Tink From The Kingston Canadian Film Festival!!

Merrick here...
Tink sent in ths message after The Kingston Canadian Film Festival - the all Canadian film festival that recently wrapped up in, well, Kingston...which is in Ontario...which is in Canada. We posted another report from the festival yesterday, which you can find HERE. I've never been to Canada, but any place that can be called Land of the Shat is great in my book. Even though I've never been there in person, I do know that Canada looks suspiciously like all the alien worlds I've seen in GENE RODDENBERRY'S ANDROMEDA, STARGATE and STARGATE ATLANTIS, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, and so forth. But...we won't go there right now.
Here's Tink...

I attended the Kingston Canadian Film Festival for the first time this year. I’m from the US so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but overall it was a pretty good festival. I'll attach a cleaner copy of the content of this email, but I basically wrote up a short description and review of each film I saw. If you decide to use this, call me Tink. The Tracey Fragments This movie could be called “Tracey Berkowitz Has Come Unstuck in Time” as homage to Slaughterhouse Five. Elle Page plays fifteen-year-old Tracey, who after losing her brother runs away from home to wander around Winnipeg looking for him and experiences Billy Pilgrim-like time jumps through pieces of her life. The most impressive thing about this movie is the editing. The story told in fragmented time with multiple images and scenes on the screen at the same time. This sounds much more distracting than it is. Different combinations of sometimes seemingly unrelated events give interesting insight into Tracey’s mind. A friend and I were having a discussion about it and he thinks that the film is actually realistic, representing the way we see the world in fragments. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I did think it was a good storytelling device. Ellen Page is excellent. She does not make Tracey likable, but she makes her real. She turns on a dime from unexpectedly funny in punk metal fantasies about her crush Bobby Zero, to devastating as she tries to survive her classmates at school (who call her “it”) and her disturbed family life. Ms. Page does her best with a script that is not always even. Visually this movie is incredible, and definitely something to see. Bruce MacDonald nearly gave up on the idea of using multiple frames (he would have edited it as a straight feature), but you’ll be glad he didn’t. It is one of the few movies where the editing is allowed to stick out and shine. (Keep an eye out for one scene, which has 99 video tracks) The score by Broken Social Scene is pretty good too. This is a movie about a fifteen-year-old girl, but it is not a movie for your average fifteen-year-old girl. Most of the people who saw it with me were really positive. Walk All Over Me Walk All Over Me is directed by Robert Cuffley and stars Leelee Sobieski, Tricia Helfer, Lothaire Bluteau, and Jacob Tierney. Without giving away the story, it’s about a small town girl named Alberta (Sobieski) who runs away from a mess she’s gotten into by catching a bus to Vancouver. Once she is there she looks up her old babysitter, Celene (Tricia Helfer), who is now working as a dominatrix. Alberta tries being a dominatrix herself by stealing one of Celene’s clients to make some extra cash. Then all hell breaks loose. I didn’t expect to like this movie as much as I did. It was sharp and funny, with enough action to keep me from getting bored (Trisha Helfer throws a man through a glass table!). Sobieski’s Alberta is played with sweet naiveté, as a girl with an uncanny knack for getting herself into messy situations. Helfer’s performance as tough and sexy Celene proves that she is more than just a Cylon on Battlestar Galactica (although one or two of her outfits even Six wouldn’t go near). Overall this was a solidly entertaining movie. Defiantly one to look out for. Shake Hands with the Devil If you live in the US you might not get to see Roger Spottiswoode’s Shake Hands with the Devil. Not to be confused with the documentary or the book of the same name, Spottiswoode’s film is a dramatization of Romeo Dallaire’s autobiography. Dallaire was commander of the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The movie is a painful portrayal of a man with the best intentions, who has his hands effectively tied by the bureaucracy of the UN. Each new phone call brings bad news, leaving only a small group of soldiers who are not allowed to fire their weapons unless fired upon to protect 30,000 refugees who are dying of illness and running out of food and water. This is not the first film to be made about the genocide in Rwanda, but is probably one of the most accurate ones (unlike the very fictional Hotel Rwanda). Each scene was filmed in the location where the events actually took place with local Rwandans as extras. It gives the movie an eerie authenticity that is stays with you after you’ve left the theater. The direction and cinematography are excellent contrasting to beautiful Rwandan landscape with the desperation and fear of the people. Roy Dupuis’s performance as Dallaire is one of the best portrayals of a soldier I have ever seen. Dupuis carries the weariness of a man in a hopeless situation as he forces himself to circumvent military rules and make deals with murderers to try and save lives. Each time the UN reminds him to be impartial you can practically feel the frustration. This is probably the best movie I saw at the festival. It does not have a distributor in the US because no one wants to carry war movies with the recent box office failures. Hope that you have the chance to see it. Up the Yangtze Up the Yangtze is a documentary that follows a young man and a girl who get jobs on a cruise ship that caters to wealthy Europeans and travels up and down the Yangtze River to the Three Gorges Dam. The girl (who takes the English name Cindy) comes from an extremely poor family. She cannot afford to go on in school, so she takes a job as a dishwasher to help her family afford to move above the rising waterline of the river. The young man (English name Jerry) comes from a middle class family, and uses his job as a server and bellboy to earn large tips from unsuspecting Americans. On a larger scale it is a documentary about modern china, with the Dam acting as the catalyst for change. It is an interesting look at china through the eyes of the Chinese, especially the young central figures. At times it is painful to watch these, mainly American, tourists blithely vacationing without any awareness of the upheaval around them. The thing that makes this doc worth watching are the sporadic moments of humor, and deep sadness that crop up as you watch the transition in Chinese culture. The Green Chain Most people who saw The Green Chain in my screening did not like it. The movie is directed by Mark Leiren-Young and stars Tricia Helfer, Tahmoh Penikett, Brendan Fletcher, Babs Chula, Jillian Fargey, Scott Mc Neil, and August Schellenberg. The movie is basically seven monologues (most of them one take) that each begins “I love trees.” The monologues outline seven different perspectives on the logging industry in a small town. The performances are good, but that is not enough to keep the audience engaged in a 90 minute long discussion of environmental issues. How She Move How She Move was directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid and it stars Rutina Wesley, Dwain Murphy, and Brennan Gademans. If you have to see a dance move, that is a movie that centers on a big dance event, see this instead of Step Up 2. It is slightly better than your average street dance movie. Raya is a girl who gets kicked out of her private school because she no longer has the money to stay, in order to get the money to go back she enters a step competition. Step is some form of dance I am not really familiar with. To me it just kind of looks like they are jumping around and clapping their hands, but who am I to judge? I’m a rhythm-less with two left feet. What I liked about the movie was the emphasis on education (the main character wants to get into medical school) and the peek into Jamaican- Canadian culture in Toronto. What I didn’t like where the dance scenes (I didn’t get them), the storyline involving a dead sister (unnecessary), and the grainy footage (I know it was low budget but it was a little hard to watch). Emotional Arithmetic Directed by Paolo Barzman and starring Susan Sarandon, Roy Dupuis, Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, and Gabriel Byrne. Emotional Arithmetic is about an American survivor of a WWII French prison camp (played in adulthood by Sarandon) who reconnects with two other survivors. In the camp Melanie, and American Jew, and Christopher (an Irish non-jew) are mentored by Jakob (a young Jewish man) who keeps them alive until they can be freed. 35 years later Melanie brings Jakob to her home and Christopher follows him. This upsets Melanie’s long-suffering husband (played by Plummer) and son (played by Dupuis). This is a decent film, but not a great one. It is beautifully photographed but the story feels forced and the survivors feel more like stereotypes that real men and women. I couldn’t help but be bothered by the fact that the two children were not French and one of them was not even Jewish. Even the usually great Susan Sarandon and Christian Plummer were not enough to save this film. Although many of the people who saw it seemed to like it, I didn’t think it was anything special.