Part 2 - first part here.
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Another year, another TIFF. Before I dive into the movies that I saw, I have to comment on the increasingly frustrating ticket purchasing process. New this year, you select seats for every screening while buying the ticket. On the face of it, this has definite advantages: it’s less stressful when entering the theatre because there’s no need to rush to find a good spot, and it leaves you time to freely take that all-important pre-show bathroom break.
On the other hand, what might not be obvious is that the seat selection is not equally available to everyone. TIFF offers paid memberships that include discounts on year-round screenings, access to a lounge in the Lightbox venue, and importantly, early access to ticket sales for the festival. Previously, it meant that members had a better chance at getting tickets for popular films, but now, with the seat selection, it means that they get to scoop up all of the best seats, too. When I purchased tickets as a non-member this year, I found that many screenings had only the worst seats left, like the first row right in front of the screen, and I decided not go to that show. In previous years, I would have just bought the ticket, and arrived early enough to find a good seat.
The resulting feeling is that TIFF is becoming more and more exclusive, where the people who pay the most get the best experience. The festival has always played on its reputation for being the “people’s festival,” in contrast to more insider events like Cannes and Venice, but in my mind, it’s slowly losing its claim to that reputation.
End rant.
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TIFF is back in 2022
Luxembourg, Luxembourg; The Grab; The Colour of Ink; Bones of Crows; Raymond & Ray
Men at Lunch & The Central Park Five
By coincidence, I saw these two New York-centric documentaries back-to-back.
The former is about the famous 1930’s photograph of the construction workers sitting on a steel beam, casually having lunch despite the dangerous position that they’re in. The latter deals with a criminal case in the 1980’s where five teenage boys were wrongly convicted for the sexual assault of a jogger in Central Park.
Both of them portray New York as a place where many cultures come together, and sometimes clash, but I thought The Central Park Five did a better job of it. The five subjects are all very well-spoken, and through their interviews, you come to understand the racial tension that existed in New York at the time. By the end of the film, it’s a real relief that they were exonerated, but at the same time, you still feel angry and sad that they wasted so many years in prison.
Men at Lunch, on the other hand, does not have the same narrative strength. Essentially, it tries to tell the story of who those men on the beam were, but since nobody knows their identities for sure, it settles for making them into symbols of the many Irish immigrants who worked in construction at the time. That’s fine, but the film gets a little repetitive, and keeps telling us how brave they were, how hard life was during the Depression, how the construction workers shaped New York as a city, &c. I found it especially awkward when they tried to draw a connection between those men, and the men who are working now to build the new World Trade Centre tower. The 9/11 scenes seemed a bit out of place and exploitative to me.
Rating:
Men at Lunch: 5/10
The Central Park Five: 7/10
Thale
Towards the end of the festival, I get a little tired. I might have enjoyed this one more if I saw it earlier in the week. I realize that it’s a low-budget movie, and I respect what they did technically. Thale has some cool horror moments and some cool action moments, but maybe that’s the problem: it doesn’t feel like either a horror film or an action film. I couldn’t really get into the story because I didn’t know what the characters were after. But again, I was pretty tired.
Rating: 5/10
Tai Chi 0
This, on the other hand, was a much more suitable pace for a weary festival-goer. It’s basically a Chinese kung-fu film, mixed with the style of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (e.g., whenever someone does a kung-fu move, the name of the move is shown in stylized text on the screen), with some steampunk thrown in. Cartoonish action at its finest. It’s the first film in a 2-part series, so structurally, it’s a bit off: what you think will be the final battle is actually just setup for the sequel, which makes the previous battle the actual final battle, and a little unsatisfying.
Rating: 7/10
TIFF 2012: Part 4
Disconnect, Antiviral, As If We Were Catching a Cobra, The Bay, Smashed, Much Ado About Nothing
I’m going to go with a shorter, “rapid-fire” format today. I’m just tired, okay?
Disconnect
Reading the description, I was a bit concerned that this would turn into a morally unsubtle “the Internet is bad” type of story. I was pleasantly surprised that it doesn’t focus too much on the Internet itself; the Internet just a device to incite events and get the story going, and then mostly stays out of the way. The focus stays on the characters, which is as it should be. The characters sometimes behave in unrealistic ways in order to increase the drama, but I thought it was effective and was caught up in the film.
Rating: 7/10
Antiviral
A lot of the pleasure of watching this film comes from trying to figure out how the premise works. I didn’t read the description beforehand and I don’t know what it gives away, but I’m glad I went in not knowing anything. Unfortunately, once the premise is set up in the first act, the movie didn’t do much to keep me interested. There are some cool and creepy visual moments, but I couldn’t really understand any of the character motivations, and I didn’t really care what happened to them.
Rating: 5/10
As If We Were Catching a Cobra
A documentary about political cartoonists working during the Arab Spring sounded like an interesting premise, but the execution was a bit lacking. All the film is is a series of talking-head interviews with various cartoonists and artists. There was nothing really visual or cinematic going on, so it’s just watching people talk and reading lots and lots of subtitles. It was too much for me for an early morning screening, so I walked out, which is a rare occurrence for me. Maybe this material would make for a good book, though.
Rating: waived because I didn’t see the whole thing. But really it’s like a 3 or a 4.
The Bay
I keep telling myself that I’m tired of the whole “found footage” thing whenever I see one (I keep watching them though), but this one felt like a fresh experience. Usually, found footage films have to jump through hoops to justify why there are cameras present, or they just don’t justify it and everyone is left thinking “why don’t you put down the camera?!” the whole time. The Bay avoids this by mixing different camera sources, e.g. A TV news crew, security cameras, police car dashboard cameras. Because of this variety, it often feels more like a well-edited suspense film than a found footage film. It definitely kept me in suspense, although in hindsight, the “monsters” themselves are a little bit silly.
Rating: 7/10
Smashed
Good performances all around, but I thought this story about a young woman with a drinking problem oversimplifies its characters. I didn’t feel like there was much depth to them beyond whether they are drunk or sober, and what they think about other people being drunk or sober.
Rating: 5/10
Much Ado About Nothing
Wesley and Fred. Enough said.
Rating: 8/10
Blancanieves
I’m going to have trouble talking about this film (actually talking, verbally, I mean, not writing about it), because I can’t pronounce the title properly. It’s Spanish for “Snow White.” Maybe I’ll just call it “Snow White,” okay? Okay. So anyway, the movie is an adaptation of the Snow White story, transplanted into 1920’s Spain, and in particular, into the world of matadors. It was the “Golden Age of Bullfighting,” the director said in the Q & A.
The fairy tale reference is both a benefit and a detriment to the film, in my opinion. While it does add an other-worldly quality to the characters (especially the bullfighting dwarves), some elements felt like they were shoehorned in, like the poison apple, and the eternal slumber. I thought the story was strong enough to stand on its own without having to hang it on the framework of an existing fairy tale.
Rating: 7/10
Byzantium
There’s something a bit cheesy about the whole vampire thing, and how they’re supposed to be all mysterious and ethereal and romantic. Byzantium has that cheesiness, especially during the flashback scenes, which tell the origin story of the two main vampire characters. The Victoria-era costumes and sets are well-produced, but they’re, you know, cheesy. I think it might have bothered me more if I hadn’t recently been watching a lot of similarly historical scenes done with a lower budget on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (lower budget = more cheesy).
Stylistically and visually, I enjoyed the film, but I had some problems with the narrative. The aforementioned flashbacks are interspersed throughout the film, and the origin story arc is supposed to parallel the modern-day storyline. But about halfway through, I had already pieced together the mechanisms of how the characters became vampires, and after that, I was just waiting for what I already knew would happen to play out. As a result, I thought the flashbacks were starting to get in the way of the present narrative, and slowed down what is already a deliberately-paced movie.
Rating: 6/10
No
Speaking of cheesy, the 80’s were. Cheesy. Specifically, the media output of the 80’s (e.g. TV commercials, movies, etc.), when watched today, can often evoke cringes and bursts of awkward laughter.
The subject matter of No could have made for a very dark film—it follows a group of advertisers as they create TV commercials encouraging voters to vote against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile’s 1988 referendum—but the fact that the commercials they create are 80’s commercials adds a lot of humour. There is a real danger involved (any election organized by a dictatorship is going to be fraught with corruption and threats) but when the anti-Pinochet “No” advertisers express their incendiary political ideas of freedom and democracy through commercials featuring dancers dressed in Day-Glo Spandex leotards, backed by synth-pop beats, it’s hard not to laugh at the contrast. The filmmakers behind No have perfectly achieved a balance between humour and solemnity.
Rating: 8/10
