TIFF11 Schedule

TIFF is nearly upon us again with another eclectic potluck of buzzy movies, gambles, cult screenings, and the best of world cinema. And this year's line-up, despite less heavy hitters, looks more promising than last year's. As usual, I eliminated pretty much anything with a release date before the end of 2011, regardless of how much interest I had.

Anyone interested in meeting up for any screenings, let me know (especially for 360, Himizu, or Rebellion as no one else I know is going to those yet). Here's the lowdown on my near-finalized schedule, leaner than last year's by six films:

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 09
02:15PM: Alois Nebel // Tomas Lunak
                This B&W Czech animation uses the same rotoscoping technique used in A
                Scanner Darkly. Looks like a visual stunner.
09:00PM: The Hunter // Daniel Nettheim
                Willem Dafoe traveling through the jungle in search of a legendary tiger (with
                Sam Neill in the mix). Sounds positively mythical.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
12:30PM: 360 // Fernando Meirelles
                Interconnected stories are getting tired and Meirelles's last film, Blindness, was
                a bust. Still, he has two major achievements in Constant Gardener and City of
                God and a high-profile cast to help him along the way.
05:45PM: Death of a Superhero / Ian FitzGibbon
                Coming-of-age stories always hit the spot for me. And the stills look promising
                enough for this to be worth the gamble.
11:59PM: You're Next / Adam Wingard
                A home invasion film with the Midnight Madness crowd is going to be a blast
                no matter what. It helps that Wingard's $2000 Pop Skull was batshit crazy in
                a good way.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11
03:15PM: Samsara / Ron Fricke
                The long-awaited follow-up to Baraka, 90 minutes of the most transcendent
                footage from across the globe ever be put to film.
09:15PM: Miss Bala / Gerardo Naranjo
                The buzz for this has just grown and grown since its Cannes premiere. I hear
                it's an intense thriller.
11:59PM: Livid / Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo
                From the guys who brought us the fucked up French home invasion horror
                Inside. This is supposedly more like a really dark Grimm fairy tale.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
04:45PM: Dark Horse / Todd Solondz
                An overgrown manchild looking for love sounds like just the right kind of
                trappings for an awesome dark comedy.
08:00PM: The Loneliest Planet / Julia Loktev
                A haunting travelogue film starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Early reviews have
                been good and Bernal has a pretty good track record.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13
03:15PM: Shame / Steve McQueen
                If you've seen McQueen's Hunger, also featuring Michael Fassbender in his
                breakout role pre-X-Men, you don't have to ask why this is a must.
10:00PM: The Moth Diaries / Mary Harron
                Vampires, all-girls' boarding school. Could be the makings of a cheesy CW
                show. Or it could be Harron's return to American Psycho craziness. Hopefully
                the latter prevails.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14
11:45PM: Café de Flore / Jean-Marc Vallée
                C.R.A.Z.Y. is one of the few Canadian films that have blown me away in
                recent years (with Incendies the only one after it). Like Cameron Crowe,
                Vallée has a talent for pairing the perfect music to images and this looks no
                different, supposedly with Sigur Ros, Pink Floyd, and Zeppelin in the mix.
03:00PM: ALPS / Yorgos Lanthimos
                The latest from the director of the bizarro Dogtooth. The premise is sheer
                genius - following a company who will hire out stand-ins for your deceased
                loved ones.
09:15PM: Carré Blanc / Jean-Baptiste Léonetti
                Dystopian sci-fi always has the potential to go to one extreme or the other.
                The footage looks breathtaking so I'm taking the gamble on this one.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15
11:00AM: Jeff, Who Lives at Home / Jay & Mark Duplass
                Jason Segel in an existential comedy. My fest badly needed an injection of
                lightness and this looks to be the ticket.
08:45PM: Himizu / Sion Sono
                Anyone who has seen Sion Sono's insane four hour epic Love Exposure
                featuring pervert gangs, cults, and kung fu or his more restrained dark
                horror/drama work in Suicide Club and Cold Fish can't possibly pass this
                up.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16
02:45PM: Rebellion / Mathieu Kassovitz
                Programmer Piers Handling calls it the French Apocalypse Now. But he's
                been wrong - terribly wrong before (Re: Passion Play). Hoping this is more
                La Haine, less Gothika or Babylon A.D..
06:30PM: The Awakening / Nick Murphy
                When the program references The Others in its description of the film, I have
                to give it a try.
09:00PM: Wuthering Heights / Andrea Arnold
                Respected auteur. Classic source material. Supposedly radical treatment.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17
03:00PM: Headshot / Pen-ek Ratanaruang
                A director I've wanted to get into for a long time and a premise that sounds like
                my kind of weird (man wakes up after being shot to see the world upside-down).
06:15PM: The Deep Blue Sea / Terence Davies
                No, not the remake of the '90s shark movie. Though I would see it if it was
                made. Most conventional movie of the fest for me - a traditional period piece
                starring Rachel Weisz and Loki from Thor.
09:00PM: Killer Joe / William Friedkin
                Could this be a return to form for the director of The Exorcist and The French
                Connection? With Emile Hirsch, Matthew McConaughey, and Juno Temple.
11:59PM: Kill List / Ben Wheatley
                Another buzz-maker on the festival circuit playing the last night of Midnight
                Madness. This should end the fest on a high note.

Possible last minute fest picks are: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, The Incident, Trishna, Twixt, Snowtown, Porfirio, Monsters Club, Keyhole, Michael, Crazy Horse, and Sleepless Night.
I may also be doing the movies Drive, Warrior, and Contagion during but not at the fest.

On Film: Perfection is Overrated

The other day, a rant was posted on a film forum with the argument that The Social Network is better than Inception in all aspects (screenplay, technical details, etc) and therefore, it is inconceivable that Inception could rank higher than The Social Network on anyone's 'Best Of' list.

Here's the thing. Perfection is overrated.

As a film fan, sure there are accountable things we can evaluate that help bring about a more accurate idea of a film's merits. But I don't think a film's power can be summed up through a simple critical breakdown. Just because one film is technically superior to another - doesn't necessarily have a direct correlation with its effect and impact on me, the viewer. Judging art cannot hinge solely on whether it achieves a state of critical "perfection". Art exists for the viewer to respond to it, as a result, its value comes from my interaction with it, what I bring to the table.

A film could be as arbitrarily perfect as possible - but that doesn't mean my own reaction to it will be anything but ambivalent. It helps, to be sure, to be formally brilliant, but it takes my experiences, my feelings, my thoughts, my personality, my baggage to really bring a film to life, to get me to respond to it.

If we all could truly put one film up and call it the best of the year without debate (i.e. if artistic perfection could be measured by the sum of its technical aspects hitting their marks) and everyone agreed on it, then the value of art, the value of the medium itself would be diminished.

The fact is, it is perfectly valid to recognize those imperfect films that impact you more as being "better" on your personal scale, despite the lack of logic to see them as such. Cult films, for example, are valid experiences that are sometimes even celebrated for their flaws and I don't think people should feel any shame at recognizing those films as having a larger impact on themselves. Sometimes, the very things one might critique in looking for perfection, are precisely the things that create that unique aesthetic, that piece of work that is unlike anything else out there. A filmmaker like Michel Gondry, for example, is messy and sprawling - and that rambling, low-tech, kitschy quality is precisely what defines him as one of the unique talents out there. Stripping that individualistic streak for a more mainstream veneer may result in a more balanced film but loses out on the qualities that make him so interesting in the first place.

I think we can still generally say a film is a bad one or good one - but we have to recognize that some flawed films can also be just as good or better in their own way - they can still hit home and work their magic. We can embrace and love those flaws for what they're worth.

In fact, that's taste. The best critics in the past generally have had very unique/recognizable sensibilities. There shouldn't be this pandering to the idea of a universal "Best Of" that can be defined simply through technical means. Your taste in film should reflect you as a person - not some kind of consensus viewpoint. The best critics know how important it is to allow their reaction (yes, their bias, if you will) to the material filter through. Without their own reaction, it becomes a systemic breakdown of elements - and explaining a film away through this robotic procedure, eliminating the human response, is surely missing the point of art.

I've seen people get more and more obsessed with the idea of technical perfection as a requirement in film. More and more, I've moved in the opposite direction. I'm not opposed to technical perfection by any means, but I'd prefer a flawed film with ideas or feelings that connect with me than a technically perfect film that I can't begin to penetrate.

To me, it's a combination - the combination of understanding the achievements of a film on its more objective levels while taking into account its subjective ties to the critic, the gut response that cannot simply be directly corroborated by this element or that.

It's the same reason why I no longer rate films using a scale. I don't believe it's a proper judgment of a film - it's heavily reliant on rewarding formally perfect films and penalizes bolder (and possibly more flawed) work, and I've begun to feel that that's the wrong approach to viewing and critiquing.

TIFF10 Final Thoughts

In the interest of moving on with this blog, I've decided to post very quick, short reactions to the final seven films I saw at TIFF.

I saw 22nd of May and Confessions in a row which was, in a way, fitting. Both films utilize heavy amounts of style to compensate for a lack of substance. 22nd of May starts out promisingly, revolving around an incident with a bomb going off at a shopping mall, but it quickly falls back on all sorts of fragmented and pretentious techniques to cover up the lack of anything happening in the film. Confessions is a step up, being very watchable with every frame gorgeously stylized but also having a more substantial storyline that explores teenage violence. The problem is that the director uses montages so often that Confessions never settles down. As a result, I never felt like the characters were three-dimensional and I never cared enough for the film to have an impact. You'll get a snatch of dialogue here, the music will come in, it'll fade to another scene, another character will say a line or two, and on and on and on. To be sure, the montages are all gorgeously done but I was looking for a movie, not a two-hour music video.

Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D was one of the films we were looking forward to most. Herzog + caves + 3D should output something pretty crazy right? Unfortunately, this is not the case as Caves is a rather muted affair. Once you've seen the cave paintings in the film, there's simply not much else to drive the film forward. I enjoyed it to a lesser degree but it's closer to one of those History Channel specials than you might imagine. It's the film that has faded the most for me out of all the films I saw at TIFF.

Cold Fish is the first film of Sion Sono's that I'd seen (since the festival, I have seen two of his other works). It is about a subdued man who runs a tropical fish store and finds himself, his wife, and his daughter caught up in a mass murderer's crime schemes. The film keeps a slow-burn simmer, in line with its extremely passive main character, for much of its lengthy running time - one that gets more and more frustrating as the minutes run by. The last act though is a new level of perverse catharsis goes a ways to redeeming the film. After having seen Suicide Club and Love Exposure however, I have to say this is by far the least of Sion Sono's works, lacking the loose-limbed wackiness of those two films.

Our Day Will Come is the feature debut of Romain Gavras, son of Costa-Gavras, starring Vincent Cassel and Olivier Barthelemy as two redheads who decide to form their own gang. It has an explosive premise but strangely, it's a more muted film than one would expect. It plays well for its entirety but I do wish it pushed the envelope more than it does.

Submarine is one-half of an engrossing film and while the second half doesn't live up to the promise of the first, it's still good enough for this to be the best of the last seven films I saw at TIFF. It's a coming-of-age story with shades of a toned down Wes Anderson meeting the tone of the more romantic Godardian works. Frankly, it's the hipster movie of TIFF10 but the dry British humor and attitude of its protagonist Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), won me over.

The last film I saw at TIFF, and one that I saw on a last minute whim, Beginners is a well-crafted adult drama focusing on the son (Ewan McGregor) of a man in his seventies (Christopher Plummer) who comes out but I can't help but wish there was more spontaneity and spark to the whole thing. It was a surprisingly muted finale to the fest.