Black Sheep @ TIFF 2009!

And here it is - the last day of the Toronto International Film Festival. The winner of the Cadillac prize for favorite audience film has been announced and I am happy to say that it is PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL "PUSH" BY SAPPHIRE. Now a lot of people have speculated that PRECIOUS might win but these same people are just as quick to point out that no film this year has captured the hearts of filmgoers like last year's winner, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, which we all know went on to dominate awards season and take the Best Picture Oscar. The first time I ever saw SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE was actually at TIFF last year and I if you read my blog at all, you pretty much know how I feel about all the love people bathed that movie in. I had told myself that I wouldn't talk about it anymore but apparently, as a lot of you out there haven't gotten over it yet, I must. SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE was an audience favorite because it was contrived and constructed to manipulate sympathy out of its audience and that ending with that fantastic closing credits dance sequence was designed to leave you feeling damn good as you tapped your feet to "Jai Ho" on your way out. Again, I reiterate that I don't hate the Danny Boyle film; in fact, I did like it. I just don't think it deserved its Best Picture win. As for PRECIOUS, it may not have connected with audiences the way SLUMDOG did but this one floors people in a way that SLUMDOG never could. Lee Daniels's film is honest, brave and unflinching and it features some of the most revelatory performances of the year. This TIFF win will mean Oprah can stay home a little more because it is now guaranteed to get noticed as its November release date approaches.


I have one more movie to catch before the festival ends this evening, Jason Reitman's follow-up to JUNO, UP IN THE AIR, starring George Clooney. If you don't mind, I'm keeping that one to myself. I'm not taking notes and I'm not even going to review it until its actual theatrical release, this December. No, I'm just going to sit back and enjoy it. Well, I hope to enjoy it. Whether I do or not, I will be sitting back anyway.


In the meantime, I will share my final TIFF experience with you. To talk about this experience, I need to talk about an experience from when I was 14 years old. It was spring and I can't recall how I convinced my mother to let me do this; I'm sure there must have been some lying involved but regardless, I somehow ended up getting her to drive me to the theatre so that I could catch Madonna's documentary about her Blonde Ambition tour, TRUTH OR DARE. It was the middle of the day and the audience was pretty bare, save for me, a couple of other male-male pairings and some random creepy old men spaced out across the theatre. Today, I caught TRUTH OR DARE for free outdoors in Dundas Square. There weren't too many people there - me, all by myself, and then a few other couples or small groups of gay guys and a few old men. At the time, the film by Alex Keshishian was not taken too seriously by the general population but critics considered it to be one of the stronger documentaries that year and were generally surprised when it didn't get any Oscar love. I haven't seen the film in at least four or five years and it is just as I remember it - an intimate portrayal of one of the world's biggest superstars with a persistent seed of doubt in regards to its authenticity throughout. The black and white backstage footage makes the contrasting color concert footage explode off the screen and allows Madonna to show why it is people have put up with her all these years - because she knows how to push people and she is one hell of a performer.


Of course the most ironic thing about watching it in Dundas Square, downtown Toronto, was when the scene in which Madonna plays Toronto came on and she is almost arrested for lewd behavior. Apparently, guests from the night before complained that when Madonna simulated masturbation on stage during "Like a Virgin", they were offended, and the police were there to inform her that if she did it again, she would be arrested. Now, here I am, 18 years later watching Madonna simulate that same masturbation number under a brilliant blue sky in the epicenter of Toronto where anyone and their children could walk by and watch for free. Oh, how the times have changed.

Thank you so much for following Black Sheep's TIFF coverage. I saw a lot of great movies and got a lot of great response from you. I'm a lucky guy just to be here and having had the opportunity to enjoy such great films surrounded by so many other great film admirers. Before I go, here is a full list of all Black Sheep's TIFF reviews one last time. Just click to read ...

AGORA

THE BOYS ARE BACK

BROKEN EMBRACES

CREATION

THE DAMNED UNITED

THE INFORMANT!

LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL "PUSH" BY SAPPHIRE

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE

LE REFUGE

A SERIOUS MAN

THE UNLOVED

WHIP IT

THE YOUNG VICTORIA

YOUTH IN REVOLT

ROCKNROLLA

Written and Directed by Guy Ritchie
Starring Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Thandie Newton, Mark Strong and Jeremy Piven


(I would ordinarily list a quote from the film that struck me at this point but damned if I could understand half of what the rock n rollas were spouting on about half the time.)

Boys will be boys, even when they’re men who haven’t been boys for a very long time. They like to get their guns out and smack ‘em around in the other boys’ faces, all in an effort to prove who the baddest boy on the playground is. It doesn’t matter to them that the playground has progressed into the entire city or that the guns have gone from plastic toys to the real deal. The game may have gotten heavier and plenty more serious, and the boys may have grown into the more rugged bodies of men, but they’re still bumbling little boys at heart, too scared to do right and even more so to be a failure. This particular London playground that embodies all this manliness plays home to the modern gangster movie, ROCKNROLLA, and the boy at the top of the mountain is none other than Guy Ritchie.


Ritchie has had a rough go at establishing himself as one of today’s big boys as of late. He burst on to the scene in 1998 with LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS. The fast moving action and even faster dialogue grabbed a lot of men by their own sensitive boys, squeezed hard and made them feel like bigger men. (Personally, I couldn’t make out a single word being said and lost track about 20 minutes in so I never made it that far.) Ritchie’s momentum grew into a Hollywood step with his follow-up, SNATCH, but his favour quickly faded after his critical disaster, SWEPT AWAY. I mean, it wasn’t great but critics went in with their own guns blazing. You simply don’t make a vanity project outside of your genre with your superstar wife, especially when that wife (or soon to be ex-wife) is Madonna, one of the most critically panned actresses of all time. No one even noticed his last release, REVOLVER, but now Ritchie is back. The problem is he isn’t really better than ever; he’s just back where he left off before everything was, well, swept away.


Lucky for Ritchie, he’s got a great group of mates along for this ride. ROCKNROLLA’s cast is top notch no matter what Ritchie’s expansive script calls for. Whether you’re watching Gerard Butler dance entirely out of step with Thandie Newton at a party while exchanging brief quips about a heist job or Tom Wilkinson being a right bastard (which he does so well) as the man who runs the streets or Butler dancing yet again, this time in a close embrace with good pal, Handsome Bob (Tom Hardy), before he is shipped off to prison, there is always a sense of playfulness that never loses sight of purpose. The purpose on the other hand is a little too far out of reach. There are bad guys and good guys who are essentially bad guys themselves and they are all involved in some sort of construction zoning law shakedown that touches the junkies of the world as well as the Russian mafia and pivots around this one missing lucky painting, which, with a quick nod to the mysterious contents of a certain briefcase in the modern gangster classic, PULP FICTION, is never seen on screen.


Complicated? Yes. Overly so? Maybe, only time will tell there. A good, fun time? For sure. Ritchie is sharp and has a keen eye for style. He hasn’t quite mastered the balance between sleek and simple yet, as his simpler bits are rendered somewhat puny in comparison with his flare. Still, you can tell he’s having a great time piecing it all together. There are the dirty, dark sets, the driving pulse of the often-obscure soundtrack choices (no more cheeky early Madonna pop tracks to be found here) and the sexy voice-over (a clearly spoken narration that was my personal saviour at times) to provide constant entertainment. My hopes for Ritchie though are that ROCKNROLLA does not amount to he himself being a “Rock n Rolla” – a boy pretending to be living large instead of actually living it. Next time out, I want to see Ritchie one step closer to being a real man.

Black Sheep @ the 2008 Festival Nouveau Cinema

And we’ve come down to the final two. The Festival Nouveau Cinema is now in it’s final day here in Montreal. The big closing night party and screening came last night. I guess Saturday was better so everyone can just wake up and get back to normal tomorrow. Ah, normal. How dull you will be in comparison with the week I just had. Maybe the festival staff will find me hanging outside the theatre tomorrow pretending like nothing has ended.

Thanks to Chris and Oliver at the pressroom – you were very accommodating, getting me everything that I needed when I needed it. And congratulations go out to Montreal filmmaker, Adrian Wills, for winning one of the festival's audience awards, the Radio-Canada People's Choice Award for his Beatles/Cirque de Soleil documentary, ALL TOGETHER NOW. I had the pleasure of interviewing Adrian during the festival; just click on the film's title to jump to that.

A few things I caught at the festival will find their ways to Black Sheep in the coming weeks but I will close now with my last two films. Talk about night and day with these two … Let’s start with the night.

FILTH AND WISDOM


They said I couldn’t do it. They said I could never be objective when it came to Madonna. Yes, I am a fan. I have been since I was 10 years old. I defended her during her sex craze in the early 90’s. I even enjoyed her “American Life” album, describing her rap attempt as cute. But I cannot condone this. FILTH AND WISDOM is Madonna’s first directorial effort. I’ve wondered if she perhaps made this film as a backdoor entrance into the film world considering the front door used for her acting has been slammed in her face so many times now. She may have snuck in but this film will not get her an invitation to stay.


Where does one begin when everything is wrong? FILTH AND WISDOM is supposed to center around three roommates in London who find themselves at various stages on what Madonna feels to be the eternal pull of life between, wait for it, filth and wisdom. In Madonna’s ongoing pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and the subsequent preaching of said enlightenment to all of us lesser folk, she tells us, through incessant and obvious narration from lead actor and Gogol Bordello frontman, Eugene Hutz (the only natural element of this mess) that all people live somewhere between these two guiding forces and that inevitably every person will be pulled toward the opposite of the force that has always guided them. Given that she wants to make such grand statements about humanity, it would have helped if she treated her characters like actual people. Instead, they are merely symbols being moved wherever needed in the story, whether there is any build or not, in order to serve the greater purpose of making Madonna’s point. If she decides to try her hand at directing again, she should A) allow the writing to someone else (she co-wrote this with Dan Cadan), B) tell a person’s story that allows for insight instead of trying so hard to cram insight into a hollow story and C) not use her own music in the soundtrack more than once … that’s just plain tacky.

ENTRE LES MURS (THE CLASS)


This year’s winner at Cannes for the Palmes d’Or and France’s official submission to the Academy Awards as Foreign Language Film contender, ENTRE LES MURS (THE CLASS) is such an engaging experience, which is quite the surprise when you think about what you are actually watching unravel on screen. Francois Bégaudeau is a teacher and novelist. He wrote a book about his experiences teaching teenagers in a troubled Parisian neighborhood, translated that into a screenplay and now finds himself playing a version of himself in the film. It is now our turn to sit with him in his classroom, as presented by director Laurent Cantet. For just over two hours, we sit with Bégaudeau’s French class and watch in amazement as the games play out. Considering the film rarely leaves the school grounds, if at all, it keeps its audience focused at all times, which is a lot more than I can say for Bégaudeau and his students.


Calling what happens in Bégaudeau’s classroom a game is a gross understatement. It is more like a war of the minds and egos. The teachers all go in at the beginning of the session feeling defensive and preparing themselves for the worst, therefore often fulfilling their own prophecies. The students, well, it isn’t that they are so uninterested in learning. They just care more about social status and where they fit in. So they spend the time they should be spending on conjugating verbs coming up with witty quips and trying to look big and tough in front of their recess buddies. The classroom has become a stage to buy yourself credibility on the playground. And with 30 or so of them and only one Francois Bégaudeau, the odds are far from being in his favor. Kids today know this and the kids in this particular class do an excellent job conveying these things in the most subtle of fashions. The entire cast is stellar as the cinema verité stylistic approach requires them to be in order to be believable. This is all the more impressive considering the majority of them have never acted before, including Bégaudeau himself. ENTRE LES MURS is a great film, funny one minute as the banter flies through the room and distressing the next when the realization that scenarios just like these are happening all over the civilized world. It is also a heck of a lot more entertaining than I remember school to be.

So what have we learnt here today class? Well, I learnt that Madonna is just like that kid in Monsieur Bégaudeau’s class – she thinks she has all the answers and likes to look cool when she can but if she would actually stop yapping for a second, she might actually learn something from the real teacher.

Black Sheep @ the 2008 Festival Nouveau Cinema

If I were 37 years old, you wouldn’t be calling me old (at least I hope you wouldn’t) but you certainly wouldn’t be looking at me like something new either. Somehow though, after 37 years of existence in Montreal, the Festival Nouveau Cinema still warrants its title. Year after year, the festival offers Montreal filmgoers a variety of fresh films that range in style and genre and are anything but ordinary. This year is certainly no different and I am fortunate enough to have the whole week off to drift in and out of the dark cinemas as I please so that I can report back to you about all the wonders I was privileged to see. The following are the Top 5 titles I am most excited about …

ENTRE LES MURS
(THE CLASS)


This is actually the festival’s closing film selection and what a fantastic selection it is. Laurent Cantet’s adaptation of Francois Begaudeau’s novel was the surprise winner of the Palmes d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film is a hybrid of documentary style and activist thinking, told in a loose narrative form. Begaudeau plays himself, a French teacher in what could simply be described as a difficult Paris classroom but that would be a gross understatement. A lesson needs to be learned and I’m sure by the film’s close, we will have learnt just as much as the kids in class.

FILTH AND WISDOM


After years of being laughed out of Hollywood for uh, poor, acting attempts, Madonna has finally gotten the point. People don’t want to see her in front of the camera. So in taking a lesson from filmmaker hubby, Guy Ritchie, she has decided to try her hand at directing instead. It may have received mixed reviews from its Berlin film festival premiere earlier this year but the curiosity factor is just too great to resist.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED


I am extremely excited for this much talked about Jonathan Demme picture. This is primarily because I’ve already seen it and cannot wait to get married again. I caught this film at its North American premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival and cried frequently throughout the film when I wasn’t in awe of how surprisingly visceral it was. When I left the screening, I was disoriented, stunned. This is rare for someone who sees a lot of movies, let me tell you. That said, I will not say too much about the film because it just needs to be experienced.

ALL TOGETHER NOW


I am not the richest guy around so even though I would love to take a short trip out to Vegas to catch the Beatles’ highly acclaimed Cirque de Soleil show, LOVE, I simply cannot. For now, I will have to settle for the closest thing to it, Adrian Willis’s behind the scenes documentary, ALL TOGETHER NOW. Willis has lensed a number of Cirque shows prior so he is no stranger to capturing the remarkably magical experience that only the Cirque de Soleil can create. And even though it isn’t the same as being there, there are advantages to this experience. If I was fortunate enough to find myself a seat at the show itself, I’m fairly positive I would not be privy to Paul McCartney’s reaction to this unexpected interpretaton.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK


This is another film that has yet to connect with audiences in its festival run from earlier this year. It has been touched up though and the world will finally get to see how the mind that penned the genius works, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, will approach directing his first feature. To call Charlie Kaufman unique is too facile. His way of thinking is just far enough beyond the masses so as not speak above them but to present them with situations they can understand but could never have imagined themselves. Given that SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK seems to be about a giant reconstruction of the city within an immense airplane hanger, I would say we’re in for another mind melt.

The Festival Nouveau Cinema is on now and take it from me, you need to get your tickets right away. I was thinking that being accredited for the festival meant I could just waltz in to whatever film I wanted but not so. Apparently you still need to get a ticket and I was rejected from my first film already. Good times. No, but seriously, there are some serious good times to be had. For a complete list of films, please visit the Festival Nouveau Cinema web site. And be sure to check back on Black Sheep throughout the festival as I report back on these films and a dozen others (from MAN ON WIRE to ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO and more!)