TIFF: Fonda Plays a Hippie, Jennifer Sculpts "Butter", Viola Talks "Dark Girls"

Paolo here again to discuss three new films.

Peace Love and Misunderstanding
Bruce Beresford's new film begins with a table full of stuffy bourgeois lawyers taking down Pulitzer-winning playwrights. They seem like the kind of people the audience would like to become when they're older, having real opinions about theatre and the other high arts. This party takes place despite the Reaganite hostess, Diane Hudson (Catherine Keener) considering a divorcing from her husband (Kyle McLachlan). She takes her kids Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen) and 'documentarian' Jake (Nat Wolff) to the legendary Woodstock, New York to see their hippie grandmother (Jane Fonda). Fonda's character's presence thus questions one's notion of adulthood, as she is older yet free as the grandmother we wish we had.

Divorce and the other conflicts pop up one after another only to be resolved, a tricky comic tone to maintain. This light freedom is also evident in one scene when a chicken practically blocks our view of a character adding to the chaotic yet natural energy in this home and town. Every member of the household gets to hook up, Diane with a local musician (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), vegetarian Zoe's surprise match with a butcher named Cole (Chace Crawford) and Jake with a barista.

Fonda was the master of modern American elocution and we still hear that when she fires off the script's great one liners. But even Fonda can't help when her character turns into a Kristen Wiig caricature. Chace Crawford, capably evokes the heavy air that comes with a young man who has grown up in a rural area. And since I might not get to catch Martha Marcy May Marlene at the festival, watching Olsen's supporting work here is a decent consolation prize. She performs Zoe just as intelligent and emotionally sound as the script suggests.

Butter
This comedy about the world of butter sculpture competition in Iowa centers around Laura Pickler (Jennifer Garner), a sculptor's wife who takes on her husband Bob's (Ty Burrell) job after he is forced into retirement. Quirk topic with the strangest case of a joke bombing in a movie... (more on Butter and the documentary Dark Girls with Viola Davis after the jump.)

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TIFF: ALPS, Edwin Boyd

Amir reporting again from The Toronto International Film Festival where I saw something I frankly can't recall ever seeing on the big screen before: Toronto history.

EDWIN BOYD
I’d watched Edwin Boyd only a couple of hours after Rampart (covered yesterday), but the review had to wait.  Scott Speedman plays the titular character, a serial bank robber in the post-war Canada of the 50s. Boyd, if you haven’t heard of him, is something like a Canadian John Dillinger figure. But I assure you this film is miles better than Public Enemies.

I’d heard the film was a total crowd-pleaser and the reports were true. It’s a clichéd film that uses all the tricks of the gangster genre – bursts of action sequences, romantic subplots, pretty girls, crazy sidekicks – but it doesn’t misuse them. Sure, you’ve seen this stuff before, and yes, the film feels too self-aware of its cinematic qualities as many genre films do, but the two hours go by like two minutes as Speedman charmingly reincarnates Boyd. This version of Boyd’s life is extensively romanticized and many details of his life have been completely eliminated, but from a purely cinematic standpoint, Edwin Boyd was a pleasure.

ALPS
The most significant film of the past two days was my personal most anticipated of the festival, Yorgos Lanthimos’ ALPS (If you’ve ever stumbled upon my blog, chances are you already know the extent of my affection for his last film, Dogtooth.) The good news is that ALPS totally lived up to my expectations. Though it’s hard to imagine Lanthimos finding new fans with this film - I’ve even encountered a few Dogtooth fans who were left cold by it - this signature work moved me in ways I did not expect and it stands high above the lot as the festival’s best offering so far.

ALPS is about a group of four people who get paid to substitute for the recently deceased to comfort their families. No information is given to us about the personal lives of three of them, but for the fact that one is the gymnastics coach of another. The fourth person, Monte Rosa (played by the brilliant Aggeliki Papoulia) is a nurse who’s also taking care of her aging father at home.

Peppered with absurd comic situations and brutal violence similar to what we saw in Dogooth, and boasting even bolder stylistic choices, ALPS reaffirms Lanthimos as a distinctive voice in today’s cinema and a visionary storyteller. He’s maintained his confident directorial control, only this time he adds a more poignant and heartfelt dimension to the film. And partnering with a new cinematographer here, he plays beautiful games with camera focus that he admitted (during the Q&A) weren’t always thought of in advance, but feel so right on the screen.

The real strength of the film however, lies in its script. If Dogtooth raised essential questions about the nature of identity, ALPS asks us to reconsider our perceptions of the identity of those around us. It will leave you thinking about the authenticity of your relationships and wondering how strong the bases of our interactions really are. How difficult is it to really replace someone? On what basis are relationships formed anyway? Do we maintain them by habit or will anybody do, if they wear the right clothes and repeat the same sentences? And so on. These questions are masked by Lanthimos’ surreal approach to storytelling but if you dig deep enough, ALPS is a layered and rich psychological study.

Often times at major festivals, we hear that a screenplay or a director award is given to compensate when a great film misses out on the top prize. Rumours about ALPS’ screenplay win at Venice say the same, but in this particular case, I think we can reject the possibility. This script can stand on its own merits.

Still to come: Andrea Arnold, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Joachim Trier and Tahar Rahim to talk about, so stay tuned!

TIFF: Michelle, Andrea and Felicity in buzzy films.

Paolo here. Day 6 of TIFF brings movies about love and passion crossing borders and oceans or trying to, despite the difficulties. Ladies and gentlemen, bring your handkerchiefs or roll your cynical eyes.

THE LADY (Luc Besson)

Most of you must already know about detained Burmese President-elect Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh), but her unlikely entry into political life happened so long ago that we, especially the younger generations, forget a few facts. First, that she lived in Oxford and bore two boys for her husband Michael Aris (David Thewlis), a professor of Southeast Asian studies and that the reason for her untouchable status in a military dictatorship is her ties to England. Second, that the reason the university intellectuals have chosen her as the figurehead of the Burmese democracy movement is because her father, a general, fought for the same goals after World War II.

The story of her adult life is now adapted to the screen as The Lady directed by Luc Besson. This movie allows Besson to diversify his CV but I personally couldn't avoid looking for his trademarks. Suu is Besson's female heroine, Michael his the Tati-esque old man, and a superstitious general is the campy, quirky villain. Besson keeps the violence to a reverent level this time, even if Suu's father becomes a martyr in the film's first scene. The Lady also has a few montages which chronicle the news of Suu's planned rallies spreading throughout the streets of Rangoon. They went on a bit longer than necessary.

As biopics go, The Lady has a surprsing lack of naturalism. Take this paraphrasal of one of Suu and David's conversations:

'The world reveres you as someone with no negative qualities.'
'I will list my negative qualities right now.'
'Your negative qualities made me fall in love with you.'

But because I like this, I'll call it 'classic English dialogue', pulled off well by Thewliss and especially Yeoh who has perfected a politician-style elegance; in a festival full of misanthropy, characters who are 'too nice' are a welcome change.

W.E. (Madonna)

The title of Madonna's much-discussed new film, is an acronym for the most gossiped marriage in the past century between Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and King Edward VIII (James D'Arcy). The couple belong to a story within the story, which is an obsession for  fairytale-stricken Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), who comes close to the couple's property six decades after their exile. Wally is bored of her neglectful husband while befriending a foreign Sotheby's security guard (Oscar Isaac). I'll assume that Madonna took on this story in engender her own so-called feminist perspective, and she brings a sympathetic and sometimes humorous light to the maligned woman. I would have preferred to see a movie based on "Famous Last Words," Timothy Findley's novel about Wallis.

More on what I liked about W.E. and disliked about Like Crazy after the jump.

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TIFF: "Rampart" Redux, "Intruders" and "Pariah."

Paolo here. Allow me to present a TIFF movie I really love with a misleading and inaccurate synopsis. "Rampart: it's Greenberg but like a paranoid neo-noir with police brutality." Amir has already eloquently written his reservations on Oren Moverman's sophomore work. Yes, I admit that the camera movements were at times self-indulgent and reactions towards the film at our screening were divisive. All of this just makes me more militantly "Pro" on this movie and I've also been tweeting about it. And besides, Woody has a better chance of winning Oscar gold than Fassy.

Robin Wright and Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman's "Rampart"

After watching Rampart, the funniest police brutality movie ever, Toronto's international cinema transported me to two unknown European cities.

Joan Carlos Fresnadillo's Intruders intertwines two story lines between a Spanish family and an English one, both haunted by the same ghosts. Given that the movie that strictly follows the horror archetypes set by Guillermo del Toro, the monster has a tentacle-y jacket, leather gloved arms. Trees in this movie are equally anthropomorphic. The movie takes place at an English country house where 'Mia Farrow,' a twelve-year-old girl (another del Toro influence) discovers a strange boxed piece of paper containing a story about the monster with the juvenile name of 'Hollowface.'

Fresnadillo has an interesting filmmaking voice, filling his movie with more dated scares than cheap ones; he's probably the only horror director left in the world who still think that cats are scary! True to del Toro's brave heroine form, Mia climbs a tree - allowing her to discover the written story - and walks along town by herself. Her Spanish counterpart, Juan, climbs in and out of his window and walks through scaffolding to escape the monster.

More on INTRUDERS and the lesbian drama PARIAH after the jump.

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TIFF: "Shame", "Rampart" & the Best Actor Oscar

Amir here, with more coverage from Toronto. Steve McQueen can direct the next Rambo sequel with The Situation in the lead and I’ll be there first in line. Most directors would be lucky to make two films as strong as Shame and Hunger well into their career, let alone in their first two attempts, but McQueen is a rare talent with a knack for visual storytelling that is unmatched by most directors

Shame

In Shame, McQueen’s “regular” star Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an Irish-born New Yorker whose uncontrollable addiction to sex drives his life, dictates his work and defines his relationships. When his troubled cabaret singer sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) moves in with him, the endless cycle of his sexual routine is broken and things go awry.

On the surface, this might sound like a much lighter subject matter for the director than Hunger, but he approaches the film with the same dazzling formal control. And though he claimed in the Q&A session that he can’t point to specific influences that he’s drawn from his work as a visual artist, one would have to be blind not to notice his fine arts background bleeding into Shame. With the help of Sean Bobbitt (cinematographer) and Joe Walker (editor) who have both done brilliant work – particularly the latter – they create a stunning, rhythmic, heartbreaking and achingly real portrayal of addiction. Addiction is nothing new to the screen. Even sexual addiction has been shown on the screen many times before, but it’s never felt as delicate as it does in McQueen’s hands. Better yet, this film is at once universal and incredibly personal.

Michael Fassbender, Woody Harrelson and Oscar speculation after the jump.

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