by ·Comments Off on The Dirties (2013, Matt Johnson)

The Blair Witch School Shooting Elephant Project. Two nerdy kids enjoy making videos for school, videos involving too much sweary violence and too many blatant rip-offs of their favorite movie scenes. Their teacher tries to get them to tone it down, but they keep ramping up, filming a story of two kids (themselves) taking revenge on the Dirties (school bullies). Inevitably, one of the two takes this to the next level, sets up cameras in the school hallways and shoots some guys, while his companion tries to escape the scene.

Owen is the more normal one, crushing on a girl named Chrissy instead of devoting all his time to firing practice and bully identification like his friend Matt (played by director Johnson). There’s a third (never seen?) boy named Jared who’s filming a documentary of Matt & Owen – his presence is sometimes noted but usually not, and he appears to be present during the actual shooting, which was inspired as much by school shootings in the news as cult movies. So our The Dirties is his documentary footage, mixed with the stuff Owen and Matt film, plus their The Dirties uncompleted feature.

Watched this because of the excellent Cinema Scope interview with the director:

Matt is always feeling the camera. And he’s not alone. The concept of always seeing the camera and always feeling like you’re on camera is a very modern problem. And by “problem,” I don’t even necessarily mean that it’s a negative thing — this is just something that we need to consider. Kids these days are always filming themselves and they’re always acting like they’re on TV. Matt is just a guy that has actively put himself on TV 24/7. So he’s always trying to perform. And he can’t break the spell because he’s made this rule for himself of performing.

Johnson believes that realistic performances are paramount, so instead of casting actors for small roles, he performs the movie in public spaces.

All you’re seeing in The Dirties is just a lot of really good acting from people who don’t know that they’re acting. … The closest thing is something like Borat, but we’re not making fun of people here. We’re the stupid ones. I’m always the one who doesn’t know what’s going on. … That old man who walks up when Owen gets hit with a rock is the same kind of example. It’s not even a joke, that moment, it’s simply reality. The old man was just there, and didn’t know what was going on. The joke is on us.

by ·Comments Off on Bestiaire (2012, Denis Côté)

Katy thought this was a boring movie where nothing happens until I told her to treat it not as a movie but as a series of motion photographs. Camera is mostly still, and half the frame is usually a wall – a favorite trick is to shoot only wall and let animals slowly wander into view. Shot at a Quebec zoo, with the occasional custodian and a parade of customers at the very end (plus a taxidermist, some sketch artists, but mostly animals and walls). Côté’s statement in the press notes declares that it can’t be a documentary since it has no subject, but he doesn’t offer what it might be instead. “Something indefinable.”

Côté:

But where is the salvation between the puppies on YouTube and a boa constrictor’s reproductive cycle narrated in eight chapters? How should one look at an animal (and find a cinematic language specific to this act)? Is it possible to shoot animals other than through the lens of entertainment or for a non-educational purpose? Neither actor nor story catalyzer, cannot an animal be contemplated and filmed simply for what it is? … The immense field of contemplative cinema offers elements of an answer.

by ·Comments Off on Life of Pi (2012, Ang Lee)

Irrfan Khan is Pi, having a quiet day at home when an annoyingly Richard Dreyfuss-looking writer (Rafe Spall, one of the Andys in Hot Fuzz) shows up demanding to be told a story. So Pi starts at the beginning – he is named after a French swimming pool and lives with brother and parents (Tabu, who played Khan’s wife in The Namesake, is his mom) at a zoo, and is interested in religion.

One day the family packs up their zoo and heads off in a ship, which sinks in stormy waters, presumably killing Pi’s whole family. He finds himself on a lifeboat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a rat, a hyena and a bengal tiger named Richard Parker, but the animals soon eat each other until it’s just Pi and the tiger. He fashions a raft so he can sleep without getting killed, but loses all his food and water due to a leaping whale. Formerly vegetarian, Pi learns to catch and eat fish. Boy and tiger stop on a “carnivorous island,” then get the hell out of there after loading up on edible roots. Finally, land and rescue, though Pi is sad that he never managed to connect with the tiger.

Rafe Spall thinks the whole thing is pretty far-fetched, so Pi gives another version of the story (told, not shown), where the lifeboat survivors were people, including Pi’s mother and a sadistic cook from the boat (Gerard Depardieu), then asks Rafe which story he prefers. The center of the film is just perfect – more colorful and awe-inspiring than a shipwreck story has any right to be.

G. Kenny:

But the frame story, in which an older Pi, a happily settled vegetarian living in Canada, tells his tale to a white male writer who in the credits is called “The Writer” is both a little cloying and forced and smacks a bit of, dare I say it, colonialist thought. I know that it’s a faithful adaptation from the book, and I know the book’s author is a white male writer, but I personally am just a wee bit tired of the convention in which a representative of The Other relates a tale of profundity to a white dude. Changing it up a little can’t hurt. Hell, a white woman would be less boring. I understand that second-guessing the artist is poor critical practice. But that fact remains that this convention, which was always pretty patronizing to begin with, has ossified into cliché, and the movie suffers for it.

by ·1 Comment

The sweetest end-of-the-world drama. Likeably lopsided Don McKellar (also writer/director) visits his family (opening nostalgia Christmas presents and having a homey diner) claims that he’s comfortable with his plan to spend the (unexplained but universally accepted) apocalypse in six hours alone in his apartment. Don is really super-depressed over the recent death of his wife, ends up helping an increasingly desperate Sandra Oh, who still thinks she can go shopping and catch taxis in the midst of societal breakdown, attempt to reunite with her intense latter-day boyfriend. This is probably David Cronenberg, a gas company manager who completes his goal to personally phone every customer and thank them for their business, before going home to await Sandra, leaving employee Donna in charge.

Sandra has car trouble:

Don and Sandra get grudging help from Don’s playboy car-collector friend Craig, who is rapidly going through a list of sexual conquests – both acts and partners (Lily, a black woman; Don, who refuses; and their high school French teacher, Genevieve Bujold).

Bujold with Callum Rennie:

Cameo by Pontypool director Bruce McDonald (with the bat)

The midnight hour approaches, but the sun is still up – apparently it hasn’t gone down in weeks. Don’s sister Sarah Polley and her boyfriend attend the final countdown celebration in the middle of town. A nerdy guy named Menzies holds a solo piano concert in an otherwise-unused theater. Cronenberg is shot by marauding youth. His employee Donna, a virgin, is Craig’s final visitor. And Sandra, losing her dream of last-second double-suicide with her beloved, ends up in the arms of Don. It seemed like a generic-indie-looking unexceptional drama in the first ten minutes, but totally hooked me and proved amazingly touching by the end. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Cronenberg gets a taste of his own horror-makeup medicine:

Polley party:

by ·Comments Off on Roadkill (1989, Bruce McDonald)

“If you wanna drive, you’ve gotta kill.”

Opens with a mini-documentary about rabbit breeding, and I’m thinking someone had been watching L’age d’Or lately.

Bruce with his lead actress:

Record label flunky Ramona (Valerie Buhagiar, later in Highway 61) is assigned the task of tracking down a touring band gone missing, Children of Paradise. She takes a taxi for this purpose, drives 18 hours straight. Main label guy Roy, with slicked-back hair and a vaguely familiar look (he had small parts in eXistenZ and A History of Violence) stays back, yelling at her over the phone when she calls in.

Roy:

She finds the band briefly, but the singer has disappeared. So she pools her efforts with a documentary crew (the director of which is played by Bruce McDonald himself) also hired to document the Children of Paradise. At some point she has sex with a 15-year-old guy at the drive-in, who gives her his car. Ramona finally finds the band’s singer, now a spaced-out mute bald hot-dog salesman. But he wanders off, leaving her with a self-proclaimed serial killer, played by Don McKellar, the movie’s writer. All the players (including Roy) meet up at a bar for the finale, supposed to be the Children of Paradise’s final show, and it is, since Don shoots a whole bunch of people (including the documentary crew – only movie I’ve seen in which the writer gets to kill the director).

Mute vocalist:

Postscript: the taxi’s meter rolls over and Ramona only owes a couple bucks. Also the cabby meets Joey Ramone for some reason.

Fun indie movie, creatively and energetically shot, with wall-to-wall music. I’d be glad to see more indie films take their cues from punk rock instead of from Little Miss Sunshine.

Joshua at Octopus Cinema:

Aesthetically, the film contains many more iconic moments than one would think, from the silhouetted conversation [Don McKellar] has with Ramona to the solitary dance Ramona shares with Luke in the center of a grouping of cars, McDonald peppers the film with moments of intermittent beauty, striking images that remain on the brain for hours afterward.

by ·Comments Off on Dura Lex / By the Law (1926, Lev Kuleshov)

The year after The Gold Rush and Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein’s teacher Kuleshov turned in his own gold rush masterpiece. It’s far less funny than the Chaplin feature, and far more economical than the Eisenstein – for the bulk it’s just three actors, a cabin and a storm. You don’t see a lot of Russian films set in Canada. I don’t, anyway, but then I don’t see a lot of Russian films – been meaning to correct that. The titles pronounce this as the “third work of the Kuleshov Collective,” the first two of which still mostly survive.

I don’t get the organizational structure here, but “chairman” Hans (Sergei Komarov of The End of St. Petersburg) with two “shareholders” (blonde-bearded Dutchy and black-bearded Harky) are out in the Yukon mining for gold – unsuccessfully, for the most part, along with Hans’s English wife Edith (Aleksandra Khokhlova of earlier Kuleshov Collective film Mr. West) and mustachioed Irishman (proven by fact that he spends his free time playing flutes and dancing jigs) Michael Dennin (Vladimir Fogel, the hero of Chess Fever).

Based on “The Unexpected” by Jack London. London’s stories made for extremely popular film adaptations from 1908 to 1930 – and he lived to 1916, so may have seen some of them. I suppose people back then enjoyed watching lone, underprepared hikers crash through the ice then slowly freeze to death. This group, however, is well stocked for the weather, and just as they were giving up on their present location, Dennin finds a cache of gold. Unfortunately, he makes up for this by developing a dark jealous rage and deciding to kill everybody. He blows away both the shareholders before Hans takes him down.

Edith is upset:

Now the surviving couple have to bury their partners (in a raging storm) then keep guard over Dennin for a whole season until the Law arrives, because Edith insists they not take revenge into their own hands. But Dennin is insane and destructive (he sets the bed on fire during a flood), and Edith seems to fall further into a religious fervor as they all suffer from cabin fever. This is the bulk of the movie’s runtime, the three of them stewing wordlessly in the cabin. It plays very much like a horror film. Kuleshov shows off his pioneering editing techniques, but also some great camerawork, like this post-Nosferatu hand shadow reaching for the gold.

Eventually the couple appoint themselves officials of the Law, give Dennin a British-style trial, sentence him to be hanged, then carry out the execution on a nice spring day. Dennin appears dramatically in their doorway that night amidst a raging storm – a ghost, a shared delusion or something else?

The trial, watched over by a painting of the Queen:

Nice day for a hanging:

I liked the rumbly electronic score by Franz Reisecker, though it provides some weird moments – while Dennin is playing his Irish flute music, the music we hear is despairingly atonal.

by ·Comments Off on Steak (2007, Quentin Dupieux)

This seems like a good idea. Mr. Oizo (seriously, the guy with the sock puppet music video from like 1997) writes and directs a movie about two maladjusted nitwits in a wacky future, casting a comedy duo who have been in at least three movies together. A good idea, but an especially underwhelming movie. I mean, I’ve seen some underwhelming movies lately, like The GoodTimesKid, but at least that one featured the wacky kitchen dance scene as something memorable to hold onto. I watched Steak last night and it’s already starting to fade. And the trouble is I don’t think that was intentional, to make a lightweight wispy mumblecore film. It’s mostly set seven years in the future, but even its futuristic society details seem stolen from other movies. For instance, plastic surgery has run rampant (Brazil) and schoolkids form exclusive, violent clubs and drink only milk (A Clockwork Orange).

It’s not totally clear how much has changed in the future, since we mainly see one town’s high school, and still more specifically, a five-man gang called Chivers (urban dictionary: “group of people dedicated to alleviating the stress of an otherwise hectic day with daily afternoon randomness”). When Blaise gets out of psychiatric hospital for shooting up some bullies (a crime actually committed by his friend George), George wants nothing to do with him, finally beginning to fit in with the super-cool Chivers. Blaise adjusts to the new social life faster than his now-ex-friend and gets himself into Chivers just as George is kicked out for smoking (a no-no in the future). Then they kill a fellow gang member by sorta-accident and run off together. The whole thing is played for absurd comedy – few laughs, just a low-key sense of weirdness. Pleasant Oizo music runs throughout, naturally. Only technical detail I noticed was the camera’s very shallow depth of field – always some part of the shot that isn’t in focus. A nice enough waste of time, but doesn’t get me too anxious to see Oizo’s new killer-tire movie Rubber.

by ·Comments Off on The Tracey Fragments (2007, Bruce McDonald)

Tracey is in therapy for teen-rebellion issues. One day while hooking up with a boy she likes from class, she loses her cute little brother, who presumably drowns in the icy river. Tracey can’t deal with what she’s done, wanders the city getting into dangerous situations looking for her brother. Part of her actually expects to find him but mostly it seems like a grief/catharsis journey.

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Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic say the movie was mostly disliked, the IMDB reviewers say it “sucks,” but a lone blog (Subtitle Literate) put it on their best-of-decade list alongside nine other movies I saw and liked, so I sought it out. And I’m going to side with the lone blogger. It’s a teen family-problems death-and-grief depression drama AND it’s presented via extreme split-screen, with frames within and beside each other, displaying memory and fantasy and foreshadow and unrelated footage, and the timeline of the main narrative is scrambled as well. Sounds like the kind of thing I would hate, but it’s done very, very well. I liked Ellen Page (Juno, Hard Candy, Whip It, X-Men 3, gee I watch a lot of Ellen Page movies) and loved her little brother (pretending to be a dog), her cross-dressing psychiatrist (would anyone visit a cross-dressing psychiatrist?), the questionably dangerous guy she befriends in the city (“Lance From Toronto”) and dream sequences of her behind-the-music imagined future with new kid in school Billy Zero. But mostly I was bowled over by the editing, which doesn’t seem arbitrary like 21 Grams, but carefully thought-out to make emotional sense.

What’s it say on the board? Pontypool (changes everything).
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Bruce’s first theatrical flick since 2001 (I’m not sure that it opened here). McDonald once again has book’s author write the screenplay (see also: Pontypool). Shot on Inland Empire-looking “bad” DV and populated with the finest Canadian actors, including Ari Cohen (Archangel) as Tracey’s dad, Max McCabe (Land of the Dead) as Lance From Toronto and Julian Richards (Hard Core Logo, Survival of the Dead, opening scene of Cube) as the psychiatrist.

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D. Sallitt, 2007:

Knowing that he’s discovered the philosopher’s stone, McDonald tirelessly generates new formal prototypes every few seconds, and leaves us at film’s end with the sense that he could have kept going forever. What makes Tracey more than an impressive demo is its unity of form and feeling, the sense that its screen may have been shattered by its young protagonist’s hormonal violence, McDonald’s wild-eyed punkish sense of drama, and Medved’s vivid dialogue

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D. Sallitt, 2008:

McDonald and his admirable writer Medved did not choose random subject matter for this experiment. Not only does the style seem intended to reflect the streaming consciousness of Medved’s material, but there is also a strong underlying musical structure to the film, with music and dialogue working together to organize the story into movements that almost resemble musical numbers.

by ·2 Comments

“What we need is a flamethrower.”

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Apparently this played in one theater for one week before going to “VOD” (whatever that is). I don’t know anyone who has this “VOD,” which was also the rumored resting place of Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and where all Soderbergh’s movies are said to be sent the same day as their theatrical releases. Is it something you watch on those portable playstation games? Is it a website? Can I get an invite? Not willing to buy a satellite dish or a fiber-optic link to hollywood or whatever I’d need, I borrowed a copy of the movie from a connected friend to close out this year’s successful SHOCKtober season. Sorry, Mr. McDonald, but rest assured I’ll be buying the movie and the book as soon as I figure out how.

“Mrs. French’s cat is missing” says a sinister voice as a blue waveform bounces across the wide screen, before the title breaks through in a blue vortex, each letter appearing from the inside out until it spells TYPO a few seconds before PONTYPOOL. What with the movie’s play with language, that can’t be accidental.

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Next half (or more) of the film has fallen big-city talk-radio DJ Grant Mazzy in his sound booth, with his producer Sydney Briar (great names) and assistant Laurel Ann sitting in the main room. It’s snowing and damn cold outside, it’s early morning, and Grant is trying to show off his “take no prisoners” attitude and start rumors. The camera is always gliding at a constant speed, which kinda bugs me though I can’t think of a more pleasing alternative offhand. Gradually we start to hear of a disturbance in town, “herds” of people banding together and murmuring, breaking into buildings and tearing residents apart. The descriptions get weirder, until Grant is saying things like this on the air: “That was our own Ken Loney interviewing a screaming baby coming from Mary Gault’s eldest son’s last dying gasps.”

The actions outside are so disturbing and unbelievable, that by this point characters and viewer are dying to break out of the radio station and walk around – but we never do. Instead the herd tries to break in, preceded by the slightly loopy Dr. Mendez who may know how the whole thing started (he tells us it’s a virus infecting words in the English language) but is never given enough time to explain himself because Laurel Ann becomes infected. They stay in the sound booth, depriving her of language to feed off, until she explodes.

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More word games, and then Grant (who, as a popular talk radio host, may have been helping spread the virus all morning) comes up with a cure that doubles as a last-minute romantic ending, defamiliarizing the infected word, changing its meaning. “Kill is kiss, kill is kiss” makes me think of Killer’s Kiss.

I wasn’t aware of Stephen McHattie though I’ve seen him before. He went from playing James Dean in a 70’s TV biopic, to Canadian thrillers in the 80’s, to a ton of TV and voice (no surprise) acting, to A History of Violence and The Fountain to major roles in Hollywood action flicks (300, Shoot ’em Up, Nite Owl in Watchmen). McDonald is known for a handful of cult road flicks and the interesting-sounding The Tracey Fragments, and also directs a ton of TV. I’d only seen his short Elimination Dance, but will be seeking out more.

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McDonald: “Zombies are undead and these people are not. They’re people who have difficulty expressing themselves. It’s a very common, very modern virus.”

AV Club:

Primarily though, the film works as a tour de force for McHattie – a veteran character actor making the most of his character’s long, fluid monologues – and as a sly commentary on journalistic responsibility. At first, McHattie seems to enjoy anchoring a broadcast that’s drawing international attention, but throughout, his conscientious producer Lisa Houle pesters him about whether it’s really appropriate for him to be goosing the drama, as when he urges the station’s field reporter to get closer to the monsters. There’s a lot of subtext in Pontypool (and some of it isn’t so “sub”) about how meaningless conversation can be a kind of plague. Yet the greater evil may be the words that sound meaningful, but are really just diverting.

from D. Cairns short but essential interview with the director:

DC: The very idea of a “war on terror” is a very Pontypool idea, the war against an abstract concept or word.

MACDONALD: Right. So our ideas naturally come out about the manufacturing of fear by the American media […] the co-opting of certain words by the media, to label people or things. And it’s in a very sly and damaging way, often. “Pedophile” is a popular word, as a weapon, you know. To suddenly hint at that, you could destroy somebody. With something as simple as “You know, I heard he was a pedophile…” It just shows how powerful certain words are. Language is so loaded with great shit, it’s almost an embarrassment of riches for us, to know how to place some of these things. And there’s kind of a cultural thing too, like when the BBC guy comes on, everybody’s like, “Oh my god, we’ve got the real guy on!” you know? It’s like these backwoods colonial guys listening to the real deal. It’s such a cultural thing, with the French-English in Canada. And suddenly these sovereigntists or separatists become “terrorists,” that easy slip, how easy that is… “Oh, I’ve never heard the French ‘Quiet Revolution’ referred to as ‘terrorists’ in Quebec.” But you could…

DC: And a violent riot becomes an “insurgency.”

MACDONALD: Yeah yeah. So you start to see how just choice of words, there’s a certain WAY that the media talks, to create a drama, to create an ongoing story. … Myself having worked in the media for so long, you have an inside view of how these things go on.

Good news:

May 16, 2009
Acclaimed director Bruce McDonald returns to the director’s chair with Pontypool Changes, a sequel to his highly anticipated psychological thriller Pontypool. Producer Jeffrey Coghlan confirmed rumors in Cannes today that the Pontypool sequel is scheduled to lens in early 2010, reuniting McDonald with Pontypool screenwriter Tony Burgess, who adapted the original from his book “Pontypool Changes Everything”.

Author Tony Burgess shares a name with the author of A Clockwork Orange, another sci-fi novel interested in language.

From Bruce’s interview with Twitch:

– Let’s talk about the after the credits scene, the cookie.
– That used to be end of the movie, but before the credits. And people thought, what? What? Too much confusion. There is a tradition now where you have something at the end of the credits where you have an outtake, or hint of a sequel. The existence for it is sort of buried in there, well the title of the book sort of suggests it, Pontypool Changes Everything, and one of the things I’ve always love about the notion of this, is that the virus could affect something as abstract as the English language. It can leap into reality itself, change the fabric of how reality is perceived.

OCT 2017: Watched again in HD, still the best.