It Might Get Loud (2008, Director: Davis Guggenheim): There has never been a proper documentary film made about the guitar. Director Davis Guggenheim thought it would be interesting to examine the unique guitar sound of three guitar legends — Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White. To watch the film with all three musicians in the audience was an incredible experience. To have the The Edge and Jimmy Page sit two rows directly in front of me was surreal.
Okay, fanboy comments aside, this was an interesting film from beginning to end. Jack White starts off the film by making a simple guitar with a Coke bottle, some wire and a few pieces of wood. Awesome!
I’m not a huge fan of Jack White but Guggenheim’s film gave me a new appreciation for White’s talent. I’m a big fan of the Edge and love the music of Jimmy Page so to find out how each musician developed their unique sound is a fascinating history lesson.
The production values of this film are quite slick. Guggenheim uses some incredible archival footage to show us where these three musicians got their start.
Each guitarist was interviewed separately and I found these segments to be the strongest and most interesting parts of the film.
Guggenheim ends the film by bringing all three musicians to Los Angeles so they can play together and discuss their musical style. It makes for an interesting jam session but it turns out to be the weakest part of the film in my opinion. I found out that Page can’t really sing but I enjoyed watching them play each other’s music and have a good time.
RocknRolla (2008, Director: Guy Ritchie): I’m a fan of Guy Ritchie’s British gangster films and RocknRolla is one entertaining movie. There are the usual double-crosses, multiple story lines, Tarantino-like dialogue and the impressive ensemble cast — Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, Ludacris, and Jeremy Piven.
The plot is confusing at times but voiceover narration ensures that you can follow along without getting too lost. It doesn’t require repeated viewings like Ritchie’s last film, Revolver (2005).
The soundtrack is scorching, the camera style is familiar and the setting is east London. There isn’t anything new or groundbreaking about this film except maybe the sex scene with Thandie Newton and Gerard Butler. It lasts a few seconds and you’ll find it quite amusing.
RocknRolla is centred around a real estate scam with a Russian billionaire and a British crime boss (Tom Wilkinson). There are several sub-plots involving an expensive painting that goes missing, a rock star who fakes his own death, and a police snitch. I don’t want to give away too much so you’ll have to see it for yourself when it gets released this fall.
Guy Ritchie introduced the afternoon screening that I saw at the Ryerson theatre but didn’t stick around for a Q&A afterward (the premiere was the night before). I found the movie to be a lot of fun and exactly what I expected. Sometimes you just want to be entertained instead of discovering the next Godard.
Hunger (2008, Director: Steve McQueen): I’ve been finding it very hard to formulate my thoughts on this film, but as I said to my wife as we walked out of the screening last night, I’d be very surprised if anything else I see at TIFF this year could be better. Director McQueen is a visual artist who is well known for his video installations, but this is his first feature film. Hunger won the Camera d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and I expect it to win many more awards once it’s released theatrically.
The film portrays the events surrounding a hunger strike that took place in 1981 in the Maze prison in Belfast, Northern Ireland. By the time the hunger strike had been called off after 7 months, 10 men had starved themselves to death. The first to die was Bobby Sands, 27-year-old leader of the republican prisoners. Hunger begins by showing a few other peripheral characters but about fifteen minutes in settles on Sands (Michael Fassbender), an intense and defiant man who is leading the jailed members of Catholic paramilitary organizations like the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army in a protest to gain separate status as political prisoners. The problem is that they’re facing a British government led by Margaret Thatcher, a woman for whom compromise was impossible. At the beginning of the film, conditions in the prison are deplorable, made even worse by the prisoners’ practice of dumping their urine into the hallways and smearing their cell walls with feces. They refuse to wear prison uniforms and so are often naked, and they refuse to bathe or shave or have their hair cut. In these barbaric conditions, they look like animals and are treated like animals by the nakedly partisan (ie. Protestant and Unionist) prison system.
But far from using words for exposition, the first third of the film is remarkably sparse in dialogue, but intensely rich with images and, especially, sounds. McQueen uses close up shots of a guard’s bloody knuckles, and we can guess how they were bloodied. We hear the terrifying beat of batons on the riot squad’s shields, and we know that violence is in the air. Even in the silence, we can feel the tension of something threatening to erupt at any moment. When Sands is introduced, it’s in a brutal scene of guards dragging him from his cell to be forcibly shaved and washed. He seems unable to just submit to this humiliation and he’s beaten severely. The camera doesn’t spare us any details. We also see in close ups the way that the prisoners smuggle communications in and out of the prison, using their bodies ingeniously to conceal messages. But after this is discovered, there’s another horrific scene in which each prisoner is submitted to a painful and humiliating body cavity search. It’s wrenching stuff, and when Sands decides to start the hunger strike campaign, it’s almost as if he’s decided that it’s the only form of control he has left over his own body.
The middle section of the film is a tour de force of acting and directorial restraint. In one static two-shot that extends more than twenty minutes, Sands and his priest (Liam Cunningham) argue over the morality and efficacy of using a hunger strike to get what the prisoners want. This section felt like watching a play, and the lack of facial close ups forces the audience to find visual clues in multiple places, in posture and gesture and tone of voice. The interplay between the two characters is compelling and by the end, Sands’ determination has grown.
The final third is almost completely free of spoken dialogue. Instead we watch as Sands’ body wastes away and his mind begins to inhabit a different place. To watch this man do violence to his own body in this way is almost even crueller than the earlier scenes, but he reaches a sort of purity of purpose that lives in his eyes, which are blazing until the very end.
Although this is a narrative film, and based on a real story, the way in which the story is told is almost completely different than most other narrative films. Imagery and sound design are as equally important as dialogue and character development. This was completely absorbing and one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theatre. Maybe that’s why I find myself so inarticulately fumbling to try to describe it.
P.S. In a scene that almost derailed the whole experience, a group of about ten women sat in the front rows and were visited before the screening by actor Michael Fassbender, who proceeded to sign autographs and have his photo taken with each of them as they clucked and screamed and giggled incessantly. My wife and I couldn’t figure out what was going on until at some point in the post-screening Q&A it was mentioned that he had also starred in 300. The irony was thick. From a slick blockbuster accused by many of being a thinly-veiled fascist propaganda piece preparing Americans for a war with Iran to a deeply personal film that explored the value of a single life. The women were undoubtedly impressed by Fassbender’s “ripped” body in the blockbuster, and I wonder how they reacted to seeing his “torn” body in Hunger.
Food Inc. (2008, Director: Robert Kenner): In this comprehensive and yet compelling film, director Robert Kenner, along with authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Nood Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) indict the American (and by extension, global) food industry. Just the fact that we call the producers of our daily bread an industry at all shows what sort of major changes have taken place in the worlds of farming and raising livestock in the past century. The explosion of fast food in the 1950s brought factory methods to the production of food and the ensuing consolidation among corporations has resulted in an increasingly monopolistic marketplace. To save costs, the size of farms and feedlots and slaughterhouses has escalated and safety standards and working conditions have plummeted.
This wide-ranging film touches on almost every conceivable issue that has affected our food supply, from new bacterial organisms that threaten our health, to deteriorating goverment regulatory bodies, the widespread use of illegal immigrant workers, and the explosion in diabetes rates among the young. And yet we’re still sold an image of American’s agrarian past, and we believe it. None of the big food producers were willing to talk to Kenner, and so he spoke to others: to the woman whose 2-year-old died from an E. Coli infection, the chicken farmer who refused the demands of one of the big corporations and lost her contract, the man trying to fight for slaughterhouse workers’ rights, and the articulate organic farmer who’s simply trying to fight the good fight for honest and healthy food. And more than just talking heads, there are some eye-popping images from slaughterhouses and some incredible overhead shots of the vast feedlots where the majority of our food comes from.
Most disturbing, or at least problematic, is the recent phenomenon of small organic food companies being bought up by the large corporations. Is this a legitimate attempt to “green” their businesses, or is it just “greenwashing”? Is the fact that Stonybrook Farm, the largest organic food company, is now selling its products at Wal-Mart a good or a bad thing? The film touches on the subject but leaves the conclusions to us. That’s a bit symptomatic of a film which brings up so many serious issues, but doesn’t have time to tackle them all. I’d recommend the two books above as a starting place, and the film’s accompanying web site also promises to be a useful resource, not just for educating ourselves, but for taking some action.
It’s a little difficult for me to be objective about this subject, because I’ve read the books and have seen a number of documentaries over the past few years on this subject, but I am hopeful that this film has the potential for mass appeal where others have not. After our screening, there was a long ovation and some insightful questions. It remains to be seen whether this film will catch the imagination of the mainstream (non-film-festivalgoer) population. I desperately hope so.
Waltz with Bashir (2008, Director: Ari Folman): I think calling this an animated documentary might be stretching it a bit, but director Ari Folman has created something really interesting. He’s used animation to go where documentary filmmaking hasn’t been able to take us before, into the memories, dreams and nightmares of its subjects. The film starts when Ari (looking uncannily like Italian film diarist Nanni Morretti) shares a drink with an old army buddy who describes his recurring nightmare of being chased by 28 dogs. After finding out that this relates to specific incidents from the 1982 Lebanon war, we discover that Ari Folman has little recollection of his participation in that conflict. But after this meeting, he begins having a strange recurring dream and after consulting a psychologist friend, he decides he needs to try to figure out why his memory seems blocked.
As he interviews other participants in the war, he begins to piece together his part in a larger narrative, that of Israeli compliance in the massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. “Christian” Phalangist militias entered the camps and massacred men, women and children for three horrific days, killing more than 3,000. Despite the militias’ stated aim of rooting out Palestinian fighters, the vast majority of these fighters had been evacuated weeks before. The bloodbath was widely seen as revenge for the assassination of the Phalangists’ leader, the recently-elected President Bashir Gemayel. Although Folman’s memory is never completely reliable, he seems to remember his army unit firing flares so that the militias could carry out their work at night.
The most shocking moment of the film comes right at the end, when the animation suddenly snaps into real-life video footage of the carnage, leaving a dramatic impression. Despite the unreliability of memory, and the nature of guilt (both survivor guilt and that of someone who killed other human beings) and its effect on the mind, this footage is evidence of a real atrocity, and Folman and his comrades have had to live with their part in this tragedy for more than twenty years. It’s no wonder that he used animation; it’s the perfect way to recreate nightmares.
Unfortunately, the director flew home after the film’s opening screening and wasn’t present for a Q&A.
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