Worldwide Short Film Festival 2011 Opening Night Gala

Posted on June 1, 2011 by James McNally

Last night was the Opening Night Gala of the CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival. This annual celebration of short film will feature 275 films in 33 programs over the next five days, and will include events at Yonge-Dundas Square as well as the return of their roaming “Shorts Bus.”

As is their custom, the organizers of the festival dedicate the Opening Night program to award-winning shorts from around the world. This means that these films have screened lots of other places, but for me, they’re still discoveries.

  • Bukowski (8 minutes, Netherlands, Director: Daan Bakker): A boy on holiday with his family convinces the hotel staff that he is the hard-bitten American writer Charles Bukowski. A one-note joke that is not without its charms. (7/10)
  • West of the Moon (10 minutes, USA, Director: Brent Bonacorso): A nonsensical plot about remembering a dream or something is the whisker-thin narrative framework on which the director hangs his considerable skills as a visual stylist. The very definition of a calling-card short, I found it a little “show-offy” for my taste, although I have no doubt that Mr. Bonacorso will soon be gainfully employed on much larger projects. (7/10)
  • Big Bang Big Boom (10 minutes, Italy, Director: Blu): Truly inspired. A work of graffiti animation that must have taken a very long time to create, encompassing an entire cityscape with the story of the universe’s beginnings from Big Bang to human civilization. Wildly ambitious and insanely labour-intensive, this didn’t feel as nakedly ambitious as West of the Moon simply because this sort of skill doesn’t seem to be quite as marketable. (9/10) (Note: The image above is from this short.)
  • Lipsett Diaries (14 minutes, Canada, Director: Theodore Ushev): An animated mixture of documentary and fiction, exploring the troubled life of Montreal-born experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett who took his own life in 1986. Dark and intense, it did succeed in making me curious about Lipsett’s life and work, although it can make for difficult viewing. (8/10)
  • Na Wewe (You Too) (19 minutes, Belgium/Burundi, Director: Ivan Goldschmidt): In 1994, a busload of Burundians is stopped by Hutu soldiers and ordered to separate into two groups: Hutus and “Tutsi cockroaches.” An absurd scenario follows which is played mostly for laughs. The sense of menace seems incongruous with the tone the director is trying to maintain, and the ending is just preachy. Issues of race are complicated, we get it. Smug and a bit silly. (6/10)
  • The Lost Thing (15 minutes, Australia, Directors: Andrew Ruhemann, Shaun Tan): A boy finds a strange creature on the beach and tries to return it to where it belongs. Wonderfully unique animation but I found the resolution of the story terribly depressing. Based on the book by Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. (7/10)

Stay tuned for more reviews as the fest continues to June 5th. Tickets are available online, at the Cumberland Terrace box office location, and at each venue.

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Love Shines

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Drew Kerr
Love Shines

Love Shines (Director: Doug Arrowsmith): Love Shines is a first-rate, in-depth portrait of acclaimed Toronto singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith. Director Arrowsmith, a hardcore Sexsmith devotee, avoids turning his film into a fanboy gushfest; instead, he unabashedly presents the singer with all of his flaws nakedly on display. Sexsmith is a painfully insecure and introverted individual – your classic “tortured artist”, as it were – and it’s surprising how much access into his life he gives Arrowsmith, in whom he clearly put a great deal of trust. Shot over the course of seven years, the documentary was originally conceived to stop filming after Sexsmith’s then career high of headlining at Toronto’s famed Massey Hall, back in 2006. Instead, Arrowsmith kept shooting, which presented the opportunity to chronicle the recording of Sexsmith’s twelfth album, Long Player Late Bloomer. Those recording sessions, which provide some intriguing insight into Sexsmith’s creative process, are the centrepiece of Love Shines, and the film is significantly better because of it.

Sexsmith, for those unfamiliar with his career (and I counted myself in that group before watching the documentary), has been a perennial critics’ favourite since his debut solo album came out in 1995 (he released an album four years prior as a member of Toronto indie band The Uncool). Peers such as Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, Leslie Feist, and Daniel Lanois have been singing his praises for years and do so throughout the film. In fact, Costello, one of Sexsmith’s biggest champions, equates his skill for creating melodies to that of Paul McCartney. Despite the accolades, Sexsmith still sells a paltry number of albums, which is a constant source of angst for him. The ongoing struggle with maintaining artistic integrity while seeking mainstream success informs much of the narrative in Love Shines, leading to the enlistment of mega-producer Bob Rock to oversee the recording of Long Player Late Bloomer. Rock is primarily known as a hard rock/metal producer, based on his earlier work on a number of hugely successful albums from the likes of Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, and The Cult. Most notably, he was Metallica’s exclusive producer for 12 years and is more than used to working with an artist and having their every move filmed, as was the case for the fantastic doc on the band, Some Kind Of Monster. In recent years, he’s diversified his scope to include acts such as Nina Gordon, The Tragically Hip, and Michael Bublé. Sexsmith hopes the pairing will raise his profile via the pure name recognition that the producer brings, as well as increase album sales by way of the more commercially palatable and highly polished sound that Rock gets from the artists he works with. A stellar group of veteran musicians is brought on board to play on the album, including drummer Josh Freese (Nine Inch Nails, A Perfect Circle), guitarist Rusty Anderson (Paul McCartney), bassist Paul Bushnell (Elton John, Sugarland), and keyboardist Jamie Edwards (Aimee Mann).

Periodic and introspective glimpses back into Sexsmith’s upbringing reveal a shy youngster who struggled with his confidence and endured abuse from bullies while growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, eventually becoming a father at age 19 after getting his girlfriend pregnant at the same moment he lost his virginity. Certain milestones from Sexsmith’s career are shown, including a home movie scene where we see his parents, watching the 2002 Juno Awards on their home television, become ecstatic over his win for Songwriter of the Year. In it, his mother is seen excitedly taking pictures of the TV screen as her son wins the award, apparently unclear of how a VCR works. It’s one of the funniest (and sweetest) moments in the film. “Funny” is not exactly a word anyone would associate with Sexsmith himself. In his interviews with Arrowsmith, he comes across as a fragile, depressed, and lacking confidence, which reminded me of a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Better Days”: “It’s a sad man, my friend, who’s livin’ in his own skin and can’t stand the company.” Most of the theatre audience stuck around for the post-screening Q&A session with Sexsmith and Arrowsmith, and I must say I felt downright horrible that I had to leave about halfway through to catch my last Hot Docs screening uptown. As I conspicuously descended the stairs and walked across the front of the theatre, past the singer to the exit, I couldn’t help but worry that Sexsmith was tapping into his ever-present insecurities and wondering why someone wasn’t interested in hearing what he had to say. Does that make me narcissistic or empathetic?

Early indications (it came out in March) indicate that Long Player Late Bloomer won’t propel Sexsmith to significantly new heights of commercial success. The album actually turned out to be a hard sell to prospective music labels, with some ironically rejecting it as being too mainstream. Still, it should improve on the sales numbers from his last several albums and this film (which is now airing on HBO Canada) should help him find a new audience. Whether it’s the excellent music, financial struggles that one wouldn’t expect a “name” musician to face, the strange dichotomy of a guy who hates the spotlight but performs in it for a living, or just the fact that Sexsmith makes for a great underdog story, non-fans will find plenty in Love Shines to hold their interest.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-hVxqBidkU
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The Invisible Eye (La mirada invisible)

Posted on May 28, 2011 by James McNally
The Invisible Eye (La mirada invisible)
The Invisible Eye opened theatrically at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on May 26, 2011.

The Invisible Eye (La mirada invisible) (Director: Diego Lerman): Based on the novel Moral Sciences by Martín Kohan, The Invisible Eye attempts to link Argentina’s crumbling dictatorship with the social order inside an elite private school during the autumn of 1982. Maria Teresa (Julieta Zylberberg) is a young teaching assistant who seems to enjoy the small amount of power she has, imposing order and discipline on students just a few years younger than her. She’s also fascinated by her supervisor Mr. Biasutto, a man who, it’s implied, has received this posting as a reward for unspecified services in the military coup that brought the generals to power in 1976.

In a performance with hardly any sustained stretches of dialogue, Zylberberg brings an iciness to her role while also showing her youthful insecurity. And Lerman is successful in creating an atmosphere of quiet terror in the school. Perhaps too successful. The film itself feels airless, joyless and oppressive. We see Maria Teresa either at school or at home, where she lives in cramped quarters with her mother and grandmother. In a rare social excursion, she seems isolated from her work colleagues and cool to the advances of a male teacher. But she lets Biasutto flirt with her and take her out for coffee. And then she develops an obsession with a male student, although her only way of relating to him is either as an authority figure, or more disturbingly, as a voyeur.

With Biasutto’s blessing, she begins spying on students, ostensibly to root out “subversive” behaviour like smoking, but her own sexual repression leads her to spend long hours crouched in a toilet stall in the boys’ bathroom. Here the film and character are reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (review), but the political allegory never lets us get to know Maria Teresa quite as well as the woman Isabelle Huppert portrays. We only know that she’s unable to relate to anyone as an equal. Either she dominates or is dominated, and by the end, it leads to violence and tragedy. Unfortunately, the political message is so heavy-handed that events within the school have to be taking place at the same time as parallel events are taking place in the streets just outside, which weakens the film. But Zylberberg’s performance is always interesting to watch, especially as someone who seems to be profiting from an authoritarian system. It makes one wonder what happens to all of these minor cogs when dictators inevitably fall.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3zMDrwHFAY
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Superheroes

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Drew Kerr
Superheroes

Superheroes (Director: Michael Barnett): Superheroes do exist, even if they come up a little light in the “super” department (by way of an obvious lack of superpowers). My first exposure to real life superheroes (referred to as “RLSH”) was a fascinating 2008 article in Rolling Stone magazine that took a look inside the subculture, which is estimated to comprise 700 individuals worldwide who dress up in costumes and attempt to effect some manner of positive change in their communities. Director Michael Barnett turns his camera on the subject in Superheroes, zeroing in on different pockets of RLSH in a number of major American cities.

Master Legend, with his pudgy frame packed into a tight silver and black costume partly made up of spray painted protective hockey equipment and baseball catcher shin guards, heads up the Orlando, Florida chapter of the Team Justice network. He was prominently featured in the Rolling Stone piece and gets plenty of camera time here as well, due to his colourful personality, including an occasional holy roller speech, proclamations that he actually possesses super powers, frequent stops for beer breaks, and a habit of trying to pick up women (all while dressed in his costume). It’s a reality TV series waiting to happen. Mr. Extreme, from San Diego, also has a most unsuperhero-like physique and draws inspiration partly from the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, who he seems to have a fascination with on a level that just isn’t healthy for a grown man. Zimmer, a gay RLSH from Brooklyn, refuses to wear a mask, equating it with someone who is trapped in the closet. The unimaginatively named Super Hero, from Florida, takes a little too much pride in his sweet crime fighting ride, a flashy red Corvette Stingray. New York City’s Life takes his costume cues from The Green Hornet and his moral code from a Hasidic Jewish upbringing that instilled strong altruistic values. These are just a few of the numerous RLSH we meet during the film.

Make no mistake, these people take what they’re doing very seriously, even if there’s an unavoidable comedic element to adults patrolling big city streets while wearing costumes, some of which are, shall we say, of a highly amateurish nature; I believe I saw duct tape on one costume and the outfit of a RLSH named The Vigilante Spider looked like something straight out of a grade school play. The common thread is that all of these people are passionate about trying to make a difference in the world, despite the personal risks of bodily harm, social ridicule, and some financial burden. Mr. Extreme even moves out of the dumpy rented house he inhabits and into his van, just so he can put more money into his cause, which includes offering rewards out of his own pocket for tips that lead to solving crimes. This begs the question: are these people of sound mind? Clinical psychologist Robin Rosenberg, an expert on the psychology of superheroes, provides helpful insight into the topic from time to time throughout the film. Also interviewed is superhero creator-icon Stan Lee, who admires the RLSH chutzpah, but worries about their safety.

Where the film falters is in its lack of action and interesting scenarios where the RLSH do, in fact, fight actual crime. We see one stand up to an intimidating drug dealer peddling his wares out in the open in a park, while another New York collective of RLSH takes a few more risks. On different occasions we see them carrying out “bait patrol” operations, which entail having one of their female members dress up in provocative clothing and walk the street, trying to lure potential criminals into committing a sexual assault. Alternately, they dress Zimmer up in a flamboyant outfit in hopes of attracting a potential gay basher. The rest of the group is always close by to provide quick backup. It’s an ethically dubious way of “fighting crime” and, as a police lieutenant informs us, borders on entrapment. The most excitement we get is watching the group take the keys from a drunk driver who is seen sideswiping other parked vehicles (they assure him they’ll mail them back the next day). They also come to the rescue of a man who gets his foot run over by a passing car. Not exactly edge-of-your-seat adventure, is it?

So it turns out that the most significant impact these people make is simply by being Good Samaritans and doing charitable things like handing out care packages to the homeless, and organizing Christmas toy drives for underprivileged kids. It may not be flashy (other than the costumes they wear), but it’s still highly admirable and more than most of us can say we do to help our fellow man.

Superheroes will be airing on HBO this summer and receiving a theatrical release later this year.

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The Princess of Montpensier

Posted on May 25, 2011 by James McNally
The Princess of Montpensier
The Princess of Montpensier opens on June 3, 2011 for a theatrical run at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

The Princess of Montpensier (Director: Bertrand Tavernier): Tavernier was a press agent for the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, and has been making films of his own for more than 40 years. He’s made films in both French and in English, narrative films and documentaries that have been equally lauded. It’s clear that he’s an accomplished filmmaker with an admirable range. Which is all prelude as to why I found The Princess of Montpensier somewhat of a disappointment.

It’s 1567, and the young and gorgeous Marie (Mélanie Thierry) is in love with the roguish Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), even though she’s been promised to his younger brother Mayenne. Things become complicated when her father is persuaded by the Duc de Montpensier to marry his daughter to the Duke’s son instead. The prince (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) seems a decent enough young man, but he’s uneasy because he is vaguely aware of the chemistry between Marie and Henri, who is also his cousin. But the marriage will create a stronger relationship between the families, and the beautiful Marie is a desirable catch besides. When the prince is called away to fight yet another uprising by the Protestant Huguenots, he leaves Marie in the care of his mentor, the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), a former warrior who grew sick of the endless battles and deserted. As he teaches the finer points of astronomy, Latin and writing to Marie, he too falls in love with her.

Meanwhile, the prince and his cousin Henri meet on the battlefield, both fighting on the side of the King. Henri distinguishes himself as a brave soldier and is quick to remind the prince that he has stolen his true love. Over time, the prince’s jealousy grows to consume him, and his wife, though obedient, never warms to him with any real affection. Things are further muddled when the King’s younger brother, the Duc d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz) decides that he wants Marie, too, even if just for the thrill of the conquest.

Despite the prince’s increasing jealousy, Marie risks everything to be with Henri again, and ignoring his own feelings, Chabannes helps to bring them together. But even as Marie’s love remains pure and constant, things around her are changing all the time, and it’s apparent early on that true love will not triumph in the end.

A few scenes brought home how determined the lives of women (and to a lesser extent, men) were in those days, even (perhaps especially) among the noble classes. The wedding night scene was particularly repugnant. While Marie is bathed by her servants, naked, her father walks in to observe, and during the couple’s clumsy lovemaking, the two fathers are playing chess just a few feet away, awaiting the breaking of Marie’s hymen. When evidence is presented to the Duc de Montpensier, it’s as if he’s sniffing the cork of a bottle of wine that’s just been opened at his table.

Despite Marie’s early attempts to resist her marriage, and her later attempts to stay true to her heart, she remains more a sketch than a fully developed character, and that’s why all the fighting over her seems more about what she represents (beauty, innocence, conquest, influence) than about who she really is as a person. At one point, her husband tells her, “I don’t know who you are” and just for a minute we sense the characters’ powerlessness in the face of much larger forces conspiring to keep things that way.

Tavernier has made a technically proficient and attractive film out of a very old and simple story. I caught myself numerous times thinking that Shakespeare could have written this plot. But Shakespeare would have provided his characters with much more interesting things to say. I found the script just adequate and was never really captivated by the plight of the characters. The Princess of Montepensier never quite distinguishes itself from so many other respectable costume dramas, and I caught myself thinking that the filmmaking felt “old-fashioned” and not in a good way. The film hints at larger themes that might have been interesting to pursue further: the institution of marriage as a force of social cohesion vs. the individualism of pursuing one’s passion, just to name the most obvious one. Surely in its 150 minute running time, Tavernier could have devoted some time to exploring that rather than capturing yet another swordfight.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D5JTxLf_K4
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