Austrian director Götz Spielmann’s Revanche was—for me—the unexpected discovery and delight of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. Its tagline inquiry—“Whose fault is it if life doesn’t go your way?”—was one I found difficult to readily answer. The film’s unexpected narrative sponsored complicated emotions that I had to sit with for a while and which I couldn’t fully articulate until I took another look at the film in preparation for its upcoming appearances at both the 2009 Berlin and Beyond Film Festival and the Rafael Film Center’s “For Your Consideration” series. Bay Area audiences are fortunate to have two chances to catch this remarkable film; Austria’s submission to the Foreign Language category for the 81st Academy Awards. If my experience is at all indicative, you might be grateful to have a double chance.

Initially I synopsized at Twitch that Revanche “starts as a slow burn, shifts from the urban to the rural, and becomes a psychological thriller of revenge held in abeyance. Negotiating by way of secrets, rage and grief are barely tempered. Violence smolders like sexuality beneath the skin and retribution is only one cruelty away.” In retrospect, I can see that by “retribution” I was circumambulating around the film’s titular double-entendre: Revanche means not only “revenge” but something like “a second chance.”

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[The following review originally appeared as part of my Toronto International Film Festival coverage and reappears now with the film starting into it’s regular theatrical release.]

The plain, indisputable fact of the matter is that Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler goes only as far as Mickey Rourke is able to take it.  No offence to either Marisa Tomei or Evan Rachel Wood, both of whom turn in solid work, but either of them could be replaced by any one of a number of other actresses without doing any sort of damage to the film whatsoever.  Not so Rourke, who is present in vey nearly every frame of the picture and whose presence looms large over even those scenes that play out without him.  Even Aronofsky seems to be aware of Rourke’s huge importance to his latest creation, tossing his entire book of visual tricks out the window for this one, instead adopting the simple policy of simply following his star wherever he may care to go.  The entire weight of The Wrestler rests enitrely on the shoulders of this one man, a man whose career has been in shambles for decades now, a man brilliantly and perfectly suited for the part.  Thank god someone had the good sense to bring Rourke in to replace the originally announced Nicholas Cage - it’s the single best decision anyone’s made in the movies all year.

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[This review originally appeared as part of my TIFF coverage over at Showcase.  It seems appropriate to reprint it here with the regular theatrical release about to kick off.]

At first glance the idea of an animated documentary seems odd, maybe even counter-productive. After all, isn’t the point of a documentary to get as close to its subject as possible with as little interference from the film maker as possible? And doesn’t animation by its very nature require constant interpretation and reshaping by the director? But mere moments into Waltz With Bashir the decision to make the film an animated feature not only makes sense, it is arguably the only real option to make the film at all.

Much as Art Spiegelman’s Maus - one of the greatest graphic novels ever written - dramatically re-cast the holocaust memoir by drawing his own family history as a literal game of cat and mouse, Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir is a total re-envisioning of what the war documentary can be. Like Spiegelman, Folman is not so much concerned with the history of the events he is documenting - though neither project is light on history by any means - as he is with the effects on those involved, the prime person involved being Folman himself.

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My interview with Darren Aronofsky for The Wrestler proved something of a benchmark because Aronofsky claims the honor of being the first director I’ve interviewed twice, indicating—I guess—that I have lasted long enough to achieve such a benchmark and that I might stick around for a while to keep conversing with the makers and shapers of my favorite films. The Wrestler was indeed one of my favorite films of 2008. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice International, and has been nominated for three Golden Globes: Mickey Rourke for Best Actor, Marisa Tomei for Best Supporting Actress, and Bruce Springsteen for Best Original Song. The San Francisco Film Critics Circle likewise awarded Rourke Best Actor (in a tie with Sean Penn for Milk). We met in Aronofsky’s suite at the Ritz Carlton to discuss the film that has almost singlehandedly resuscitated Mickey Rourke’s career. Limping from a rock climbing accident outside of Phoenix, Aronofsky was otherwise in great spirits.

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Although my vote for Best Supporting Actress at this year’s Academy Awards would be for Viola Davis for her powerhouse performance in Doubt, there’s no question that Davis will receive stiff competition from Marisa Tomei, whose performance as strip dancer Cassidy—the love interest in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler—recently garnered her a win in that category from the San Francisco Film Critics Circle. She’s likewise running neck and neck with Davis for that honor at this year’s Golden Globes. I recently had the opportunity to discuss how she developed her character for The Wrestler.

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Though disgruntled that promotional obligations during his five-day stint at the Toronto International Film Festival prevented him from catching any other films in the festival line-up, Pablo Larraín was nonetheless appreciative of the opportunity to attend with his second feature Tony Manero, despite missing his wife and newborn daughter Juana back home in Chile. Born in Santiago de Chile in 1976, Larraín studied film direction and audiovisual communication at UNIACC University, after which he founded Fabula, a company devoted to audiovisual and communications development, where he has carried out the following projects: In 2005 he produced and directed his first feature film called Fuga, which was commercially released in March 2006. During 2006 he produced a film called La Vida Me Mata (Life Kills Me), directed by Sebastián Silva. In 2007 Pablo Larraín worked on Tony Manero, which won the top prize at the 26th annual Turin Film Festival, as well as the FIPRESCI prize for best film, and the best actor honor for Alfredo Castro. Tony Manero is Chile’s submission to the 81st Academy Awards for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Tony Manero concerns itself with Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro), a man in his fifties obsessed with the idea of impersonating Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever; an obsession situated in the midst of the tough social context of Augusto Pinochet‘s dictatorship. Raúl leads a small group of dancers regularly performing at a bar located in the outskirts of the city. Every Saturday evening he unleashes his passion for the film’s music by imitating his idol. His dream of being recognized as a successful showbiz star is about to become a reality when the national television announces a Tony Manero impersonation contest. His urge to reproduce his idol’s likeness drives him to commit a series of crimes and thefts.

My conversation with Pablo Larraín, conducted during the Toronto International Film Festival, is not for the spoiler-wary.

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Many years ago I was taught to dream in detail and that such details involve the discipline of placing one foot patiently in front of the other. Walking to my scheduled appointment with Kiyoshi Kurosawa—whose most recent film Tokyo Sonata screened during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival—I kept watching the tips of my shoes on the sidewalk; the fulfillment of some dreams are just that vivid. If there were only five filmmakers in the world I would ever be allowed to talk to, Kiyoshi Kurosawa would be first among them and I am deeply grateful to Fortissimo Films for arranging the interview and to Linda Hoagland for her translative assistance.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata is a portrait of a struggling Japanese family: a father Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), who abruptly loses his job and conceals it from his family; the eldest son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) who hardly ever returns home from college; the youngest son Kenji (Kai Inowaki) who furtively takes piano lessons without telling his parents; and the mother Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) who knows deep down that her role is to keep the family together, but cannot find the will to do so. Somehow a single, unforeseeable rift has developed within the family, spreading quickly and quietly, and threatening to break them apart.

At the Greencine Daily, Dave Hudson has gathered together the critical response from both Cannes (where Tokyo Sonata won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize) and the New York Film Festival. In her Cannes report to Film Comment (July/August 2008, p. 54), Amy Taubin discerns: “The film would seem to be a turning point for Kurosawa; the sustained quiet anxiety that pervades the early scenes and the eruption of hysterical behavior toward the end are grounded in realism with no reference to the paranormal phenomena that have been at the center of his work.” At Senses of Cinema, Markus Keuschnigg writes that Kurosawa’s “somber family tale” exceeds expectations. “Kurosawa’s assured directing makes way for a new family structure that falls into place at the very end of the movie.” As Matt Riviera assesses in his write-up of Tokyo Sonata for the Sydney Film Festival: “Japanese society obeys strict laws and a rigid structure, but in Kurosawa’s dystopia, it takes very little to break the social contract. The eruption of the supernatural—or even the semblance of the supernatural—frees men and women from their responsibilities and renders meaningless the rules that ordinarily keep them in line. While it is devoid of supernatural elements and includes occasional forays into screwball comedy, Tokyo Sonata is not a total departure from Kurosawa’s genre offerings of the past 10 years. In fact, it could be his most frightening film to date. Thematically, it contains many of the motifs present in the director’s horror films: alienation in contemporary Japanese families, the fragility of the social fabric, the incapacity to articulate our fears.”

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Yes Ladies and Gentlemen, the moment we’ve all been waiting for… will arrive on the 10th of March in the US of A.
Tomas Alfredson’s “Let The Right One In” has been very much lauded on these pages,
like here…
or here…
or here…
or here…
or here…
or here…
So you can bet we are glad to get a confirmed release date for both the DVD and BluRay.
Thanks go to forumer Majorforce for pointing this out!

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This is a blatant plug for a film that definitely deserves more love.  As a part of the Serbian Film Festival in Toronto (which apparently has no web presence), the ‘most expensive movie ever made in Serbia,’ Tears for Sale (aka Charleston and Vendetta) is screening one time only:  Tonight at 7pm.  Todd and I both caught this Luc Besson produced film at the 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival and fell in love with Uros Stojanovic‘s brash visuals and whimsical-melancholic story telling.  Tears for Sale lives up to the work of masters Jean Pierre Jeunet and Terry Gilliam at their most experimental.  For those not in Toronto, the DVD (and hopefully Blu-Ray version where this will really shine) cannot come out soon enough.

One of the several trailers is after the jump.  Others can be found at the link below.

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Todd and Kurt liked Bruce McDonald’s take on the zombie genre in his latest film Pontypool, based on the Tony Burgess novel. Very much indeed. And the good folks over at Bloody Disgusting have scored themselves an exclusive look at the first trailer. Todd’s synopsis below.

Morning radio personality Grant Mazzy is having a bad month. His career from Toronto radio personality has been diminished to broadcasting small town radio from the basement of a church; a task he makes bearable by thinly veiled sarcasm and small town mockery. His producer wants him to talk about school closings and traffic hick-ups. He wants drama and controversy. With a three person crew running Pontypool’s “The Beacon,” there is already a fair bit of tension in the room. The level rises significantly when reports start coming in of some sort of mob attacks. The traffic reporter confirms that there is indeed a mob attacking the local psychiatrists office, and there is much blood and murder on the scene. Not your average day in Pontypool. While Grant, more than a bit of an egotist, at first thinks the locals are playing a practical joke, when calls from the BBC start coming in asking for details (they think it is a French separatist terrorist attack), he begins to believe that he is nearly at ground zero of a major story. Determined to keep broadcasting even when the infected come up to the front door, The Beacon is pretty much the radio broadcast that the characters in every other Zombie flick tune into for a little it of exposition. But what if the language itself is spreading the disease?

Head on over to Bloody Disgusting and check it out!

The Q&A session following the TIFF08 screening of Albert Serra’s Birdsong (El Cant Dels Ocells) started off contentiously with one fellow pointedly asking Serra: “Why?”  Mark Peranson who played Joseph in the film and joined Serra on stage after the screening, commented that the same question had been asked of them a couple of days previously and Serra decided the appropriate response was, “Why not?”  Serra added goodnaturedly, “Why are you alive?”  The fellow who asked the question would have none of it and angrily retorted Serra’s response was not a fair answer.  He insisted he had asked Serra a fair question and wanted Serra to give him a fair answer.  The audience did not necessarily agree as the man’s one-word question was drenched in critical accusation and—because he would not let go and was disrupting the Q&A session—Serra summarily responded with exaggerated confidence: “Because it’s a masterpiece” and stressed that—long after the fellow was dead and gone and buried in his grave—his masterpiece of a film would live on.  That earned him applause even as the man who asked the question sulked in silence.

Photo of Albert Serra courtesy of Mark Peranson, Cinema Scope.

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Topping the childhood tongue-twister of saying “unique New York” 10 times in a row, Charlie Kaufman‘s titular pun on Schenectady, New York arrived fraught with the hazard of mispronunciation (and just when I finally got Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to trill liltingly off my tongue). While waiting for Jonathan Marlow to finish up his interview with Kaufman for Greencine, I practiced Synecdoche, New York (SNY) over and over underneath my breath, telling myself that if I could say it right even once, then I could thereafter refer to it as “your film” or “this film.”

Straight off, I advised Charlie Kaufman that there were some things I simply did not want to talk about and I put those right out on the table. I didn’t want to talk about his alleged reclusivity—because it’s a browbeaten mistruth—and, despite his being Synecdoche, New York‘s producer, as well as writer-director, I wasn’t particularly interested in discussing the film’s commercial viability. He was okay with that.

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A.J. Annila’s horror film Sauna has been one of our conversation pieces around these parts. We have been talking about it a long time and a lot of us finally got to see it in September at TIFF and Fantastic Fest. Most of us liked it. Some did not. But that is not as important as the news that IFC Entertainment has picked up the U.S. rights for VOD and DVD sales for this Finnish supernatural thriller.

When more details surface we’ll keep you in the know.

If you’re thinking you’ve seen a post about this trailer before, you are correct.  The director of the film provided an early, rough version of the trailer a while back so that something would be out there prior to the Toronto International Film Festival.  But he was never happy with that one, asked to have it taken down shortly thereafter and has now replaced it with a brand new, extra shiny version.  Enjoy.

The Shaolin Temple.  Just naming the place immediately conjures up images in the minds of any martial arts fan, the legendary birth place of Chinese kung fu featuring large in scores of films.  Even casual fans know of it, and yet it’s easy to forget that the Shaolin Temple is a real place, populated by real people learning the ancient arts.  Just announced as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, Alexander Lee’s The Real Shaolin tracks the lives of four people entering the temple to train, following the demands of the ancient way of life.  It’s compelling stuff, fascinating both as history in action and human drama and it’s amazing to see the lengths people are willing to go in pursuit of their dreams.  Check out the trailer for the film below the break.

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The indie horror film Deadgirl emerged from nowhere to a world premiere as part of the Midnight Madness program at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival in mid-September.  To say that the film, which plays like a mixture of Larry Clark and Jorg Buttergeit, set some people off would be putting it mildly. Much to the likely chagrin of detractors, however, Deadgirl is proving it has staying power. For example, various distribution deals for the film are in discussion and festival screenings continue to fall into place. Deadgirl picked up the second place prize in the AMD Next Wave Competition at Fantastic Fest 2008.  The next screenings will be part of the “New Visions” competition at Sitges in October. Screenings at Leeds International Film Festival and Stockholm International Film Festival will follow. Screenwriter Trent Haaga shared his thoughts with Twitch about the film’s origins, development and public reception. He also commented on his career, including past and present projects.

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