TIFF: Thrilling Trio "Dogs Don't Wear Pants", "Sea Fever", and "Resin"

Chris Feil takes a quick look at three under-the-radar films at TIFF for genre fans and thrill seekers...

J-P Valkeapää’s Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is a giddy shocker about grief and domination, an imposing Scandinavian delight that could make John Waters proud. The film follows Juha (Pekka Strang), a heart surgeon still grieving the death of his wife a decade prior as he raises his teenage daughter. Almost comically by chance, he stumbles into the dungeon of dominatrix Mona (a suberb Krista Kosonen) whose asphyxiation routines become an addiction for Juha that bring him in hallucinatory communion with his dead wife. The film shocks with its spiritual and biological intimacy (get ready for some seriously squirm-inducing gore), but moreso in its wicked sense of humor. We’ve got a weird one here, and it’s kind of spectacular...

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Do Emmy Submission Episodes Actually Matter?

With the Emmys fast approaching here's Abe Fried-Tanzer to ask a perennial question...

For the past twelve years, I’ve analyzed the Emmy episodes submitted by the nominees. Every summer, I screen as many of the episodes of shows I don’t regularly watch as I can, and review the selections of those I do. It’s a fun way to get to sample popular series that, for whatever season, aren’t on your watchlist, but the question is: do these submissions actually matter?

The idea behind them is a good one. Emmy voters can’t be expected to watch every nominated performer’s work in every nominated show, and requiring them to screen just a select few episodes is far more reasonable...

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TIFF: "A White White Day"

by Nathaniel R

In the middle of the stylish grief-stricken Icelandic drama, what appears to be an amateur children's play is airing on the television. The camera drifts to it and stays far longer than is natural for "background" atmosphere in a movie. An astronaut and assorted spacesuit wearing children, have experienced some kind of spacecraft crash. As we zero in on the television, the lone adult onscreen. after finding out that each of his charges are still alive (for now), launches into a hysteric speech about how 'we're all going to die. Including your parents and siblings. Yes, even you.' Salka, an eight year-old towhead granddaughter of the the film's protagonist, watches the television with her cheerio-sucking baby brother, entirely unfazed by this truth. Obviously children's entertainment like this would only fly in Scandinavia or maybe France, where young'uns can also drink wine with their parents and learn their existential nihilism young.  

Which is not to snarkily say that A White White Day is nihilistic. Just that it's pragmatically clear-eyed even when it should be crying. Far from callous and cold, despite the temperatures suggested by that omnipresent fog, thick-maned Icelandic horses, and all the heavy sweaters, the film is warm when it counts. This is a compassionate drama about grief and the sideways behaviour that will out if you keep stifling the main thing...

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TIFF: Robert Eggers' euphoric hell of "The Lighthouse"

by Chris Feil

As gloopy with various bodily fluids as it is with sea foam, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse lulls us into insanity from its first foggy frame. Diverging from the more straightforward horrors of his debut The Witch, Eggers thrusts us into the isolate hellscape that is the male mind with this Mellville-esque absurdist dark comedy. The bizarre quotient is high, both in the film’s psychosexual hysterics and crusty verbal dexterity, as the film devolves into an abstract battle of the wits and wills of two men meant to preserve the titular phallic monument. It’s genius and a complete hoot.

Set over a century ago on an offshore island, this tempestuous and physically taxing setting plays host to the two male egos of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s lighthouse watchmen. Dafoe’s superstitious, more experienced Thomas immediately puts Pattinson’s Ephraim to back-breaking arduous work, dominating him further over candlelit dinnertime monologues...

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Kirsten Dunst Becomes a God in Central Florida

By Spencer Coile 

Back in 2017, I wrote about Kirsten Dunst’s “return to glory” with her performances in The Beguiled and Woodshock. What I foresaw as glory didn’t exactly materialize - The Beguiled had its ardent fans but no real awards traction, Woodshock was quickly forgotten. Two years later, and Kirsten Dunst receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is center-stage in the Showtime original series, On Becoming a God in Central Florida, but for Dunst, something still feels missing. 

Her interview on SiriusXM’s “In Depth with Larry Flick” gave Dunst a chance to discuss how she feels slighted by the film industry - an industry that, she claims, pans her films and then celebrates them years later. Major awards? She’s nabbed two Golden Globe nominations and an Emmy nomination. She even won Best Actress at Cannes for Melancholia though that doesn’t necessarily translate to mainstream attention. It is our sincerest hope here at TFE that Kirsten Dunst’s performance on On Becoming a God in Central Florida starts getting her the credit she's deserved for decades...

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