Toronto Life: Toronto Movie Index

Wanted (NO STARS)

Posted on June 27, 2008 by

Angelina Jolie is Hollywood’s biggest female star, and—humanitarian work aside—she is squandering her status. The woman could have her pick of roles, could have built a bitchy, glamorous film persona à la queens of yesteryear, yet here she is in Wanted, one in a long line of trashy action flicks that have defined her career since her Oscar-winning role in Girl, Interrupted. (One might add that her turns in films like A Mighty Heart and the upcoming Eastwood-directed Changeling are only further proof of her ineptitude; the woman actually thinks she’s a method actress.) Continue...

WALL-E (***)

Posted on June 27, 2008 by

Pixar is not a studio to compromise on quality, at least as far as visuals are concerned. Their new WALL-E is expertly rendered; the CGI animation is breathtakingly realistic, arguably beyond anything we’ve ever seen from them, or anyone else. And to begin with, WALL-E presents a concept to match. The eponymous robot is a remnant among remnants. Some time in the future he was created to compact garbage; in the far future in which this film is set, humans have long since abandoned earth for a flotilla of corporatized life-support systems in outer space. WALL-E still goes about the task he has been programmed for on earth, however. He wheels between obelisks of trash, forever building, and goes home at night to a lonely bunker, where he watches the same scene from Hello, Dolly! over and over again on a beat-up television. It seems WALL-E, in addition to his industriousness, is an archivist, and an incurable romantic. Continue...

Encounters at the End of the World (****)

Posted on June 27, 2008 by

Few directors could get away with making a film like Encounters at the End of the World, and Werner Herzog is one of them. The documentary is a lot like his others: a cinematic logbook, this time about his journey to Antarctica. It rests on Herzog’s cultivated Teutonic persona, expressed in a voice-over narration that makes everything he presents seem both fallacious and fascinating. Continue...

Expelled (*)

Posted on June 27, 2008 by

For all Expelled’s asinine tautologies, one must concede a few things to its creator and smothering presence, anti-Darwinist Ben Stein. First, Stein is right to imply that scientists are not philosophers; to look to science for existential solace is, for most, a cold comfort. This is the primary oversight of Stein’s bête noire, Richard Dawkins, who, with his intellectual sanguinity, wants everyone to be capable of abandoning the irrational fear and hope that ties them to religion in favour of science’s perpetually unfolding world of facts. Second, Stein is not completely off in pointing to an ideological lineage connecting Darwin to eugenics and Nazism. The Nazis perverted the evolutionist’s ideas (they did the same to Nietzsche, Wagner and many others), but to completely divorce the two, as reactionary critics of Expelled have done, is inaccurate. It’s like saying Betty Friedan had nothing to do with Madonna. Continue...

Get Smart (*)

Posted on June 20, 2008 by

Get Smart the ’60s television show, co-created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, was full of gags and groaners. There was little sophistication in it, but Get Smart the 2008 blockbuster has even less. It rehashes the series’s most popular jokes (the Cone of Silence, for instance) and adds a lot more asinine, prim ones for the sake of its intended Middle American demographic. Continue...

Before the Rains (**1/2)

Posted on June 20, 2008 by

Before the Rains’ Henry Moores (Linus Roache) is a British developer in late-colonial India with ambitious plans to construct a road through the mountains. T.K. (Rahul Bose) is his indispensable assistant, and also a prominent member of a local Nayar community, which is just beginning to become swept up in the independence movement. T.K.’s flip-flopping is strained as he discovers an affair between Moores and Sajani, Moores’ maid, who is married to a brutish Hindu traditionalist. Then Moores’ wife arrives with their child, Peter, at the same time as Sajani’s husband begins to accuse her of infidelity, and a clash of wills and cultures follows. Continue...

The Incredible Hulk (***)

Posted on June 13, 2008 by

The Incredible Hulk washes away Ang Lee’s eccentric and despised Hulk (2003) and puts in its place a competent franchise. Audiences who enjoy blockbuster superhero films—the predictable yet engrossing plot arcs, the populist tropes of heroism and individualism—will connect with this reworking, which takes no risks yet gets the job done without any major guffaws. And comic book aficionados (who no doubt already know this) will be thrilled by The Incredible Hulk’s teasers, which tie its narrative to that of the recent Iron Man, predicting in-development Marvel Studios projects about Thor, Captain America and, eventually, The Avengers (the writer for which is slated to be Zak Penn, who wrote The Incredible Hulk along with lead Ed Norton). Continue...

The Happening (*)

Posted on June 13, 2008 by

M. Night Shyamalan is the critics’ favourite whipping boy because his films represent everything that’s wrong with auteurism. His idol is Hitchcock, yet Hitchcock was an auteur of another era—one who worked with ideas and scripts he did not conceive himself, and hired actors who could contribute their own considerable charisma to his films. Conversely, Shyamalan’s execrable new The Happening falls apart because it is in its director’s fist; nothing escapes his smothering purview. Continue...

Irina Palm (*)

Posted on June 13, 2008 by

Maggie, a.k.a. Irina Palm, the heroine of Sam Garbarski’s latest film, is a poor, 50-something widow who gets a job jerking men off at a London sex club in order to pay for her ill grandson’s operation. She is played by legendary singer and hard-liver Marianne Faithfull. Despite this—and against all logical principles of storytelling and moviemaking—Irina Palm is basically dull and humourless. It trusts the authenticity of its conceit, and squanders the talents of its lead, a woman famous for her wryness. Continue...

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (*)

Posted on June 6, 2008 by

Now in his 40s, Adam Sandler is in a deep, widely acknowledged creative funk (correspondingly, he’s gotten meatier and logier-looking, as if he’s been on the same diet and weightlifting regime for too long). Last year’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry wasn’t as execrable as fearful liberals said it was (the Alexander Payne–Jim Taylor–Barry Fanaro script actually had many bright moments), but Sandler’s performance was distinctly turgid. With You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Sandler returns to co-writing after a hiatus (his last effort was in 2002’s animated Eight Crazy Nights, and before that 2000’s Little Nicky), and he is in poor shape. Zohan regurgitates the conceits of his ’90s comedies, complementing them with a distastefully simple-minded take on contemporary ethnic politics.

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Mongol (***)

Posted on June 6, 2008 by

Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol—nominated for an Oscar as this year’s Best Foreign Language Film—is being marketed in North America as a jolty, gory war epic à la 300 (2007), which isn’t quite accurate. The film is violent, as any recounting of Genghis Khan’s early career must be, but its commitment to stylization owes more to precedent than to contemporary video games (though it does indulge in the obnoxious recent trend of filming fights at high speeds, so that every drop of blood is discernible). Bodrov, who is Russian, seems sympathetic to the graphic inroads made by Soviet cinema: many choppy sequences echo Eisenstein or Bondarchuk; depictions of ancient ritual bring to mind those in Sergei Parajanov’s cult classic Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964). Continue...

My Brother Is an Only Child (***)

Posted on June 6, 2008 by

Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child (Mio Fratello è Figlio Unico) will suffer from inevitable comparisons to Bertolucci, whose high-period films remain the gold standard for art films about Italian revolutionaries. Indeed, Luchetti’s film is so close in theme to Bertolucci that it would seem redundant were it not for a slight tweak in context: instead of the ’40s, My Brother gives us the Republican ’60s, when Mussolini’s legacy was present in the fascist-nationalist MSI party and vehemently rejected by the popular Communist Party. Continue...