Hot Docs 2011 Preview, Part 2

Posted on April 19, 2011 by James McNally
Hot Docs 2011 (April 28-May 8, 2011)

As promised, here are a few more films that I’m anticipating at this year’s Hot Docs, which kicks off April 28. Tickets and passes are on sale now.

The National Parks Project

The National Parks Project (Directors: Various): I missed the one screening of this film that took place in Austin at SXSW last month, but won’t miss my chance at Hot Docs. This project brings together 13 filmmakers and 39 musicians to create short films about 13 of Canada’s national parks during the centenary of the founding of Parks Canada. It’s an enormous project that also features a television series documenting the making of each of the films, so I’m looking forward to exploring this for a long time to come.

Official site of the project


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjLTBj1bVYc

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The Pirate Tapes

The Pirate Tapes (Directors: Matvei Zhivov, Roger Singh, Andrew Moniz, and Rock Baijnauth): Tracing the rise of piracy in the waters off the Horn of Africa, this film features a young Somali-Canadian who smuggles a hidden camera along as he takes part in a pirate raid. Even as it promises to uncover the complex roots of the problem, this film also buzzes with the energy of a real-life thriller.

Official site of the film

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Cinema Komunisto

Cinema Komunisto (Director: Mila Turajlic): A cinematic history of Yugoslavia, a country which no longer exists. From the idealism of the post-war period to its eventual collapse barely a decade after the death of its architect Marshal Tito, the history of Yugoslavia is bound up with its output of films which aspired to use the myths of wartime heroism to propel its people into a harmonious and prosperous future.

Official site of the film


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9k7hm1M54Y

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Knuckle

Knuckle (Director: Ian Palmer): For more than a decade, director Ian Palmer documented the feuds of the Travellers, an itinerant subculture living in caravans all over Ireland. Through contests of bareknuckle boxing, the intensely clannish community resolves its disputes. Knuckle introduces us to a pair of brothers as they fight for their family’s honour.

Official site of the film

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Christopher Doyle Talks Chungking Express at TIFF Bell Lightbox

Posted on April 18, 2011 by James McNally

Cinematographer Christopher Doyle has worked with some of the world’s most renowned directors over a career that has spanned almost three decades. Best known for his work with Asian directors, perhaps his greatest collaboration over the years has been with Wong Kar-wai. The two first worked together on 1990’s Days of Being Wild but the partnership really hit its stride with 1994’s Chungking Express (above), where, according to the TIFF notes, Doyle transformed Hong Kong into “a woozy array of sublime neons and entropic slow-motion, a dizzying dance of disorientation and displacement.” Amazingly, the film was shot in just two months in the middle of the protracted production of Wong’s epic Ashes of Time.

Doyle will be at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Saturday April 23 at 7:00pm to discuss his work on Chungking Express and likely many of his other films as well. Tickets are available now.

Chungking Express opens its own engagement at the Lightbox on Thursday April 21st and will play for at least a week.

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Hot Docs 2011 Preview, Part 1

Posted on April 7, 2011 by James McNally
Hot Docs 2011 (April 28-May 8, 2011)

Spring is springing and that means Hot Docs, my favourite film festival of the year. The 18th annual Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival will present 199 films this year between April 28th and May 8th, and you’d better believe that I’ll be there covering it. In fact, it will be my own eighth year of attendance, and fifth as an accredited journalist. Negotiations are underway, but I believe we’ll have reviews again from the Doc Brothers, Jay and Drew Kerr. Some screeners have already found their way to me, and I’ll be seeing lots at the festival, too, so look for extensive coverage of what looks to be a very strong year for documentary film.

Here are just a few films that I’m looking forward to seeing at this year’s festival. Look for additional preview posts between now and when the festival begins on April 28. Tickets and passes are on sale now, so don’t hesitate!

El Sicario, Room 164

El Sicario, Room 164 (Director: Gianfranco Rosi): A hooded man sits in a hotel room and describes in detail his life as a hitman for the Mexican drug cartels. Without ever leaving the confines of the room, the film takes us into a shadowy world of violence and betrayals.

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Gnarr

Gnarr (Director: Gaukur Úlfarsson): In the wake of Iceland’s economic implosion, comedian Jon Gnarr launches a political party as a joke. The last laugh is on him when the citizens of Reykjavik, fed up with politics as usual, propel him into the mayor’s seat.

Official site of the film


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cTAJNxwur0

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Becoming Chaz

Becoming Chaz (Directors: Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato): A friend of mine recently “came out” as transgendered, and I want to learn as much as I can about a very misunderstood topic. I’m also very curious to see how Chaz (formerly Chastity) Bono, the little girl from the Sonny & Cher show, has dealt with both the transformation and the intense curiosity of a celebrity-obsessed culture.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLUy2L3PjQU

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The Interrupters

The Interrupters (Directors: Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz): From the co-director of Hoop Dreams comes another Chicago story of hard knocks and hope. We follow three “violence interrupters” in Chicago who are now desperately trying to protect their communities from the violence they once embraced.

Official site of the film


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmm0MZLGxY

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Halal police d’État (Halal Five-O)

Posted on March 27, 2011 by James McNally
Halal police d'État (Halal Five-O)
Halal police d’État (Halal Five-O) is screening as part of Cinefranco on Thursday March 31 at 9:00pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Halal police d’État (Halal Five-O) (Director: Rachid Dhibou): French comedy duo Eric and Ramzy (Eric Judor and Ramzy Bedia) star in this utterly stupid but frequently funny farce about two Algerian cops solving a serial murder case in Paris. Looking like a North African Borat, Inspector Nerh-Nerh (Ramzy) is picked to represent the Algerian force when one of their diplomats is murdered in a corner grocery store. He takes along Kabyle (Eric), a former cop who claims to have been abducted by aliens, an incident which has left him without his Algerian accent. He also appears to be hiding an alien stowaway, but we’re never quite sure he just hasn’t lost his marbles.

The film plays upon every racial stereotype in the book for laughs, and it probably resonates with a lot of French North Africans when our two heroes are repeatedly busted by French cops, beginning as soon as they step off the plane from Algiers. When the case they’re working on turns out to be part of a string of killings at corner groceries all over Paris, the local cops think they’re dealing with the Chinese mafia. Only Nerh-Nerh, in true Inspector Clouseau fashion, determines that it’s really the work of a secret network of white supremacist Catholics. In the end, the conspiracy is revealed, with the help of a visitor from space, and everyone learns a valuable lesson.

This crowd-pleasing trifle borrows heavily from everything from the Pink Panther movies to Mel Brooks to the previously-mentioned Borat. And although the humour will likely have a sharper edge for the French audience for whom it was made, Halal police d’État kept me entertained right up to the utterly ludicrous final set piece.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP4REAu7VW0
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Room in Rome

Posted on March 21, 2011 by James McNally
Room in Rome
eOne released Room in Rome on DVD in Canada on March 1, 2011. Help support Toronto Screen Shots by buying it on Amazon.ca.

Room in Rome (Director: Julio Medem): My disillusionment with the work of Julio Medem continues. After one great film (1998’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle), I’ve found the rest of his work creepy and self-indulgent. His last film, 2007’s Chaotic Ana (review) infuriated me, but when I saw the synopsis for Room in Rome, I thought he might be able to deliver a simpler, more character-based story.

Alba (Elena Anaya) and Natasha (Natasha Yarovenko) meet while drinking at a bar in Rome and Alba invites Natasha back to her room after what we assume to be a mutual attraction. Natasha claims never to have been with a woman before, and is reluctant to let herself be seduced by the more experienced Alba. But one thing leads to another and the two experience an intense one-night stand. So far so good. They’re both beautiful women and based on Medem’s previous work, there was bound to be an abundance of flesh on display. I was even prepared for a bit of talkiness in the service of character development. But true to Medem’s self-indulgent style, we get so much more than we can believe.

The women spend the first half of the night lying to each other about who they are. Spaniard Alba makes up a story about being spirited away with her mother by a Saudi prince to live in luxury, while Russian Natasha claims to be an actress. One of the things that annoyed me so much about Medem’s previous film was the constant desire to show off, manifested in lots of different locations around the world. In this film, we still get to travel around the world; only this time, bizarrely, it’s using Bing’s Virtual Earth software on Alba’s laptop. This gimmick is repeated so often that it becomes almost a Microsoft commercial.

The characters speak to each other in English despite the fact that we later find out they can both speak Italian and Spanish. This makes the dialogue sound even more ridiculous than it would in another language. When it turns out that Natasha has a twin, who’s a tennis player and who is actually an actress, it’s hard to tell where the tale-spinning will stop. Natasha confesses that her name is actually Dasha and that she is really just a lowly art historian. Coincidentally, Alba’s room is filled with Renaissance paintings that the two women can discuss when they’re not writhing around with each other. Alba’s real identity is even more ludicrous. She’s a mechanical engineer who’s invented a form of ecologically-friendly transport. When they both end up singing Volare in the shower, you might think it couldn’t get much sillier. And then it does, with Max the opera-singing room service waiter.

Medem is certainly an able filmmaker and even a capable stylist. But his films so often seem to be reaching for profundity and failing miserably. Ponderously paced, and with a repetitive and annoying soundtrack, Room in Rome is able to take all the fun out of what might have been a sexy premise. The characters feel fake, the romance feels fake, and like a one-night stand, the next morning leaves you feeling empty of anything except regret.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOlWezhYuBY
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