CANADIAN SHORT FILMS at CANADIAN FILM FEST 2012 - Review By Greg Klymkiw

CANADIAN SHORT FILMS at CANADIAN FILM FEST 2012
Reviewed By Greg Klymkiw
The Canadian Film Fest 2012 at the Royal Theatre in Toronto is feature-heavy, but luckily, there are a number of shorts that will provide a nice glimpse into what several Canadian filmmakers can achieve with few dollars, tiny running times and scads of talent. Below are reviews of a few short films I had the opportunity to screen prior to the festival. Most of these will be screened in a short film program on Saturday, March 31 at 12:00pm. The following reviews are presented in alphabetical order. For tickets and further information visit the Festival website HERE.

Everybody Wing Chun Tonight (2011) dir. Karen Suzuki
Starring: Karen Suzuki, Mike Dufays, Kevin Robinson, Christopher Mott
**
By Greg Klymkiw
A group of sexist, misogynistic boneheads harass a woman verbally as she walks through the park. Little do they know she possesses the prowess of a highly skilled martial artist. It's one thing to fantasize about what she'd like to do to them, but is her true power in the knowledge that she could decimate them? Slight and didactic martial arts lesson makes its point - perhaps a bit too clearly.

Hangnail (2011) dir. Cavan Campbell
Starring: Tasha Lawrence, Dylan Scott Smith
****
By Greg Klymkiw
Shot completely in one take, this exquisitely written, acted and directed kitchen sink domestic drama examines a great divide between a couple in their bathroom. He's an immature video-game-and-porn-obsessed mall employee. She's a "dancer" in a "gentleman's club". He's taking a dump. She's taking a shower. Both of them are smoking cigarettes. The sniping is vicious, the pain is palpable. Love, however, finds itself in the strangest of places and in the most unusual circumstances. It's rare to find this level of maturity and dramatic resonance in short films these days when the emphasis in this medium is usually on one-note jokes and empty "calling card" endeavours. Hangnail takes us into the territory of despair among the disenfranchised. Though these characters live on the fringe and are often the types whose existence we'd prefer to repress, this evocative slice of their life is more universal than most will care to admit. Out of anguish can come incredible tenderness and compassion. This is a powerful work. It creates levels of complexity within a simple framework and I have to admit the film has continued to haunt me since first seeing it. I am especially eager to see more films from this clearly gifted filmmaker. He's the real thing.

Long Branch (2011) dir. Dane Clark, Linsey Stewart
Starring: Alex House, Jenny Raven, Al Maini
***1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
She wants a one-night stand. He's into it - bigtime. Her place is not an option. Luckily, his is. The problem, as it turns out, is that he lives two hours away via public transit. Subway. Bus. Bike. All in the frigid, snowy climes of a Canadian winter. She wants simple, fun, no-strings-attached sex. Two hours, however, leaves many opportunities for conversation. The last thing she wants is to get to know him. He's too nice. Like Willard's journey into the heart of darkness neither is quite sure what will be waiting for them in deepest, darkest suburbia. Hopefully, it won't be Col. Kurtz. Long Branch is a bright, breezy and thoroughly delightful romantic comedy. The dialogue is crisp, gorgeously performed by the two attractive leads, shot with clear, simple and direct compositions to let the magic and movement work within the frame so that every cut counts as a truly resonant dramatic beat. Though the soundtrack is peppered with far too many whiny, upbeat indie-styled songs for this curmudgeon's liking, most normal people - especially those who are not curmudgeons - will love it as much as everything else in the picture that truly deserves - uh, love.

My Loss Your Gain (2011) dir. Elli Raynai
Starring Chris Handfield
**1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
This Sci-fi-tinged one-hander is replete with cool retro-styled effects and an effectively odd obsessive quality. Take a lone scientist, a fly in a jar and imagination - the results can prove to be quite revelatory.

Onion Skin (2011) dir. Joseph Procopio
Starring: Zachary Peladeau, Vanessa Qualiara
***1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
Gorgeously photographed, well written tale of a young man who has a major crush on a beautiful young lady who is new to his high school. Instead of utilizing the contemporary communication techniques of text messaging and cel phones, he takes the time to craft a series of hand-written love letters. In our age of technologically convenient approaches to getting a message across, the young lady is initially flummoxed by this "odd" approach. Infused with heartfelt sentiment and romance, Procopio demonstrates a natural gift for creating images that are as beautiful as they are dramatically resonant. There isn't a single performance in the film that rings any less than true. All this said, there is a gorgeously acted and directed scene in the middle of the film that, from a writing standpoint provides a too convenient impetus for the young lady to discover and accept the approach of this wildly romantic suitor. It's a minor quibble, but given how terrific the film is, it's one of those elements that sticks out prominently. In time, however, I have no doubt Procopio will discover any number of narrative shorthands that will allow him to craft many more fine films that avoid the sorts of pitfalls that are ascribed in a knee-jerk fashion to young filmmakers, but are, in fact, quite prominent in any number of mainstream works made by people with far more experience and who should ultimately know better.

The Perfect Vacuum (2011) dir. Alana Cymerman
Starring: Natalie Choquette, Carl Alacchi, Pierre Lenoir, Géraldine Doucet
**
By Greg Klymkiw
Mona lives for her vacuum cleaner. She's lost her true passion and this normally inanimate object takes on a life of its own. At first she shares her perverse love with neighbours and suitors. However, in order to regain her lost passion, she abandons human contact to keep the dirt-sucking phallic symbol all to herself. Will this achieve the desired result or will tragedy strike? This slender, mildly amusing comedic musical vignette is clearly rooted in operatic and melodramatic tradition. Its visual compositions and art direction are both lovingly rendered with aplomb - resembling a curious amalgam of Frank Tashlin, Douglas Sirk and Arthur Freed. One, however, wishes the approach to the material had been less over-the-top. The material itself is already imbued with a bigger-than-life quality. Straighter playing of it might have brought out its richly and potentially hilarious perversities much more pointedly.

Sonata For Christian (2010) Dir. Stéphane Oystryk
Starring: Benjamin Beauchemain, Onalee Ames, Claire Thomas
**1/2
By Greg Klymkiw
A young lad in the leafy burbs of Winnipeg has the hots for his piano teacher. His Mom assumes he is lazily wanting to avoid going to his lessons. Nothing could be further from the truth. He fantasizes about a romantic tryst with the sexy neighbourhood keyboard instructor. This manifests itself in obsessive masturbatory shenanigans in his bedroom. If anything, he's terrified of acting on his amorous impulses. And what might be the result if she should respond? In spite of tentative performances and a script that doesn't quite deliver on its potential, there is clearly a strong talent here for visually rendering a narrative.

AVATAR - Canknuckle-Headed Canuck Cameron might feel like he's on top of the world, but watching his films can make you feel like a bottom feeder

AVATAR (2009) dir. James Cameron
Starring: Jake Sully, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Wes Studi and Giovanni Ribisi

RATING (out of ****) **

By Greg Klymkiw

Given how little use I've had for the Kapuskasing, Ontario-born James Cameron since his great film The Terminator, I was prepared to hate Avatar.

I was, however, rather indifferent about it. On the plus side, it has terrific special effects, a serviceable science fiction premise and it's never boring. On the down side, it has terrific special effects, a serviceable science fiction premise and it's never boring. In other words, the picture is neither a win or a loss, but a draw. In my books, a draw is definitely nothing to be proud of. In fact, there are times when a spectacular loss can be endowed with considerable merit in its folly alone. Alas, this is not such a movie. It's a winner - sort of.

Of course, some might wonder why I have no use for Cameron, especially considering my penchant for genre pictures. Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the big three are as follows:

1. Cameron somehow managed to lose the sense of humour he displayed in The Terminator. Humourless action movies are a dime a dozen and he's been strangely unable to crack a dark sardonic smile since Schwarzenegger uttered the famous words, "I'll be back."

2. Cameron utilizes (save for The Terminator) lots of noise and bluster to generate suspense and excitement - pounding your pulse rate with wild cymbal-smashes and brute-force baseball bat blows instead of finely wrought and generated thrills that stick in the craw, slide slowly down the throat, burrow into the innards until they shockingly charge back up through the upper torso and uncontrollably spew globs of nasty undigested bits of viscous-enveloped matter into the audience's collective faces.

3. Cameron is earnest. Being earnest is bad enough when it belongs to dour National Film Board of Canada documentaries about children with learning disabilities who find teachers they can really relate to, but when it hangs like a constipated turd from the anus of an action director, it's virtually intolerable.

Avatar suffers from all three, but what made it SLIGHTLY watchable for me is that the bluster is finally more controlled, and therefore, ALMOST effective while the earnestness factor manages, at the very least, to generate some surprisingly interesting ideas regarding other life forms in the universe as well as some noodlings on the themes of American colonization, genocidal acts on behalf of corporate superpowers and the exploitation of natural resources

At the end of the day, though, the movie leaves me cold. I admire some of the craft, but I never have the feeling I'm experiencing a picture that truly engages.

One of the primary reasons it doesn't fully engage is that it's impossible to latch wholeheartedly onto any of the characters. If the movie had been endowed with at least a villain on a par with Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator instalment (which gave that film something to negate the dour humourlessness of the stalwart Kyle Reese, the hero played by Michael Biehn), then structurally and otherwise, Avatar might have gone the sort of distance it needed to go to achieve the same kind of relentless energy. Instead, we're forced to follow the slender tale of a paraplegic soldier whose mind melds with an avatar of an alien on a distant planet so he can join a scientific team to gather data that will allow an American corporate superpower to exploit the natural resources of the planet. While amongst the planet's blue-coloured indigenous populace, the soldier comes to understand the simple, spiritual and wholly environmental ways of these New-Agey warriors and joins them in battling the nasty, would-be conquerors.

The characters are finally little more than caricatures and ultimately, since most of them are jolly blue computer generated giants that are oddly not very pleasing to the eye, it's no wonder we're not too wrapped up in their struggle. This is not to say that caricatures in an action picture are always a bad thing, but there has to be some zip and oomph in the writing to give them the resonance that makes you bounce up and down in your seat with the same kind of giddiness that Schwarzenegger inspired in The Terminator. All Avatar has going for it is a humourless hero and heroine and a couple of villains who offer little more than mild amusement value.

Another disappointing element of the picture is the IMAX 3-D theatrical format itself and the fact that the true joys of 3-D are never exploited to their fullest because Cameron is so humourless and earnest that he doesn't actually let himself loose and wholeheartedly embrace the real reason anyone might want to see a 3-D picture. In the 50s, when 3-D burst on the screen, filmmakers went out of their way to throw things at the camera lens (or audience) so that it actually felt like a tomahawk or spear or some other projectile was hurtling right towards you. During the brief revival of 3-D in the 70s and 80s, it was more of the same - most notably in Paul Morrissey's film of the Andy Warhol production of Frankenstein (AKA Flesh For Frankenstein) where gooey, blood splattered guts dangled disgustingly before you. In recent years, 3-D has become so boring, so non-exploitative that most of the 3-D films are better off being viewed in flat 2-D. The exceptions to this are few and far between - the otherwise unwatchable Polar Express and the unjustly maligned Journey to the Centre of the Earth at least delivered on the roller coaster ride pleasures to be had in 3-D. Avatar is far too humourless and earnest to engage wholeheartedly in the deliciously exploitative pursuit of throwing stuff in our faces and/or taking us on harrowing amusement park rides. Cameron's more interested in using the 3-D technology to paint a portrait of a "real" fantasy world. This doesn't really cut the mustard since it's not a real world anyway - it all looks and feels computer generated.

This is not to say I have a problem with special effects LOOKING like special effects. The great stop-motion animation of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen look like effects - in fact, they ALWAYS looked like effects, even when I was a kid I knew they weren't "real". That, of course, never mattered as there was also a huge effort to create a world that existed ONLY on the silver screen while making us care and believe in ALL the characters such as those in King Kong or Jason and the Argonauts. When we watched those movies, we truly felt immersed in a cinematic land of spectacle, but the pictures worked because the stories themselves seemed infused with a heart, a core of human emotion and where the special effects were there to truly serve the STORY and CHARACTER.

With Avatar, it's the opposite of that. Cameron, always the technophile knot-head, cares more about the effects and visual razzle-dazzle than anything else. This should have come as no surprise since it doesn't take much to remind me of the fact that in the appalling Titanic, so much time and attention was lavished on making the great ship sets as technically and historically accurate as possible, yet no time or effort was placed upon making the characters SOUND, MOVE or even LOOK (beyond the costumery) like they lived in the Edwardian period (save for Billy Zane's mincingly delicious bit of nastiness and Kathy Bates impersonation of Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure).

Sam Raimi is the perfect example of a truly great filmmaker since many of his pictures are laden with makeup, optical and/or digital effects, but they're all there in service of the movies themselves, as well as being infused with a delicious, nasty, funny pulp sensibility. Or how about the wonderfully insane Paul Verhoeven who dazzles us with his dark wit and delicious comic-book stylings? These filmmakers are certainly in direct contrast to Cameron who is, finally, a cold, calculating man of craft - a proletarian George Lucas, if you will. And on top of it all (and not the top of the world, by any means), Cameron is just one big square.

One thing in Cameron's screenplay for Avatar that I responded to positively was the world of the aliens and how a blend of the spiritual with physical allowed the blue goodies to live as one within their natural world - tethering soul and physiology so that all living creatures are tied together and not just with each other, but with the dimension of the afterlife and the ghosts of the past and the spirits of the planet's ancestors. This is such a lovely and intriguing element that it's sad to note that it leads us to one of the big flaws/holes in Cameron's screenplay. When the scientist, played by Sigourney Weaver, pleads with the corporate boss to not unbalance the delicate balance of the aliens' world, it's simply all too predictable how the New World Order-styled nasty-pants played by Giovanni Ribisi rejects this. What didn't jell with me on this front was the fact that Weaver's character could and should have used her expertise in dealing with corporate lackeys to fund her research by trying to argue that the minerals the Americans are trying to exploit are, in fact, less lucrative than trying to get to the bottom of how the aliens live. This latter secret seems even more ripe for corporate exploitation and that this is NEVER even brought up is an idiotic omission.

As the story, such as it is, is crafted, this logical pitch on the scientist's part is all but ignored (and probably not even considered) by Cameron's script. One can only surmise that if it HAD been bandied about at the writing stage, the possibility of Weaver pitching the Aliens' ecology as being far more valuable than the mineral deposits might have completely decimated the need for Cameron to blow things up real good. It might have turned into one of those great sci-fi films from the 60s and 70s where the movies really were about something.

There would, ultimately, be no bluster, no noise. And that, finally, is all Cameron is really all about. As a filmmaker, he's the equivalent to a New Year's Eve noisemaking party favour.

Dullsville!

Avatar is cold, lifeless, humourless and only marginally better than Cameron's previous work in this genre (save for the original Terminator). Like most of his films, it's aimed at all the fanboy (and fangirl) bone-brains who get off on attending screenings dressed as their favourite characters. No doubt, the Avatar fans will be arriving en masse to the theatres with blue paint smeared all over their faces and making all the Star Trek, Star Wars and Rocky Horror deadheads look like Rhodes Scholars.


Happily, the picture's adjusted for inflation gross will still never begin to approach that of a REAL hit like Gone With The Wind. However, Avatar, no matter how you slice it - is going to be one hell of a monumental hit by contemporary standards.

It could, however, have been so much more.

"Avatar" is available on fully-loaded and impressively produced Blurays and DVDs. This review originally appeared in a slightly different form at Daily Film Dose.

MELANCHOLIA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2011

Melancholia (2011) dir. Lars von Trier
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgard, Udo Kier

****

By Greg Klymkiw

Every year I gain more life experience and creep closer to death. The thing I love almost as much as my family, my friends and my very mortality – movies – will occasionally yield the work of artists I enjoy growing with as I advance towards bodily putrification and (I hope) spiritual transcendence.

Lars von Trier has been, for me, one of those artists. My relationship with him has been complicated. His early work drove me up a wall, but with each new film, as he's grown, I have, in turn, found myself more and more drawn to his vision.

His new movie, Melancholia, is deeply moving.

It is a tale of two sisters – Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) – privileged beyond belief, yet facing many of the same demons and challenges we all must confront.

Respectively, one is ethereal, the other pragmatic.

Together they face the ultimate destruction.

Last year, von Trier redefined the horror genre in his own image with the stunning Antichrist. With Melancholia, he seeks to do the same with science fiction.

In its own strange, gentle fashion the picture succeeds admirably.

Melancholia is, one one hand, an extension of Thomas Vinterberg’s handheld examination of a bitter family sniping in a country home in the 1998 masterpiece of the dogme movement The Celebration (AKA Festen).

Blend that, then, with a poetic Kubrick-like rumination on the universe (similar but less New-Agey than Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life) and an end of the world saga (think a kinder, gentler, deeper Deep Impact) and you have a picture guaranteed its place in the pantheon of the greats.

From the beginning we’re plunged into a blend of surrealism, expressionism and German Romanticism as Richard Wagner’s soaring Tristan and Isolde Overture wells up on the soundtrack. Here we’re treated to a series of sumptuous, gorgeously composed shots of the universe, nature, the opulence of the sprawling estate the film is set on, weirdly beautiful images of Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourgh and a magnificent steed seemingly moving forward, which, as we keep fixing our gaze, move in reverse. Or are they going forward, too? This montage, layered with beauty and portent, climaxes with a shot of the most gorgeous image of mass destruction I’ve yet to witness in any film.

We are now ready for Melancholia in all its splendour.

The carefully composed images of this evocative preamble lead to his trademark dogme-styled shaky-cam as we follow the events of Justine’s wedding day.

And what a wedding!

Maestro von Trier plunges us into a dinner party that explodes with yummy vitriolic sniping amongst the assembled members of the family.

Justine and her handsome, but rather unimaginative, bland and ineffectual husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard) arrive two hours late and are chastized by Charlotte.

Justine’s Dad (John Hurt) appears with two chubby ladies both named Betty and drunkenly engages in a childish game of openly filching the silverware and complaining repeatedly to a server about the lack of said silverware. Justine’s Mom (Charlotte Rampling), with nary a shred of humour, hurls out a variety of bile-tainted barbs against her silly ex-husband.

During his toast, Dad quips about Mom’s "domineering" qualities. Mom proceeds to disagree and then, in a most "domineering" fashion, steals the limelight, interrupting Dad’s speech and makes one of her own. It's quite the inspirational wedding speech as she declares, "I hate marriage" and adds her well-wishes to the happy couple with: "Enjoy it while it lasts!"

Udo Kier offers a whole whack of magnificent scene stealing knee-slappers as the pricey, pretentious wedding planner who prissily declares he's "at his wit's end". He later complains that Justine has ruined “his” wedding and announces he will never again look at her. In a hilarious running gag, dearest Udo holds up his hand and averts his eyes every single time Kirsten Dunst passes him.

Ah, family!

Ah, weddings!

Ah, Maestro von Trier!

He delivers the goods what might be one of the most memorable movie weddings - right up there with The Godfather and The Deer Hunter.

The lovely bride mopes about inconsolably. The best man (and her ad agency boss), played by Stellan Skarsgard with suitable slime-oozing, expects her to – at the wedding, no less! – come up with a tag line for their new and important client, Claire natters on to Justine about decorum while her husband John (a great Kiefer Sutherland - oddly sweet AND knobbish) keeps reminding everyone how much the wedding is costing him.

Pathetic hubby Michael proves he clearly doesn't have the stuff to enter this family. When it's time for him to make a speech, he burbles out a few uncomfortable sentiments that boil down to "I love you." Nice enough if you're marrying into a "normal" family, but clearly inadequate for this clan endowed with flamboyant dysfunction and, one hell of a lot of style. Even more pathetic is when Michael privately presents Justine with his wedding gift - a snapshot of an Empire Apple orchard that he just bought for their years of retirement.

I don't know about you, but if I were Kirsten Dunst at the peak of my youth and beauty, the last thing I'd want to be thinking about on my wedding night is sitting in the shade of an apple tree when I'm more wizened and rotting than an apple that's fallen to the ground and has festered in the sun.

Is then, any wonder that just before the cutting of the cake, Justine decides to take a bath.

Her loopy Mother decides to do the same.

Like daughter, like mother.

Furious, John grabs his Mother-in-law’s luggage and tosses the bags out front of the mansion. And just when it looks like all will settle down once husband and wife retreat to the nuptial boudoir, the new bride spurns hubby’s advances and rushes out onto the rolling lawns to look at the heavens and then have sex in a sand trap on the estate’s golf course with her boss’s nephew.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. All families behave this way, don’t they?

The entire first part of the film is subtitled “Justine”. The second half is subtitled “Claire”. In the latter portion of the film we discover that a mysterious planet, long hidden behind the sun, is making its way in the direction of the Earth. Astronomy buff John insists this will be an interplanetary “fly-by”, but Claire's obsessive internet trolling suggests there’s a very distinct possibility that the humungous, blue, glowing orb will collide with the Earth at a rate of 60,000 miles per second.

It is here the film launches into a tremendously sad waiting game as the sisters keep trying to make (mostly on Claire’s part) the sort of sibling connections of love that have kept and indeed keep eluding them.

By fusing a darkly comic domestic drama with an impending apocalypse, von Trier has created a bold and original work. There’s obviously the possibility that the movie works on a purely metaphorical level since the planet threatening Earth is called Melancholia and as such, this all might actually be one grand statement that the sickness of depression is what threatens to swallow everyone and everything whole.

I prefer, however, to think the metaphor exists within the literal context of life on Earth being snuffed out. I suspect this is ultimately the case as Justine's character feels like a mouthpiece for von Trier himself - especially when she very matter-of-factly declares: “The Earth is evil. Life on Earth is evil.”

As evil as it may be for von Trier, this evil has also yielded his genius and, most importantly, gives us an exquisitely beautiful, haunting and thought-provoking work of art.

Maestro von Trier has also created images that shall never retreat from the memory banks of all who see his film. Who will ever forget, for example, Kirsten Dunst adorned in her wedding dress as she lay (Ophelia-like) in a stream or as she bathes naked upon a rock under the gorgeous blue glow from the rogue planet?

And for every image of heartbreaking beauty, von Trier counters it with something so indelibly appalling (the vicious beating Justine lays upon her horse Abraham) that he creates, once more, an important film exposing the dichotomous nature of life itself.

It’s a great picture! Any petulant nonsense von Trier spewed out at the notorious Cannes film festival press conference about being a Nazi should ultimately be swept under a rug.

There's no need to allow anything to impede your experience of seeing this movie.

Melancholia is having its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2011) and will be released theatrically in Canada via e-one Entertainment.