Toronto Movie Index

May 2008 Archive

Sex and the City (**)

Posted on May 30, 2008 by

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Sex and the City used to be a good show—a fact that faded further from view during its last few seasons, and of which the movie version seems terrified to remind us too often. This goodness was not rocket science. People liked the show’s four strong female leads, their unblushing attitudes toward sex, and especially the way they talked with each other: an assortment of bons mots, ribald neologisms and frank, sisterly advice. Sex and the City was always a fantasy, but its characters had authenticity. They wanted irrational things; were driven to absurd, humiliating lengths in pursuit of them; and were usually made to face, in the series’s perpetual moral, some form of compromise. Continue...

The Strangers (NO STARS)

Posted on May 30, 2008 by

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The Strangers’ awfulness is manifold. The thin, shock ’n’ schlock plot is based on true events (as a booming, Cops-like voice tells us at the beginning, reading aloud text that appears onscreen, as if the audience is illiterate) and concerns that oh-so-American of subjects, home invasion. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are the beautiful couple that arrives at the latter’s parents’ vacation home after an already-rocky night, during which Tyler rejects his proposal of marriage. They walk in at four in the morning; she takes a bath, her face tear-stained; he, brow furrowed, digs into some ice cream. Then there’s a pounding at the door and, well, that’s that. Continue...

Planet B-Boy (***)

Posted on May 30, 2008 by

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Planet B-Boy is a well-made look at the culture of B-boying, popularly known as breakdancing, across the world. The thesis of director Benson Lee’s (Miss Monday) film is that B-boying is a craft, a way of life—not a retro fad that just happens to have lingered on 30 years after its inception. The focus of the documentary is a recent Battle of the Year, full of enthusiastic international athletes who in many cases have given up a lot, or have overcome some kind of socio-economic adversity in pursuit of their dreams. Continue...

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (****)

Posted on May 28, 2008 by

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As the fourth instalment of one of the most successful franchises in movie history, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is intrinsically unsatisfactory. It tacks itself on to an internally sound trilogy that began and ended in the ’80s, one that spoke fluently and dynamically to a generation of filmgoers. That said, Crystal Skull has shrewdly anticipated its own awkwardness; it is a consciously strange entity, one as desolate and esoteric in concept as it is entertaining in construct. Continue...

The Edge of Heaven (***)

Posted on May 23, 2008 by

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The current cinematic trend towards exploring apparent truths of globalization shows no signs of stopping, and The Edge of Heaven, by director Fatih Akin (Head-On), is bound to impress savvy-seeming audiences and critics alike (it already won best screenplay at Cannes). Concerning a family in Germany and one in Turkey, the film uses two deaths to suggest a sequence of socio-political mirroring and counterbalancing between the two countries, and within the nascent European Union as a whole. But The Edge of Heaven’s topicality and clever, labyrinthine plotting (people keep missing each other by a hair’s breadth) isn’t quite enough: it’s too long (and, consequently, seems a tad self-important) and its characters, though wrapped in Akin’s concerted realism, are largely flat—be they shrill, lesbian student radicals; a sensitive, asexual professor; or an aging, jaded whore. Continue...

This Beautiful City (***)

Posted on May 23, 2008 by

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Local stage director Ed Gass-Donnelly has set his take on urban alienation and desperation in Queen West West, a decision that makes the mercurial neighbourhood a pivotal sixth character in this bleak five-person story. The characters’ worlds collide when Carol (Caroline Cave), a downtrodden architect’s wife, plunges from her condo’s balcony to the alley below, drawing coke-addled prostitute Pretty (Kristin Booth, who also stars in Young People Fucking), her boyfriend, Johnny (Aaron Poole), and cop Peter (Stuart Hughes) to the scene. Fast-forward three months later and Carol has survived, but now she must deal with her crumbling marriage to Harry (Noam Jenkins), who is consumed by the fact that he doesn’t know if she leaped or fell from their home. Continue...

Savage Grace (***½)

Posted on May 16, 2008 by

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With Savage Grace, Julianne Moore plays a mid-century housewife for the fourth time in her career (the other three were for Far From Heaven, The Hours and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio), but she shows no signs of fatigue or boredom. She has embraced the character type in a way old movie stars used to embrace them—as a means by which to plumb the conceptual depths of a persona, and to brand it as her own—thus making her performance endlessly fascinating to watch. Granted, Moore’s Barbara Baekeland is no suffering naïf, which is the most significant change from her previous roles. In Savage Grace, Barbara’s victimization draws her, Medea-like, toward a cool, perverse form of vengeance. Continue...

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (****)

Posted on May 16, 2008 by

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Matt Wolf’s new documentary on cult musician Arthur Russell, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, comes on the heels of a wave of reissues and endorsements by Jens Lekman, Victoria Bergsman, and Joel Gibb of the Hidden Cameras. Thankfully, Wolf is not out to position Russell as seminal or hip, but to use the events of his short life (ended by AIDS, in 1992) as a testament to his subject’s quiet, unflagging dedication to his art. Continue...

Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? (*)

Posted on May 16, 2008 by

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Those under the impression that vulgarity is the exclusive domain of the right wing need only watch the first few minutes of Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, during which a computer-generated Osama bops across the screen to the tune of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Much more than Michael Moore, Spurlock is the left’s shock jock. He’ll do anything to get you to notice him and to prove a vague political point (such as stuffing himself with McDonald’s for a month, as he did in Super Size Me)—but once he’s got you looking, all he can think to do is another trick. Continue...

The Stone Angel (**)

Posted on May 14, 2008 by

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Kari Skogland’s The Stone Angel resembles Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, and not just because it’s a film about dying and death. Both are based on acclaimed Canadian literary works, by Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro, respectively. Both are directed by women. Both use the woeful Can-film vernacular style: bland, conventional editing, lighting and shot composition; intrusive, homely sound design and scoring that is virtually indistinguishable from that of a television drama. And both have a veteran, non-Canadian lead who gives a tremendously moving and hard-won performance, but whose efforts cannot save her film from the mediocrity it courts. Continue...

Son of Rambow (**)

Posted on May 9, 2008 by

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Son of Rambow is writer-director Garth Jennings’ cartoonish coming-of-age tale set in the 1980s, based loosely on his own forays as a youngster into amateur video filmmaking. His subject is little Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), an odd one for the ’80s as Will is a member of the Plymouth Brethren—a cloistered evangelical sect that rejects the excesses of mainstream secular society and its popular culture. Presumably because of this enforced detachment, Will is a prolific daydreamer and creator; one day, while waiting outside class while other students watch a movie, he encounters troublemaker Lee Carter (Will Poulter). Lee rapidly immerses Will in heresy, among other things introducing him to First Blood, in which Will sees an inspiring, outsized male prototype to replace his recently deceased father. Lee soon recruits Will to help him finish one of his videos—a project that takes Will, and in turn his family, further away from the community in which they have found shelter.

Continue...

The Unknown Woman (***½ )

Posted on May 9, 2008 by

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It doesn’t seem fair to give too much away about The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta), the new outing by Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore. Despite its flaws, the film depends so much on mystifying and terrifying its viewers that even the slightest spoiler could eradicate its considerable potency. Continue...

Redbelt (**)

Posted on May 9, 2008 by

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David Mamet’s Redbelt offers more of the same stilted dialogue and convoluted narrative for which the playwright-director is famous. Again Mamet takes a classic noir conceit—here, the boxing film—and makes it contemporary (Redbelt is about jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts), configuring it both as a parody of Hollywood brass and, consequently, as an allegory for the struggle of the principled individual against the capitalist system. Continue...

My Blueberry Nights (**)

Posted on May 9, 2008 by

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When critics scoffed at Wong Kar-Wai’s English language debut My Blueberry Nights at Cannes last year, it was as much a pronouncement on the film itself as a troubled look inward. Could it be that the acclaimed director of such contemporary art house classics as Chungking Express, Happy Together and In the Mood for Love had finally revealed himself to Western cinephiles as a vapid stylist whose deliberately loose handling of plot, character and dialogue was sloppy, rather than inspired? Continue...

Standard Operating Procedure (***)

Posted on May 2, 2008 by

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One of the most interesting things about Standard Operating Procedure is how much it fails as an Errol Morris film. Morris is best at investigating situations, his superior works—the previous The Fog of War, and his breakthrough, The Thin Blue Line—building up tension and suspense like a John Frankenheimer thriller. Morris calls Standard Operating Procedure investigative, but in most respects it is not: there seems little mystery to what happened at Abu Ghraib. Indeed, the dread that comes from contemplating the phenomenon stems in part from its chilling familiarity; anyone who follows U.S. politics or, for that matter, has worked within a government bureaucracy or corporate hierarchy, can (in part) understand how this shameful horror might have transpired. Continue...