The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA) Very much a companion to Anderson’s Blood Will Have Blood, this is another richly detailed period piece about an intense, ambivalent relationship between a young man and an older, charismatic but monstrous mentor. Like its predecessor, the film provides no easy answers or directives as to how to interpret what we are seeing, other than perhaps to see the nature of character itself, or at least the American character, a little more clearly. Seems that for Anderson it’s a titanic, self-creating thing, stretched over a frightening void. The performances here by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix are themselves titanic, elevating their characters to the scale of mythic giants. Seymour’s L. Ron Hubbard clone is beguiling and frightening, and Phoenix’s lost soul, cast adrift by his time in the war, is a genius-level film performance of great pathos. The post-WWII period is brought to life with great vitality and conviction.The film seems to be an allegory of the meaning of that time; Anderson is after something bigger than just the early days of a phony religion. Johnny Greenwood contributes one of the most sheerly masterful scores I’ve heard in ages. The film has the bottomless quality of really good art.
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (Shola Lynch, USA) Radical chic, apparently, is not dead! Kind of amazing that TIFF presented this specialty-channel type doc as a Gala. It is absorbing viewing no doubt, and a story worth telling. Though it’s great to hear Angela Davis talk about her experiences, the film is pure hagiography, determined to avoid seeing anything from more than one point of view. It’s not that I want someone to speak up for Dick Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But when will we be able to take a more complex view of the sixties’ social conflicts instead of continuing to try to, at least implicitly, re-fight them? Yes, Angela’s acquittal was worthy of celebration. But that doesn’t mean the pretensions of radical ideology don’t deserve interrogation just as readily as the sanctimonious pronouncements of state power. The film is pure romance.
The Last Supper I can’t really review this movie. In spite of handsome production values, it seemed to be establishing itself with a mixture of bombast and pictorial stiffness that wasn’t promising, and I fled the cinema after a half an hour looking for something more appealing. Which proved to be:
Clip (Maja Milos, Serbia) This film boldly follows a bunch of Serbian teenagers, in particular, 16 year-old Jasna. Her and her friends’ lives mostly consist of honing their porn-star styles, and using their cell phones to videotape themselves having sex with their loutish boyfriends. The lead performance is a heartbreakingly vulnerable portrait of a teenager dangled like a puppet on a string by her hormones, her inability to connect with her family, and her desperation for the approval of her future wife-beater of a boyfriend. The setting is a relentlessly depressing suburb of run-down housing blocks, and one wonders if the teenagers’ hyperbolic vitality is a desperation to transcend it through the energies of their own bodies. In comparison, the adults seem already dead. On-screen sex acts raise the difficult-to-watch quotient considerably, but the film’s constant alternation of a clinically objective POV with the views of the characters’ own cell-phones works brilliantly throughout. Some have accused the director of being a provocateur, but I felt she was extremely true to her subject.
I Declare War (Jason Lapeyre & Robert Wilson, Canada) I loved the concept of this movie – an all out wargame between a bunch of barely pubescent boys — for about five minutes. By then it had become clear that the filmmakers were determined to have their cake and eat it too, treating the events as though they were a game and as though they were real, without distinction. (Either could have worked, or a gradual transition from one to the other; but the film fudges them from the very first.) This sets every scene against itself so that little of what the characters does makes any sense. Stiff line readings of stylized dialogue from the young cast further enhance the impression of filmmakers too in love with their own ideas to think clearly about what they are doing. Visually and sonically the film is extremely impressive, especially given its probably very low budget. Now the filmmakers need to learn a few things about audience suspension of disbelief, and about working with actors. The movie sure looked like it was fun to make, though, and the young cast’s pleasure in the charade is probably what kept me in my seat — barely.
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, USA) A movie about movies, or one movie in particular: The Shining, as watched obsessively by a number of interview subjects. We hear them talk about their theories while the filmmaker cannily uses clips from The Shining and a wide range of other films as illustrations. Most of the theories are surprisingly compelling, and the film provides a nice meditation on the way that movies knit themselves into our mental lives. The film does not judge the theories at all, which is probably good; in fact, though, it seems to believe in all of them, and a hundred others, since together they amount to an affirmation of the god-like mastery of the film director, for which Kubrick has always been the number one totem. As a result there is something curiously airless and joyless about the whole affair. Perhaps no consideration of art based on total control can be either satisfying or ultimately revealing.
Show Stopper. (Barry Avrich, Canada) A jazzy documentary about the rise and fall of Canadian theatre and film impresario Garth Drabinsky. The film tells this story well, capturing its world-class ironies with precision through well-done interviews and tons of video clips. Ultimately more of a broadcast piece than a film festival work, but I did enjoy it.
Leave a comment