail just kind of hangs there in an intriguing and only mildly nag­ging way. It might seem like an odd cre­ative choice on Shelton’s part, but it actu­ally stems from the fact that Rachel Weisz, a Brit, was ori­gin­ally sup­posed to play Hannah before pulling out at the last minute. DeWitt, usu­ally one of the best things in any­thing I’ve ever seen her in (espe­cially her work on Showtime’s United States of Tara), deserves even more credit for her per­form­ance, con­sid­ering the lack of pre­par­a­tion she had before jumping into the movie’s lean twelve day shooting schedule. Along with Shelton’s work, another major rev­el­a­tion for me was Duplass, who I’d pre­vi­ously never heard of. He proves more than cap­able of hand­ling the movie’s demanding dra­matic material, while also demon­strating a real flair for its comedic require­ments via his goofy charm. And it turns out that like his dir­ector, Duplass also writes, dir­ects, and pro­duces films with his brother, Jay. Their latest movie, Jeff, Who Lives At Home, premiered at this year’s TIFF.

The film’s soundtrack deserves spe­cial men­tion. Composed by Vince Smith (who handled all aspects of sound recording and design on this pro­duc­tion), it meshes nicely with Shelton’s visuals fea­turing the scenic Pacific Northwest, and his score plays a key role during an extended montage sequence at the end of the movie that has next to no dia­logue. The sequence is a bit of a gamble on Shelton’s part, but it’s nicely put together and doesn’t sap the film’s momentum as the story comes to its conclusion.

Your Sister’s Sister was picked up for dis­tri­bu­tion at TIFF by IFC Films for a summer 2012 release. Hopefully, a movie this quiet and clever can find an audi­ence amidst the clatter of the studio tent­pole offer­ings. Those who do dis­cover it will be treated to a film that wasn’t just the best thing I saw at the fest­ival, but the best film I’ve seen this year.

Tagged as: #tiff11, siblings

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Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding

by Drew Kerr on September 30, 2011

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding

Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding (Director: Bruce Beresford): Jane Fonda takes on just her third acting role in the past 21 years in dir­ector Bruce Beresford’s latest film. It’s not dif­fi­cult to see what drew Fonda to the showy char­acter of Grace, an eccentric hippie that allows her to send up her lib­eral Hanoi Jane image. What is hard to figure out is why she pulled her­self out of semi-retirement for a dramedy that has little else going for it, as Grace inhabits a cine­matic world that sur­rounds her with dull char­ac­ters and unin­ventive storylines.

The plot: Diane, a repressed, con­ser­vative New York City lawyer (played by Catherine Keener) sep­ar­ates from her hus­band of 20 years and decides to take her two kids Zoe and Jake (played by Elizabeth Olsen and Nat Wolff, respect­ively) to visit her mother (Fonda’s char­acter) in Woodstock, New York. Diane and Grace haven’t spoken in 20 years, an estrange­ment appar­ently stem­ming from an incident where Grace tried to sell an attendee at her daughter’s wed­ding some pot. Seems a little harsh, but okay. We know Grace is wacky because she lets chickens stay inside her house and still lives like the 60s never ended. Naturally, Diane’s kids come to love their cool new grand­mother because she rep­res­ents everything their uptight mother isn’t. The gang’s earn­estly trans­form­ative trip finds Diane and Grace trying to heal their rela­tion­ship, while Diane and the kids also all laugh­ingly set off on their own romantic adven­tures: Diane hooks up with a carpenter/singer-songwriter played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe with a butcher played by Chace Crawford, and Jake with a diner wait­ress played by Marissa O’Donnell.

Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert’s script suf­fers greatly from an unima­gin­ative over-reliance on the theme of oppos­ites to create dra­matic ten­sion. That might be fine if they played this card once or twice, but they go to the well three times with it in pairing char­ac­ters with dia­met­ric­ally opposed beliefs and ways of life. Along with the mother/daughter rela­tion­ship we also have Zoe, a staunch veget­arian, falling for a guy who slices and dices dead animals for a living, and Diane fights her ingrained repres­sion (and the fact she’s mere days removed from leaving her hus­band) as she falls for Morgan’s free spir­ited char­acter. By the way, Morgan’s tone-deaf singing per­form­ances are by them­selves enough for me not to recom­mend the film. The other major problem with the script is the reunion of Diane and Grace and the intro­duc­tion of the kids to their grand­mother for the first time. There’s some mild awk­ward­ness, but other than that it just feels com­pletely devoid of any emo­tion or basis in reality.

Fonda’s per­form­ance is one of the few redeeming parts of the film, even if Grace does veer some­what toward being a cari­ca­ture of an aging bohemian. Despite being 73, Fonda still brings a sex­i­ness and energy to her work that’s a good fit for her mis­chievous char­acter — her “cock block” line is one of the fun­niest I’ve heard in a film this year. Otherwise, Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding dis­ap­point­ingly plays it safe and straight up.

Tagged as: #tiff11

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