The list of films I saw, in reverse chronological order.
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SEPTEMBER |
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Swimming Pool
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It probably helps if one of your favourite themes is the creative
process and the relationships authors forge with the characters they
create. Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), an author of junky crime
fiction, reacts to Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the person intruding upon
her working vacation in sunny France, like she would to a particularly
unwanted idea, the kind that just won't go away, the kind whose very
existence casts doubt upon a wordsmith's chosen direction. As such,
Julie is initially painted with the kind of qualities that Morton
looks down upon, probably because they are attributes that she does
not possess herself: youth, energy and a heavy sexual drive. But
nagging thoughts can only be ignored so long, and soon Morton has
seen the possible benefits of this bit of serendipity and begins to
pump her new protagonist for her backstory. If said backstory is
more than a little banal, well, that's possibly the point. There's
little evidence that Morton is a good writer and even less that her
change of tactics is going to result in a work of art. In fact, the
ensuing murder (spawned, perhaps, unconsciously by Morton) is proof
enough that the scribe cannot change her spots so easily. It takes
a conscious decision on Morton's part to sweep the murder away
(played out like a po-faced mockery of the very kind of fiction she
has written in the past) and adopt a truly foreign viewpoint (Julie's
mother's manuscript) to arrive at what she claims is "the best thing
I've ever written". Since we never get a look at the book beyond
the cover, we never know whether her claim is true or not, but it's
purely in keeping with the nakedness of the film's central conceit.
To know more could only be supported by a film that developed its
ideas into something beyond a schematic metaphor.
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Out Of Time
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Ah, lazy, laid-back life in the Florida Keys, where the contrivances
grow on trees, the innuendos are burstingly overripe and the choices
people make are always stupid enough to further the plot. Even the
construction of hotel balconies is astoundingly shoddy. I mean, no
one would come up with such a ridiculous piece of tripe if they were
really exerting any effort, would they?
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Freddy Vs. Jason
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Seems to me there was a missed opportunity here to make a clever horror
flick about the spread of fear and paranoia in the information age.
(No, really.) Alternately, with both the Nightmare On Elm Street
and Friday The 13th series being so completely played out, campy
fun might have been the way to go, a la last year's Jason X.
But as the witless,
often offensive one-liners and pedestrian death scenes indicate, we're
not exactly dealing with a surfeit of imagination in the creative
department, and so Yu and company serve up a straightforward hybrid
of the two horror franchises that begins like an unfunny parody of
itself and proceeds to squander potentially interesting ideas in favour
of building towards a climax pitting two increasingly non-threatening
individuals against each other. It's the old immovable
object/unstoppable force problem; at some point (pretty quickly,
actually), you just stop caring since it's clear that neither of
these creatures are capable of ever being defeated. Aside: nice to
see young Canuck actors Brendan Fletcher and Katharine Isabelle
handily outshining the bland Hollywood teenagers who are supposed
to be carrying the film.
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Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
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Hard to say exactly why, apart from the opening sequence, McG's second
run at the Angels franchise just doesn't reach the deliriously silly
comic book heights he's so clearly aiming for. It might be the
wrong-headed, ham-fisted attempts at injecting actual character
development into the proceedings, all of it nothing more than
shorthand filling time between explosions, fast-moving vehicles
and copious amounts of cleavage. It might be the overly complicated,
nigh unintelligible and totally beside-the point plot, a holdover
of sorts from the original television show that stretches the appeal
of endearing lameness far past its breaking point. It might be the
ceaseless stream of crushingly unfunny sexual innuendos, bringing
to mind a script written by sniggering teenage boys getting off on
their ability to make hot chicks say dirty things. It might even be
that all of the fun that was had on set (and the outtakes over the
end credits seem designed to convince us of just that) prevented
anyone from actually getting down to work. Whatever the case, the
final product is nothing more than a series of largely disconnected,
increasingly loud set pieces that provoke boredom even as they
attempt to browbeat the audience into enjoying themselves.
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Matchstick Men
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So often do I criticize a particularly ill thought-out performance
for being nothing more than a bundle of ticks and mannerisms that
I find myself more than a little dumbfounded when confronted by an
exhibition that is intended to be just that. Thankfully, aided by
Scott's manipulation and distortion of images, Nicholas Cage suggests
an ebb and flow to his con-artist character's obsessive-compulsive
illness that takes his performance beyond mere grandstanding. Perhaps
a reflection of the highly planned frauds he has perpetrated throughout
his entire life, his symptoms appear to come on stronger when he is
forced to deal with the uncontrollable aspects of the larger world.
For Cage, the most unexpected of these is the sudden appearance of
his 14-year old daughter, an independent-minded teenager who immediately
takes a shine to her long-absent dad and his unorthodox line of work.
For the audience, the unexpected is the sudden turn the story
eventually takes. That I didn't see it coming despite such twists
being a staple of the con-film genre is perhaps less a comment on my
gullibility (although it is certainly that) than it is a reflection
of where the film's strengths actually lie. The real problem with
the twist is not its believability -- it seems to rely on too many
variables, but since Cage's character is a man who desperately tries
to limit the number of variables in his life, perhaps he's not such
a hard mark to play after all -- but the fact that its existence
cheapens the father/daughter bonding that had been so central to the
film's emotional pull. The hook that would normally coax the audience
to follow the sharp turn in the plot's path is left to the denouement,
where we find that Cage continues to hold the time he spent with the
girl in high regard. Never mind that he was operating under mistaken
assumptions in a falsely created reality; given those constraints,
he made the kind of choices that proved himself a better person than
even he thought he was capable of becoming.
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Dragon Fight
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It must be hard being the only righteous man in America, and even
harder when you aren't even American. Poor straight-arrow Jet Li,
reduced to running from uncaring cops and a consulate ready to
believe the worst when circumstances surrounding the defection of
his best comrade Wong (Dick Wei) point to Li as a cop killer. Wong
works his way into the gangland drug scene like he was born to live
a life of treachery and brutality, but even Li's saviour Yau (Stephen
Chow) proves that he isn't above a little hustling when a package
of drugs falls in his lap. In Tang's film, the only destination
that can be arrived at from a path of such moral corruption is
death itself. Redemption isn't even a consideration. This grim
little message is the unexpected and rather pleasing result of
the unfortunate melodrama that comes to prominence as the martial
arts scenes of early in the film begin to fade away. (Wei's
gravitas makes his scenes watchable; the American cast aren't
nearly so lucky, but then, they haven't been given anything more
than stereotypical personas and fashions to work with.) The long
wait for the inevitable Li/Wei standoff yields little more than
polite approval when the fighters reveal themselves to be perhaps
too evenly matched. Their back and forth footwork and attempt
to fake the other out aren't nearly as much fun as, to pick one
example, Li using a broom to sweep away some anonymous
nunchuk-wielding street tough who has nothing more than a
rudimentary grasp of martial arts. Best subtitling discrepancy:
rendering the spoken English of "We've got to kick their asses"
as the gentler written command "We must use our influence".
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Shivers
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Not just the kind of film that gets under people's skins, but also
the type of film that gets denounced. (And Canadian cultural critic
Robert Fulford apparently did just that all the way back in the
mid-70's, prompting parliamentary discussion on the use of taxpayer
dollars to produce such "trash".) Indeed, the film seems designed
to offend all portions of the political spectrum by showcasing a
catalogue of depravity oozing out of a very paranoid extension of
the values of the flower generation. Cronenberg gives our very
ordinary desire for pleasure a shocking twist, starting at an
emotional hot point and taking the concept ever further until all
rationality has been proven powerless in the face of a collective
id run amuck. Only the low-budget production values -- hollow
sound, ugly locations, wooden actors -- detract, but by pulling
the viewer outside of the piece, they contribute to an ironic
sense of comedy born of watching characters succumb to a
horrifically original premise.
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The Trail Of The Broken Blade
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More slash-and-bludgeon than precision swordplay, less action
than talk. And boy do the characters talk, each of them more than
happy to recap the plot every 15 minutes or so for the benefit of
those who just wandered in. Still, there's something to be said
for the film's melodramatic take on honour and self-sacrifice,
showing how these lofty ideals can lead a man to needlessly put
himself through the emotional wringer. In hiding from the law,
Li (Jimmy Wang Yu, scruffy and tortured) not only has to swallow
his pride and submit to being treated like a commoner, he also must
evade the attentions of the swordsman Fang who has promised to
find Li and re-unite him with his true love Liu. After Li's secret
is revealed when he is unable to idly stand by during an attack on
Fang by members of the evil clan of Flying Fish Island, Li opts for
the ultimate act of self-sacrifice: his own life in exchange for the
ensured well-being of Fang and Liu. One should never deign to speak
for the wishes of others, however, and Liu is not about to give up
Li so easily, marking Chang's film as one of the few stories where
the dead guy gets the girl. Chang's trademark gonzo, go-for-broke
style is little more than a gleam in the director's eye at this
early point in his career, but the herky-jerky tracking shot out
of the casino into the rain nevertheless has the feeling of life
being pulled kicking and screaming into the world. More successful
is the Western-esque theme song that plays over the opening credits,
a telling mixture of Eastern sounds and Hollywood-style mythmaking.
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Lost In Translation
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The essence of being an outsider, of being unable to relate to
either the culture one is currently swimming in or the remnants
of one's own that inevitably pop up. Also, the pure, exhilarating
joy of meeting a like-minded soul, of connecting on a level
that goes beyond words, and then of being able to make it
complete, a treasured memory rather than a fleeting moment.
Coppola's film traffics in such ineffable details, and if you
can relate, if you share the sense of having been there (or
perhaps, of living there almost daily), chances are you'll come
away glowing like Scarlett Johansson after Bill Murray whispers
something special in her ear. Neither the characters nor the
film make much of an attempt to understand or honestly engage
with the foreign culture at hand, and while that may strike some
as typical Ugly Americanism, it is more accurately described as
a reflection of the characters' own stasis. Besides, laughing
at the seeming absurdity of an unfathomable world is no crime.
Heck, sometimes it's the only thing that'll get you through
the day.
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Millennium Actress
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Intriguing notion, this, that artificially enhanced memories (realized
via the medium of film, natch) may be preferable to the real thing.
When an old stage-hand sets out to interview Chiyoko, the one-time
leading lady of a closing movie studio, the gift of an old keepsake
opens up a floodgate of memories, each of them rendered as a clip
from the former actress' rich career, most of them pulling the
interviewer himself into the action to play one of the side characters.
Kon builds this conceit to a crescendo as Chiyoko furiously runs to
catch her one true love through a flurry of genre shifts -- a rescue
by truckers, a kaiju monster attack, even a beguiling lunar romance.
As in the tear-jerkers that built her career, she is pre-ordained to
never reach her intended destination, but it's no matter. It was
always the chase she enjoyed the most, always the artificially
created melodrama that was more fulfilling than cold reality.
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Toronto International Film Festival 2003
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May
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Best when it's tender. Misfit May inching her way towards possible
romance with sensitive, long-haired gorehound Adam touches the heart
in a way that Angela Bettis overplaying May's most freakishly
embarrassing attributes can't begin to match. Sadly, McKee's
touch is predominately on the heavy side, leading to strained
comedy, complete non sequiturs and a painfully inevitable
conclusion. If we have to go with the obvious, I'd rather have
more of Anna Faris' predatory lesbian or the "cannibal sex"
film-within-the-film, thank you.
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August 2003 |
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Notes: If the feature film listed is less than four years old, the year
that accompanies it is the year of its release in Toronto. If the feature
is older or if it has not been released in Toronto, the year listed
is derived from the IMDB. In the latter case, the year is preceded
by the characters 'nr'. TV movies are listed by year of first broadcast
and are preceded by the characters 'tv'. Years for short films
are retrieved from wherever I can find information.
Legend:
Confused by my idiosyncratic 5-star rating system? Here's an explanation.
tv = I saw the movie on television
video = I saw the movie on videotape
dvd = I saw the movie on dvd
ld = I saw the movie on laserdisc
infl = I saw the movie on a plane
instl = I saw the movie as a gallery installation
net = I saw the movie streamed on the internet
vp = I saw the movie projected from a video source
qba = print/video quality below average
3d = the movie was in 3-D
r = repeat viewing -- I had previously seen the movie sometime in my adult life
pre = pre-release viewing -- I saw the movie in advance of its release to Toronto theatres
tiff = I saw the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival
fest = I saw the movie at a film festival other than TIFF
ot = I saw the movie outside of Toronto
orig = I saw the original-language version
dub = I saw the English-dubbed version
tntv = tentative grade; I was considerably distracted during the screening or missed significant sections of the film
z = I nodded off during a small portion of the film, but I don't think I missed
enough to alter my grade
zzz = I slept through a considerable portion of the film, so take my
grade with a grain of salt
| My Scale | What It Means | Letter Grade | 4-Star Scale | Pro/Mixed/Con |
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| 5 / 5 | All-time great | A+ | 4 | Pro |
| 4.5 / 5 | One of the year's best | A | ||
| 4.25 / 5 | Damn good | A- | 3.5 | |
| 4 / 5 | Very good | B+ | ||
| 3.75 / 5 | Quite good | |||
| 3.5 / 5 | Good | B | 3 | |
| 3.25 / 5 | Decent | |||
| 3 / 5 | Ok | B- | 2.5 | Mixed |
| 2.75 / 5 | Almost, but not quite | C+ | ||
| 2.5 / 5 | Has its moments | C | 2 | Con |
| 2 / 5 | Not good | C- | 1.5 | |
| 1.5 / 5 | Very bad | D | 1 | |
| 1 / 5 | Dire | F | 0 |
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