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.
