Hey folks, Harry here with Anton's final straight fest report from the 25th Toronto International Film festival.... From here on out Anton will be busily transcribing interviews that he's done with various uber-coolites that attended the festival and we'll be bringing you all of that... Here ya go...
Day Ten
Actually, this is Day Eleven. The partying Saturday night went into the wee hours, which meant my Sunday activities consisted of: fest Awards brunch at the Four Seasons; sleep; karaoke at the Bovine Sex Club, where I met up with Takeuchi (Wild zero’s director) and Colin (Midnight Madness programmer), along with many other certifiably insane folk. Blew my voice out on Mac the Knife too, and had to turn it into a Shane McGowan cover version.
Big award news is that my tip on Almost Famous turned out to be a crock of doodoo- Crouching Tiger took the People’s Choice. This is fantastic news. If anyone needed reassurance that the general public would be willing to accept the film, subtitles and all, this should do it. Something will be very wrong if Tiger doesn’t make $100 million plus at the box office. (Mind you, it’s only third on my top ten fest list- go figure). The other notable winner was George Washington (a film that, unless you’ve been following Ebert’s fest coverage, you likely haven’t heard much about- a situation I will rectify as soon as I can salvage the review off the Accursed Laptop), co-recipient of the Discovery Award (Best First Feature) along with Baltasar Kormakur’s 101 Reykjavik. You will be hearing a lot more from Mr. David Gordon Green. Trust me on this one.
In conjunction with that People’s Choice, I’m giving Belle of the Ball to Zhang Ziyi, even though she wasn’t here. I was tempted to go with Rose Byrne from Goddess of 1967, total sweetheart that she is, but Ziyi just kicked too much ass in Tiger to ignore. For those of you in New York City, though, if you run into a gaggle of Aussie women running amuck tell the really cute one Anton says hi (and Rose, if you’re reading this, get the gang all dressed up and check out a little hole in the wall club called Mother- it’s tres cool.)
Amazingly enough, this fest saw the birth of not just one screen goddess (Ziyi) but two. If you know me from TalkBacks, you know I HARDLY EVER get involved in casting debates (ahem) but this time I really mean it. Everyone involved in making casting decisions for the Matrix sequels needs to go out and see Baise-moi immediately, as Karen Bach is exactly what you are looking for with the young French woman part. She owns the camera, and could be a bigger break-out star than Carrie-Ann was. Karen has young Liz Taylor sex appeal with Barbara Stanwyck steel underneath and an Angelina Jolie edge. Give her a screen test. Teach her English if you have too. The woman is pure dynamite. She’ll be more than worth the investment.
My fest top ten:
1) The Goddess of 1967 (Clara Law). I was wavering on this one mid-week, but then I caught the last twenty minutes again at an added screening and saw at least three images that broke my heart with their beauty, images that could justifiably be displayed in the Louvre. Maybe the most poetic film ever made.
2) Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aranofsky). I STILL don’t know if I can say I like the movie, but images from it have haunted me all week, and I imagine they will haunt me for weeks still.
3) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee). Zhang Ziyi. Sigh.
4) Heart of the World (Guy Maddin). Yes, I know it was a Prelude. Doesn’t matter. It’s the greatest short film ever made.
5) The Long Holiday (Johan van der Keuken). Lyrical and brilliant.
6) Stardom (Denys Arcand). Brutally funny at times, and Dan Aykroyd deserves an Oscar nom.
7) The King is Alive (Kristian Levring). Fantastic effort from the last of the Wild Dogme Bunch.
8) George Washington (David Gordon Green). A better debut than Paul Thomas Anderson. ‘Nuff said.
9) Brother (Takeshi Kitano). Let’s hope this is the one that opens the eyes of American audiences.
10) Endgame (Conor McPherson). A testament to the power of the written word and pure acting.
Honorable Mentions: Time and Tide (Tsui Hark); Teeth (Gabriele Salvatores); American Nightmare (Adam Simon); Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi) and What About Me: The Rise of the Nihilist Spasm Band (Zev Asher.)
C’est ca- I’m outta here, except for the eight or nine interviews I still have to transcribe and the reviews yet to be rescued from laptop oblivion, of course. But now is the time for sleep...
The Mechanism (2000, directed by Djordje Milosavljevic)
Last year at the fest some of the biggest buzz went to a Yugoslavian first feature, Wheels. I didn’t see it, but the raves sounded good enough to get me into the director’s follow-up, The Mechanism.
The film plays out large as a metaphor for the war. Two innocents, a school teacher and an ex-soldier who was wounded before he even saw combat, become entangled with a sadistic hit man, who talks a lot about everyone being part of ‘the mechanism’, his way of describing a particularly chilling take on a blind, predetermined universe.
Like a number of films, most famously and recently Breillat’s Romance, The Mechanism could have made a truly remarkable short film, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes long. Instead we get a soggy feature that makes its point over and over again, the only difference each time being the amount of brutality inflicted on the female teacher. Yes, war is horrible; yes, its touch infects everyone that crosses its path. We get it already.
Mind you, that’s still better than Saving Private Ryan’s blatant hypocrisy. There is something to be said for purity of vision. And The Mechanism does have some decent tricks of its sleeve visually, even if it overuses them. Milosavljevic might be a director to keep an eye on, one or two festivals hence.
Teeth (2000, directed by Gabriele Salvatores)
The latest picture from the director of Mediterraneo, Teeth is a mind-blower. Think of it as an Italian Bite Club, with a happier (well, that’s a debate for another time) ending.
Antonio, the protagonist, has always been haunted by his teeth. The film opens with a flashback to his childhood, as a trip with his family to Pompeii gives him an opportunity to try and relieve himself of the burden of his giant incisors, and also freak out the audience unmercifully. Back in the present, a fight with his girlfriend (and a handy ashtray) accomplishes what the stones of Pompeii couldn’t, and the monstrosities are broken. This leads Antonio on a quest through his memories of his mother, and confrontations with increasingly menacing dentists. Will Antonio find happiness and let go of his jealousy? Will his teeth get fixed? Will the director let up for an instant and stop grossing people out?
Teeth is a remarkable movie. Antonio’s dental problems, and their attendant fantasy sequences, hallucinations, and dental appointments you WISH were hallucinations, work on so many levels it’s impossible to count, forcing you to sit back and let the film work in your subconscious, where it belongs. Teeth offers no easy answers for Antonio or the audience, instead keeping you hugely entertained while letting you find your own conclusions. I’m a sucker for films that give its viewers credit for intelligence, and Teeth has enough depth to allow you to sink into it however far down you wish to you.
And the dental sequences! Most of the audience erupted in shrieks every time some new pain was inflicted on Antonio’s abused gums. If you have a dentist phobia I’d recommend avoiding Teeth like the plague, since you won’t last ten minutes. The rest of us, on the other hand, can enjoy a wonderful film. Just be prepared to wince a lot.
City of Lost Souls (2000, directed by Takashi Miike)
The second-last Midnight film, City of Lost Souls plays out like Swallowtail Butterfly meets True Romance. Alas, very few of you have seen Swallowtail Butterfly, one of the best Japanese movies of the last decade, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I say that’s a good thing. It also has more than its fair share of wild action and gross-out humor, fitting from the man who made Fudoh: the New Generation, and its lesbian school girl crotch-dart assassin.
Mario, a Brazillian thug on the run loves Kei, a Chinese hairdresser, due to be deported from Japan. He rescues her, thus running afoul of the Chinese Triad lordling who also desires her. This puts the young couple in the middle of the burgeoning war between the Triads and the Yakuza, which explodes when Mario and Kei break up a drug deal between the two, mistakenly stealing the product instead of the cash. Mayhem results.
Visually City of Lost Souls is brash and twisted. An unabashed comic book film, the gangs are portrayed with an over-the-top stereotypicality that makes Rising Sun look like neo-realism. Mario and Kei make a very photogenic (if lethal) Romeo and Juliet, and the cock fight... well, the cock fight you have to see to believe.
Underneath the pyrotechnics, though, lies some interesting thoughts about immigrants and their place in Japanese society. Again, this is a far more light-weight effort than Swallowtail (made in ’96 by Shunji Iwai, and a film that you absolutely must see if you get the chance), but it’s still a look at a side of Japan you rarely see.
Endgame (2000, directed by Conor McPherson)
As part of the 25th anniversary this year the festival put on a program called Beckett on Film, highlighting the works of Samuel Beckett. I must admit I dreaded seeing this one a little. Plays are notoriously difficult things to adapt to the screen, and since Beckett’s work is arguably the most quintessentially theatrical of any twentieth-century playwright’s, I figured a Beckett play shouldn’t work at all on film.
I was wrong.
Trying to describe Beckett’s plot is a waste of time. It’s Beckett, so absurdity and profundity intermingle freely to produce a magnificent other. But Endgame the film doesn’t just rely on Beckett’s words. It also features David Thewlis and Michael Gambon, two outstanding actors, in the main roles. Their work here is extraordinary, as the sparse, tiny setting gives them an opportunity to apply cinematic internal acting to a stage play, with fantastic results. In fact, it is Endgame’s brooding claustrophobia that allows this adaptation to soar. McPherson’s camera movements are minimal and precise, with the result being that every zoom or pan is amplified and fraught with meaning, adding whole new layers to the original text.
Not enough can be said about how incredible Gambon and Thewlis are here. Gambon, of course, has a long and distinguished career, but Thewlis has rarely had an opportunity to display his talents since Naked, and all that frustration from working in crap like Dragonheart explodes into his performance here.
A truly outstanding film.
25 x 25 program
Another anniversary experiment, this series of shorts was put together by 25 of the film-makers with films at the festival. Each was given 25 hours and a DV camera to create a 3-5 minute short. All the shorts were then shown in one program on the festival’s last day. The results were of course uneven, with many of them ending up as nothing but talking heads or meaningless crowd shots, but a full third of them proved memorable. The highlights:
John L’ecuyer’s How I Learned To Love My Pussy starts out with John and friend getting ready for a party, until their cat decides to upstage them both.
Francoise Romand’s piece whose title I didn’t catch, about a very amusing pedicurist who natters on about how horrible it is living with her mother. A catharsis of sorts is reached when her mother is brought in for her own pedicure.
John Greyson’s Topping is essentially a video for a film festival love song (complete with bare-chested men on a bicycle built for two) intercut with shots of two babies planning out their fest schedule through subtitles. Hilarious, and a throw-back to Greyson’s Zero Patience days.
Jean-Francois Monette’s tale of the Alberta Beef Queen loose at Norman Jewison’s beefless CFC barbeque provided some laughs
Asia Argento’s How To B Beautiful in Toronto features her and her Scarlet Diva co-star Vera Gemma mostly naked for its running length, as they get ready for a fete. Asia’s sarcastic lipstick scrawls on the mirror provide counter-point.
Robert Kennedy’s Glitter Jones has him succumbing to the pressures of non-stop parties, the yawning abyss of press coverage and friends’ demands for screening tickets.
Glenn Standring’s Windows has him lurking in his hotel room as the Magic Hour approaches, spying into the windows of other hotel rooms and observing the murky doings within. Surprisingly creepy.
The best of the bunch, though, was Carlos Siguion-Reyna’s Festival Shuffle. Featuring a soundtrack that includes “The Hustle” (!) the short follows Carlos as he arrives at the festival, delighted by all the goodies. His happiness turns to despair, though, as he discovers all the films he wants to see are sold out. His antics with the Cumberland support staff (hey Steph!) reinforce everything McKellar bitched about in his Prelude.
Wild Zero (2000, directed by Tetsuro Takeuchi)
Think Streets of Fire meets Resident Evil. Wild Zero, the final film of the fest, stars Guitar Wolf, semi-nearly-legendary Japanese rock group as themselves, bailing a young fan named Ace out of trouble when he runs afoul of some meteorite-created zombies. The veers drunkenly (almost as drunkenly as the band) from psycho set piece to psycho set piece, and includes explosive concert footage from Guitar Wolf as well as crowbar swingin’, grenade launchin’, laser guitar pick flyin’ action. Horribly campy zombie make-up just adds to the fun. Wild Zero is one of those instant cult classics like Six-String Samurai that smacks you upside the head and says “Hey! Dumb-ass! Movies are supposed to be fun!” And it’s the perfect kiss-off to the fest when you see it in a 900-seat theater packed to the rafters at midnight.
And if you’ve never seen Guitar Wolf in action, well... Rock ‘n’ rollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll, baby!
