2009 Toronto International Film Festival Wrapup

I look forward to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) every year as my only opportunity to tap into the global cinema network. Unlike Cannes, TIFF is affordable and decidedly user friendly. It is meant to be a market, of course (though it failed miserably this year), but the coordinators cater to everyday cinephiles, some of whom come to see celebrities (Megan Fox, who else?) or to gorge on exotic and rare delicacies they have only read about in exotic and increasingly rare film magazines.

Over the last three years I've had an early opportunity to see great movies like "The Wrestler" and "Wendy and Lucy" before they hit theaters and masterpieces that never hit theaters like "Colossal Youth," "Birdsong," and "Still Life" (it got a very brief L.A. release two years later.) Each year brought at least a half dozen films that left me feeling reinvigorated about the state of world cinema.

At the 2009 TIFF… not so much.

In a lot of ways, it was my own fault. For four years running now, I have watched several films from TIFF's wildly popular Midnight Madness program and for four years running, I have been left disappointed virtually every time. But just like Charlie Brown keeps trying to kick that football, I return for more abuse year-in and year-out because Midnight Madness coordinator Colin Geddes is, at the very least, good at selecting movies that sound good.

"Bitch Slap" has been a hot commodity ever since its saucy-sleazy trailer premiered on Youtube almost a year ago. Allegedly an homage to the sexploitation films of Russ Meyer and others, the film has a simple enough concept. Women with very large breasts and strategically engineered outfits kick ass.

I'm down with that. What I'm not down with is the film's visual style. One-third of it is shot in split screen, another third in slow motion and the other third in split-screen and slow motion. I don't know why people are willing to sit there and let butt-ugly images like this hit their optic nerves and pass into their brains. What if they stay there? I could live with the idiotic dialogue (the movie is called "Bitch Slap" after all) but this should be a movie about visual pleasure (of several kinds) and it offers none. In the interests of full disclosure, I walked out after a little more than a half hour. Maybe the rest was brilliant.

I can at least understand how viewers who are tuned in and turned on by that sterile aesthetic could enjoy "Bitch Slap," but there's absolutely no excuse for anyone to enjoy "George Romero's Survival of the Dead," a movie that is not only an embarrassment to a great director but would even be an embarrassment to late night cable. Romero's "Diary of the Dead" (2007) was bad but it could at least be defended as an experiment. "Survival" is simply a sad, incompetent parody. Perhaps the sight of brainless, shambling undead triggers automatic giggles for younger viewers weaned on "Shaun of the Dead," but that doesn't mean Romero can't at least try to make a real movie. And if he's only going for the funny it would be nice to actually be funny. Romero's shuffling zombies now exist only to be pushed aside and killed in increasingly cutesy and not-clever ways. I like Romero too much to talk about this anymore. Suffice it to say it might be the worst film of Romero's career. It was certainly the worst film I saw at the festival.

But "Solomon Kane," my third and final (ever! At least until next year…) Midnight Madness foray, is a reasonable contender for the title. Solomon Kane, created by Robert E. Howard of Conan fame, is a relatively obscure character who won't be known to the majority of the film's viewers. It is therefore a bit of a mystery why writer-director Michael Bassett and his studio backers bothered to use Kane's name at all. It certainly doesn't stem from an interest in adapting the character. The Kane of the film (played by James Purefoy) bears absolutely no resemblance to Howard's character, not even in the most basic aspects. The Kane of Howard's imagination was a dour, single-minded Puritan who fought for God's glory, but here that nasty God-thing is downplayed as much as possible. The Solomon Kane of the film is simply a generic fighter dude who hacks people up real good.

Howard didn't give Kane an origin story of any kind. Bassett, obviously being the superior writer, chose to correct Howard's oversight. In the film, Kane is a super bad guy who fights to save his soul after the devil claims it for no apparent reason, and also has to struggle with his family's legacy of cruelty. It's not enough to have a solitary stranger fight against evil because that's just what he does. No, we need to explain why and we need to make it personal. Most viewers won't care about the film's lack of fidelity to the source material, but even ignoring that, the movie leaves a lot to be desired. Strictly as an adventure film, the first half is competent if familiar, but the film just turns plain stupid in the final act and the climax is laughable. Amazingly, some of the horror/fanboy sites have given "Kane" enthusiastic reviews. I only wish these guys had been around 25 years ago so we all could have benefited from their insight about masterpieces like "Krull" and "Red Sonja." If your standards for entertainment are similarly non-existent, then you'll enjoy the hell out of "Kane." At least he wears a cool hat.

Perhaps I have been unkind in singling out the Midnight Madness section for scorn because there was disappointment enough to go around in other programs. "Life During Wartime," Todd Solondz's ten-years later sequel to "Happiness" (1998) arrived with good advance buzz which proves once again that good advance buzz should be ignored. Every Solondz movie is an exercise in sour condescension but when he's at his best, he crafts squirm-inducing moments that cause the viewer both to laugh and feel ashamed about laughing (the Sunshine Singers in "Palindromes," for example.) But the watered-down, ready-for-network-TV "Life During Wartime" skips on the provocation which leaves only the smugness, hammered home with leering low-angle shots of Allison Janney being all hypocritical-like. Sam Mendes would be proud. It has its share of cheap laughs, but it's limp and lifeless.

Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or winning "The White Ribbon" provided yet another disappointment though, in this case, in comparison to high expectations. It's an immaculately composed and edited film that provides a twist on the Heimat film, a popular German genre in the postwar years. The Heimat films celebrated the fatherland and painted a picture of German villagers as simple, honest, decent who really would never do anything wrong, the implication being that the good people were merely betrayed by corrupt politicians. Haneke depicts a pre-WW 1 German town as rotten to its core, right down to its dirty, grubby little children. It's as cheerful as you would expect from the director of "Funny Games" (1997). It's also somewhat tedious and obvious, a long journey with only a modest reward. "The White Ribbon" is hardly a bad film, but it's nowhere close to Haneke's best work like "Caché" (2005) and "The Seventh Continent" (1989).

Was TIFF '09 really a complete disaster? For a while, I was starting to think so. Opening night brought this year's middlebrow mediocrity, Lone Scherfig's "An Education," a paint-by-numbers coming of age story that will fill the suburban crowd-pleaser role left wide open by the absence of a proper Judi Dench film on the schedule this year. The same night also provided a mild downer from Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. Starting with an elaborate crane shot traveling through the jungle, the first half of "Nymph" is a visual treat even though (or because) it looks like a sequel to Joe's "Tropical Malady" (2004) but when a silly, twisty plot takes over in the film's latter scenes, it falls apart. It does, however, feature the year's best performance by a tree.

One more lament before I switch gears. I thought that "Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America" (2007) was the only stoner Viking movie I would ever see, but right on its heels comes Nicolas Winding Refn's "Valhalla Rising," starring Mads Mikkelsen in a no-dialogue performance as Viking warrior One-Eye. The film opens with some promising "Conan"-style blood and guts but the Danish director takes the film into psychedelic territory in the second half. This sounds promising but I couldn't make a damn bit of sense out of a long, hallucinogenic stretch in the middle of the film. Refn revealed in the Q&A that he really had no interest in Vikings at all, and it shows. There's some good material here but I'm still waiting for that balls-out Viking adventure movie that it seems I'll never get. Mikkelsen advised the audience to "light that imaginary joint" before watching the movie, and that probably would have helped. I'm willing to give it another shot on DVD.

As depressing as all of this was, there were still pleasures to be found in Toronto, starting with the lovely Isabella Rossellini in a series of Porno films. "Green Porno" films, that is. Rossellini has been making "Green Porno" shorts for the Sundance Channel for a few years now (they're also available on Youtube.) Each runs a few minutes and features a rather idiosyncratic depiction of the sex life of certain bugs or fish. At "Green Porno: Bon Appetit," Rossellini showed up in person to discuss some of her new shorts as well as conservation issues in general. TIFF '09 also provided the only chance I am likely to have to watch both a director's first film and his most recent film… made 78 years apart. Manoel de Oliveira shot his most recent film "Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl" as he turned 100. It's a compact (63-minute) charmer based on a short story by 19th century Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós which also pays tribute to the writer. As part of the same ticket, I was treated to the director's 1931 debut silent short "Douro, Faina Fluvial," a beautiful portrait of the Douro river which contains a saucy cutaway that shows de Oliveira's comic sensibility was in place from the very start.

And after the first few gloomy days, there were still more pleasures to be found. One of the "discoveries" of the festival, at least for me, was Reginald Harkema's "Leslie My Name is Evil" (trailer here) a kick-ass title taken from the song "Leslie" by The Pink Mountaintops. The film takes a jaundiced look at America in the 60s (and today) through a parody of the Manson Family trial. Young and totally square Perry (Gregory Smith) is a jury member who, despite never meeting or speaking to her, falls in love with defendant Leslie (Kristen Hager) who is obviously Leslie van Houten even though no character in the film has a last name, including Charlie (Ryan Robbins.) Fused with a pop art sensibility, the film reminded me a bit of William Klein's "Mr. Freedom" (1969) particularly with its anti-American sensibility. The film takes some cheap shots at Christianity, but it's a pretty pointed satire. Parodying a scene from Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" in a film about the Manson Family murders is either cheeky or tasteless, or perhaps both.

"Leslie My Name is Evil" is way trippy, but Harmony Korine's "Trash Humpers" is just way… something. "Trash Humpers" (trailer here) is the most literal title since "Fighting." It could also have been called "Tree Fellators." Three people in creepy old people masks (two of whom are played by Korine and his wife Rachel) commit acts of mayhem ranging from said trash can humping and tree fellating to putting razor blades in apples, smashing glass and killing people. This sounds like an attention-grabbing attempt at provocation but it's not. Instead Korine has created a completely hermetic world, a kind of pocket universe that sometimes intersects the real one, in which moral values are simply irrelevant or at least different. Imagine a parallel universe in which E=mc cubed, rather than squared; the world of "Trash Humpers" just operates by different rules. Despite all of the vile acts committed, there's nothing the least bit salacious or sensationalistic about this film. Shot on degraded VHS, it also features an aggressive audio track which consists of one character screeching, another one singing and another one saying "Make it. Make it. Don't take it." over and over again. It's hard to apply the term "pleasure" to this strange-as-hell movie, but I think it might be great. I also think it might not be what I think it is at all. I've certainly been thinking about it more than any other movie I saw.

I adore Werner Herzog. Yet there was nothing in the festival that filled me with more dread than the prospect of seeing the former Kinski-wrangler directing Nicolas Cage, one of a handful of actors whose presence all but guarantees my total lack of enjoyment. Pairing the two of them in an unlikely and unnecessary remake of Abel Ferrara's Christian redemption parable "The Bad Lieutenant" (1992) made the project sound like a disaster in the making.

So I was wrong.

"Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" is a real blast, the funniest movie I've seen since "In the Loop." How can a remake of "Bad Lieutenant" be funny? It can't be. As Herzog said in the Q&A, he had no interest in remaking the original film and didn't even want the title "Bad Lieutenant" attached to it. The two films share a drug-addicted cop and a sports betting subplot, but otherwise the resemblance is non-existent. In fact, it's a comedy and Cage delivers possibly the finest performance of his career, hamming it up to great effect in his Hunter Thompson-esque drug trip scenes which, a la Herzog, occasionally involve exotic animals like alligators or singing iguanas. Aside from the idiosyncratic use of animals, the film doesn't feel particularly "Herzogian" which is why it took me a few days to realize how much I actually enjoyed it. Herzog has made it a point recently to claim that he is forging "new alliances" and the 67 year-old safari hunter/circus ringmaster is pushing into unlikely new territory.

He kept on pushing in his second TIFF film of the year "My Son My Son What Have Ye Done," a movie guaranteed to be panned by most critics, but damned if I didn't enjoy this one too. Based on a real case, Herzog and co-writer Herbert Golder tell the story of a young suburban man (Michael Shannon) who simply snaps one day and runs his mother through with a sword. This is all revealed in the opening scenes and the rest of the film involves a detective's (Willem Dafoe) attempt to piece together the events leading up to the tragedy. An awkward flashback structure creates a sense of inertia that Herzog employs to his advantage. Just as his characters simply stand around the crime scene and talk about what happened, some of the characters in the flashbacks literally freeze and stare at the camera from time to time. It's a creepy effect that plays into the sense of creeping inevitability. Herzog denies that the film is intended as comedy but, intended or not, there are some very funny moments in the movie, the best involving Brad Dourif who turns in great supporting performances in both Herzog films this year. Brad Dourif is a GREAT actor. No qualifications needed. The strangest details in the film are so ridiculous they seem like authorial indulgences, but as it turns out many of them actually happened (such as the killer mistaking a can of Quaker Oats for God.) As terminally weird as "My Son My Son" is, it may be more faithful to the "real story" than some of his documentaries.

Speaking of which, it's about time to give Chris Smith the love he deserves. Smith kicked off his career with the criminally underappreciated (and virtually unseen) "American Job" (1996), one of the best movies ever made about work, then moved into the documentary realm with "American Movie" (1999) and "The Yes Men" (2003.) Last year he directed his second feature "The Pool" (2008) which was last year's film set in India, shot in Hindi, and directed by an Anglophone white guy that was actually good. Jai Ho. Smith returns to the documentary realm with "Collapse" which consists mostly of a single long interview with former L.A. cop Michael Ruppert. Ruppert doesn't like being called a conspiracy theorist, but I imagine that's a trait shared by most conspiracy theorists. It's kinder than calling him a crackpot. Nutty or not, Ruppert is fascinating to listen to (at least on screen, I imagine dinner would be an ordeal) and "Collapse" winds up feeling like a spoken word concert more than a documentary. Ruppert envisions himself as a prophet of doom and has lots to say about peak oil, gold, and other cheerful topics and he knows just enough to sound convincing to the more gullible. One sound rule of thumb: Anyone who is certain in the face of uncertainty is someone you certainly shouldn't believe. Smith refuses to judge, however, and it's surprisingly uplifting to see a (deservedly) marginalized voice like Ruppert's given an open forum. Youtube doesn't count.

I'm almost sounding enthusiastic now so let's talk about a few more disappointments. I love the first person essay format but both Alain Cavalier's static "Irène" and Philip Hoffman's eclectic "All Fall Down" had little more than sincerity going for them. Granaz Moussavi's "My Tehran for Sale" promised to capture the underground youth culture in Iran's capital, but fell back into uninvolving melodramatic territory. Chris Chong Chan Fui's Malay-language "Karaoke" had a few beautiful shots but wound up a pale imitator of the slow long-take films that define a certain branch of contemporary Asian and Eastern European art-house cinema. I don't remember a single thing about Boris Khlebnikov's 2003 "Koktebel" except that it was one of the most visually striking films I had seen in a long time. Unfortunately, his new film "Help Gone Mad" feels more like cut-rate Aki Kaurismaki, a deadpan comedy centered on a couple of eccentric outsiders. Except it wasn't funny.

On a brighter note, Johnnie To's "Vengeance" was a solid HK gangster flick starring French rock icon Johnny Hallyday. Inspired heavily by "Le Samourai" and a little by "Memento," the film doesn't mess around with any silly set-up material, kicking off the action with a literal bang. The characters here have a little more depth than you might expect from a revenge film and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience until the disappointing final act. I also wish Hallyday's character didn't have a certain gimmicky attribute which I won't spoil here. But if you like Johnnie To, you'll like this.

Saving the best for last, Corneliu Porumboiu's "Police, Adjective," winner of two Cannes awards, was the shining jewel of the festival for me. His first film since the great "12:08 East of Bucharest" (2006), Porumboui's film is a policier of a different kind. There's no spectacular case or Byzantine mystery at the heart of this anti-thriller. Police detective Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is assigned to follow a couple of teens who smoke dope. The film captures the sheer tedium of the job in long sequences which involve Cristi hiding behind a column and watching kids light up. It's a dryly comic critique of the sheer stupidity of state surveillance (much better than in the shallow "The Lives of Others") as well as a film about language. The final lengthy sequence involves Cristi being forced by his captain to look up words in the dictionary: Conscience. Moral. Law. Police. Words defined by other words that are defined by other words. It's turtles all the way down. And it's pretty brilliant.

All in all, TIFF felt a lot more disappointing while I was experiencing it, but improved with five hundred miles of interstate under my tires to provide time for reflection. It was certainly the weakest fest of the last four years, at least for me, but there is still a long list of films I didn't see which might have changed that, including "Wild Grass," "Hiroshima," "Leaves of Grass," "I Killed My Mother," and even Audience Award Winner "Precious," now an Oscar front runner after also winning at Sundance. At least Herzog was there to save the day(s).

If you've skipped to the bottom, or you like lists, here's a list of the films I saw ranked roughly in the order I liked them which is as inherently arbitrary and reductive as all such lists are. I didn't comment on all of these.

GREAT:

Police, Adjective – Corneliu Porumboiu

VERY GOOD:

Trash Humpers – Harmony Korine