Now before you think that I’m breaking out of my writer’s block with a vengeance, based on that title, I’ll have to let you down ever so easily. It’s actually the title of a really interesting film lecture series coming up at the Miles Nadal JCC. Each Monday night from January 16 through March 26, from 7:00 until about 9:00, critic and author Kevin Courrier (Critics at Large) is going to examine this meaty-sounding subject with a selection of film clips. The films under discussion make this sound fascinating:

• Monday January 16: The Kennedy Era (The Godfather, Part II, The Manchurian Candidate, JFK assassination news coverage)
• Monday January 23: The Johnson Era (Bonnie and Clyde, Dr. Strangelove, In the Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, Night of the Living Dead, The Wild Bunch, Bullitt)

• Monday January 30: The Nixon Era (Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, Dirty Harry, Billy Jack)
• Monday February 6: The Carter Era (The Conversation, All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver, Winter Kills, Who’ll Stop the Rain, Nashville, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Star Wars)
• Monday February 13: The Reagan Era (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Blow Out, Pennies from Heaven, Diner, The Border, The Survivors, Moscow on the Hudson, Under Fire)
• Monday February 20: No class
• Monday February 27: The Bush Era (Field of Dreams, True Believer)

• Monday March 5: The Clinton Era (Primary Colors, Forrest Gump, JFK, In the Line of Fire, Love Field, Three Kings, The Contender, Wag the Dog, The West Wing (TV))
• Monday March 12: No class
• Monday March 19: The GW Bush Era (We Were Soldiers, Tears of the Sun, The 25th Hour, Team America: World Police, Fahrenheit/Fahrenhype 9/11)
• Monday March 26: The Obama Era (Rachel Getting Married, Definitely, Maybe, No Country for Old Men, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Hurt Locker, The Visitor)

Tickets are $12 for each class ($6 for students) or $100 for the entire series, and are available in person at the Miles Nadal JCC information desk (750 Spadina Ave. at Bloor St.). Hope to see you there!

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism

I know things have been pretty quiet around here since my big philosophical post last month. And while I’m still experiencing writer’s block when it comes to reviewing individual films, I haven’t been sitting around feeling sorry for myself. In fact, I’m busier than ever. In addition to coordinating the second edition of the CAST Awards (look for an announcement early in the new year), I’ve decided to take my long-gestating idea for a shorts screening public.

I’ve always enjoyed short films, but seeing them outside of festivals has never been easy. In fact, even at festivals, they’re usually bundled together in unpromising sounding packages like “Canadian Shorts 1″ or “Programme 6.” And the problem at the spectacular Worldwide Short Film Festival, where they group the films thematically, is just overload. I’ve always wanted to curate a regular program of films that would be something like a mixtape, and in 2009, I started doing it on a small scale.

I’d been a huge fan of Wholphin, a DVD “magazine” of short films from the people behind McSweeney’s, ever since the first one came out in 2005. By 2009, I was still amazed that hardly anyone I knew had heard of it, so I decided to screen a selection of films for a small group of friends at my apartment. It was a hit, and not only because of the cupcakes my wife thoughtfully provided. After running a few more of these nights, I wanted to share my enthusiasm and some great films with the rest of the city. Starting last winter, I began researching venues and licensing fees and possible partners, and I’m very happy to announce that we’re finally launching!

On January 13, 2012, at 7pm, Shorts That Are Not Pants will screen our inaugural program of international and Canadian shorts at the NFB Mediatheque (150 John St. at Richmond). I’ll refer you to the site for more details, but I sincerely hope you’ll join us at the start of this new adventure.

My plan is to make this a quarterly event, and we hope to be working with a variety of partners. For the first screening, we’re showing the entirety of the Future Shorts Pop Up Festival lineup, as well as a couple of wonderful animated Canadian shorts from the National Film Board. But I’m excited by the fact that there is such a wealth of great material out there that has either never been screened before in Toronto, or was buried amongst hundreds of other films at festivals. I’m looking forward to discovering and sharing films with you, live and on the big screen. Hopefully we’ll even get a group together after the screenings to discuss the films over a drink. Short films are worthy of your attention, and I hope to demonstrate that to a larger audience than just the dozen I’ve been cramming into my apartment. I hope you’ll join us!

You can buy tickets for just $8 in advance. At the door, tickets will be $10, or $5 if you’re crazy enough to show up in shorts. Even if you can’t make it and want to support the series, buy a ticket and just let me know that’s your intention. Of course, mentioning us on Twitter (follow us here), Facebook (we have a page) or anywhere else online or off would be helpful, too. I’m certainly not hoping to make money on this, but it would be great if I didn’t lose too much.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Announcing Shorts That Are Not Pants!

Years before he was persona non grata at the Cannes Film Festival, I discovered the films of Danish “bad boy” Lars von Trier at the old Cinematheque Ontario. So it’s fitting that the folks behind the Cinematheque are bringing a mini-retrospective of his work to their new digs at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Beginning tonight and running through November 19, six of von Trier’s earlier films will be shown as a sort of appetizer for his latest, Melancholia, which opens on Friday November 18.

Still from Melancholia (2011)

Though I’m disappointed with the omissions, both obvious (no Antichrist?) and not-so-obvious (The Kingdom would have been perfect running over a few nights, and Epidemic seems not to be shown much), I’m most excited to revisit the (literally) dark early films that were my introduction to his work. The Element of Crime (1984) is a sort of police procedural, with a protagonist who practically goes mad trying to track down a serial killer in a post-apocalyptic and dreamlike environment that just might be the inside of his own head. And Europa (1991), the very first of von Trier’s films I saw, which follows a naive young American working as a porter on a very strange train in post-World War 2 Germany. Both films are dripping with style, evocative images, and dark, dreamlike plots.

Still from The Element of Crime (1984)

I’d also like to finally see The Idiots and Dogville, both of which seemed reliably provocative when I saw clips during Adam Nayman’s excellent class earlier this year at the Jewish Canadian Cultural Centre.

Still from Europa (1991)

Here are the details for the schedule. Don’t forget that in addition to the retrospective, you can see Melancholia beginning Friday November 18.

• Breaking the Waves (1996) — Wednesday November 9, 6:30pm
• The Element of Crime (1984) — Friday November 11, 6:30pm
• Europa (1991) — Saturday November 12, 8:00pm and Thursday November 17, 9:15pm
• Dogville (2003) — Wednesday November 16, 6:30pm
• Dancer in the Dark (2000) — Friday November 18, 6:00pm
• The Idiots (1998) — Saturday November 19, 8:00pm

As always, tickets are available online.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Waiting for the End of the World: Lars von Trier Retrospective at TIFF Bell Lightbox

From October 2nd through December 13th, TIFF Bell Lightbox will present a retrospective of the work of iconoclastic American director Nicholas Ray (1911–1979). It’s a full-scale exhibition in honour of the centenary of Ray’s birth, and will continue into the new year with another selection of his work.

Ray was a unique character, making personal films about alienated youth and vulnerable people within the Hollywood studio system. Perhaps best known for his work with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Ray had been exploring the same themes from the very beginning of his career. His first feature, They Live By Night (1948), featured two naïve young lovers on the run from the law; it was remade by Robert Altman as Thieves Like Us (1974) and was a huge influence on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973). Other career highlights screening during the series:

• In A Lonely Place (1950): Humphrey Bogart gives one of his best performances as a man accused of murder who finds love but sees it destroyed by his self-loathing rage.
• On Dangerous Ground (1952): Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino star in this noirish tale of the transforming power of love.
• Bigger Than Life (1956): a Technicolor marvel featuring James Mason in a terrifying turn as a benevolent teacher transformed by the side effects of a drug treatment.
• Bitter Victory (1957): an anti-heroic war film set in the North African desert during World War II, the film pits two British officers against each other in the aftermath of a love triangle.

Ray’s focus on outsiders, on the lonely and misunderstood misfits in our midst, was ahead of its time, and has endeared him to modern directors like Jim Jarmusch (who studied under him at NYU in the 1970s), Martin Scorsese, and many of the figures of the French New Wave, most notably Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. It was Godard who, in his review of Bitter Victory, provided the quotation that forms the title of the series:

There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforward there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray.

Tickets for all screenings are now available to order online.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray at TIFF Bell Lightbox

From July 14–31, TIFF Bell Lightbox is presenting a retrospective of the work of pioneering American independent filmmaker John Cassavetes (1929–1989). It’s the first time in 20 years that such a major exhibition of Cassavetes’ work has taken place in Toronto.

Beginning his career as an actor with roles on stage as well as on television and film (including a memorable turn as Mia Farrow’s husband in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby), Cassavetes always chafed against the strictly economic focus of the studio system, and was one of the first filmmakers to finance, make and exhibit his films outside the existing infrastructure of the Hollywood movie business. Working with a small group of collaborators and friends, including his wife Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes made a handful of films that have had an enduring influence on American filmmaking, including the work of directors as different as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

I am eagerly looking forward to correcting yet another blind spot in my knowledge of American film history, especially since Cassavetes’ obsession with characters rather than plots is right up my alley. In many of his films, his characters are ordinary people facing difficult situations or at major turning points in their lives. He also chose to work with actors who looked and spoke like regular people, using his friendships to challenge them to dig deeper and to give some of their rawest and most direct performances. Some of his regular collaborators (Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel) are among my favourite actors, and I’m especially looking forward to seeing the recently-departed Falk light up the screen again.

Tickets are available online for the entire series, including a very special conversation with Gena Rowlands on July 14th at 6:30pm. She will also introduce her Oscar-nominated performance in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) at 8:45pm that evening, as well as Cassavetes’ second feature Faces (1968) on Friday July 15th at 6:30pm. More information on the series is available on the TIFF Bell Lightbox site.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Masks and Faces: The Films of John Cassavetes at TIFF Bell Lightbox