Movie Review: Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go ****
Directed by: Mark Romanek.
Written By: Alex Garland based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Starring: Carey Mulligan (Kathy), Andrew Garfield (Tommy), Keira Knightley (Ruth), Iosbel Meikle-Small (Young Kathy), Charlie Rowe (Young Tommy), Ella Purnell (Young Ruth), Charlotte Rampling (Miss Emily), Sally Hawkins (Miss Lucy), Kate Bowes Renna (Miss Geraldine), Hannah Sharp (Amanda), Nathalie Richard (Madame).

Spoiler Alert: Never Let Me Go takes great pains to conceal it’s secret, only doling out a little information at a time before it hits you with what is really going on. Personally, I do not know how to review the movie without discussing the reveal, so if you do not know the secret (which is at least hinted at, if not spoiled by the trailers) please come back and read the review after you have seen the movie.

Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go is a strange movie. It is a dystopian science fiction film, set in an alternate past that disguises itself an English period piece – something that Merchant Ivory would have made at their peak. Well some critics have found this combination – along with Romanek’s purposefully cold and detached style for the film – disconcerting, I think it is absolutely vital to making the film work. Romanek doesn’t milk tears out of his audience, but gets them anyway, because the story is so engaging, the characters so real. Those who complain that the characters don’t make a break for it have completely missed the point of the movie – which in my mind is one of the best of the year.

The film tells us that following WWII, there was a mass expansion in medical testing, and by 1967 life expectancy had surpassed 100 years. The movie picks up sometime in the 1970s in a seemingly idyllic English boarding school, where something is not quite right. The grounds are gorgeous, the children learn to read and paint and sing, and everything looks like it is right out of Goodbye Mr. Chips. But there are no parents around ever, and they are never mentioned. There seems to be an obsession with keeping the children healthy, and they are overly excited by the prospect of their market days, where they can trade in their tokens for the kind of crappy, broken, outdated toys that everyone else would have long gotten rid of. Plus there’s the issue of the strange boxes in every room that the children have to scan their wrists on every time they enter. All their art work is evaluated and the best pieces are taken away by a mysterious woman known only as madam, who when we see her seems exceedingly creeped out by these seemingly normal children. To the children, all of this is normal, but to those of us in the audience something is certainly wrong with this picture. (I will again add a SPOILER WARNING because while I have not revealed anything yet, the next paragraph will).

One of their teachers finally takes pity of the children of Hailsham, the school that seems so perfect, and tells them the truth. None of them will go to America, become actors or work in a supermarket. They were made for a specific purpose – that is to grow up and then be harvested of their organs so that they can be used to save the lives of real people. They will have short, meaningless lives by most people’s standards. The children have undoubtedly been told something like this in the past, but never put so bluntly. They do not rebel, but almost seem resigned to their fate. Somehow rebelling is unthinkable to them.

Three students emerge from this group. There is the thoughtful, pensive, shy Kathy (played as a youngster by Isobel Meikle Small and then as a teenager and adult by Carey Mulligan), the sweet but volatile Tommy (Charlie Rowe as a child, Andrew Garfield later on) and the scheming Ruth (Ella Purnell then Keira Knightley). It is really their story that is told in the three distinct acts. First is their idyllic life in Hailsham, then they are moved to something called the cottages when they turn 18, and the sexual triangle between the three of them becomes more complicated, and finally 10 years later when both Tommy and Ruth have become donors and know that their time is limited, and Kathy has become a “carer” – a future donor whose job until they are called is to help the current donors through their donations until they die.
It is really the performances that make the movie so effecting, so involving. Mulligan nails the part of Kathy perfectly – creating a woman, who like many characters who are close to death, spends her time looking backwards, not forward, trying to glean some meaning from her short life. Garfield is excellent as the confused Tommy – he knows what it is he wants, but is somehow too scared to truly reach for it. And finally Knightley gives one of her best performances as the seemingly selfish Ruth – who gradually reveals herself to be just another scared little girl – and that is the last thing she ever wanted to be.

To the critics who thought that the movie was too cold, I have to disagreed. It is certainly true that Romanek has taken his cue from Kubrick in his somewhat detached style, but it works for this movie better than any other choice would have. It gets the formal air of a place like Hailsham perfect, and as the movie progresses, so does his direction – the color palette shifts slightly in each section of the movie, becoming warmer by the end. The critics, who wanted these characters to rebel and go on the run, are essentially asking Romanek to remake Michael Bay’s The Island. There is something all the more profound about Never Let Me Go because the characters don’t run – they accept their fate and try to glean some meaning, however small, about their lives where they are basically used and discarded by society. The film is quite moving right up until its final shot. If you think it’s too cold, too clinical, too detached, that’s your right, but I don’t think any other style could have worked any better than this one does. Never Let Me Go is a movie about life and death, a moving statement on both disguised as a sci-fi movie, disguised as an English period piece. That Romanek has crafted a film that hits all of these notes makes Never Let Me Go a triumph.

Movie Review: Enter the Void

Enter the Void ** ½
Directed By: Gaspar Noe.
Written By: Gaspar Noé
Starring: Nathaniel Brown (Oscar), Paz de la Huerta (Linda), Cyril Roy (Alex), Emily Alyn Lind (Young Linda), Jesse Kuhn (Young Oscar), Olly Alexander (Victor), Masato Tanno (Mario), Ed Spear (Bruno), Sara Stockbridge (Suzy).

I have to hand it to Gaspar Noe. It takes balls the size of watermelons to make a film as screwed up and daring as Enter the Void is. He had to have known that his film would alienate pretty much any audience member who ever dared to watch the damn thing, yet for two and half hours, Noe makes his dizzying, sometimes disgusting, sometimes ridiculous, always provocative film on screen and dares you to turn away. Most probably will. I, on the other hand, was enthralled.

Noe’s film is told in three distinct parts, all following the life and death of a low level drug dealer named Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) living in Tokyo. In the first part – approximately 20 minutes or so is told from Oscar’s literal point of view. The camera registers everything that Oscar sees – even registering his blinks – as he gets stoned (and hallucinates), then heads out onto the streets of Tokyo to conduct business, ending up in a disgusting toilet in a bar with the cops banging on the door before shooting him, and collapsing on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

The second part is a flashback of Oscar’s life, and everything that led him up to being in that bathroom in the first place. The camera hovers just behind Oscar – we are literally peaking over his shoulder to witness the events that shaped his life – including the brutal car accident that killed his parents, and his painful separation from his beloved younger sister Linda (who, we meet again in Tokyo, where she has become a stripper).

The third part, we are again seeing things from Oscar’s point of view, but this time after he is dead. He floats above the action, spying on his sister and his best friend Alex (Cyril Roy), who gave Oscar the Tibetan book of the dead before he died – the ideas of reincarnation contained within will certainly come into play in the film’s final act. In this part – undoubtedly the longest of the three – Oscar seems to transport himself through the lights in any given room, as the camera moves relentlessly into the light, goes a trippy, acid inspired visual montage, before coming out somewhere else entirely.

For the first two acts of the movie, I went with the movie. I realized fairly early on that this was going to be an entirely different type of movie, and that I had two choices – to give myself over to its insane visuals and narrative, or to fight it tooth and nail. Being lazy (and because I knew that if I fought the film, it would be a very long two and half hours), I picked the path of least resistance and found Noe’s visuals in the film astonishing, vibrant and original. Although I was disappointed that he chose to use this style on such a seemingly seedy, simple story, I didn’t mind because I felt like I was in the hands of a director who knew what he was doing.

Somewhere in the third act though, I lost patience. It became kind of a joke the number of times Noe and his camera “transported” itself – first through whatever lights were in the room, and later just about anything else. By the time Linda has an abortion, and we see the bloody fetus sitting in the sterile try, I was too busy wondering how long it would be before Noe used the fetus as his latest transport device (answer, about a minute), to be overly disgusted or offended by the image itself. By the time we get to the films overly long (not to mention overly literal) climax, I was passed the point of caring any longer. The film’s final sequence is an extended one (I’d say close to 20 minutes, but maybe it just felt longer than it was), as Oscar transports himself into the “Hotel Love”, where we see every character we have come across in the movie engaged in one form of sex or another. Once again though, I was too busy trying to figure out if the sex was simulated or not (it certainly looks real), to really care what Noe was trying to accomplish. By the time we get to the final couple – Linda and Alex – and Noe literally takes his camera inside Linda’s vagina for a POV shot of sex from the perspective of the vagina – complete with a cum shot that goes all over the camera – I realized that somewhere along the way, the entire enterprise had veered off into the ridiculous, and was not going to be able to recover by the films end.

Yet as ridiculous as I ended up finding Enter the Void, I cannot say that the movie is bad. True, I’m not sure even Noe really had any idea what his film means, and spent too much time trying to provoke a response from the audience (and, I might add, I don’t think he cares WHAT response he gets, as long as it’s a powerful one) and that at two and half hours, Noe goes at least one hour past the logical point of forcing an audience to endure a movie like this. But having said that, Enter the Void is also just about the most daring, most visually innovative film I have seen this year. I cannot say I much liked it – and I can honestly think of no one that I would actually recommend going to see the movie – but I also cannot say I was sorry to have seen the film. Too many directors these days play it all too safe. Say what you want about Gaspar Noe, and Enter the Void (and a lot has already been said), but play it safe, the film certainly does not.

Movie Review: Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass *** ½
Directed By: Tim Blake Nelson.
Screenplay: Tim Blake Nelson
Starring: Edward Norton (Bill/Brady Kincaid), Keri Russell (Janet), Melanie Lynskey (Colleen), Susan Sarandon (Daisy), Richard Dreyfuss (Rothbaum), Tim Blake Nelson (Bolger), Maggie Siff (Rabbi Zimmerman).

The opening scenes of Leaves of Grass seem to be a cross between a coming home story, a fish out of water comedy, and a stoner movie. But as the movie moves along, I was surprised by home involved I got in its story, how wrapped up I became in the characters. The movie sneaks up on you and ends up being quietly profound.

Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton) is a philosophy professor at a University in the Eastern USA. He comes from Oklahoma, but has done everything possible to put that behind him. He has gotten rid of his accent, and never goes back home from any reason. He has built up a sizable reputation for himself in his limited academic circle – so much so that Harvard comes calling, wanting to open a school of philosophy built around him. Life is good. That is before he gets a call from back home telling him that his twin brother Brady (Norton again) has been killed in a freak crossbow accident. This confuses his assistant, until he assures her that crossbows are “oddly popular where I come from”.

Of course, Brady isn’t actually dead. While he has just as high an IQ as Bill does, he has funneled his brains into an illegal pot growing operation. He grows the best pot in the area, and everyone knows it. That is why Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss), the local gangster, wants him to expand his operation. Brady owes Rothbaum a lot of money, but doesn’t want to expand. He calls Bill back home because he’s going to see Rothbaum, and doesn’t know how things will play out. If he has to kill him, Bill can provide him with an alibi by being in their small hometown where everyone will see him. Since Bill is never home, everyone will just assume that he is Brady. It’s actually a rather ingenious scheme when you think about it.

Nothing about Leaves of Grass turns out how we expect it to. Sure, we know that Bill will start to realize what he is missing back home, and he does fall for the local beauty Janet (Keri Russell), who is also smart and funny. And while that does happen, the movie takes a rather interesting route getting there. We know there are problems between Bill and his mother Daisy (Susan Sarandon), but when the expected heart to heart does take place, it doesn’t go as we think it will. Some old wounds never heal, you simply have to except them and move on.

Brady’s friend Bolger (writer/director Tim Blake Nelson) is another interesting example. When we meet him, we assume that he is just another Southern fried hillbilly, but he surprises us with just how sensitive, and yes, intelligent he is. In fact, all of the characters in the movie are like that. We assume we know who they are, but they surprise us throughout. Nelson, who is making his fourth film (following three strong efforts in Eye of God, O and The Grey Zone), has certainly seemed to learn from the Coen brothers, who he worked for in O Brother, Where Art Thou? The film strikes a similar comic tone, yet surprises us with its depth.

The performances anchor the movie, none more than Edward Norton who does his best work in years as the Kincaid twins. These two characters strike us initially as polar opposites. Bill is the buttoned down tight ass professor, and Brady the freewheeling drug dealer, yet Norton lets us see their similarities. He is obviously having a blast playing a redneck like Brady, but the character remains grounded in reality. Norton is one of the most talented actors of his generation, but has developed a reputation of being difficult, which may explain why he often works with first time directors. Here though, given a chance to shine, he truly does. He delivers a pair of fine performances.

The rest of the cast isn’t nearly as well written as the twins are, yet the actors make up for it. Russell is playing the idealized woman, yet makes her a little more vulnerable than normal. Melanie Lynsky, having a great year with this along with Away We Go and The Informant, is quite funny as Brady’s pregnant girlfriend. Sarandon is unapologetic as the mother, who is just waiting to die. And Richard Dreyfuss has not been this good in years, playing a Jewish gangster with a strange accent that is part Brooklyn Jew, and part Southern hillbilly.

Leaves of Grass remains a comedy throughout – with witty dialogue and clever set-ups, but it never loses sight of what it is – a character study. This is as intelligent as modern comedies get.

Note: I saw this film at TIFF 2009, and the film has yet to receive a proper release. It played in Chicago earlier this year, and apparently it opened in New York over this past weekend. I’m not sure why the film hasn’t gotten a proper release yet, and I have a feeling that most people are going to have wait to DVD to see movie. Please don’t miss it.

Movie Review: The Town

The Town *** ½
Directed by: Ben Affleck.
Written By: Peter Craig and Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard based on the novel by Chuck Hogan. Starring: Ben Affleck (Doug MacRay), Rebecca Hall (Claire Keesey), Jon Hamm (FBI S.A. Adam Frawley), Jeremy Renner (James Coughlin), Blake Lively (Krista Coughlin), Slaine (Albert 'Gloansy' Magloan), Owen Burke (Desmond Elden), Titus Welliver (Dino Ciampa), Pete Postlethwaite (Fergus 'Fergie' Colm), Chris Cooper (Stephen MacRay).

Sometimes I think we don’t quite appreciate a perfectly executed genre piece. Ben Affleck’s The Town is a heist movie that really does do nothing all that original. There is nothing here that you haven’t seen in other heist movies - like John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing or Michael Mann’s Heat to name but three of the best the grenre has produced. But rarely do you see a genre film that it delivered with this type of skill, both in front of and behind the camera. No, it’s not original. Yes, it’s pretty much a perfect example of the genre it belongs to.

The movie takes place in the Charlestown neighbourhood of Boston, a neighbourhood that apparently produces more armed robbers than anywhere else in the country. One of those crews in led by Doug McCray (Ben Affleck) with the help of his slightly psychotic right hand man James (Jeremy Renner). We see them at work almost right away, robbing a bank with expert proficiency, and taking the bank manager Claire (Rebecca Hall) hostage in case the cops come after them. They don’t, and they let her go, but Doug cannot quite let her go. There is something different about her, and so he arranges to bump into her, and the two begin dating, with her never expecting the truth. Meanwhile, FBI Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) wants to catch this crew, who is impressed by the professionalism of this crew.

And that’s all I am going to say about the plot of the movie, because one of the joys is to watch this tight thrillers plot slowly unfold. Affleck, who impressed me a great deal with his directorial debut Gone, Baby, Gone three years ago, builds on that one and has made another solid crime drama. Adapting Chuck Hogan’s great novel, Prince of Thieves, Affleck and his co-writers have boiled that big novel down to its essentials and has made a tightly plotted, exciting movie highlighted by great performances. Affleck himself has rarely been better as an actor than he is here as McCray, the thief who wants to leave it all behind. In Rebecca Hall, he has found a sympathetic female lead - one that it is not hard to believe that he would be able to leave everything for. Jon Hamm is solid as the straight arrow FBI agent, and Pete Postlewaite and Chris Cooper provide what are essentially cameo roles, but make them memorable. Best of all is Jeremy Renner, who exudes danger as his right hand man with a short fuse. And Blake Lively is also impressive as Affleck’s white trash ex - leaving behind any memories you may have of her is Gossip Girl. Whenever that show is over, she’s going to have a real career as an actress.
The Town doesn’t break any new ground as a heist movie. It doesn’t quite rise to the level of Heat - Michael Mann’s masterpiece that is an obvious influence on this film. But then again, so few movies even come close to that film. I can’t think of any higher praise than to say that this film at least deserves comparison to that one. Ben Affleck has proven once again that he is a real filmmaker. I look forward to seeing what he decides to do next behind the camera. I guarantee you he has a masterpiece or two in him.

Movie Review: Easy A

Easy A *** 1/2
Directed by: Will Gluck.
Written By: Bert V. Royal.
Starring: Emma Stone (Olive), Penn Badgley (Woodchuck Todd), Amanda Bynes (Marianne), Dan Byrd (Brandon), Thomas Haden Church (Mr. Griffith), Patricia Clarkson (Rosemary), Stanley Tucci (Dill), Cam Gigandet (Micah), Lisa Kudrow (Mrs. Griffith), Malcolm McDowell (Principal Gibbons), Alyson Michalka (Rhiannon), Fred Armisen (Pastor).

There are some movies that are elevated by one terrific performance, and Easy A is certainly one of those movies. This could have been just another teen movie - a Juno-lite, too satisfied with its own cleverness and intelligence. But Emma Stone makes the movie feel much more real that it should - she grounds the film in her own reality and carries the film in each and every scene. Yes, she is supported by a great cast - particularly Thomas Haden Church as one of her teacher and Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as her parents who threaten to steal every scene they are in - but this is Stone’s movie from beginning to end. She had already proven that she is one of the best young comedic actresses around right now with her great work in Superbad, Zombieland and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (where she was the only bright spot in a horrific movie). Here she proves that she is a movie star in the making.

The movie stars Stone as Olive, a high school senior who is pretty much invisible to her classmates. But then she tells one lie to her best friend (Alyson Michalka) that is overheard by Marianne (Amanda Bynes). The lie involves Olive losing her virginity to a college student, and soon rumors start flying about Olive all over the school. Her friend Brandon (Dan Byrd) overhears them, and wants Olive to do him a favor - he is constantly being picked on for being gay - and thinks that if everyone thinks that he had sex with Olive that people will leave him alone. So at a party, they fake it, and it saves Brandon - but makes Olive into the school slut. Marianne, head of a group of Christian students really starts picking on Olive, who has become the school slut. Instead of running from this label, she embraces it, and starts helping other losers “lose their virginity” to her as well. Things eventually get far too out of control.

There are many ways in which this movie could have gone horribly wrong - but it wisely sidesteps them all. The screenplay by Bert V. Royal is witty and hilarious, giving Stone many memorable one liners, and helping to create some memorable supporting characters. Thomas Haden Church is great as the “cool” teacher, and Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson have tremendous chemistry as Olive’s parents, obviously still madly in love after all these years. Yes, the overly moral Christians is something that has been done a few too many times in recent movies (best was in the movie Saved a few years ago), but Amanda Bynes carries off her role easily. The movie knows it is indebted to the teen movies of the 1980s, but instead of running from this, it embraces it - even going so far as to include clips from those movies. Director Will Gluck, who did the absolutely horrible, and mildly offensive Fired Up last year, keeps things moving along nicely, and is smart enough to simply get out of the way. The screenplay and acting is strong enough that it would be hard to screw up.

But the movie belongs to Emma Stone. Not quite the typical Hollywood starlet, Stone is still a beauty, has a sexy, slightly husky voice, and tremendous comic timing. If Stone does not completely sell this role, then the entire movie could have become a horrible film - and film with a lot of one liners in need to someone to deliver them. But Stone gives a star making performance as Olive - it is impossible to not fall for her, not root for her in the movie, and not to find her absolutely hilarious. There are so many teen comedies that come out every year, and most of them seem to come off an assembly line that weeds out any originality or anything of any real interest. But Easy A is different. Because of Stone, Easy A becomes one of the year’s best comedies. I look forward to seeing Stone doing even better work in her career. Trust me, she will be a huge star if she wants to be.

Final TIFF Report

So my week at the Toronto Film Festival is over. I ended up seeing 21 films in total (down from my scheduled 23 because of I got sick on Thursday and ducked out before my last two shows). You will notice that a few changed from my preview, but that’s the way these go. Since I already gave short reviews of Trust, Boxing Gym and The Conspirator I will update you on the other 18 movies I saw over the weekend.

Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek)
Mark Romanek’s film, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishigiro, is a beautiful, touching film that mixes an English boarding school with an alternate history that is a dystopian view of the recent past. The movie opens at Hailsham, a boarding school in the English country side. But there is something different about this school, which if you don’t already know, I won’t tell you because the movie doesn’t reveal it right away. The reviews on this one have been mixed - with many complaining that they thought the film was cold and distant - but I think the style of the film worked wonderfully well with story. Romanek is obviously inspired by Stanley Kubrick, and that style makes the film even more effective to me - the formal coldness of the boarding school is perfectly captured, and as the film progresses through its three act structure, Romanek subtley changes the color palette. The performances are great - particularly Carey Mulligan as the narrator and main character Kathy who is tremendously sympathetic and Keira Knightley as her bitchy friend, who turns out to be much more complex than we initially thought. Never Let Me Go was one of my favorite films at the festival - and one of the best films of the year.

127 Hours (Danny Boyle)
James Franco gives a great performance in this real life story of Aron Ronston, a hiker out in the desert who falls down an cavern and gets his arm stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s out there for days on end, with no one around except his camera to talk to. Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire, uses the same hyper kinetic style of filmmaking to keep things interesting - because afterall, much of the movie really is just Franco by himself in a canyon. Boyle does use some flashbacks, and a dynamite opening sequence involving Franco and two women he meets while hiking (Kate Mara and Amber Tamblyn). The film is harrowing, well made and intense pretty much from beginning to end, and Franco is great in the lead role (a definite candidate for an Oscar nomination this year). I do think that Boyle may go a little over the top with the visual fireworks, and A.R. Rahman’s score (which I think is brilliant on its own) is at times a little distracting when used in the course of the movie). Still, this was a great film.

Miral (Julien Schnabel)
Perhaps my biggest disappointment of the film festival is this, the new film from director Julien Schnabel. His last film was the brilliant and visual innovative The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The reason why the subjective visuals worked in that film was because that film was about a man trapped in his own body. But Schnabel decides to use the same style in this - a far reaching study of Palestine from 1948 through 1993. The film at different times has different protagonists, and the film shifts between them telling the story of an orphanage run by Hiam Abbas, and eventually the story of one of the girls who grew up there (Frieda Pinto). The film looks great - Eric Gautier’s cinematography is sweeping, and the editing is marvelous - but it is completely and totally the wrong style for the film. The narrative is confused, and Schnabel never really provides any real perspective on anything. The film is clearly very pro-Palestinian, and even if I don’t agree 100% with its politics, that’s not why I think the film doesn’t work. It’s that Schnabel has a fascinating story, a good cast (Abbas is particularly good, and I think Pinto could have been good given the chance) but he gets so lost in the visual style that he forgets to tell the story, and let the actors build their characters. A failure from a great director, who will ubdoubtedly rebound.

Let Me In (Matt Reeves)
Like many people I was nervous when they announced plans to remake the wonderful Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In from a few years ago. But to my surprise and delight, the American remake by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) is nearly as good as its predecessor - a film that respects the original, and remains faithful to it, but isn’t a shot for shot remake either. Casting talents kids like Kodi Smit McPhee (The Road) and Chloe Grace Mortez (Kick Ass) helps. Mortez in particular changes the character from the original, and makes her vampire more naïve and even sympathetic at times. Also excellent is Richard Jenkins, playing her “father” as a painfully shy man unable to communicate on pretty much any level. Reeves captures the mood and atmosphere of film perfectly. This is easily the best American horror film I have seen this year, and as for the ending - why mess with perfection?

Beautiful Boy (Shawn Ku)
Michael Sheen and Maria Bello give great performances as parents of a teenager who shoots up his college killing 17 students and faculty before turning the gun on themselves. Shawn Ku’s debut film takes a different approach to the school shooting movie - we don’t get to know the kid at all, what his motivations were, and we never see any of the footage of the shooting itself. Instead it concentrates solely on the aftermath of the shooting from the point of view of the parents - who seem like normal, loving people who had no idea what their son was planning or why he killed so many people before killing himself. It makes it impossible to grieve normally when the entire country hates your son and by extension you. This is a powerful examination of loss and grief that doesn’t let up for a second, and contains two of the years best performances. I do have to wonder how big an audience there will be for this film, which is unrelentingly dark and depressing, but hopefully it finds its audience.

Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell)
John Cameron Mitchell is one of the most daring, interesting filmmakers working right now. For the first time, he is working from someone else’s material - David Lindsay Abaire’s Broadway play that he has adapted himself. The movie stars Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as a couple reeling after the death of their 4 year old son in an accident 8 months ago. They are dealing with their pain in different ways - and most importantly dealing with it alone. This is Kidman’s best performance in years - raw and real, both painfully honest and also darkly funny. Eckhart as well does some of his best work as her husband who is trying so hard to keep it together, but just can’t do it anymore. Diane Wiest is excellent as Kidman’s flaky mother, as are Tammy Blanchard as her immature sister and Miles Teller as a teenager whose role I will not reveal. Totally unlike Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus (Mitchell’s first two films, which it should be said are not much alike either), this film brings Mithcell into the mainstream, but still manages to be honest and real. A triumph for everyone involved.

The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Briellant)
I have always had a like hate relationship with the films of Catherine Briellant (I don’t say love hate because I don’t think I’ve ever loved any of her films), and The Sleeping Beauty certainly falls into the later category. This is perhaps the film I have disliked the most of any of the films I have ever seen at the film festival. The Sleeping Beauty is a confused, jumbled mess of a movie that makes little sense and is wildly pretentious to boot. I’m sure someone will explain why this is really a masterpiece at some point, but to me it is the same old, same old from Briellant. I mean how many times I am going to have to watch some teenage lothario seduce an innocent girl and steal her virginity in a Briellant film? I hated this film, but I guess if you are more of a fan of her work, you may have like it more.

Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
Kelly Reichardt has quickly established herself as one of the most interesting filmmakers in American right now. Old Joy is a sensitive, original portrait of two middle age friends reuniting after years, and Wendy and Lucy was an even better film, a study of a poor woman on the road with her beloved dog. Meek’s Cutoff is a larger movie than Reichardt has made before - with a much larger cast - and is a period piece, about a wagon train in the 1840s across Oregon. They are led by Bruce Greenwood’s Meek, who has led other groups before, but this time his shortcut has done nothing but gotten them lost. As they wander further and further out in the middle of the desert, their food supply becomes short, and the three couples along with Meek (including Michelle Williams, excellent as always) all start coming in on Meek - debating whether or not they should hang him, and starting to trust an Native they have captured. The modern day parallels are obvious (crazy old white guy brings a bunch of people into the middle of the desert where he doesn’t know what the hell he is doing), but I admired the film on a much simpler level - it is a wagon train movie completely devoid of the normal clichés the genre brings - Reichardt even went as far as shooting the movie in 1.33:1 instead of widescreen to keep the “majestic vistas” shots to a minimum, concentrating solely on the present of these characters. A fascinating, excellent crafted, intelligent, well acted film - one of the best films of the festival, although I know some people are going to be pissed off about the ending.

The Debt (John Madden)
John Madden’s The Debt is a crackerjack thriller - and the directors best film since Shakespeare in Love more than a decade ago. Flashing back and forth in time, from the 1960s to the 1990s, the film is about three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastin, Martin Csokas and Sam Worthington in the 60s, Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkison and Ciaran Hinds in the 1990s - and the mission they take in the 1960s to take down a Nazi war criminal (Jesper Christensen) in Berlin - and how the secrets of that mission effect the agents 30 years later. The film is fast paced, and twists and turns and surprised me with each new revelation. The performances are all fine - but Helen Mirren stands out as a woman who is much more complex than we first believe and Jesper Christensen who is excellent as the evil Nazi war criminal. A fine thriller, that is also a little more morally complex than most films of its ilk.

Amigo (John Sayles)
John Sayles is one of the few truly independent filmmakers in America - he always makes precisely the films that he wants to make. His latest, Amigo, is one of his best recent efforts. The film is set in the Phillipines in 1900 when the Americans were an occupying force. Garret Dillahunt is the leader of a platoon of troops assigned to occupy a small village. At first he and his soldiers are wary of the villagers, but soon they come to like and respect them. This is bad news for Chris Cooper, who is the leader of the ground forces who hates them becoming friendly even though they are supposed to be “winning their hearts and minds”. Yes, the film is an allegory for Iraq, but it works on its own terms as well. Joel Torre is excellent as the head man of the village who is in a no win situation - if he cooperates with the Americans, the rebels will kill him, if he doesn’t the Americans will kill him. An intelligent movie that while it doesn’t quite reach greatness, still represents some of the best work Sayles has done in a decade or so.

Womb (Benedek Fliegauf)
Womb has a story idea that I thought sounded completely fascinating, Eva Green stars as a woman who falls madly in love with a man who dies in a car accident. She decides to give birth to the man’s clone, but that just makes things more complicated. In this movie, set slightly in the future, clones are common, but looked down upon by everyone as second class citizens. But what is more interesting is the relationship between the mother and child - which is confused between maternal and sexual feelings, which is even more confusing for the child because he doesn’t know he is a clone, or that anything is wrong with what he feels. The problem with the movie is nothing is ever really explored in any detail. Writer/director Benedek Fliegauf is too interested his visuals - which are often arresting - that his story suffers, and never properly develops. There are some good moments, and Eva Green is quite good, but the movie never really gels. I doubt this one will get picked up for distribution over here, but a DVD is inevitable - and they will try and sell it as a horror film. Don’t buy it, this is a pretentious film that never really takes off.

Route Irish (Ken Loach)
Ken Loach has been making his socially conscious films for almost 50 years now - and some of his films certainly work better than others. It was just a matter of time before he made a film that dealt directly with the Iraq war, and that is what Route Irish is about. It is centered on a former Irish soldier working for a private security firm in Iraq until he is killed. His best friend back in Ireland wants to get to the bottom of what really happened to his friend - what he discovers is a vast conspiracy involving money and the killing of Iraqi civilians, which causes him to go all Charles Bronson in Death Wish in the last act of the film. The film never quite comes together into a believable narrative, although the lead performance (by Mark Womack) is excellent, and as always the direction by Loach is fine. I just wish the film, which Loach has said he made because he wanted to focus on the Iraq tragedy for the civilians of Iraq, had either been more focused on the politics, thus making it is a truly political film, or less so, so that it could have been a guilty pleasure of a revenge movie. By trying to do both, Loach does justice to neither.

What’s Wrong with Virginia (Dustin Lance Black)
Dustin Lance Black’s extremely personal What’s Wrong with Virginia is a movie about schizophrenia that takes a decidedly different take on the disease - he has made essentially a comedy/satire about the subject. Jennifer Connelly gives one of her best performances as a schizeophrenic mother to a teenage son who has been having an affair with the married Sheriff (Ed Harris) of her small hometown for years. Now he is running for State Senate, and her son has his eyes on his daughter (Emma Roberts) and he needs to cut off all contact with her, or risk his sexual obsessions. The film plays like a mixture of the work of Douglas Sirk and David Lynch, by way of Todd Haynes, a bright, candy colored portrait of small time life where a lot more is going on beneath the surface than we first suspect. Academy award winning screenwriter Black (Milk) may have bitten off a little more than he can chew to make a truly great directorial debut, but he has made a very good one - a film filled with wild ambition that shows that even if this film isn’t a masterpiece, that he has one in him at some point.

Passion Play (Mitch Glazer)
I may have hated The Sleeping Beauty more than any film I saw at this year’s festival, but objectively speaking Passion Play was the worst film. It is an absolutely ridiculous fantasy about a down on his luck jazz singer (Mickey Rourke) who is taken out to the middle of the desert to be murdered, somehow escapes and ends up at a circus where he meets sideshow freak Megan Fox - a woman with wings. He uses her to get him out trouble with a gangster (Bill Murray), but then realizes that he has fallen in love with her. No matter how ridiculous that premise sounds, I guarantee you that watching the movie is 10 times worse - it is horribly written by Glazer, and the talented cast cannot save it. This is the type of work Rourke was doing before his comeback, and while it is easy to take potshots Megan Fox, no one could have saved this role. Bill Murray seems to know that the whole thing is ridiculous, and has fun with his role. It is a downright awful film, and one that should be forgotten as quickly as possible.

Casino Jack (George Hickenlooper)
Kevin Spacey gives his best performance in at least a decade as Jack Abramoff, the Washington DC super lobbyist who was at the heart of the biggest political corruption scandal since Watergate. Spacey makes Abrahmoff charming and somewhat likable - a nice guy who is undone by his own greed and ego. Nothing is ever enough for him, and he keeps spending more and more money that he doesn’t have, meaning he has to stretch the laws further and further until he has way surpassed what he is legally allowed to do. The typical movie would have portrayed him as a one note villain, but Spacey does more than that. You like the bastard despite of yourself - his easy charm, his cheesy movie impressions - until you remember just what it is he is doing. Spacey is the best reason to see the movie - the supporting performances are all fine, especially from Jon Lovitz as a sleazy mattress salesman and the late, great Maury Chaykin as a mobster - but this really is Spacey’s show, and he makes the most of this great role. At times, the movie does feel like something you could see HBO making, but since HBO often makes great movies, that isn’t really an insult. A supremely entertaining film with a great lead performance by an actor who used to be among the best in American movies - and can be again if he gets many more roles this good.

The Whistleblower (Larysa Kondraki)
Larysa Kondraki’s debut film features Rachel Weisz in a wonderful performance as a Lincoln, Nebraska cop who agrees to head off to Bosnia for 6 months to be a peacekeeper. It isn’t long before she realizes that women are treated like second class citizens, and almost nothing is being done to protect them - even by the police and the UN itself. As she digs deeper, she stumbles upon a sex trafficking ring that the UN is not only complicit with, but involved in. The film is a rather standard issue thriller, with a political motive, but it is very well made by Kondraki, and at times very difficult to watch as we see what happens to these poor girls who are smuggled into the country and used as sex slaves. Rachel Weisz is excellent in the lead role, and is provided decent support by David Striathairn, Vanessa Redgrave and Monica Bellucci among others. A very good little film that indicates that Kondraki could make an even better film at some point in the future - she has the tools to do so.

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong)
The last film I saw at this year’s festival was also far and away the best. In 2007, I saw Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine because I had a hole in my schedule and was completely and totally blown away by it (that the film never got proper distribution in North America, not even on DVD, is still a source of disappointment to me). His follow-up to that film is this masterful film about a 65 year old woman (played brilliantly by Jeong-hee Yoon) who living on government assistance and what she earns as a part time maid, and has to raise her teenage grandson by herself as her daughter got divorced and moved, leaving her alone. She gets two shocking pieces of information almost at once - one is that she has early onset Alzheimers, and will slowly lose her mind, and the other being that her grandson was involved with raping a classmate of his over a span of six months that only ended when she killed herself. At the same time, she starts taking a poetry class, and finds that writing poetry is far too difficult for her. The film, like Secret Sunshine, is about a woman who is confronting an almost impossible obstacles, but this time, she has no one to lean on, and instead puts all of her faith into this poetry - as if she needs to get her thoughts out now before the Alzheimers steals her language forever. A masterful film by one of the best directors working anywhere in the world right now - and one that deserves much more attention in North America.

So there you have it, 21 movies over 6 days at the festival. I am tired, and of course I am still sick and tired. This coming week, I will be back with full length reviews of Never Let Me Go, The Town and Easy A (the last two being Festival films that I have seen since my festival ended) as well as Enter the Void, a film I saw at last year’s festival that is finally making its way into theaters this week. We are now well into the last third of the year, which means that pretty much every week between now and the end of December will bring at least one film that is vying for awards attention - it is the best time of year to watch movies.

TIFF Report #1

As always, I get off to a slow start at TIFF, not attending the first Thursday and Friday, and only one day on the weekend. So yesterday was my first day, I'm off today, then back for five straight. I thought I'd share my thoughts on what I saw yesterday. I will try to do daily reports starting Tuesday, but no guarntees.

Trust (David Schwimmer)
David Schwimmer's Trust is a throughly unplesant movie to sit through - yet given its subject matter that's more of a testament to how well it is made rather than a criticism. Clive Owen and Catherine Keener star as two suburban parents in Chicago who think they have it all. They are not concerned when their 14 year old daughter Annie (Liana Liberato) befriends someone online. After all, the boy is only 16, and is all the way in California. But unknown to them, things are getting more serious between the two of them online - and the kid isn't really 16. First he confesses he is really 20, then 25, but age doesn't matter when you're soulmates does it? He arranges to come to Chicago and meet Annie, and when he shows up, he is really at least 35. Annie is at first put off by this, but the man is good. He tells her that age doesn't matter, and that he thought she was mature enough to handle this. Then he takes her back to his motel. This part of movie works amazingly well. Liberato is great in the role of the naive Annie who believes what she wants to believe about her new friend - even after they have had sex. When the truth comes out, and the FBI becomes involved, Annie still claims she loves him. Meanwhile Clive Owen breaks down and becomes obsessed with trackig the man down and making him pay. The film is directed with sensitivity by Schwimmer - there will be no claims of feeding a pedophiles obsessions here. I admired his way with actors - getting great work from Liberato and Chris Henry Coffey, who is truly the creepiest pedophile in recent memory, because he seems so normal. I also admired the way Schwimmer shows us the sexualized society of young girls all around Annie, without ever directly commenting on it (which would have been too much) and how Owen's job may have contributed to what happened. Less effective is stuff with Owen, which to me was a little too obvious. But when Liberato is onscreen, the movie is never less the riveting. Trust is a difficult movie to watch, but it should be. It is made with skill and sensitivity, and I admired it a great deal. Currently without a distributor, I hope this finds someone to take a chance on it, because it really is worth seeing.

Boxing Gym (Frederick Wiseman)
I said in my TIFF preview that I was a little embarassed that I had never seen a Frederick Wiseman movie, and now that has been corrected. According to Wiseman (who was at the screening) Boxing Gym continues his recent investigations into institutionalized violence. The film is an observational documentary that simply sets up in a boxing gym in Austin, Texas and watches as people from all walks of life come and go and train for different reasons. The only constant presence if Rober Lords, who runs the gym, and trains everyone. What fascinated me about the movie is the care in the editing - Wiseman creates a perfect rhythm to the movie, and the sounds of the gym (people punching bags, jumping ropes, etc.) becomes almost a score in itself. The film, to be, was fascinating, but I now do understand why Wiseman is considered a master - it is impeccably well made - and why he will never be a hugely popular filmmaker - the film doesn't have the "story" many people want out of a doc. It is a fine film, and I am glad I saw it, but it hasn't really made me want to track down Wiseman's other, significantly longer films.

The Conspirator (Robert Redford)
Robert Redford's The Conspirator is the type of historical drama that Hollywood rarely makes anymore - the most recent movie I can think of to compare it to would be Steven Spielberg's Amistad all the way back in 1997. The film opens with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, but is really the story of the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) who was the only woman tried as part of the conspirary. Represented by young Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) a Civil War hero for the Union, Aiken at first doesn't want the assignment, but comes to see it as vital. Redford uses this chapter in American history to comment on current issues. It is impossible not to think of the War on Terror and the treatment of terrorism suspects when the trial - which is not a civilian trial but in front of a military court with members handpicked by the Secretary of War (Kevin Kline), where Surratt is forbidden to testify in her own defense. The movie argues that even during times of war, defendants charged with the most heionous crimes deserve a fair trial in front of jury of their peers. There is a lot of talk about what the Civil War was about if not defending the Constitution, as well as fear mongering. The parallel works remarkably well for Redford, who also has a good eye for period detail, and lets the actors due some great work. If there is a problem with the movie its that other than McAvoy, the rest of the characters don't ever really get a chance to develop - they are set in their firsts scenes, and that is who they remain throughout. That doesn't mean the work of the ensemble cast - including Tom Wilkinson, Evan Rachel Wood, Justin Long, Alexis Bledel and Danny Huston alongside McAvoy, Wright and Kline - are not all great, just that I wished for more complexity in their characters, just like there was in the story. But that's a minor gripe. The Conspirator is old fashioned, Hollywood entertainment at its finest.

Stay tuned. Tomorrow I will be seeing Never Let Me Go, 127 Hours, Miral and Let Me In, so hopefully I will be back on Tuesday to let you know my thoughts.