Toronto Movie Index

February 2008 Archive

The Other Boleyn Girl (***)

Posted on February 29, 2008 by

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The Other Boleyn Girl, scripted by Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland) and based on Philippa Gregory’s 2001 novel, puts melodrama first and history second. This is wise, for its plot points (some of which are daringly outré, right out of a Shakespearean problem play) are, above all, titillating fun, rather than trite lessons on the making of the modern world. And its cast, especially Kristin Scott Thomas as the Boleyn mother, wants very much to share the romp with us. This alone puts the film head and shoulders above, say, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, in which only Cate Blanchett seems aware of the suds through which she is unmistakably wading. Continue...

The Counterfeiters (***)

Posted on February 29, 2008 by

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Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters—which won the best foreign language film Oscar last Sunday—aims to be a Holocaust movie with a difference. It doesn’t succeed in doing this, despite its focus on a rapscallion who seems almost immune to suffering. The sky is always grey, for instance, and there is a manipulative gas-or-water communal shower scene. Continue...

Semi-Pro (**)

Posted on February 29, 2008 by

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Any one of us could write a treatment for a new Will Ferrell movie: set it in the ’70s or early ’80s, give him a daggy haircut and duds, make him a big fish in a small pond who gets his comeuppance but triumphs anyway, throw in Andy Richter and some scantily clad babes (definitely an animal attack), and there you go. Continue...

Be Kind Rewind (****½)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by

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For director Michel Gondry, cinema begins and ends with its first genius, Belle Époque magician-by-trade Georges Méliès; his other influences (Busby Berkeley, Jacques Demy and, perhaps most of all, Jacques Rivette) can all be traced back to this source. Like Méliès, Gondry has been pegged, wrongly, as an infantilist—someone trapped in cutesy nostalgia—and his new Be Kind Rewind, with its adolescent capering and devotion to all things analog, is sure to suffer similar accusations. But Be Kind Rewind deserves more. It is a treatise on why cinema matters—and on why its modus operandi hasn’t changed a bit since Méliès did A Trip to the Moon in 1902. Continue...

Charlie Bartlett (***)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by

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The slick, charismatic, eponymous hero of Charlie Bartlett, well-played by Anton Yelchin, is obviously meant as a riff on John Hughes’s preppy icon of ’80s rebellion, Ferris Bueller. Unlike Bueller, however, Bartlett claims the school, rather than the outside world, as his exclusive domain. He shuns the victimology of the high-priced child-psych shrinks his alcoholic mother (Hope Davis) sends him to, and exploits the shrinks’ rubber-wrist prescription writing, selling anti-depressants and stimulants to his messed-up peers in the boys’ bathroom and becoming, as a result, the big man on campus. Continue...

La France (**)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by

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One of last year’s more obscure critical fixations, La France has, as a concept at least, much to recommend it. Serge Bozon’s story of French soldiers in World War I puts a stubborn, enterprising woman, Camille (Sylvie Testud), at its centre. After receiving a letter from her husband indicating, enigmatically, that she should never contact him again, Camille cuts her hair short and runs away from her small town in North Eastern France to look for him. She stumbles upon a cadre of soldiers, who begrudgingly accept her, putting her in soldier’s garb. As the group’s travels become increasingly desperate, they begin, inexplicably, to pull out instruments and sing beautiful songs, which constitute the only music in the film, and are inspired by post-Revolver pop-psychedelia, not, as one might assume, by period appropriate music hall ditties. Continue...

Vantage Point (*)

Posted on February 22, 2008 by

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Vantage Point offers election year audiences the sick pleasure of watching a staid U.S. president getting shot again and again and again—though that pleasure wears quickly thin when the president is a rumpled, wooden William Hurt, who, as the film’s trailer even indicates, seems to possess strange powers of resurrection. Continue...