TIFF Review: I Saw the Devil

I was on my way to the Susanne Bier film today when a couple of friends talked me into going to see I Saw the Devil instead. I asked one of them to quickly pitch me on why I would want to see it, and he pitched it thusly: Did you like The Good, The Bad, The Weird? This is a serial killer thriller flick by the same director, Ji-woon Kim, and it stars “The Bad” (Byung-hun Lee), and Min-sik Choi, the guy from Oldboy!
Read the full article »

TIFF Dispatch Day Five: It’s Kind of a Funny Film Festival Story …

So tonight I want to talk a little bit about something interesting that’s happening at the fest around the film It’s Kind of a Funny Story, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

I was catching up with indieWIRE’s Day Four Hot Topic, where film critics drop in the Film Lounge to chat about What’s Hot and What’s Not at the fest (I will be chatting there myself on Wednesday). This episode included LA Weekly’s Karina Longworth and indieWIRE folks Anne Thompson, Eugene Hernandez and Eric Kohn, and one of the films that got a mention as “losing” at the fest was It’s Kind of a Funny Story.
Read the full article »

TIFF Review: Made in Dagenham

The film with the strongest “female empowerment” vibe at TIFF may just be Made in Dagenham, a film about the feminist movement taking over an unlikely corner of working class England in 1968, when female factory workers who sewed seat covers for the Ford Motors plant went on strike.

For once, we have a film about women where they do something interesting and important, and talk about things other than the men in their lives or fashion. Hallelujah. It’s kind of the anti-Sex and the City — a Norma Rae tale of the British working class with a vibe tonally similar to Calendar Girls (also directed by Cole) or The Full Monty (not directed by Cole), so if you liked either or both of those films, you’ll almost certainly like this one.

Made in Dagenham stars Sally Hawkins, whose presence in a film is always a good thing; Toss Bob Hoskins in the mix, and you up the odds considerably of the film being a winner.

Hawkins plays Rita O’Grady, a wife, mother and factory worker at the Dagenham factory where she works alongside 186 other women sewing custom-made seat covers for Ford cars. The women are downgraded to “unskilled labor” and end up striking not just to be reinstated to “semi-skilled” but for equal pay, at a time when the tide of feminism was rising and threatening to sweep the corporate world by storm. This film is really about much more than this particular strike at this particular point in history, though; it’s about what’s fair, what’s “right” versus what’s a “privilege,” and the need to stand up for what you believe in, even in the face of adversity.

The film dramatizes how the men — both in management and the women’s own husbands — are at first patronizingly tolerant of “the girls” going on strike, but when push comes to shove and their own jobs at the factory are jeopardized by the shutdown, it’s another story. Although the women supported their men when they went on strike, the shoe being on the other foot doesn’t fit quite as well with the male perspective on women’s place in society.

And to an extent, that’s every bit as relevant today as it was in 1968, the year in which I was born. I work, and travel for my job, and I’ve experienced a lot in my own career having people dare to question my commitment to my family and whether my work conflicts with that — something I daresay my male colleagues have largely never had to deal with. Things have changed a lot on the one hand with regard to women in the workplace and pay (although we still have yet to achieve that whole “equal pay” thing across the board), but on the other hand societal attitudes towards working women haven’t changed all that much over 40 years later. We’ve still got a long ways to go, baby … but it’s thanks to women like Rita O’Grady that we’ve come as far as we have.

I could see Made in Dagenham playing very well to the female audience in America with the right marketing and enough critical support behind it; it’s a relevant film about an important topic, and moreover it’s enormously entertaining. In addition to Hawkins and Hoskins, by the bye, Miranda Richardson is on-hand as British Labour Party firebrand Barbara Castle, and she does a hell of a job bringing that great lady to life.

Overall, Made in Dagenham is solid, entertaining, even inspiring. I’d love to see this film get a little momentum behind it, because Hawkins is every bit as good in this film as she was in Happy-Go-Lucky.

TIFF Dispatch Day Four: Mixed Bag

I ran into a friend today who mentioned that he was enjoying these dispatches and wanted me to keep writing them. So here you go, this one’s for you.

Today was a real mixed bag for me, screening-wise. I logged about four hours sleep last night and woke up with my head aching and stuffed up, which pretty much confirmed that it was, in fact, my friend’s cooties and not the Clint Eastwood film that was making me feel like crap yesterday.
Read the full article »

TIFF Dispatch Day Three: The Best Laid Plans

I’ve finally gotten myself to the point of feeling more or less fully immersed in my Toronto routine (read: catching my sleep in four hour power sessions, fueling on coffee and Balance bars all day when there’s no time to eat between back-to-back screenings and Starbucks runs out of paninis, spending so much time in dark screening rooms that the sunlight, when you do come out, hurts your eyes) and have mastered the subway. I’ve seen 11 films in three days, and it’s getting to be kind of a blur (thank you, publicists who hand out press notes for us weary film crickets).
Read the full article »

TIFF Review: The Illusionist

The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet‘s animated adaptation of an unproduced script by French comedic legend Jacques Tati, is a sad, soulful, touching tale about a vaudeville magician past his prime and his friendship with a young girl.

Chomet, who previously made the excellent The Triplets of Bellville (which referenced Tati’s Jour de Fête), uses his uniquely beautiful hand-drawn animation style to bring the character of the illusionist to life, modeling him after Tati’s famous recurring character Monsieur Hulot in both design and action. Read the full article »

TIFF Review: Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen

Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, revisits an iconic character originally played by Bruce Lee (in Fists of Fury) and Jet Li (in Fist of Legend). Here, Donnie Yen reprises the role of Chen Yen from a 20-episode 1995 television series version of Fists of Fury. This time around, Chen Zhen returns to China under an assumed identity after fighting with the Allies in Europe, just in time to take on the Japanese on his home turf.
Read the full article »

TIFF Review: Biutiful

When a great director has teamed repeatedly with a brilliant writer over the course of a career, one has to ponder how much the unique chemistry of two artistic minds working on a common canvas shapes the quality of the end result. Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s films Amores Perres, 21 Grams, and multiple-Oscar nominee Babel (which won only for Original Score), were written by Guillermo Arriaga (sometimes off ideas hatched by Iñárritu), with whom the much-lauded director had a much-ballyhooed falling out.
Read the full article »

TIFF Dispatch Day One: Ups and Downs

I’m starting to feel settled and in the groove now that I’m getting acclimated to being back in Toronto. It was just about a year ago that I attended my first day of the fest going full force and then wound up being taken by ambulance to the hospital on Day Two, where I spent the duration of the fest.

Given how grim things looked when I was finally discharged and allowed to return to Seattle for medical treatment at home, it feels good, really good, to be fully back on my feet immersed in covering Toronto just a year later.

I think this year’s slate is one of the best they’ve had since I’ve been coming to Toronto, and I am excited to see the many potentially great films on my slate and to dive into the fest routine of seeing as much as possible and writing as much as possible, hopefully mostly coherently. And, of course, I’m looking forward to catching up with friends I haven’t seen since last year.

We headed downtown to the new fest headquarters at the Hyatt Regency (more or less) bright and early — adjusting to the East Coast time change is always a bit of a bitch the first night, so I did sleep in just a wee bit after a late night of writing and listening to the rowdy frat party across the street.

We grabbed our badges and headed to the Scotiabank for some screenings, where my day kicked off with some action and laughs courtesy of Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen, which I enjoyed the hell out of. Went straight from that into Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s relentlessly dark and depressing tragedy, Biutiful, which I loved, but … MAN.

Hoping to bang out reviews on both of those before I crash for the night, and finish watching a screener, too. Then I have to pack it in and get a few hours sleep, because tomorrow I have four, maybe five films that I really want to catch, plus, of course, lots of writing. Will be fueling on energy bars and coffee most of the day, but there might be time for an actual dinner later on, hopefully with friends. Stay tuned … more TIFF coverage coming.

TIFF Review: Behind Blue Skies

Swedish film Behind Blue Skies very strongly reminded me of Holy Rollers, Kevin Asch‘s Jesse Eisenberg-starrer about a young, fresh-faced Hasidic Jew whose greed lures him into a scheme to transport ecstasy from Amsterdam into the US using other young Hasidics as mules. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, as I actually liked Holy Rollers, which debuted at Sundance earlier this year, quite a lot.
Read the full article »

I Just Flew Into Toronto, and Boy, Are My Arms Tired

After a full day of travel, I finally landed in Toronto around 10PM tonight. I spent part of the flight watching screeners — I’ll have a review of Swedish film Behind Blue Skies up soonish, but in brief: it’s kind of a Swedish Holy Rollers (the Jesse Eisenberg, Hasidic Jews smuggling ecstasy flick), set in the ’70s, and stars Bill Skarsgård (Son of Stellan) in a soulful, impressive lead performance.
Read the full article »

The Trouble with Embargoes

I’m always a bit amused by embargoes; if I’d seen Mmmpth Mmmmpth at Cannes back in May, I could tell you right now what I thought of it. But since I saw it last night, I can’t.

I get that studios have a vested in interest in making those of us who get to see films early hold our tongues until opening day, thus maximizing the benefit of the all-important Good Buzz and minimizing any detrimental effects of Bad Buzz.

But I’ve also always thought that if a studio chooses to debut a film at a giant public bash like Cannes, from that point on it ought to be fair game. Anyone wanting to know what critics at Cannes thought about Mmmmpth Mmmmpth has only to do a quick Google search to turn up at least a dozen write-ups on the film from critics both prominent and not.

If you weren’t at Cannes, though, God forbid you even speak the film’s name on Twitter or Facebook before opening day, or you might just be smacked down and blacklisted for Breaking the Rules. And the conundrum — at least for this particular film — is that the opening day embargo rule just gives me that much more time to ruminate on the film’s flaws, when if I’d been allowed to post some thoughts, say, last night, they might very well have been much more positive. But so it goes.