Toronto: Anton Sirius on MARTYRS, THE BROTHERS BLOOM & COOPER'S CAMERA!!!

Hey folks, Harry here - I'm dying of curiosity to see MARTYRS and BROTHERS BLOOM. Tim League has been bending my ear about the awesomeness of MARTYRS ever since he saw it at that infamous screening outside the festival at Cannes. And as a huge fan of BRICK and again - having my ear bent by Quint since his long ago set visit, I've been curious beyond words to see what it's all about. If you don't know these films - well, giver our starkinder Anton a read and tremble with curiosity, like me!

Martyrs (2008, directed by Pascal Laugier) The recent French horror resurgence is already mutating beyond anyone's wildest imaginations. Haute tension may have gotten most of the attention from folks in the genre ghetto (and, in my opinion, undeservedly so) but more recent works like A l'interieur have really started to push the envelope, taking the horror film in directions it's rarely gone before. And then there's Martyrs. Good God. Fuck pushing the envelope, Martyrs tears up the envelope, burns it, mixes the ashes with blood and hands it back to you as a cocktail. The film starts with young Lucie escaping unfathomable torment in an abandoned factory. Scarred for life she befriends Anna in the mental hospital, as Anna is the only child there with any sympathy for the damaged, self-destructive Lucie, whose nightmares have terribly real consequences. Fast forward a decade or so. Lucie breaks into a charming suburban home and brutally slaughters the family inside, convinced that the mother and father were her childhood torturers. Anna, still looking after poor Lucie, rushes over to clean up the mess, while Lucie tries to understand why her nightmares continue their assault upon her even after she has exacted her revenge... And THEN the real movie starts. The beauty of Martyrs' subversion comes in no small part because of its economy. The plot above is fairly standard horror stuff (albeit extremely well done) but it's packed into the first two-thirds of the movie, which leaves absolutely no time for a second to be wasted on anything extraneous. Once the conventions are dispensed with though Laugier goes for the jugular, taking the movie in a crazy new direction that isn't so much a 180 as it is something that could only be described using three-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry. What Anna goes through is brave new territory for any film in any genre, not just a horror film, and that it navigates that unexplored terrain so well is a tribute both to Laugier's skills as a writer and director and the work of actress Morjana Alaoui as Anna. She has to do things here no actress has ever had to do before, and will probably never have to do again, and she makes every second seem real. I got a little flack in the comments for my Deadgirl review for being, well, perverted, but my point in going so far over the top was simply that that film thought it was being transgressive when it was merely being exploitative. Martyrs, on the other hand, is truly transgressive. The film got blacklisted by the ratings board in France, receiving their equivalent of an NC-17 rating despite the fact that it contains no sex whatsoever and has a gore quotient far less than what's contained in even a red band trailer for an Alejandro Aja movie. Martyrs contains disturbing visuals, to be sure, but it marries those visuals to ideas that make the film far more corrosive and far more plausible than any of the grand guignol excess of your usual slasher or monster flick. In fact, crazy as it sounds, Martyrs presents a shockingly moral frame for its horrors, and that more than anything is what sent the French ratings board round the bend. What Anna suffers is awful and unthinkable and evil, but it's awful and unthinkable and evil not because she randomly walked into the wrong campground but because the world is sometimes an awful, unthinkable, evil place, and because people can coldly and logically justify awful, unthinkable, evil things. One person puked at the midnight screening of this, and quite frankly I was shocked there weren't more such reactions, or more walkouts. Another person during the Q & A tried to unfavorably compare it to Haneke's Funny Games, but to me it's Funny Games that pales in comparison. Haneke showers his audience and characters with contempt, while Laugier has nothing but respect and empathy for his creations, even the monsters, and for anyone who watches them. This is a beautiful, horrible, tragic, ghastly, shocking, heartbreaking work of genius that lovingly scars you for life. Martyrs is one of those films you can't unsee, and wouldn't want to. ****************************************** The Brothers Bloom (2008, directed by Rian Johnson) There may be no trickier genre of film to pull off than the con flick. Actors have to portray characters who are themselves actors, sometimes with multiple roles; the script must be air-tight while juggling any number of concerns and goals; and the direction has to walk an extremely fine line between letting the audience know too much and letting them know too little. When a con flick works (as in The Sting, or the original Argentinian Nine Queens) it's a masterpiece. When it doesn't (as in The Sting 2) it's a disaster. In this one, two brothers (Stephen and Bloom, played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrian Brody) have been con artistes extraordinaire since childhood. Stephen is the schemer, concocting elaborate plans which he illustrates with handy flow charts, while Bloom is the dreamer, playing the lead role in Stephen's productions. Bloom has grown tired of the vagabond grifter existence though, and the two have fallen into a rut of every con being Bloom's last one, with Stephen having to talk him out of retirement afterwards. Stephen, loving his younger brother and realizing that he really does need something more in his life, drags Bloom in for yet another 'one last con' on lonely heiress Penelope (Rachel Weisz)- only this time, it becomes impossible to tell who's the mark and who's the con man. Rian Johnson (the guy what did Brick) isn't trying to make the perfect con flick here. Instead he's aiming even higher, taking the approach Mamet did with House of Games and using his cons as a vehicle to deliver a message rather than just taking the audience on a roller-coaster ride of reversals and double-crosses. In this case, Johnson -- in just his second feature, no less -- uses the con as a metaphor for filmmaking itself, even bringing back basically the entire cast of Brick (including Nora Zehetner and a strangely slack-jawed Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to portray the 'cast' of the con the brothers are just finishing when the story begins, just to drive the point home. Unfortunately, his reach exceeds his grasp. Don't get me wrong here. F for Fake is my favorite Orson Welles movie; I love seeing the curtain pulled back on the wizard. But Johnson doesn't seem to have much more to say other than "Movies are an entertaining con", and quite frankly I knew that before I walked into the theater. The Brothers Bloom is certainly clever (there's a great scene where Stephen is introducing a mysterious stranger played hilariously by Robbie Coltrane, and Penelope immediately jumps on the fact that the whole thing is just a nod to Herman Melville's Confidence Man) and for the most part well-acted (although it's the first time in a long time I've seen Weisz look a little out of her element) but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. And the ending (when Johnson decides to up the stakes and take the con seriously for a change) is not only telegraphed nearly from the first words out of Stephen's mouth, it doesn't really work. The Brothers Bloom is quirky and cute, but that's all it is. If it reminds me of anything it's Danny Boyle's A Life Less Ordinary, a lightweight romantic romp masquerading as something else. That's not the stinging rebuke most people would take it for, since I actually like A Life Less Ordinary's silliness, but it's certainly a letdown after Brick. ************************************ Coopers' Camera (2008, directed by Warren Sonoda) A showcase for the comic talents of Daily Show power couple Jamantha Jobee... err, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones, Coopers' Camera tells the oft-told tale of an extremely dysfunctional family's train wreck of a Christmas, this one set in the early '80s in upstate New York -- complete with the usual closet skeletons, wacky neighbors and kin and deliberately dated pop culture references. The central conceit of the film is that, rather than collect the money owed him by local amateur porn king Bill (played with somewhat disturbing enthusiasm by Kid in the hall Dave Foley... his role seems to be nothing less than a tribute to Bill Hicks' "Hairy bobbin' man ass" routine) so he can take the family to Orlando, dad Gord (Jones) accepts a second-hand video camera instead, which he gives as a present to younger son Teddy. Teddy then uses his new toy to record all the unfolding mayhem as relatives start to pile into the house, and family secrets get revealed. If I sound less than enthusiastic about Coopers' Camera it's because the film is decidedly underwhelming. Bee is excellent as Gord's very pregnant wife Nancy and Jones is solid, the plot revelations are suitably crazy and there are some good gags scattered about (such as older son Marcus' jury-rigged Star Wars toys), but the whole movie really seems to exist as an excuse for Jones and Bee to help their Canadian sketch comedy buddies get work (Mike Beaver co-wrote the script with Jones and fills the Randy Quaid role, while Jen Baxter - probably best known as the softball-playing zombie in Land of the Dead, Jayne Eastwood, Jenny Parsons and other recognizable faces from the Toronto comedy scene have prominent roles.) All the performers are good, with Baxter's probably the best of the supporting cast as bitterly shrewish sister-in-law Bev, and are clearly comfortable working together but the performances themselves and the dialogue seem semi-improvised, as set-ups sometimes go nowhere and occasional conversations take on the 'I can top that' vibe of an episode of Who's Line Is It Anyway? Director Sonoda also drops the video camera conceit at odd times, cutting away to unnecessary establishing shots or security cam footage that really have no place in the movie. Basically, if you've ever wondered what a Will Ferrell movie would be like without Ferrell in it (or Paul Rudd, or even John C. Reilly...) this is the movie for you. Anton Sirius