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

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Backyard

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.

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The Hour (BBC)

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!

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Animation Express 2

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.

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Deep End

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.

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Tabloid