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
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
Editor’s Note: I’m gradually figuring out that my Snapshots category is for films which baffle me a little but whose visual or other elements won’t leave me alone. I’d characterize myself as someone who’s much more comfortable talking about plot and character than about, well, anything else to do with film. So please indulge me.
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Director: Nicolas Roeg): It really doesn’t surprise me a bit that this film baffled the critics upon its release. Perhaps the presence of David Bowie in his first film role led them to believe it would be a musical. Or perhaps they expected a straight-up sci-fi film like some others from that era (Logan’s Run, Rollerball). What they got instead is something like a sci-fi western satire, which of course makes no sense at all. It didn’t help that in the US, twenty minutes of crucial footage was excised.
Roeg wasn’t at all worried about working with a non-actor like Bowie, having worked with Mick Jagger in Performance a few years earlier. He knew that rock stars like Jagger and Bowie were performers, able to inhabit a persona just as skilfully as any actor. And Bowie’s performance is fine; he’s able to harness his physical charisma perfectly playing a cipher onto which the other characters project their own needs.
The film still baffles today, even as it dazzles with some great visuals. The closest I can come to unlocking some its meaning is to say that it’s the story of an alien becoming human. Bowie plays “Thomas Jerome Newton,” a visitor from a planet which is dying from drought. His mission is to find water and return with it to his planet. But he quickly becomes corrupted by his contacts with people and ends up secluded in a huge apartment like Howard Hughes. At the beginning of the film, his alien intelligence allows him to register some unique patents and form a company that becomes incredibly successful. But his wealth leads those closest to him to betrayal, and the government, suspicious of his company’s success, destroys his business, confines him and carries out medical experiments to see what makes him different. There is a mishmash of ideas at work in the film, but at root it’s the story of an innocent corrupted by exposure to the venality of human society.
His relationships are formed with other outsiders, who are drawn to his vulnerability as well as to his intelligence, wealth or influence. Mary Lou (Candy Clark) falls in love with him, and uses him to escape her life as a hotel maid with a booze problem. When he reveals his true self to her in a memorable scene, she is unable to bear it. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn), a college professor with a weakness for co-eds, devotes his life to scientific research for Newton. He’s the only one who really guesses Newton’s secret, and he vows to help him develop the technology needed to get him back home. And Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry), the man to whom Newton entrusts his company, is a gay man in the 1970s, when discrimination would have been much worse than it is now. But each of these trusted confidantes betrays him in one way or another, because of lust, greed, or a desire for power.
At the end, he doesn’t even seem to mind so much. “We’d have probably treated you the same if you’d come over to our place,” he tells Bryce when asked if he’s bitter. The angelic being introduced at the beginning of the film has become as jaded and cynical as the rest of us. The Man Who Fell to Earth is a strange, sad and haunting thing.
Note: The stills are from the standard-def DVD. The Blu-Ray from Criterion looks very nice indeed, and if you have the option, I’d recommend the Blu-Ray unreservedly.
A few other tidbits about the film:
- The last still above, of Brueghel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is an important touchstone, as is W.H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts which comments on it. Both pieces emphasize that Icarus’ fall was pretty much ignored by the rest of the world. Newton’s plight is similarly smothered by the world; first by its curiosity, then by its suspicion and finally by its indifference.
- Bowie did record some music for the film but it wasn’t used. It ended up as Side 2 of his album Low (1977)
- Bowie also used the interior of the space travel set (in the fourth still above) for the cover of his album Station to Station (1976)
Essay by Graham Fuller on the Criterion website
(8/10)
Tagged as:
blu-ray,
criterion,
scifi
L’heure d’été (Summer Hours) (Director: Olivier Assayas): On the one hand, Summer Hours has been getting some of the strongest reviews of the year, and yet in some quarters it is being derided as “the furniture movie.” Let me explain.
Hélène (Edith Scob) is the matriarch of a large extended family. Her daughter Adrienne and sons Frédéric and Jérémie visit her in her country home perhaps twice a year. Her uncle was a famous painter and so the house is filled with valuable objets d’art; paintings and furniture are both everyday objects and valuable art pieces. She pulls aside eldest son Frédéric (Charles Berling) during a family visit to speak to him about what should be done with all these things after her death. He doesn’t want to listen. Of course we’ll keep the house as it is, he tells her, for them and their children. But when she dies unexpectedly, it turns out that his siblings have different feelings.
Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) works as a designer in New York City and is constantly in motion. She treasures her memories but has no attachment to the things now that her mother has gone. Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) works as a plant manager in China and has settled there with his wife and children. He needs money to buy a bigger house. So the push and pull begins over what to do with everything. Considering some of the criticism I’d heard, I expected this to be petty, but it definitely is not. This family loves each other deeply, but their lives have taken them to different places.
Assayas’ film pointedly asks us what our “stuff” actually means to us. Hélène laments that when she goes, so much goes with her. Each object in her house has a history that only she can tell. The children’s memories are different, less attached, and the grandchildren hardly know the place at all. The film is a moving meditation on growing old and leaving the world. When each person dies, she takes many things out of the world forever. Though the objects are left behind, their life has gone with the person who held their story. In the end, objects, even beautiful ones, are only objects when their stories have been forgotten.
Far from being a movie about furniture, Summer Hours is about human beings and their absolutely unique contributions to the world. I could not watch this film without thinking every second of another film. Mia Hansen-Løve, Assayas’ wife, directed the similarly powerful Le père de mes enfants (The Father of My Children) (review). Not only do they share a similar theme, but both feature the lovely and magnetic Alice de Lencquesaing, who has a very bright future ahead of her. As well, both directors have an incredible way of working with their actors, coaxing performances of real depth. Though I don’t think Hansen-Løve’s film has yet received the acclaim it deserves, the two films would make a wonderful double-bill.
Official site of the film
(8/10)
Tagged as:
aging,
death,
family,
france
