DVD

Backyard

by James McNally on January 31, 2012 · 0 comments

in Documentaries,DVD

Backyard

Backyard (Director: Árni Sveinsson): While it’s true that I’ve long been a fan of Icelandic cinema, I have been a fan of Icelandic music for even longer. In the late 1980s, a band called The Sugarcubes and their elfin singer Björk intro­duced me to the unique sounds of this tiny country, and since then, I’ve come to love dozens of bands from Iceland. Someone in another recent doc­u­mentary about Iceland’s seem­ingly bound­less cre­ativity said that the fear of failure is almost nonex­istent, so people take risks. They also help each other out, which is exactly how Backyard came to be.

Each August the city of Reykjavik cel­eb­rates Menningarnótt (Reykjavik Culture Night), a daylong cel­eb­ra­tion of the cre­ative spirit of its cit­izens. There are all kinds of offi­cial and unof­fi­cial events, and in 2009, Árni Rúnar Hlöðversson (of FM Belfast) decided to hold a con­cert in his back­yard and invite his friends to play. He wanted to record the audio, but he also invited his friend Árni Sveinsson to shoot video. None of the bands (or even the two Árnis) thought they were making a “real” movie, so the whole thing is incred­ibly loose. Based on my own exper­i­ences in Iceland, most things organ­ized are “incred­ibly loose.” Icelanders like to fly by the seat of their pants, to be honest, but it gives the film a real energy, too.

Though we get the back­ground around the plan­ning (which seems to happen in a matter of days), the majority of the film’s brisk 73-minute run­ning time is given over to the per­form­ances, and what a treat. The lineup is incred­ibly diverse, from the lo-fi styl­ings of Borko and Sin Fang Bous to the raucous assault of Reykjavik! to the feel-good party sounds of Retro Stefson and FM Belfast (whose finale “Underwear” is guar­an­teed have you boun­cing around your living room grin­ning like an idiot). And though the musical styles change, it’s great to see how many bands actu­ally share mem­bers. In a small place like Iceland, this might be a neces­sity but it also allows for some very inter­esting musical cross-pollination. It’s fit­ting that the film ends with many of the musi­cians soaking together in one of Reykjavik’s thermal swim­ming pools.

Some of these bands (múm, Hjaltalín) were known to me, but most were new dis­cov­eries, and luckily the DVD package (buy it here!) comes with an audio CD of the songs as well. It’s been on con­stant rota­tion over the past few months for me, rein­for­cing my sin­cere belief that Iceland is pound-for-pound the most cre­ative place on the planet.

Official site of the film

Tagged as: iceland, music

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The Hour (BBC)

by James McNally on January 29, 2012 · 0 comments

in DVD,Television

The Hour
Editor’s Note: The Hour will be released on DVD and Blu-ray in the US and Canada on February 7 by BBC America. You can help Toronto Screen Shots by buying from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

For my Canadian readers, I must begin by saying that obvi­ously this is not the CBC chat show with George Strombolopoulos. Instead, The Hour is a BBC series about the making of a tele­vi­sion news­magazine pro­gram in the 1950s. This prom­ises the art dir­ec­tion of Mad Men with the back­stage man­euv­ering and larger polit­ical intrigues of some­thing like Good Night and Good Luck. Starring a cast of British actors who will be largely unknown to North American audi­ences (Romola Garai, Dominic West, Ben Whishaw), the six hour-long epis­odes of this first season (or “series” as the English more accur­ately describe it) set up the cre­ation of a new pro­gram to deliver the news to the British public in the early days of television.

It’s 1956 and TV news is still being delivered like the news­reels shown in the cinema. Young BBC reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) and his best friend/crush Bel Lyons (Romola Garai), already bored of the way they’re presenting the news, apply for pos­i­tions on a new pro­gram, “The Hour.” But there is also a dark con­spiracy brewing, and by the end of the first episode, two people are dead, one of whom was a friend of Freddie’s. While he invest­ig­ates the murders, Bel is coping with her new pos­i­tion as pro­ducer as well as flirting with the hand­some anchorman Hector Madden (Dominic West). Whishaw has just the right amount of cyn­icism to play the underdog, and based on the first hour, I’m hopeful that the con­spiracy stuff will win out over soap opera melo­drama and romantic entanglements.

The series has been a suc­cess on British tele­vi­sion and has already been renewed for another six-episode series.

Tagged as: bbc, Television, uk

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Animation Express 2

by James McNally on December 2, 2011 · 0 comments

in DVD

Animation Express 2 Blu-ray

Animation Express 2 (Directors: Various): It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since the National Film Board of Canada released the ori­ginal Animation Express col­lec­tion. I raved about that col­lec­tion, and although sequels are usu­ally not as good as the ori­ginal, this second col­lec­tion is just as stuffed with treas­ures as the first.

Particular favour­ites include the exper­i­mental CMYK, where printer’s marks dance around the screen to the music of the Quatuor Bozzini quartet, and Wild Life in which an Englishman trades his bowler hat for a cowboy hat, coming to Alberta in 1909 to try his hand at ranching. It doesn’t quite work out in this whim­sical and yet haunting film.

The DVD con­tains 20 more (and the Blu-ray 26 more!) and while I don’t like all of them quite as much as the two above (I par­tic­u­larly didn’t like the Meryl Streep and Forest Whitaker-voiced Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life), this col­lec­tion con­tinues to gather the very best in Canadian anim­a­tion, some of the most-awarded work in the world.

P.S. Though I’ll be posting more about this later, you can see both CMYK and Wild Life on the big screen as part of a new shorts screening series I’m launching in January. Behold Shorts That Are Not Pants. Hope you can join us!

Tagged as: animation, blu-ray, nfb

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Deep End

by James McNally on November 2, 2011

in DVD

Deep End
BFI Flipside released Deep End in a combo DVD/Blu-ray package in the UK on July 18, 2011. The region-free package is avail­able from Amazon.co.uk.

Deep End (Director: Jerzy Skolimowski): Somewhat con­demned to art­house obscurity after its 1970 release, Skolimowski’s first film in English (prior to this he was best-known as the co-writer, with Roman Polanski, of Knife in the Water) is a fas­cin­ating time cap­sule of a period between the hope and energy of the 1960s and the rather more dark decade to come. A stylish exer­cise from a dir­ector who has at various times in his life worked as a poet and painter, its nar­rative of adoles­cent obses­sion ends up being far more visu­ally impressive than psy­cho­lo­gic­ally convincing.

Fifteen-year-old Mike (John Moulder-Brown) drops out of school and takes a job as an attendant at a slightly seedy public bath­house in London. Almost imme­di­ately he is smitten by his spunky and street­wise col­league. Flame-haired Susan (Jane Asher) is in her early 20s and engaged, but not in any par­tic­ular hurry to get to the altar. In fact, she’s car­rying on an affair with one of Mike’s former teachers, a mar­ried man who gropes and man­handles his female stu­dents at will.

Mike is imme­di­ately jealous of both of the other men, and car­ries out childish acts of sab­otage when he’s not stomping off in a sulk. Susan’s beha­viour doesn’t help, since her flir­ta­tion often has a cruel edge. She seems to enjoy drawing him close and then pushing him away. Meanwhile, at the baths, she instructs Mike to accept tips from the female cus­tomers for any “extra ser­vices” he can provide. We’re never quite sure that she isn’t doing the same for the men, and when, during a sur­real night in Soho, Mike seems to learn that his crush might also be working as a stripper, it pushes him closer and closer to the edge of accept­able beha­viour. It’s a line that we know is def­in­itely going to be crossed by the end.

BFI’s res­tor­a­tion of the film is remark­able, and since most of the film’s appeal is visual, it makes for a stun­ning present­a­tion, espe­cially on Blu-ray. Also enlight­ening is a feature-length (74 minutes) doc­u­mentary on the making of the film, with input from Skolimowski, Asher, Moulder-Brown and many others. There’s also a short film star­ring Asher exploring obses­sion from a female per­spective, as well as another short doc­u­mentary about scenes which weren’t included in the film. Finally, a sub­stan­tial booklet is included with essays from David Thompson, Yvonne Tasker and Skolimowski expert Ewa Mazierska.

While I appre­ci­ated the film’s daring visuals and the theme of adoles­cent sexual obses­sion, I found the script weak and the per­form­ances uneven. In a few places (par­tic­u­larly one scene with former blonde bomb­shell Diana Dors), the film played like a classic British sex farce in the manner of the Carry On films, making its third act turn into darker ter­ritory some­what jar­ring. But the leads are beau­tiful to look at, as is London (even though much of the film was actu­ally shot in Munich!) and the soundtrack (with songs by Cat Stevens and Can) evokes a time and place that per­fectly suits our protagonist’s tragic loss of innocence.

Tagged as: 1970, adolescence, obsession, uk

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Tabloid

by James McNally on October 31, 2011 · 2 comments

in Documentaries,DVD

Tabloid
eOne released Tabloid on DVD in Canada on November 1, 2011. Help sup­port Toronto Screen Shots by buying it on Amazon.ca.

Tabloid (Director: Errol Morris): Joyce McKinney first came to the atten­tion of dir­ector Errol Morris back in 2008 when she paid a huge sum to a Korean lab to have her beloved dog Booger, recently deceased, cloned. As inter­esting as that story was, it was nothing com­pared to Ms. McKinney’s earlier exploits. Back in the late 1970s, she’d been a tabloid sen­sa­tion in the UK due to her involve­ment in a bizarre kid­nap­ping plot involving a Mormon mis­sionary. Ex-beauty queen McKinney claimed that her boy­friend Kirk Anderson had been brain­washed by Mormons and taken to England against his will, and that she was simply set­ting out to rescue him. But the rescue involved a fake gun, chlo­ro­form, and Anderson’s con­fine­ment (involving either ropes or chains, depending on the source) in a rural cot­tage where he was raped over a period of sev­eral days. McKinney’s ver­sion reads much more romantic­ally. She took Kirk to a “hon­ey­moon cot­tage” where they cooked meals and made love. She wanted to take him to a “quiet” place where she could essen­tially depro­gram him from what she con­sidered the cult-like indoc­trin­a­tion that was keeping them apart. She was even­tu­ally arrested and charged, and as the story emerges, the British papers had a field day. After three months in cus­tody, she was granted bail along with her accom­plice Keith “KJ” May, and they promptly fled the country, dis­guised as deaf-mutes. To hear her describe it today, it all sounds like a lark, rather than crim­inal behaviour.

Once back in the US, she con­tacted one of the tabloids, the Daily Express, to sell her story. Meanwhile, its com­pet­itor, the Mirror, was attempting to dig up some dirt on the woman loudly pro­claiming her inno­cence. And boy did they suc­ceed. I won’t spoil any more of the film’s many enter­taining sur­prises, but I promise you that you’ll be riv­eted. And that’s surely Morris’ intent, but I believe he’s also very con­sciously implic­ating all of us in a con­tinuing tabloid story. Why do we love these kind of lurid tales, and what makes us so happy to see someone pour out details of their life that any rational person would keep private? It’s inter­esting to note that although Joyce McKinney par­ti­cip­ated readily in the film’s pro­duc­tion, she’s since dis­avowed it, going so far as to turn up at some of the film’s fest­ival screen­ings to dis­pute cer­tain aspects of her portrayal.

And that’s where the film makes me a bit uncom­fort­able. McKinney is charming and a born storyteller, per­fectly happy to explain her side of the story, and sounding reas­on­able most of the time. But as I con­tinued to watch, it became more and more clear that she’s almost cer­tainly men­tally ill. Her obses­sion with the romantic fantasy of Kirk being “the one” for her has con­demned her to a lonely life where this bizarre tale is her only nar­rative. She has the like­ab­ility of most pro­fes­sional liars, and when parts of her story don’t add up, she simply throws another curve­ball to dis­tract us. At one point, refer­ring to Kirk’s sup­posed brain­washing, she says, “you can tell a lie often enough that you believe it.” It’s all ter­ribly sad, and I wonder if Morris should have simply let this story, great as it is, go past him.

On the other hand, it’s a chance to have a dis­cus­sion about these kinds of issues. Are films and stories like this exploit­ative, or are they simply a part of human exper­i­ence? I’m sure Joyce McKinney, no matter what she claims after the fact, was delighted to be able to tell her unfor­get­table story to a whole new audi­ence, and sad as it may be to give any more atten­tion to some­thing that happened so long ago, she seems to relish the oppor­tunity to revisit it. It’s both unfor­tu­nate and com­pletely under­stand­able that the Prince Charming in her romantic fable, Kirk Anderson, has refused all requests for inter­views over the years. He’s busy living a reg­ular guy’s life.

Tagged as: scandal

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