Review: Jake Gyllenhaal gets "Stronger"

by Eric Blume

Have patience watching director David Gordon Green’s film Stronger, which captures real-life Boston native Jeff Bauman (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) as he’s caught in the 2013 Marathon bombing.  After a rickety start, Green relaxes into a nice rhythm and delivers an almost extinct creature: a true adult movie drama.

The first few scenes of Stronger come on a little, ahem, strong.  They’re written to show what a great guy Bauman is (he cuts out from work so he and his lucky beer can help the Red Sox win, he stands up for his gay boss), and Green has all the actors pushing too hard.  The initial scene where we meet Bauman’s family (including mom Miranda Richardson and girlfriend Tatiana Maslany) in a bar reeks of Boston cliché.  It’s a very tricky thing, honestly capturing that lower-middle-class Beantown language and attitude, and Green overplays his hand in this and several other early scenes.  The energy is overly commercial, and the movie gets off to an uneasy start.

But once the big sequence begins, where Bauman loses his legs in the terrible terrorist attack, Green begins observing smaller details, and starts scoring...

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Review: Darren Aronofsky's "mother!"

This review contains mild spoilers from the first half of the film since everything is essentially a spoiler given the cryptic promotions. The review was previously published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. 

“Baby?” is the first line spoken in Darren Aronofsky’s new film mother!  but not its first image. The film begins with a defiant girl burning in a house consumed by fire. Javier Bardem collects a gem from the ashes. He places it on a shelf with other less brilliant but similar gems and we watch as the house restores itself from blackened ash. What to make of this rebirth… or is it a timelapse reversal of the destruction? Are we seeing the future or the past?

Cut to Jennifer Lawrence, waking up suddenly in bed. Where is her husband?

Baby?

While Lawrence is the star she’s a cypher-like presence in this particular film (new for her) a mostly passive figure to whom the action happens... We learn very little about her marriage besides the fact that he is a writer and she spends her time restoring their massive home.

Then a knock on the door…

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TIFF: Elle Fanning is "Mary Shelley"

Our ongoing adventures at TIFF

In the summer of 1816 legendary Romantic literary figures Mary Shelley (and stepsister Claire Clairmont), Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori were holed up in a Swiss estate and challenged each other to write scary ghost stories. From that fateful contest two famous works of horror emerged ("Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus" in 1818 and "The Vampyre" in 1819 -- neither of them actual ghost stories!). Ken Russell attacked this collision of authors with his trademark sexual abandon and visual insanity in Gothic (1986) and his wasn't the first or last film to stare with fascination at that morbid contest 201 years ago. We return to that summer for a good chunk of Haifaa al-Mansour's Mary Shelley but with far different intent.

Haifaa al-Mansour, the first Saudi female film director (she previously directed Wadjda) is more interested in the trailblazing of Mary Shelley (née Godwin) as a female author -- and the unique challenges that came with her gender in the literary world of 1818 -- than in the creation of Frankenstein...

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Official Foreign Film Submissions Thus Far

All the foreign submission charts have been updated to reflect the speedy announcements of new titles. We're now up to 84 (last year's tally was an all time record of 85). Somehow I neglected to include Ireland on the submission charts. They've selected an "audacious" biopic about the singer Joe Heany called Song of Granite. The film uses both documentary footage and narrative sequences. It's in black and white and looks gorgeous in still photos

Submissions we've reviewed thus far here at TFE...

• Argentina's Zama
• Austria's Happy End
• Belgium's The Racer and the Jailbird
• Estonia's November
• Hungary's On Body and Soul
• Norway's Thelma

Submissions we've seen but haven't yet reviewed...

• Czech Republic's Ice Mother
• Egypt's Sheikh Jackson
• Finland's Tom of Finland
• France's 120 Beats per Minute
• Polan's Spoor

Submissions we're scheduled to see soon...

• Sweden's The Square
• Switzerland's The Divine Order

The rest of the list (thus far). We'll look out for opportunities to see them...

• Afghanistan A Letter to the President
• Albania's Daybreak
• Algeria's Road to Instanbul
• Armenia's Yeva
• Azerbaijan's Pomegranate Orchard
• Bangladesh's Khacha
• Bolivia's Dark Skull
• Bosnia & Herzegovina's Men Don't Cry
• Brazil's Bingo: King of the Mountain
• Bulgaria's Glory
• Cambodia's First They Killed My Father
• Canada's Hochelaga, Land of Souls
• Chile's A Fantastic Woman
• Colombia's Guilty Men
• Croatia's Quit Staring at My Plate
• Denmark's You Disappear
• Dominican Republic's Woodpeckers
• Ecuador's Alba
• Georgia's Scary Mother
• Germany's In the Fade
• Greece's Amerika Square
• Hong Kong's Mad World
• Iceland's Under the Tree
• India's Newton
• Indonesia's The Leftovers
• Iran's Breath
• Iraq's The Dark Wind
• Ireland's Song of Granite
• Israel's Foxtrot
• Italy's A Ciambra
• Japan's Her Love Boils Bathwater
• Kazakhstan's Road to Mother
• Kenya's Kati Kati
• Kosovo's Unwanted
• Kyrgyzstan's Centaur
• Laos's Dearest Sister
• Latvia's Chronicles of Melanie
• Lebanon's The Insult
• Lithuania's Frost
• Luxembourg's Barrage
• Mexico's Tempestad
• Morocco's Razzia
• Mozambique's The Train of Salt and Sugar
• Nepal's White Sun
• Netherland's Layla M
• New Zealand's One Thousand Ropes
• Pakistan's Saawan
• Palestine's Wajib
• Panama's Beyond Brotherhood
• Paraguay's Los Buscadores
• Peru's Rosa Chumber
• Philippines's Birdshot
• Portugal's Saint George
• Romania's The Fixer
• Russia's Loveless
• Serbia's Requiem for Mrs J
• Singapore's Pop Aye
• Slovakia's The Line
• Slovenia's The Miner
• South Africa's The Wound
• South Korea's A Taxi Driver
• Spain's Summer 1993
• Taiwan's Small Talk
• Thailand's By the Time It Gets Dark
• Tunisia's The Last of Us
• Turkey's Ayla: The Daughter of War
• Ukraine's Black Level
• United Kingdom's My Pure Land
• Uruguay's Another Story of the World
• Venezuela's El Inca
• Vietnam's Father and Son

Current predictions

Some Rami to Love

Look, it's the first image of Rami Malek as the iconic Freddie Mercury in the movie Bohemian Rhapsody. The film will be directed by Bryan Singer, who is stepping away from the mutants for once, unless you count Freddie Mercury's mutant lungs / range (four octaves -heeeyyy) which maybe you should. What'cha think?

It's quite a fine image, really. Rami's unique facial structure really plays up the Freddieness once you add that moustache. For what it's worth we are promised that this will not be a traditional biopic (it covers only the formation of the band in 1970 through their Live-Aid performance in 1985). There have been murmurs that the project might not do justice to Freddie's story, or his sexuality, because the surviving members of Queen are totally involved. That's always tricky with true stories when the actual people are involved in telling it.

With deep apologies to Queen, I'm now singing one of my favorite of their hits with new lyrics

All we hear is Rami oh ga ga
Rami oh goo goo
Rami oh ga ga
All we hear is Rami oh ga ga
Rami oh blah blah
Rami oh, what's new?
Rami oh, someone still loves you!