TIFF: Anton Sirius reports in on LET ME IN, James Gunn's SUPER, GRIFF THE INVISIBLE and PASSION PLAY!

Things I am thankful for so far at this year's festival: - the chance to sit down and have dinner with John Turturro. One star of O Brother down, two to go! - the realization that Amber Heard exists on this earth to star in a Veronica Lake biopic. - the fact that unlike the Romero last year, John Carpenter's The Ward didn't suck, and was in fact an entirely decent little throwback horror flick - the new downtown set-up, where almost everything fest-related is walking distance from each other. - the smoothies at the restaurant on the ground floor of TIFF's new Lightbox theater, and half the menu down the street at the Grindhouse Burger Bar. The fest is keeping me well-fed this year. - the chance to pimp my Twitter account (@AntonSirius) again, even though I've been delinquent the last few days in Tweeting my every move On to the reviews, starkinder! Let Me In (2010, directed by Matt Reeves) Here's the Let Me In Cliff notes for those of you who need it: A bullied young boy, Owen, isolated and trying to navigate through his parents' divorce, makes a new friend when Abby and her father move into the apartment next door. His new friend turns out to be a vampire though, forcing him to make some terrible choices along the path to adolescence. At least, that's what it's supposed to be about. Based on the novel and film Let the Right One In, Reeves' take on it makes for a good movie. I'm not going to slag the very idea of Hollywood remakes, and I'm certainly not going to rag on this particular remake; it's a solid film. It's a dark coming-of-age story, darker than American audiences are used to, and for that reason alone it deserves to be seen. But it left me a little bit cold. The source material isn't just good, it's great, and Reeves wasn't able to push Let Me In to those heights. The problem wasn't in the performances either. Chloe Moretz was very good playing a very different role than Mindy Macready. Any worries anyone had that she might be a one-trick pony should be put to rest. And Kodi Smit-McPhee is just as good opposite her, better here than he was in The Road. The two of them trade vulnerability back and forth like (hmmm... what were those crazy kids big into collecting back in '83? Pogs? let's go with pogs) pogs, with Abby's soul-weariness and Owen's frustration at his own weakness driving the movie forward. Really, the emotional disconnect is all on Reeves. His decision to use CGI for Abby's attacks on her victims is as distracting as it is unnecessary, and it doesn't help that the quality of the animation is about the level of Raimi's first Spider-Man. And he makes Owen's mother even more distant than she was in the Swedish version, not even giving the audience a clear view of what she looks like. The near-removal of Owen's mom from the film is just a symptom of the biggest issue I had with Let Me In though. Owen's choices, in the end, are too easy. He's supposed to be conflicted about siding with the 'evil' Abby, and yet the film gives him no reason not to cast his lot with her. Coming-of-age stories have to put their characters through a crucible so that they can find out who they are and who they are capable of becoming. Let The Right One In did that. Let Me In does not. And that, in the end, is the most crucial difference between them. ******************************************* Super (2010, directed by James Gunn) Some people are born to be heroes, receiving the spark at birth that makes them one of the few among us capable of doing the extraordinary when necessary. And some have heroism thrust upon them, and find themselves in the right place at the right time in order to do the right thing. Frank D'Arbo is none of those people. James Gunn's Super is yet another film about an everyday Joe who feels a powerful need to don a costume and take a swing at evil. If it seems like the genre is played out, Super proves that it isn't. Its adherence to a DIY aesthetic, both in terms of plot and production values, gives it a realistic(-ish) grounding that makes the comedy work all the better. And moreso than most low-rent wannabe superhero movies, comedy is what Super does best. Rainn Wilson brings the perfect amount of brooding ineptitude to Frank's efforts to transform himself into the Crimson Bolt, scourge of criminals and theater line-butters alike. Nathan Fillion is at his deadpan best as the Holy Avenger, the star of a Christian kid's show and Frank's inspiration (well, he's also inspired by a hallucination in which he's attacked and his skull opened up by hentai tentacles and his brain is touched by the tiniest tip of God's finger). Even Kevin Bacon gets in some great lines as the drug dealer who steals away Frank's wife. But when it comes to the comedy quotient of Super, nobody bring the pain quite like Ellen Page does. We're used to seeing her as a wisecracking, wise-beyond-her-years teen and occasionally as a two-dimensional projection in someone's dream world (based on the latest NASA tracking on Inception's plot, anyway). What we're not used to seeing is her as a total spaz. She plays Libby -- comic shop employee, wannabe sidekick to the Crimson Bolt (Boltie!) and sufferer from any number of possible mild personality disorders -- with a full-throated roar of stupid that has to be seen to be believed, and has me worried that her research for the role involved her following around a couple of my ex-girlfriends for a few days. She is unbelievably funny as the wildly enthusiastic Libby, and the cosplay sex between her and Wilson is probably the funniest single scene in any movie this year. Page's "It's all gushie" will be burned into your memory forever, and with any luck will be on t-shirts by next summer. Of course, it's still a movie about an ordinary man trying to become a superhero, which means that just like Kickass, it forgets all about the inherently ludicrous nature of that quest when it comes time for the big finale. The Crimson Bolt goes from being a joke in a badly-made costume who flails away at people with a pipe wrench to transforming into a brightly-colored Punisher for the final assault on Bacon's ranch, blowing away perps with reckless abandon and uncannily good aim. At least when the movie decides to take the premise seriously it doesn't shy away from the consequences, but it's still a cliched way to take it home. One of these days, someone's going to come up with a better ending for this story. Until then though, Super might be the best of the bunch. Shut up, crime! The Crimson Bolt has his eye on you! ******************************************** Griff the Invisible (2010, directed by Leon Ford) A little Aussie trifle starring True Blood's Jason Stackhouse (Ryan Kwanten), Griff the Invisible is about a timid oddball who deals with the misery of his lonely life by dressing up as a superhero and patrolling the streets. This is no Down Under Kickass riff though. While Griff does seem to occasionally scare off a mugger, for the most part he is completely wrapped up in his fantasy world, monitoring the city via satellite and computer network, getting calls from the commissioner on his red Batpho... err, Griffphone and battling shadowy figures dressed in Victorian finery. His secret identity is threatened by outside forces though. Tony the office bully at work won't leave him alone, forcing him to use his homemade invisibility suit (a white painter's suit soaked in invisible ink, i.e. lemon juice) to sneak into the office at night to play practical jokes on Tony. More dangerous though, his straight-laced brother's new girlfriend Melody is a misfit like him, and seems far more interested in being part of his life than in his brother's. What's a delusional, socially maladjusted freak to do? While Griff the Invisible ties hard to be Benny and Joon, only with Charlie Chaplin replaced by Bruce Wayne, it fails on a couple of fronts. While the film is admittedly low budget no effort is made at all to distinguish Griff's fantasy missions from reality, which makes it tough to tell exactly how out of touch Griff is. Worse, the conflicts keeping the couple apart are more on the level of Three's Company-esque misunderstandings than real issues to be resolved, sapping the story of any real urgency. It's a cute idea for a movie, and everyone involved is game enough, but it just doesn't do anything to distinguish itself. Especially in a festival already containing James Gunn's Super, this one's as invisible as its title character wishes he could be. ******************************** Passion Play (2010, directed by Mitch Glazer) Holy fuck is this thing bad. Mickey Rourke plays a Chet Baker-esque, washed-up junkie trumpeter who gets dragged out into the desert to be killed by a hitman because he fucked the wife of a gangster. When he's miraculously saved, he staggers off and finds a sideshow in the desert, where he meets a freak played by Megan Fox, who amazingly enough is there because she has bird wings growing out of her back and not because of her thumbs. He springs her from her metaphorical cage with the intent to trade her to the gangster, but in a shocking twist falls in lobe with her instead. Things go downhill from there. It's hard to pick out exactly what the worst thing about Passion Play is. Certainly Mitch Glazer's script and direction are neck and neck. The set-up goes for magic realism territory and winds up in Painful Clicheville instead (i.e. when the hitman, played by a mute Chuck Liddell of UFC fame, is about to shoot him, Mickey looks up at a hawk soaring in the sky. Seriously, a fucking hawk) while he delivers his clumsy script in the most stifling, stylized example of early '90s LA style I've seen since, well, every bad movie shot in the valley in the early '90s. It's all crappy smooth jazz covers of classic songs, and laconic camera moves, and no sense of urgency or danger or anything except that oblivious arrogance Steely Dan made a living out of skewering. What might actually be worse than Glazer's efforts though is Rourke's performance. He phones it in to the point that he's almost engaged in self-parody, staggering through lines of dialogue so incoherently that he has to repeat himself two or three times just to wring some semblance of meaning out of them. He's not just bad. He actually gets out-acted by Fox, which is really a hell of a feat when you think about it. About the only decent thing about the film is Bill Murray as the gangster, who as per usual manages to look just fine despite the cinematic atrocities taking place around him. Let me put it to you this way: fully two-thirds of the audience at the screening I was at was gone by the time the house lights came up. And most of those who stayed only stuck around to settle a bet on what position would get used for Rourke and Fox's sex scene - would he be on his back, with her spreading her wings above him? Or would he be kneeling, so she could tenderly enfold him with her feathers? I would have preferred some sort of elevated doggie style myself, with Fox flapping madly to keep herself aloft and at the right angle, but that kind of outside-the-box thinking wasn't going to happen in Passion Play.