originally posted at Toronto Star:
Marwencol: A tiny world within
Editorial Rating: 3 (out of 4)
by Bruce DeMara
After five drunken yobs beat him nearly to death outside a bar, Mark Hogancamp is a changed man. After nine days in a coma and 40 days in hospital, the Kingston, N.Y. native has little memory of his past life. Not surprisingly, the U.S. health care system cuts him off from Medicaid, forcing him to pick up the shattered fragments of his life pretty much on his own.
Is it any wonder that Hogancamp retreats into a fantasy world he calls Marwencol, a miniature World War II town constructed of cardboard and hobby store accessories and populated with valiant action figure American soldiers, beautiful Barbie doll women and evil SS troops? Using a badly-functioning camera, Hogancamp creates a series of “stills” — similar to his own memory — and becomes an unlikely artist of sorts, attracting the attention of a magazine editor that eventually leads to having a show of his work in New York's Greenwich Village.
To say the chain-smoking Hogancamp is an unlikely subject of a documentary is an understatement. By his own admission, prior to the accident he was a serious boozer with a failed marriage behind him, stuck in a dead-end job at a local restaurant. Post-trauma, he remains a fearful eccentric who can be seen walking down the side of the road near his home towing a toy jeep filled with Marwencol characters to ensure its tires show a proper amount of wear. If nothing else, at least his appetite for booze is gone with the beating that has permanently scrambled his brain, leaving him a man-child naïf.
Director Jeff Malmberg sees something in Hogancamp that he wants all of us to see, an imperfect human scarred by horrific trauma who nonetheless finds a reason to live — even if much of his time is spent within a fantasy world — and a previously undiscovered artistic soul.
Like Hogancamp's understanding of himself, there are some pieces missing. We don't know what happened to his marriage, only that it is over. We see photos of the five creeps who attacked him and hear briefly from one of them via a police tape recording, but have little understanding of their motivation. Hogancamp does have one little kink — one the film's producers don't want revealed — that may have triggered the beating and no, it's not that he's gay.
Malmberg allows us to see Hogancamp, imperfect as he is, as a man worthy of empathy and respect, not just a victim but a man who strives to believe in the goodness of others and to find peace within himself. It's not an easy film to watch and Hogancamp isn't the most obvious protagonist. But the film carries a message of redemption and hope that all can heed.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Toronto Sun: Marwencol
originally posted at Toronto Sun:
'Marwencol' deserves Oscar buzz
Editorial Rating: 4.5 (out of 5)
by Jim Slotek
A haunting movie about a haunted man, Marwencol is a revelatory documentary which is already generating Oscar buzz.
It manages to touch, in one personal profile, themes of consciousness, imagination and reality, indomitability of spirit, alternative lifestyles, the nature of art, even the sink-or-swim harshness of the American healthcare system.
And it defends the dignity of the documentary -- a genre that seemingly has been hijacked of late by polemicists and sophomoric pranksters (yo, Joaquin!).
The subject of Marwencol is Mark Hogancamp, a man who was beaten nearly to death by five men outside a bar in Kingston, N.Y., in April 2000 and left in a coma. After 40 days in hospital, he emerged with impaired motor skills, severe memory loss (he couldn't remember having once been married for several years) and myriad odd brain chemistry changes (a longtime alcoholic, he found his desire for liquor had completely disappeared).
A perfunctory state-funded therapy program quickly ran out, leaving Hogancamp basically alone. On his own, living in a trailer, he created a strange form of therapy, sort of dollhouse Gestalt. He constructed a town in Nazi-occupied Belgium named Marwencol (a collage of his name and the names of Wendy and Colleen, a co-worker and a friend), full of Barbies, G.I. Joes and other action figures dressed in carefully tailored period clothing to support their backstory.
The backstory: Hogancamp is an American airman who crashes behind enemy lines. Wandering about, he discovers Marwencol, a town where the men have either fled or been conscripted, and the women remain. It's his town now, and he creates a bar reminiscent of Casablanca's Rick's Café Americain, where American and German soldiers can drink in a state of truce.
All, that is, except for the SS, who hover about menacingly seeking the bar.
To Hogancamp, they represent the men who beat him. And in one of his cathartic plotlines, he is kidnapped and tortured by these very same men, with a different result.
In fact, everybody in Marwencol turns out to be a representation of somebody Hogancamp knows in real life. All his friends and co-workers, the married neighbour he knows he can't have (but whom he makes love to in miniature), the professional photographer who discovers his proxy life and deems it art, even the director of the film become characters.
There's a witch, there's a time machine, and there are paroxysms of Inglourious Basterds-style violence (yes, these are dolls we're talking about). Dutifully photographed in storyboard style by their creator with all the emotion and drama their frozen faces can muster, it's no wonder they'd end up in a gallery.
And that's the second half of Marwencol -- Hogancamp's New York debut, and no-less-than heroic attempt to represent himself at his own gallery show.
His "discovery" doesn't make Hogancamp rich, but it does free up other aspects of his damaged personality that paint a fuller picture of what went on that night in 2000.
Hogancamp's artificial reality is clearly so real to him, it demands respect. Credit director Jeff Malmberg, who takes what could have been simply presented as a freak show and allows it its dignity.
'Marwencol' deserves Oscar buzz
Editorial Rating: 4.5 (out of 5)
by Jim Slotek
A haunting movie about a haunted man, Marwencol is a revelatory documentary which is already generating Oscar buzz.
It manages to touch, in one personal profile, themes of consciousness, imagination and reality, indomitability of spirit, alternative lifestyles, the nature of art, even the sink-or-swim harshness of the American healthcare system.
And it defends the dignity of the documentary -- a genre that seemingly has been hijacked of late by polemicists and sophomoric pranksters (yo, Joaquin!).
The subject of Marwencol is Mark Hogancamp, a man who was beaten nearly to death by five men outside a bar in Kingston, N.Y., in April 2000 and left in a coma. After 40 days in hospital, he emerged with impaired motor skills, severe memory loss (he couldn't remember having once been married for several years) and myriad odd brain chemistry changes (a longtime alcoholic, he found his desire for liquor had completely disappeared).
A perfunctory state-funded therapy program quickly ran out, leaving Hogancamp basically alone. On his own, living in a trailer, he created a strange form of therapy, sort of dollhouse Gestalt. He constructed a town in Nazi-occupied Belgium named Marwencol (a collage of his name and the names of Wendy and Colleen, a co-worker and a friend), full of Barbies, G.I. Joes and other action figures dressed in carefully tailored period clothing to support their backstory.
The backstory: Hogancamp is an American airman who crashes behind enemy lines. Wandering about, he discovers Marwencol, a town where the men have either fled or been conscripted, and the women remain. It's his town now, and he creates a bar reminiscent of Casablanca's Rick's Café Americain, where American and German soldiers can drink in a state of truce.
All, that is, except for the SS, who hover about menacingly seeking the bar.
To Hogancamp, they represent the men who beat him. And in one of his cathartic plotlines, he is kidnapped and tortured by these very same men, with a different result.
In fact, everybody in Marwencol turns out to be a representation of somebody Hogancamp knows in real life. All his friends and co-workers, the married neighbour he knows he can't have (but whom he makes love to in miniature), the professional photographer who discovers his proxy life and deems it art, even the director of the film become characters.
There's a witch, there's a time machine, and there are paroxysms of Inglourious Basterds-style violence (yes, these are dolls we're talking about). Dutifully photographed in storyboard style by their creator with all the emotion and drama their frozen faces can muster, it's no wonder they'd end up in a gallery.
And that's the second half of Marwencol -- Hogancamp's New York debut, and no-less-than heroic attempt to represent himself at his own gallery show.
His "discovery" doesn't make Hogancamp rich, but it does free up other aspects of his damaged personality that paint a fuller picture of what went on that night in 2000.
Hogancamp's artificial reality is clearly so real to him, it demands respect. Credit director Jeff Malmberg, who takes what could have been simply presented as a freak show and allows it its dignity.
NOW: Marwencol
originally posted at NOW:
Marwencol: Model Subject
Editorial Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
by Norman Wilner
Outsider art has never seemed as riveting – or as revealing – as it does in Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg’s study of Mark Hogancamp of Kingston, New York, who’s constructed an elaborate scale-model world in his backyard as a way to cope with the after-effects of a brutal beating that left him with a brain injury and memory loss.
Hogancamp’s fantasyland is a Belgian village where Germans and Americans can wait out the Second World War in peace. Its unfolding narrative finds his avatar, “Hank,” dragged away by the SS and tortured until the local women rally to his rescue, attacking the evildoers and liberating their hero.
Arranged and photographed by Hogancamp as an action epic, the film is wish fulfillment and self-mythologizing at its most nakedly obvious, though its creator doesn’t quite see it that way. That’s clearly what fascinates director Malmberg, at least at first; as the documentary progresses and Hogancamp’s ever-expanding installation becomes more and more complicated, another story emerges.
When the images of Marwencol come to the attention of a Greenwich Village art gallery, everything changes – and Malmberg probes still deeper into his subject’s complicated, wounded soul.
It’s absolutely thrilling to watch the camera push Hogancamp closer and closer to confronting some elements of himself that he obviously doesn’t want to discuss, and what happens after that is even more incredible.
This is one of the best movies you’ll see all year. Don’t let anyone ruin it for you.
Marwencol: Model Subject
Editorial Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
by Norman Wilner
Outsider art has never seemed as riveting – or as revealing – as it does in Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg’s study of Mark Hogancamp of Kingston, New York, who’s constructed an elaborate scale-model world in his backyard as a way to cope with the after-effects of a brutal beating that left him with a brain injury and memory loss.
Hogancamp’s fantasyland is a Belgian village where Germans and Americans can wait out the Second World War in peace. Its unfolding narrative finds his avatar, “Hank,” dragged away by the SS and tortured until the local women rally to his rescue, attacking the evildoers and liberating their hero.
Arranged and photographed by Hogancamp as an action epic, the film is wish fulfillment and self-mythologizing at its most nakedly obvious, though its creator doesn’t quite see it that way. That’s clearly what fascinates director Malmberg, at least at first; as the documentary progresses and Hogancamp’s ever-expanding installation becomes more and more complicated, another story emerges.
When the images of Marwencol come to the attention of a Greenwich Village art gallery, everything changes – and Malmberg probes still deeper into his subject’s complicated, wounded soul.
It’s absolutely thrilling to watch the camera push Hogancamp closer and closer to confronting some elements of himself that he obviously doesn’t want to discuss, and what happens after that is even more incredible.
This is one of the best movies you’ll see all year. Don’t let anyone ruin it for you.
Globe and Mail: Marwencol
originally posted at Globe and Mail:
Marwencol: Dolls, Nazis and fiction as brain therapy
Editorial Rating: **** (out of 4)
by Liam Lacey
One of the oddest and most moving documentaries since Best Boy or Grey Gardens, Jeff Malmberg’s debut film, Marwencol, is a marvel. A portrait of a small-town drunk whose near-fatal beating turned him into a compelling outsider artist, it is both an inspirational back-from-the-abyss tale and an uncanny experience of watching a mind trying to heal itself by creating fiction.
In 2000, 38-year-old Mark Hogancamp lived in an upstate New York town where he was a part-time illustrator and “gallon a day” drunk. One night, outside a bar, he was viciously beaten by five men. After recovering from a nine-day coma, he had lost his taste for alcohol and most of his memory. When his health benefits ran out, he invented his own form of therapy to keep his hands and mind busy: he started playing with children’s dolls and action toys.
The result was a 1/6 scale Second World War-era Belgian town named Marwencol that fills his backyard, built of scrap construction materials and populated by more than 100 Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures.
Marwencol (a contraction of the names of Mark and two women friends, Wendy and Colleen) is also a simulacrum of Hogancamp’s hometown, Kingston, N.Y., populated by dolls representing the artist, his friends, the occasional celebrity (Arnold Schwarzenegger, rock star Thom Yorke) and even his assailants, dressed as SS officers.
Because he was unable to draw any more, Hogancamp bought a camera and began photographing his dolls and creating stories about their world. Some of his ideas seem inspired by the 1960s Nazi-prison-camp comedy Hogan’s Heroes (a play on his surname) but there are also time machines, episodes of brutal violence and revenge, and, for the soldiers’ entertainment, evenings of girl-on-girl wrestling.
Malmberg treats Hogancamp, a down-to-earth guy with extremely specific aesthetic ideas, with non-patronizing fascination. We are placed in the world of Marwencol (including a bit of stop animation), shooting the dolls from low angles and getting to know them as characters in an imaginary movie.
But even in a town of plastic heroes and beauties with frozen stares, real life has a way of intruding. A local photographer managed to get Hogancamp’s work into a New York art magazine. A gallery called. Those developments set up the second act of Marwencol, in which Hogancamp deals with his private world going public.
Thanks to some of Malmberg’s own storytelling savvy – he holds back a significant detail of the night that changed Hogancamp’s life until late in the film – Marwencol doesn’t stop delivering surprises until its last frame.
Marwencol: Dolls, Nazis and fiction as brain therapy
Editorial Rating: **** (out of 4)
by Liam Lacey
One of the oddest and most moving documentaries since Best Boy or Grey Gardens, Jeff Malmberg’s debut film, Marwencol, is a marvel. A portrait of a small-town drunk whose near-fatal beating turned him into a compelling outsider artist, it is both an inspirational back-from-the-abyss tale and an uncanny experience of watching a mind trying to heal itself by creating fiction.
In 2000, 38-year-old Mark Hogancamp lived in an upstate New York town where he was a part-time illustrator and “gallon a day” drunk. One night, outside a bar, he was viciously beaten by five men. After recovering from a nine-day coma, he had lost his taste for alcohol and most of his memory. When his health benefits ran out, he invented his own form of therapy to keep his hands and mind busy: he started playing with children’s dolls and action toys.
The result was a 1/6 scale Second World War-era Belgian town named Marwencol that fills his backyard, built of scrap construction materials and populated by more than 100 Barbie dolls and G.I. Joe action figures.
Marwencol (a contraction of the names of Mark and two women friends, Wendy and Colleen) is also a simulacrum of Hogancamp’s hometown, Kingston, N.Y., populated by dolls representing the artist, his friends, the occasional celebrity (Arnold Schwarzenegger, rock star Thom Yorke) and even his assailants, dressed as SS officers.
Because he was unable to draw any more, Hogancamp bought a camera and began photographing his dolls and creating stories about their world. Some of his ideas seem inspired by the 1960s Nazi-prison-camp comedy Hogan’s Heroes (a play on his surname) but there are also time machines, episodes of brutal violence and revenge, and, for the soldiers’ entertainment, evenings of girl-on-girl wrestling.
Malmberg treats Hogancamp, a down-to-earth guy with extremely specific aesthetic ideas, with non-patronizing fascination. We are placed in the world of Marwencol (including a bit of stop animation), shooting the dolls from low angles and getting to know them as characters in an imaginary movie.
But even in a town of plastic heroes and beauties with frozen stares, real life has a way of intruding. A local photographer managed to get Hogancamp’s work into a New York art magazine. A gallery called. Those developments set up the second act of Marwencol, in which Hogancamp deals with his private world going public.
Thanks to some of Malmberg’s own storytelling savvy – he holds back a significant detail of the night that changed Hogancamp’s life until late in the film – Marwencol doesn’t stop delivering surprises until its last frame.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Winnebago Man Q&A and QTV Appearance
Here's part of the Q&A with Jack Rebney from after the premiere at the TIFF Bell Lightbox last week:
And as a bonus, here's Jack Rebney attempting to do a station ID for Jian Ghomeshi's QTV show:
And as a bonus, here's Jack Rebney attempting to do a station ID for Jian Ghomeshi's QTV show:
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Water on the Table Nominated for a Gemini
Acclaimed doc will make its Toronto premiere at Planet in Focus
Gemini-nominated for the Donald Brittain Award for Best Social Political Documentary, Water on the Table is a character-driven, social-issue documentary by Liz Marshall that explores Canada's relationship to its fresh water, arguably its most precious natural resource. The film asks the question: is water a commercial good like running shoes or Coca-Cola, or, is it a human right like air? Following its highly anticipated Toronto theatrical premiere at Planet in Focus at the ROM on October 14th at 7:00pm, Water on the Table will screen at the Royal Cinema on October 16th & 17th.
There will be a Q&A session with director Liz Marshall and subject Maude Barlow following the October 14th screening.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Globe and Mail: No Heart Feelings
No Heart Feelings: Nothing much happens, but it's a quiet triumph
Editorial rating: *** (out of 4)
by Rick Groen
Get past the rather laboured pun in the title, and No Heart Feelings is a quiet delight. Quiet, because nothing much happens. Delightful, because nothing much happens in sharply observed and revealing ways. What emerges is a thin yet credible slice of Toronto life among the hipster crowd, twentysomethings who wear their light irony like heavy armour, only occasionally lifting the visor to peer out at the world head-on. As they do, the characters and the city fuse neatly - both relatively young, both self-conscious, alternating between energetic bursts of construction and anxious bouts of de-construction.
Appropriately, then, the film is framed in break-up scenes, once-solid relationships razed by life's wrecking ball. Mel (Rebecca Kohler) is the early victim, sitting on a front stoop and sifting through the debris. Inside, a house party rages and there, in an Altmanesque flurry of overlapping dialogue, we hear someone or other making this non-commitment to something or other: "I don't think I can't not do it." Yes, a triple negative struggling to seem positive - the lingo of the ironic class, and it rings perfectly true.
From there, on park benches and bar patios, the script follows Mel and friends through their journey into tomorrow. Of course, that's well-travelled turf in the movies. But the distinguishing mark here is the picture's acute sense of time and place. Working with a Lilliputian budget and a non- professional cast, the trio of directors (Sarah Lazarovic, Geoff Morrison and Ryan J. Noth) has managed to do in Toronto what Whit Stillman did in New York with Metropolitan - precisely capture particular mannerisms, turns of phrase, modes of dress, then allow all that specificity to resonate. So the threesome has made a virtue of necessity. When you're poor in money and scant of plot, get rich by deifying the details.
Wielding a surprisingly fluid camera, they've taken the same approach to the city, offering up specific but telling glimpses - of Kensington market in all its fresh avocado/rotten tomato variety, of bike paths that weave theatrically from urban exhaust to pastoral retreat. There's even a cinematic sight gag that Toronto everywhere invites: a crane shot that is literally a shot of a crane, its vast steel arm nurturing yet another embryonic condo.
As for that meagre plot, it touches on Mel's slow-to-develop feelings for Lewis (Dustin Parkes), just arrived from Vancouver to start a new job. Speaking of which, the hipsters' attitude to work is fascinating. Most toil in web-related gigs, grateful for the pay cheque yet bemused by how they earn it. But if the work has changed, the workplace has not, and a drone's complaints are classic: "I've got five bosses and, all together, they've got, like, one sense of humour."
Classic too, even among the irony-clad, is the trodden path from flirtation to sex to mild regret, sometimes leavened with rising hopes. En route, the amateur casting succeeds for the simple reason that, in this case, self-conscious acting is a perfect fit for self-conscious characters. They, and the nothing much they do, are equal parts endearing and annoying. But the mix is deliberate, maybe even wise, a quiet argument that the search to "find yourself" is a dead end at any age. In a rare moment of unfiltered candour, dear annoying Mel puts it best: "You're always going to be the person you are, except a few years later."
Editorial rating: *** (out of 4)
by Rick Groen
Get past the rather laboured pun in the title, and No Heart Feelings is a quiet delight. Quiet, because nothing much happens. Delightful, because nothing much happens in sharply observed and revealing ways. What emerges is a thin yet credible slice of Toronto life among the hipster crowd, twentysomethings who wear their light irony like heavy armour, only occasionally lifting the visor to peer out at the world head-on. As they do, the characters and the city fuse neatly - both relatively young, both self-conscious, alternating between energetic bursts of construction and anxious bouts of de-construction.
Appropriately, then, the film is framed in break-up scenes, once-solid relationships razed by life's wrecking ball. Mel (Rebecca Kohler) is the early victim, sitting on a front stoop and sifting through the debris. Inside, a house party rages and there, in an Altmanesque flurry of overlapping dialogue, we hear someone or other making this non-commitment to something or other: "I don't think I can't not do it." Yes, a triple negative struggling to seem positive - the lingo of the ironic class, and it rings perfectly true.
From there, on park benches and bar patios, the script follows Mel and friends through their journey into tomorrow. Of course, that's well-travelled turf in the movies. But the distinguishing mark here is the picture's acute sense of time and place. Working with a Lilliputian budget and a non- professional cast, the trio of directors (Sarah Lazarovic, Geoff Morrison and Ryan J. Noth) has managed to do in Toronto what Whit Stillman did in New York with Metropolitan - precisely capture particular mannerisms, turns of phrase, modes of dress, then allow all that specificity to resonate. So the threesome has made a virtue of necessity. When you're poor in money and scant of plot, get rich by deifying the details.
Wielding a surprisingly fluid camera, they've taken the same approach to the city, offering up specific but telling glimpses - of Kensington market in all its fresh avocado/rotten tomato variety, of bike paths that weave theatrically from urban exhaust to pastoral retreat. There's even a cinematic sight gag that Toronto everywhere invites: a crane shot that is literally a shot of a crane, its vast steel arm nurturing yet another embryonic condo.
As for that meagre plot, it touches on Mel's slow-to-develop feelings for Lewis (Dustin Parkes), just arrived from Vancouver to start a new job. Speaking of which, the hipsters' attitude to work is fascinating. Most toil in web-related gigs, grateful for the pay cheque yet bemused by how they earn it. But if the work has changed, the workplace has not, and a drone's complaints are classic: "I've got five bosses and, all together, they've got, like, one sense of humour."
Classic too, even among the irony-clad, is the trodden path from flirtation to sex to mild regret, sometimes leavened with rising hopes. En route, the amateur casting succeeds for the simple reason that, in this case, self-conscious acting is a perfect fit for self-conscious characters. They, and the nothing much they do, are equal parts endearing and annoying. But the mix is deliberate, maybe even wise, a quiet argument that the search to "find yourself" is a dead end at any age. In a rare moment of unfiltered candour, dear annoying Mel puts it best: "You're always going to be the person you are, except a few years later."
National Post: No Heart Feelings
originally posted at the National Post:
No Heart Feelings: Fresh, local and organic cinema
Editorial rating: *** (out of 4)
by Chris Knight
Full disclosure: This film had the potential to produce the most conflicted review of my career. It was co-directed by my boss’s wife and features a lot of National Post friends and colleagues. I couldn’t, for instance, say that I found the actor playing Michael to be completely xxx, because he’s editing the story and would just strike out the offending term. See?
But the conflict would only have come into play if the film were bad. Thankfully, it’s not. No Heart Feelings is a simple, approachable little feature about the romantic travails of a pair of thirtyish Torontonians, set against the patio get-togethers and cottage getaways of a typical summer in the city. It’s not Scott Pilgrim, though it does feature a lot of local locales, TTC vehicles and Toronto streetscapes.
It opens with Melanie (Rebecca Kohler) breaking up with her long-distance boyfriend, Joe (Jonathan Goldstein, phoning it in -- really, he’s just a voice on her cellphone). “I think that we should stop not seeing each other,” she says haltingly. “We should not stop seeing each other?” comes the confused reply.
Clearly, communication is not this couple’s strong point. And yet time and again the halting dialogue manages to capture the mood of both the movie and its cast. “Pick yourself up and get drunk,” is the seemingly contradictory advice offered to another recently broken-up character. I also liked the accurate backwardness of “…and a 20 box of Timbits.”
Melanie, not long after picking herself up and getting drunk, runs into Lewis (Dustin Parkes), recently returned to the city after a stint at university in British Columbia. They amble through Kensington Market, have coffee, buy a used bicycle and then fall into bed together. Ron Sexsmith, as the bemused garage-sale guy, likes the look of them but declares: “Cute is the new annoying.”
Co-writers and directors Sarah Lazarovic, Geoff Morrison and Ryan J. Noth make do with a less-is-more ethos in which Toronto’s green spaces as well as its urban environment are used to create a wide array of settings. If the production values are a touch uneven, it can be set off against the fact that some scenes were filmed during actual thunderstorms.
The are-they-or-aren’t-they couple struggles to define their feelings for each other. With Melanie on the rebound and Lewis new in town, it’s unclear whether anything other than mutual loneliness and convenience is bringing them together. Contrasting with their confusion, their circle of friends are starting to buy condos, have babies and realize that most of the Blue Jays are younger than they are.
As such, the film feels like a slice of generational pie, cooked up using local ingredients -- a 100-mile movie, if you will. It’s light, but it’s tasty. And I’m not just saying that because Steve Murray, who plays Chris, has the power to draw funny pictures of me in the paper. For the record, though, Steve, I loved your performance.
No Heart Feelings: Fresh, local and organic cinema
Editorial rating: *** (out of 4)
by Chris Knight
Full disclosure: This film had the potential to produce the most conflicted review of my career. It was co-directed by my boss’s wife and features a lot of National Post friends and colleagues. I couldn’t, for instance, say that I found the actor playing Michael to be completely xxx, because he’s editing the story and would just strike out the offending term. See?
But the conflict would only have come into play if the film were bad. Thankfully, it’s not. No Heart Feelings is a simple, approachable little feature about the romantic travails of a pair of thirtyish Torontonians, set against the patio get-togethers and cottage getaways of a typical summer in the city. It’s not Scott Pilgrim, though it does feature a lot of local locales, TTC vehicles and Toronto streetscapes.
It opens with Melanie (Rebecca Kohler) breaking up with her long-distance boyfriend, Joe (Jonathan Goldstein, phoning it in -- really, he’s just a voice on her cellphone). “I think that we should stop not seeing each other,” she says haltingly. “We should not stop seeing each other?” comes the confused reply.
Clearly, communication is not this couple’s strong point. And yet time and again the halting dialogue manages to capture the mood of both the movie and its cast. “Pick yourself up and get drunk,” is the seemingly contradictory advice offered to another recently broken-up character. I also liked the accurate backwardness of “…and a 20 box of Timbits.”
Melanie, not long after picking herself up and getting drunk, runs into Lewis (Dustin Parkes), recently returned to the city after a stint at university in British Columbia. They amble through Kensington Market, have coffee, buy a used bicycle and then fall into bed together. Ron Sexsmith, as the bemused garage-sale guy, likes the look of them but declares: “Cute is the new annoying.”
Co-writers and directors Sarah Lazarovic, Geoff Morrison and Ryan J. Noth make do with a less-is-more ethos in which Toronto’s green spaces as well as its urban environment are used to create a wide array of settings. If the production values are a touch uneven, it can be set off against the fact that some scenes were filmed during actual thunderstorms.
The are-they-or-aren’t-they couple struggles to define their feelings for each other. With Melanie on the rebound and Lewis new in town, it’s unclear whether anything other than mutual loneliness and convenience is bringing them together. Contrasting with their confusion, their circle of friends are starting to buy condos, have babies and realize that most of the Blue Jays are younger than they are.
As such, the film feels like a slice of generational pie, cooked up using local ingredients -- a 100-mile movie, if you will. It’s light, but it’s tasty. And I’m not just saying that because Steve Murray, who plays Chris, has the power to draw funny pictures of me in the paper. For the record, though, Steve, I loved your performance.
Toronto Star: No Heart Feelings
originally posted at the Toronto Star:
No Heart Feelings: Modern Love
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by Jason Anderson
What with their newfangled social networks, fondness for hook-ups and reluctance to define intimate relationships in anything but the vaguest terms, today’s 20-somethings require a new kind of romantic comedy. Surely the old-school formula of boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl — and, in its Judd Apatow-favoured incarnation, girl-waits-for-boy-to-drop-the-bong-and-get-a-life — begs for an upgrade.
A Toronto-made indie feature that makes its local premiere with a run at the Royal this week, No Heart Feelings gets us closer to the mark. An almost-love-story with a summery feel, lively dialogue and plenty of perceptive observations about the mating rituals of the young and the aimless, it feels very much like a rom-com for the Facebook age.
One of a cast comprised largely of non-professional actors, Toronto comedian Rebecca Kohler makes her movie debut as Melanie, a 29-year-old who finally opts to end her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend (voiced by CBC host Jonathan Goldstein). Her friends eagerly help her sort out her next move over a brunch at Aunties & Uncles and a clandestine drinking session in Kensington Market.
The arrival of a new boy in town nudges her in a new direction. Sparks fly with Lewis (Dustin Parker) when Melanie gives him a tour of her neighbourhood, an odyssey that includes a strange encounter with a yard salesman played by Ron Sexsmith.
Yet Melanie is a little too comfortable with her own state of inertia. As she and Lewis are thrown together at patio drinking sessions and a cottage weekend, the would-be couple continue to suss each other out. Desire may exist in the lives of these characters but deciding what to do about it is a whole other matter.
The sarcastic chatter of Melanie and her friends fills the film with memorable lines that ring true to their social milieu. (Says her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend after she rebuffs his request to Skype, “We’ve had some nice video chats, I thought.”)
Largely improvised based on scenarios developed by the movie’s trio of directors — Sarah Lazarovic, Geoff Morrison and Ryan J. Noth — the scenes boast great vitality and authenticity even when the film’s exact direction is as unclear to viewers as it is to the people on screen.
No Heart Feelings also has no shortage of hometown appeal — like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and This Movie Is Broken, it’s another cinematic tribute to Toronto that captures the city in all its slacker splendor.
And given the characters’ enthusiasm for touring the town on two wheels, it’s only fitting to learn the screenings will be equally cyclist-friendly — patrons of the 9 p.m. screenings on Friday and Saturday at the Royal can enjoy bike valet parking and complimentary air and oil.
What more could the movie’s target audience of tender-hearted commitment-phobes possibly ask for?
No Heart Feelings: Modern Love
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by Jason Anderson
What with their newfangled social networks, fondness for hook-ups and reluctance to define intimate relationships in anything but the vaguest terms, today’s 20-somethings require a new kind of romantic comedy. Surely the old-school formula of boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl — and, in its Judd Apatow-favoured incarnation, girl-waits-for-boy-to-drop-the-bong-and-get-a-life — begs for an upgrade.
A Toronto-made indie feature that makes its local premiere with a run at the Royal this week, No Heart Feelings gets us closer to the mark. An almost-love-story with a summery feel, lively dialogue and plenty of perceptive observations about the mating rituals of the young and the aimless, it feels very much like a rom-com for the Facebook age.
One of a cast comprised largely of non-professional actors, Toronto comedian Rebecca Kohler makes her movie debut as Melanie, a 29-year-old who finally opts to end her long-distance relationship with her boyfriend (voiced by CBC host Jonathan Goldstein). Her friends eagerly help her sort out her next move over a brunch at Aunties & Uncles and a clandestine drinking session in Kensington Market.
The arrival of a new boy in town nudges her in a new direction. Sparks fly with Lewis (Dustin Parker) when Melanie gives him a tour of her neighbourhood, an odyssey that includes a strange encounter with a yard salesman played by Ron Sexsmith.
Yet Melanie is a little too comfortable with her own state of inertia. As she and Lewis are thrown together at patio drinking sessions and a cottage weekend, the would-be couple continue to suss each other out. Desire may exist in the lives of these characters but deciding what to do about it is a whole other matter.
The sarcastic chatter of Melanie and her friends fills the film with memorable lines that ring true to their social milieu. (Says her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend after she rebuffs his request to Skype, “We’ve had some nice video chats, I thought.”)
Largely improvised based on scenarios developed by the movie’s trio of directors — Sarah Lazarovic, Geoff Morrison and Ryan J. Noth — the scenes boast great vitality and authenticity even when the film’s exact direction is as unclear to viewers as it is to the people on screen.
No Heart Feelings also has no shortage of hometown appeal — like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and This Movie Is Broken, it’s another cinematic tribute to Toronto that captures the city in all its slacker splendor.
And given the characters’ enthusiasm for touring the town on two wheels, it’s only fitting to learn the screenings will be equally cyclist-friendly — patrons of the 9 p.m. screenings on Friday and Saturday at the Royal can enjoy bike valet parking and complimentary air and oil.
What more could the movie’s target audience of tender-hearted commitment-phobes possibly ask for?
Friday, July 16, 2010
Globe and Mail: Sweetgrass
originally posted at Globe and Mail:
Following the herd has its rewards
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by Stephen Cole
A documentary of the last-ever sheep drive through Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, Sweetgrass occasionally feels in need of a shepherd. Or maybe a drama coach. Grizzlies attack the flock at night, dining on lamb. A cowboy chases off after them with a rifle, but filmmakers stay with the herd. Elsewhere, there is a bottleneck in a pass – a noisy, 3,000 sheep pile-up. Once again, the camera remains at the back, uninterested in getting in front of “the story.”
After a while, however, we understand that husband-and-wife filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor – Harvard anthropologists – aren’t really interested in conventional drama. And that there are audience rewards for sticking with the herd and its lonesome cowboys.
For instance, a scene late in the drive, shot from atop a mountain, where we see tiny sheep wandering loose below – a white river curling around rocks – as their aggrieved shepherd, Pat Connolly, talks on a cellphone, bellyaching to his mother about how his knees hurt and he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in forever and the sheep … hell, even his dog, never listens to a thing, he says.
As Pat continues whining, the camera drifts away; we enjoy a God’s eye view of the world. Sky and stone go on forever. The complaining cowboy, the filmmakers seem to be saying, is but a single speck in a glorious universe that is almost completely indifferent to his suffering.
Sweetgrass is a study of man and animal struggling to make their way in the natural world. Cowboys sing to themselves, mumbling the words to Coming Down the Mountain when they do just that. They sing to their horses, dogs and sheep, too. And sheep call out to each other (in a subtle variety of inflections we eventually discover). After a while, we understand the voices, every one of them, repeat variations of the same phrase, “I’m alive, I’m alive.”
Sweetgrass isn’t exactly a cowboy movie, but it does have a star cowboy – John Ahern, a slow moving, chain-smoking (unfiltered rollies) drifter who is so accustomed to being alone that he answers every question with the same startled, “what?” as if he’s been pulled from a prolonged sleep.
Montana sheep ranchers have been driving herds 150-some miles through the Beartooth range for over 100 years. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor attended the last three-month round-ups, from 2001-03, amassing more than 200 hours of documentary footage. The resulting film is an anthropological marvel and an animal-drive movie that belongs beside the classics of the genre – Red River and Lonesome Dove.
Following the herd has its rewards
Editorial Rating: *** (out of 4)
by Stephen Cole
A documentary of the last-ever sheep drive through Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, Sweetgrass occasionally feels in need of a shepherd. Or maybe a drama coach. Grizzlies attack the flock at night, dining on lamb. A cowboy chases off after them with a rifle, but filmmakers stay with the herd. Elsewhere, there is a bottleneck in a pass – a noisy, 3,000 sheep pile-up. Once again, the camera remains at the back, uninterested in getting in front of “the story.”
After a while, however, we understand that husband-and-wife filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor – Harvard anthropologists – aren’t really interested in conventional drama. And that there are audience rewards for sticking with the herd and its lonesome cowboys.
For instance, a scene late in the drive, shot from atop a mountain, where we see tiny sheep wandering loose below – a white river curling around rocks – as their aggrieved shepherd, Pat Connolly, talks on a cellphone, bellyaching to his mother about how his knees hurt and he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in forever and the sheep … hell, even his dog, never listens to a thing, he says.
As Pat continues whining, the camera drifts away; we enjoy a God’s eye view of the world. Sky and stone go on forever. The complaining cowboy, the filmmakers seem to be saying, is but a single speck in a glorious universe that is almost completely indifferent to his suffering.
Sweetgrass is a study of man and animal struggling to make their way in the natural world. Cowboys sing to themselves, mumbling the words to Coming Down the Mountain when they do just that. They sing to their horses, dogs and sheep, too. And sheep call out to each other (in a subtle variety of inflections we eventually discover). After a while, we understand the voices, every one of them, repeat variations of the same phrase, “I’m alive, I’m alive.”
Sweetgrass isn’t exactly a cowboy movie, but it does have a star cowboy – John Ahern, a slow moving, chain-smoking (unfiltered rollies) drifter who is so accustomed to being alone that he answers every question with the same startled, “what?” as if he’s been pulled from a prolonged sleep.
Montana sheep ranchers have been driving herds 150-some miles through the Beartooth range for over 100 years. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor attended the last three-month round-ups, from 2001-03, amassing more than 200 hours of documentary footage. The resulting film is an anthropological marvel and an animal-drive movie that belongs beside the classics of the genre – Red River and Lonesome Dove.
Toronto Star: Sweetgrass
originally posted at Toronto Star:
Sweetgrass: A sheepish look at the modern world
Editorial Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 4)
by Jason Anderson
Rarely seen on the silver screen outside of the animated adventures of Wallace & Gromit and the occasional horror flick about killer livestock, sheep have long been denied the movie exposure accorded other members of the animal kingdom.
Is it due to some collective case of denial over the source of our favourite wool sweaters? Or is this distaste due to painful memories of childhood traumas that occurred during singalongs of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”? Only our psychotherapists can know for sure.
Hopefully, this abominable practice of barnyard discrimination will come to an end with the arrival of Sweetgrass, an American documentary that puts these creatures front and centre for what may be the first time.
A surprise hit on the festival circuit last year that begins a Toronto run at the Royal this weekend, Sweetgrass depicts a year in the life of several flocks in the Absaroka and Beartooth mountain ranges in Montana.
A team of artists with backgrounds in visual anthropology and environmental studies, Sweetgrass directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash favour lengthy shots of sheep mostly being sheep in a variety of often stunning landscapes.
Their movie has no music, narration or much of anything else that other filmmakers typically use to add drama to nature-oriented documentaries. Instead, the viewer comes to feel like part of the herd, an experience that may send some audience members to sleep but will prove to be curiously compelling for others.
Though the film’s mood is mostly serene, it’s still punctuated by surprising moments of humour and tension. Seldom seen in the opening stretches, the animals’ human guardians are the sheepherders and cowboys who tend the sheep, collect their wool and protect them from predators. The last task proves especially difficult during the film’s final section, which depicts a long and stressful drive across snow-covered ridges and valleys.
The fact that this was to be the last instance of traditional sheepherding practices in the region lends a certain poignance to Sweetgrass. What Castaing-Taylor and Barbash document is the end of a way of life. The harsh economic reality for the people involved becomes evident when we hear a sheepherder vent his frustrations in a cellphone call — his very liberal use of profanities seems even more extreme when juxtaposed with the pastoral beauty of his location.
The presence of a hilariously laconic old cowboy adds echoes of cinema’s most famous representations of the American west. In its own subtle way, Sweetgrass compels viewers to lament the loss of the real thing, and perhaps consider the fraying bonds between humans and the animals that have long provided so much for us.
Of course, the real stars of the show remain oblivious to any of the weightier matters at hand, which is part of Sweetgrass’ charm. If there’s anything we can learn from the creatures here, it’s that any day in which you don’t get stripped of your coat or eaten by a bear is probably a good one.
Sweetgrass: A sheepish look at the modern world
Editorial Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 4)
by Jason Anderson
Rarely seen on the silver screen outside of the animated adventures of Wallace & Gromit and the occasional horror flick about killer livestock, sheep have long been denied the movie exposure accorded other members of the animal kingdom.
Is it due to some collective case of denial over the source of our favourite wool sweaters? Or is this distaste due to painful memories of childhood traumas that occurred during singalongs of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”? Only our psychotherapists can know for sure.
Hopefully, this abominable practice of barnyard discrimination will come to an end with the arrival of Sweetgrass, an American documentary that puts these creatures front and centre for what may be the first time.
A surprise hit on the festival circuit last year that begins a Toronto run at the Royal this weekend, Sweetgrass depicts a year in the life of several flocks in the Absaroka and Beartooth mountain ranges in Montana.
A team of artists with backgrounds in visual anthropology and environmental studies, Sweetgrass directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash favour lengthy shots of sheep mostly being sheep in a variety of often stunning landscapes.
Their movie has no music, narration or much of anything else that other filmmakers typically use to add drama to nature-oriented documentaries. Instead, the viewer comes to feel like part of the herd, an experience that may send some audience members to sleep but will prove to be curiously compelling for others.
Though the film’s mood is mostly serene, it’s still punctuated by surprising moments of humour and tension. Seldom seen in the opening stretches, the animals’ human guardians are the sheepherders and cowboys who tend the sheep, collect their wool and protect them from predators. The last task proves especially difficult during the film’s final section, which depicts a long and stressful drive across snow-covered ridges and valleys.
The fact that this was to be the last instance of traditional sheepherding practices in the region lends a certain poignance to Sweetgrass. What Castaing-Taylor and Barbash document is the end of a way of life. The harsh economic reality for the people involved becomes evident when we hear a sheepherder vent his frustrations in a cellphone call — his very liberal use of profanities seems even more extreme when juxtaposed with the pastoral beauty of his location.
The presence of a hilariously laconic old cowboy adds echoes of cinema’s most famous representations of the American west. In its own subtle way, Sweetgrass compels viewers to lament the loss of the real thing, and perhaps consider the fraying bonds between humans and the animals that have long provided so much for us.
Of course, the real stars of the show remain oblivious to any of the weightier matters at hand, which is part of Sweetgrass’ charm. If there’s anything we can learn from the creatures here, it’s that any day in which you don’t get stripped of your coat or eaten by a bear is probably a good one.
Toronto Sun: Sweetgrass
originally posted at Toronto Sun:
Sweetgrass a love letter to the West
Editorial Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
by Liz Braun
Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
So you'd gather from a documentary called Sweetgrass, a love letter to the old West that shows all the hardships and all the beauty involved in working a herd.
In this case, the herd is sheep, and the people who raise and tend them are a dying breed of workaholics. An anthropologist's dream and a desk-job guy's worst nightmare, Sweetgrass reveals the intense labour involved -- for man and beast -- in the seemingly simple annual task of moving a flock up to high pasture to graze.
Sweetgrass takes place in and around the town of Big Timber and the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains of Montana. Almost completely without dialogue or music (except for what seems to be Highway to Hell playing in the barn during a sheep-shearing scene), the movie shows the animals moving through an extraordinary physical landscape and initially shows them eating, being shorn and having babies in lambing season.
Once the annual summer migration begins up into the mountain range, things change. First comes the amazing sight of a massive flock of sheep moving through town, and then the slow journey to pasture begins. Although the camera tends to stay out of the faces of the humans in Sweetgrass, there are scenes of setting up camp the old-fashioned way, hints of the horsefly situation (or are they bluebottles?) and shots of the awe-inspiring physical surroundings.
Those surroundings include any number of places for sheep and people to get stuck: Streams to cross, piles of deadwood, thick brush, large rocks. The sheep get stuck, they wander, they spread out too far from one another, they bleat. As the film makes clear, sheep need constant attention. The word 'ornery' comes up more than once.
And then there are the predators. Bears are sighted; wolverines are talked about. At night, all is dark and desolate, with only the remarkable dogs to sound a warning if any four-legged danger comes near. A gutted sheep is the distressing clue that something is stalking the herd. After a heart-rending scene that has one cowboy weeping over the phone to his mother about the endless frustration and physical mishaps -- he, his dog and his horse are all lame from scrabbling up and down the hills after sheep -- you begin to wonder how anyone could still live this way.
And in fact, they generally don't. The idea for Sweetgrass began with Lawrence Allested, a rancher who was the very last in the area to drive his sheep long distances into the mountains to take advantage of his family's grazing permit. The filmmakers began following the sheep drive in 2001; before Sweetgrass was even finished, the ranch and the sheep had been sold off. The movie celebrates a particular lifestyle and it's an homage to a dying tradition -- a slice of history that's fascinating to witness.
Sweetgrass a love letter to the West
Editorial Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
by Liz Braun
Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
So you'd gather from a documentary called Sweetgrass, a love letter to the old West that shows all the hardships and all the beauty involved in working a herd.
In this case, the herd is sheep, and the people who raise and tend them are a dying breed of workaholics. An anthropologist's dream and a desk-job guy's worst nightmare, Sweetgrass reveals the intense labour involved -- for man and beast -- in the seemingly simple annual task of moving a flock up to high pasture to graze.
Sweetgrass takes place in and around the town of Big Timber and the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains of Montana. Almost completely without dialogue or music (except for what seems to be Highway to Hell playing in the barn during a sheep-shearing scene), the movie shows the animals moving through an extraordinary physical landscape and initially shows them eating, being shorn and having babies in lambing season.
Once the annual summer migration begins up into the mountain range, things change. First comes the amazing sight of a massive flock of sheep moving through town, and then the slow journey to pasture begins. Although the camera tends to stay out of the faces of the humans in Sweetgrass, there are scenes of setting up camp the old-fashioned way, hints of the horsefly situation (or are they bluebottles?) and shots of the awe-inspiring physical surroundings.
Those surroundings include any number of places for sheep and people to get stuck: Streams to cross, piles of deadwood, thick brush, large rocks. The sheep get stuck, they wander, they spread out too far from one another, they bleat. As the film makes clear, sheep need constant attention. The word 'ornery' comes up more than once.
And then there are the predators. Bears are sighted; wolverines are talked about. At night, all is dark and desolate, with only the remarkable dogs to sound a warning if any four-legged danger comes near. A gutted sheep is the distressing clue that something is stalking the herd. After a heart-rending scene that has one cowboy weeping over the phone to his mother about the endless frustration and physical mishaps -- he, his dog and his horse are all lame from scrabbling up and down the hills after sheep -- you begin to wonder how anyone could still live this way.
And in fact, they generally don't. The idea for Sweetgrass began with Lawrence Allested, a rancher who was the very last in the area to drive his sheep long distances into the mountains to take advantage of his family's grazing permit. The filmmakers began following the sheep drive in 2001; before Sweetgrass was even finished, the ranch and the sheep had been sold off. The movie celebrates a particular lifestyle and it's an homage to a dying tradition -- a slice of history that's fascinating to witness.
NOW Toronto: Sweetgrass
originally posted at NOW Toronto:
Sweetgrass: As Ewe Like It
Editorial Rating: NNN (out of 5)
by Susan G. Cole
Is there such a thing as an ethnography of animals? If there is, Sweetgrass qualifies. It tracks a mammoth flock of sheep as they’re herded through the mountains of Montana in 2003 – the last such trek ever undertaken – and it’s directed by two anthropologists who let the beasts take the spotlight.
The film begins with a near-one-minute shot of a sheep snacking on grass and then bleating for the camera. Except for a fascinating early sequence in which the sheep get shorn, industrial-style, and a few lambs are birthed, that opening reflects what you can expect from this doc. The sheep are, well, sheep – eating, nursing and following the sometimes not so clear trail.
One thing about a visual art like film: it can’t convey how much that flock must have reeked. Not that filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor worry about such things. They’re only slightly interested in the experience of the herders, a fairly dim crew with apparently no personal relationships except with their dogs, which really do all the work.
Sweetgrass is a hypnotically gorgeous thing, though. The mountains are spectacular and the wide shots of the flock superb. Too bad there’s a little dip in the last half-hour even though it features the film’s only tense moment – the appearance of hungry bears.
Sweetgrass: As Ewe Like It
Editorial Rating: NNN (out of 5)
by Susan G. Cole
Is there such a thing as an ethnography of animals? If there is, Sweetgrass qualifies. It tracks a mammoth flock of sheep as they’re herded through the mountains of Montana in 2003 – the last such trek ever undertaken – and it’s directed by two anthropologists who let the beasts take the spotlight.
The film begins with a near-one-minute shot of a sheep snacking on grass and then bleating for the camera. Except for a fascinating early sequence in which the sheep get shorn, industrial-style, and a few lambs are birthed, that opening reflects what you can expect from this doc. The sheep are, well, sheep – eating, nursing and following the sometimes not so clear trail.
One thing about a visual art like film: it can’t convey how much that flock must have reeked. Not that filmmakers Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor worry about such things. They’re only slightly interested in the experience of the herders, a fairly dim crew with apparently no personal relationships except with their dogs, which really do all the work.
Sweetgrass is a hypnotically gorgeous thing, though. The mountains are spectacular and the wide shots of the flock superb. Too bad there’s a little dip in the last half-hour even though it features the film’s only tense moment – the appearance of hungry bears.
Metro: Sweetgrass
originally posted at Metro:
Not interested in a sheep herding trek? Think again
Editorial Rating: ***** (out of 5)
by Adam Nayman
The brilliant Sweetgrass is a documentary that’s also a hymn to tradition: the annual sheep herding drive in Montana's Beartooth Mountain range.
The directors spent three years in the company of cowboys and their flock, and the film evinces that intimacy. It’s hard not to marvel at the filmmakers’ ability to provide multiple perspectives on the action even as they’re in the middle of it with a single camera.
Not interested in a sheep herding trek? Think again
Editorial Rating: ***** (out of 5)
by Adam Nayman
The brilliant Sweetgrass is a documentary that’s also a hymn to tradition: the annual sheep herding drive in Montana's Beartooth Mountain range.
The directors spent three years in the company of cowboys and their flock, and the film evinces that intimacy. It’s hard not to marvel at the filmmakers’ ability to provide multiple perspectives on the action even as they’re in the middle of it with a single camera.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
CBC.ca: Sounds Like a Revolution
originally posted at CBC.ca
by Greig Dymond
Songs of defiance
The documentary Sounds Like a Revolution explores modern-day protest music
It’s hard to believe in this era of Biebers and Ushers and Jonases that the pop charts used to pack a political punch.
Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction (penned by P.F. Sloan) was a certified No. 1 hit in 1965, and caused an uproar among several American conservative groups who felt the lyrics were unpatriotic (“The eastern world, it is exploding/ Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’/ You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’/ You don’t believe in war but what’s that gun you’re totin’/ And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’”). One suspects that Miley Cyrus will never get quite this incendiary.
Although protest music doesn’t register on today’s charts, the genre still thrives outside the pop mainstream. In their documentary Sounds Like a Revolution, co-directors Summer Love and Jane Michener deftly trace its evolution over the past 50 years. The idea for the doc came to Love after a chat with her mother in 2003.
“By the time the invasion of Iraq happened, you had a huge wellspring of activism, millions of people marching, the largest pre-war demonstrations ever,” says the Toronto filmmaker. “And I was inspired. My mom and I were having a conversation around that time and she said, ‘Where’s the music? Where’s the soundtrack of this generation?’ I thought that was a very good question.”
Love travelled around North America between 2003 and 2008, interviewing modern-day musical activists like Michael Franti, rapper Paris and punk bands NOFX and Anti-Flag. Although they create wildly disparate sounds, the doc shows just how much these musicians have in common: a loathing of George W. Bush and the Iraq war, a desire to distribute their own music on indie labels (in several cases created by the artists themselves) so they don’t have to compromise their lyrics, and impressive internet savvy they use to connect with their respective fan bases. During the 2004 U.S. election, NOFX lead singer Fat Mike created the website Punkvoter.com, an attempt to engage punk youth in the voting process.
These artists don’t need to appear on the cover of Entertainment Weekly to attract sizeable crowds — the film devotes a large chunk of time to Michael Franti’s annual Power to the Peaceful festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which regularly draws 50,000 people. Of all the artists profiled in the doc, he caters most directly to the neo-hippie demographic. Among his fans, Franti’s song Bomb the World has become an anti-war anthem to rival Give Peace a Chance. “We can bomb the world to pieces,” he sings, “But we can’t bomb it into peace.”
“I connected with Michael early on, because I saw him changing a business model that he didn’t agree with,” says Love. “He didn’t just acquiesce, he was trying to make it into his own, and in a way that he could feel proud of later on. Even in the film he says, ‘20 years from now, when my son asks, “What did you do during this time?” I can say proudly that I was there doing something.’ That’s why I connected with each one of these artists; I felt like I needed to do something. This is my small piece of the puzzle.”
Although Sounds Like a Revolution focuses on 21st-century protest music, the spectre of the 1960s and early 1970s hovers in the background. Early on, David Crosby tells a remarkable story about the genesis of Ohio, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s classic indictment of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970 (“Four dead in Ohio”). Seeing the famous photos of the incident a few days afterward in Life magazine, Neil Young wrote the song on the spot, placing the blame squarely on Richard Nixon (“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming”). The band recorded the tune the same night and it was rush-released within a matter of days by their label, Atlantic Records. It went to No. 14 on the Billboard charts.
That chain of events could never happen today, and Sounds Likes a Revolution explains why. Indeed, the film is at its best when it delineates how the noose gradually tightened on politically charged music at major labels. The doc takes the viewer on a tour of relevant events, from Ice-T’s Cop Killer controversy at Warner Music in 1992 to the Dixie Chicks’ backlash during the lead-up to the Iraq War. (At a concert in England, Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines had said, “We’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,” the band’s home state. It led to a boycott of their music by several country music radio stations.)
“Today’s highly corporatized environment leads to a general risk aversion,” Love argues. “That risk aversion is in every aspect of the industry, and it didn’t exist on the same level in the 1960s as it does today. I find it slightly condescending when people think that no generation since the ‘60s counterculture has cared [about politics]. Part of my personal mission was to prove that the business context had changed, and to make any value judgments about the music or the message was wrong, because the context is so different today.”
Sounds Like a Revolution suffers from some repetition in its musician interviews, but the film makes a convincing case that there’s more protest music today than at any other time in history — it’s just being distributed in a different way.
Love was thrilled when Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name — a powerful track condemning racism — went to No. 1 in the UK charts at Christmas last year, the result of a massive online protest against the manufactured-by-Simon-Cowell pop idols that traditionally inhabit that spot.
“It’s exactly the kind of backlash that you would expect from a hyper-commercialized environment,” she says. “The UK is even worse than the US in my opinion for this sort of bubble-gum pop karaoke. This was a retaliation against all of those values. It was about the need for some content, something more today. That’s what people are craving.”
Sounds Like a Revolution opens in Toronto on June 25. It opens in Ottawa on July 2.
by Greig Dymond
Songs of defiance
The documentary Sounds Like a Revolution explores modern-day protest music
It’s hard to believe in this era of Biebers and Ushers and Jonases that the pop charts used to pack a political punch.
Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction (penned by P.F. Sloan) was a certified No. 1 hit in 1965, and caused an uproar among several American conservative groups who felt the lyrics were unpatriotic (“The eastern world, it is exploding/ Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’/ You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’/ You don’t believe in war but what’s that gun you’re totin’/ And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’”). One suspects that Miley Cyrus will never get quite this incendiary.
Although protest music doesn’t register on today’s charts, the genre still thrives outside the pop mainstream. In their documentary Sounds Like a Revolution, co-directors Summer Love and Jane Michener deftly trace its evolution over the past 50 years. The idea for the doc came to Love after a chat with her mother in 2003.
“By the time the invasion of Iraq happened, you had a huge wellspring of activism, millions of people marching, the largest pre-war demonstrations ever,” says the Toronto filmmaker. “And I was inspired. My mom and I were having a conversation around that time and she said, ‘Where’s the music? Where’s the soundtrack of this generation?’ I thought that was a very good question.”
Love travelled around North America between 2003 and 2008, interviewing modern-day musical activists like Michael Franti, rapper Paris and punk bands NOFX and Anti-Flag. Although they create wildly disparate sounds, the doc shows just how much these musicians have in common: a loathing of George W. Bush and the Iraq war, a desire to distribute their own music on indie labels (in several cases created by the artists themselves) so they don’t have to compromise their lyrics, and impressive internet savvy they use to connect with their respective fan bases. During the 2004 U.S. election, NOFX lead singer Fat Mike created the website Punkvoter.com, an attempt to engage punk youth in the voting process.
These artists don’t need to appear on the cover of Entertainment Weekly to attract sizeable crowds — the film devotes a large chunk of time to Michael Franti’s annual Power to the Peaceful festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which regularly draws 50,000 people. Of all the artists profiled in the doc, he caters most directly to the neo-hippie demographic. Among his fans, Franti’s song Bomb the World has become an anti-war anthem to rival Give Peace a Chance. “We can bomb the world to pieces,” he sings, “But we can’t bomb it into peace.”
“I connected with Michael early on, because I saw him changing a business model that he didn’t agree with,” says Love. “He didn’t just acquiesce, he was trying to make it into his own, and in a way that he could feel proud of later on. Even in the film he says, ‘20 years from now, when my son asks, “What did you do during this time?” I can say proudly that I was there doing something.’ That’s why I connected with each one of these artists; I felt like I needed to do something. This is my small piece of the puzzle.”
Although Sounds Like a Revolution focuses on 21st-century protest music, the spectre of the 1960s and early 1970s hovers in the background. Early on, David Crosby tells a remarkable story about the genesis of Ohio, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s classic indictment of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970 (“Four dead in Ohio”). Seeing the famous photos of the incident a few days afterward in Life magazine, Neil Young wrote the song on the spot, placing the blame squarely on Richard Nixon (“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming”). The band recorded the tune the same night and it was rush-released within a matter of days by their label, Atlantic Records. It went to No. 14 on the Billboard charts.
That chain of events could never happen today, and Sounds Likes a Revolution explains why. Indeed, the film is at its best when it delineates how the noose gradually tightened on politically charged music at major labels. The doc takes the viewer on a tour of relevant events, from Ice-T’s Cop Killer controversy at Warner Music in 1992 to the Dixie Chicks’ backlash during the lead-up to the Iraq War. (At a concert in England, Dixie Chicks singer Natalie Maines had said, “We’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,” the band’s home state. It led to a boycott of their music by several country music radio stations.)
“Today’s highly corporatized environment leads to a general risk aversion,” Love argues. “That risk aversion is in every aspect of the industry, and it didn’t exist on the same level in the 1960s as it does today. I find it slightly condescending when people think that no generation since the ‘60s counterculture has cared [about politics]. Part of my personal mission was to prove that the business context had changed, and to make any value judgments about the music or the message was wrong, because the context is so different today.”
Sounds Like a Revolution suffers from some repetition in its musician interviews, but the film makes a convincing case that there’s more protest music today than at any other time in history — it’s just being distributed in a different way.
Love was thrilled when Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name — a powerful track condemning racism — went to No. 1 in the UK charts at Christmas last year, the result of a massive online protest against the manufactured-by-Simon-Cowell pop idols that traditionally inhabit that spot.
“It’s exactly the kind of backlash that you would expect from a hyper-commercialized environment,” she says. “The UK is even worse than the US in my opinion for this sort of bubble-gum pop karaoke. This was a retaliation against all of those values. It was about the need for some content, something more today. That’s what people are craving.”
Sounds Like a Revolution opens in Toronto on June 25. It opens in Ottawa on July 2.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Globe and Mail: Land
originally posted at the Globe and Mail
Land: Where land is all they’ve got
Documentary examines the impact of developers on a pristine stretch of the Nicaraguan coast
Editorial Rating: **** (out of 4)
by Jennie Punter
In January, 2006, three starry-eyed American resort developers, two expat eccentrics and some increasingly restless locals were living in imperfect harmony in a sleepy fishing village on a gorgeous stretch of Nicaragua’s Pacific coast dubbed the Central American Riviera. Toronto filmmaker Julian T. Pinder’s captivating, intimate and often funny documentary Land lets us join the citizens of this “underdeveloped” community during the months leading up to a general election that threatens radical change to the status quo.
Of course the November, 2006, election results in Nicaragua are known: Former revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega became president for the second time. But this knowledge in no way detracts from this rich film, which uses the looming election (with artful use of archived footage and photographs providing historical and political context) to build tension.
The main attractions of Land, however, are the engaging folk Pinder finds to illustrate the complexity of land issues in Nicaragua. The issues aren’t as simple as “developers bad, locals good,” although some gringos do exploit cheap local labour. Pinder makes sure his key characters are not merely “representative” but real people whose fates we care about – even if we don’t like some of them that much.
My favourite is Dean, an irascible, foul-mouthed, beer-swilling American expat who’s a hilarious commentator on the intrigue between developers (“land whores and dirt pimps”) and locals. His gruff poetry finds its counterpoint in lovely scenes with Nicaraguan poet and ex-guerrilla Sebastien Narvaez, who feels for the nation’s broken, forgotten soul.
We also get choice words from politician Eden Pastora, who once cut a dashing figure as a revolutionary leader nicknamed Commander Zero. Pastora points out Nicaragua has few exports and no industry: “All we have is our land.” This passion drives some locals to take both legal and illegal actions to change the game.
With a personal touch, Land tells a universal story of foreigners transforming paradise to attract more foreign tourists. Whether this is good or right depends on your idea of the ideal vacation.
Land: Where land is all they’ve got
Documentary examines the impact of developers on a pristine stretch of the Nicaraguan coast
Editorial Rating: **** (out of 4)
by Jennie Punter
In January, 2006, three starry-eyed American resort developers, two expat eccentrics and some increasingly restless locals were living in imperfect harmony in a sleepy fishing village on a gorgeous stretch of Nicaragua’s Pacific coast dubbed the Central American Riviera. Toronto filmmaker Julian T. Pinder’s captivating, intimate and often funny documentary Land lets us join the citizens of this “underdeveloped” community during the months leading up to a general election that threatens radical change to the status quo.
Of course the November, 2006, election results in Nicaragua are known: Former revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega became president for the second time. But this knowledge in no way detracts from this rich film, which uses the looming election (with artful use of archived footage and photographs providing historical and political context) to build tension.
The main attractions of Land, however, are the engaging folk Pinder finds to illustrate the complexity of land issues in Nicaragua. The issues aren’t as simple as “developers bad, locals good,” although some gringos do exploit cheap local labour. Pinder makes sure his key characters are not merely “representative” but real people whose fates we care about – even if we don’t like some of them that much.
My favourite is Dean, an irascible, foul-mouthed, beer-swilling American expat who’s a hilarious commentator on the intrigue between developers (“land whores and dirt pimps”) and locals. His gruff poetry finds its counterpoint in lovely scenes with Nicaraguan poet and ex-guerrilla Sebastien Narvaez, who feels for the nation’s broken, forgotten soul.
We also get choice words from politician Eden Pastora, who once cut a dashing figure as a revolutionary leader nicknamed Commander Zero. Pastora points out Nicaragua has few exports and no industry: “All we have is our land.” This passion drives some locals to take both legal and illegal actions to change the game.
With a personal touch, Land tells a universal story of foreigners transforming paradise to attract more foreign tourists. Whether this is good or right depends on your idea of the ideal vacation.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Straight.com: Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space
originally posted at Straight.com
by Ken Eisner
With the social, financial, and environmental problems bubbling up at the moment, we can’t be blamed, exactly, for failing to search the skies for trouble. Still, we’re idiots to ignore the warning signs above, and that’s the main message of this troubling documentary.
Directed by French-born Denis Delestrac, and written by him and others, including Siobhan Flanagan, Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space details the history and possible outcomes of a space race that began with Russia’s 1957 Sputnik launch. Of course, things started much earlier, when Hitler sent those V-2 rockets into English airspace, followed by Washington’s instant de-Nazification of rocket man Wernher von Braun, who put a big smile on NASA’s public face.
The prevalence of “kill vehicles” and other potentially lethal exotica in space sped up under Ronald Reagan, who gave carte blanche to the U.S. Air Force to expand dominance of the stratospheric high ground. And every president since has increased the budget for this dangerous grandiosity, always in the guise of national defence, of course—a position asserted by the many military figures seen here.
As illuminated by a welter of commentators, including Noam Chomsky, Helen Caldicott, and Martin Sheen, this less-than-heavenly push has been a spectacular boondoggle for the military-industrial complex—a “long con”, as one congressional observer calls it, designed as a licence to print money for programs that generally fail before getting off the ground. The scam may hide even more sinister purposes, but the most threatening aspect could be the proliferation of fast-moving space junk encircling our planet even before a catastrophic conflict or accident takes place.
Given all these fright factors, it almost seems wrong that the 85-minute film, goosed along by fast edits, high-tech graphics, and Amon Tobin’s electronic music, should be so cosmically entertaining.
by Ken Eisner
With the social, financial, and environmental problems bubbling up at the moment, we can’t be blamed, exactly, for failing to search the skies for trouble. Still, we’re idiots to ignore the warning signs above, and that’s the main message of this troubling documentary.
Directed by French-born Denis Delestrac, and written by him and others, including Siobhan Flanagan, Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space details the history and possible outcomes of a space race that began with Russia’s 1957 Sputnik launch. Of course, things started much earlier, when Hitler sent those V-2 rockets into English airspace, followed by Washington’s instant de-Nazification of rocket man Wernher von Braun, who put a big smile on NASA’s public face.
The prevalence of “kill vehicles” and other potentially lethal exotica in space sped up under Ronald Reagan, who gave carte blanche to the U.S. Air Force to expand dominance of the stratospheric high ground. And every president since has increased the budget for this dangerous grandiosity, always in the guise of national defence, of course—a position asserted by the many military figures seen here.
As illuminated by a welter of commentators, including Noam Chomsky, Helen Caldicott, and Martin Sheen, this less-than-heavenly push has been a spectacular boondoggle for the military-industrial complex—a “long con”, as one congressional observer calls it, designed as a licence to print money for programs that generally fail before getting off the ground. The scam may hide even more sinister purposes, but the most threatening aspect could be the proliferation of fast-moving space junk encircling our planet even before a catastrophic conflict or accident takes place.
Given all these fright factors, it almost seems wrong that the 85-minute film, goosed along by fast edits, high-tech graphics, and Amon Tobin’s electronic music, should be so cosmically entertaining.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Straight.com: Pax Americana delivers history lesson on weaponization of space
originally posted at Straight.com
by Travis Lupick
Nuclear weapons are frightening. The prospect of kinetic bombardment is even scarier. And if you believe the information presented in Pax Americana: The Weaponization of Space, it won’t be long before delivery systems capable of kinetic bombardment are orbiting Earth.
The concept is simple. Load a satellite up with rods of tungsten that can be fired down to the surface. Those projectiles would travel at an estimated 11,000 kilometres an hour and, with all of that energy, strike the planet with the force of an atomic bomb.
Even with a small network of such satellites, any target on Earth could be destroyed in less than 10 minutes of the press of a button.
In Pax Americana, which opens at the Vancity Theatre on Friday (June 4), director Denis Delestrac methodically presents publicly available information that should serve as a warning: the weaponization of space is happening and could end with a scenario not unlike the one outlined above.
“What is inevitable is that there is always going to be somebody who will want to dominate any territory,” Delestrac told the Straight in a telephone interview from Barcelona, where he is currently based. “That doesn’t make inevitable the fact that we can’t stop it.”
Which is what Pax Americana, Delestrac’s first feature-length film, is trying to do.
“The first step we need to take…is to inform and to get people to know what is happening,” the French-born writer and director said.
He explained that a handful of nations—primarily the United States, but China and others as well—are already far along in the process of weaponizing humankind’s final frontier, and that the public is largely unaware of this fact.
“It is called the Pax Americana, or the ‘American peace’,” a preacher delivering a sermon on a US military base says in the film. “It refers to the period in which American influence throughout the world has caused a relative peace to come about.”
Delestrac, who previously worked on the 2005 IMAX film Mystery of the Nile, said encountering that sort of attitude was an intriguing part of making the film.
“Some of the people who want to weaponize space really believe that if somebody has to dominate, then it has to be the US,” he said. “They have a good heart.”
The problem, Delestrac continued, is that moving militaries into space will likely bring consequences dangerous for the entire planet. As the film illustrates, a new arms race may already be under way.
Since former US president Ronald Reagan started the country’s “missile defence” program in 1983, the American government has spent $200 billion trying to figure out how to use satellites to shoot down projectiles launched from earthbound sites. In January 2007, China successfully destroyed one of its own satellites in a military exercise that caused international alarm. And Russia has vowed to destroy any weapon the US deploys in space.
Delestrac emphasized that all of this is happening just 100 kilometres above our heads.
“When the weapon is there,” he said, “there could always be a hand that could use the weapon not the way that it is supposed to—not to protect or not to defend, but to attack.”
by Travis Lupick
Nuclear weapons are frightening. The prospect of kinetic bombardment is even scarier. And if you believe the information presented in Pax Americana: The Weaponization of Space, it won’t be long before delivery systems capable of kinetic bombardment are orbiting Earth.
The concept is simple. Load a satellite up with rods of tungsten that can be fired down to the surface. Those projectiles would travel at an estimated 11,000 kilometres an hour and, with all of that energy, strike the planet with the force of an atomic bomb.
Even with a small network of such satellites, any target on Earth could be destroyed in less than 10 minutes of the press of a button.
In Pax Americana, which opens at the Vancity Theatre on Friday (June 4), director Denis Delestrac methodically presents publicly available information that should serve as a warning: the weaponization of space is happening and could end with a scenario not unlike the one outlined above.
“What is inevitable is that there is always going to be somebody who will want to dominate any territory,” Delestrac told the Straight in a telephone interview from Barcelona, where he is currently based. “That doesn’t make inevitable the fact that we can’t stop it.”
Which is what Pax Americana, Delestrac’s first feature-length film, is trying to do.
“The first step we need to take…is to inform and to get people to know what is happening,” the French-born writer and director said.
He explained that a handful of nations—primarily the United States, but China and others as well—are already far along in the process of weaponizing humankind’s final frontier, and that the public is largely unaware of this fact.
“It is called the Pax Americana, or the ‘American peace’,” a preacher delivering a sermon on a US military base says in the film. “It refers to the period in which American influence throughout the world has caused a relative peace to come about.”
Delestrac, who previously worked on the 2005 IMAX film Mystery of the Nile, said encountering that sort of attitude was an intriguing part of making the film.
“Some of the people who want to weaponize space really believe that if somebody has to dominate, then it has to be the US,” he said. “They have a good heart.”
The problem, Delestrac continued, is that moving militaries into space will likely bring consequences dangerous for the entire planet. As the film illustrates, a new arms race may already be under way.
Since former US president Ronald Reagan started the country’s “missile defence” program in 1983, the American government has spent $200 billion trying to figure out how to use satellites to shoot down projectiles launched from earthbound sites. In January 2007, China successfully destroyed one of its own satellites in a military exercise that caused international alarm. And Russia has vowed to destroy any weapon the US deploys in space.
Delestrac emphasized that all of this is happening just 100 kilometres above our heads.
“When the weapon is there,” he said, “there could always be a hand that could use the weapon not the way that it is supposed to—not to protect or not to defend, but to attack.”
Friday, May 28, 2010
Toronto Sun: Documentaries Thrive on DVD
originally posted at Toronto Sun
by Bruce Kirkland
Sadly, despite being an exciting art form and a source of enlightenment, documentaries do not travel well through cinemas.
Exceptions such as Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth ($48.8 million worldwide) and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fahrenheit 9/11 ($222.4 million worldwide) merely prove the rule. Obviously, they were hits as well as controversial catalysts for public debate.
But docs in general are almost dead in theatres.
So it is great news that the genre is alive and well and living on DVD in specialized collections. One outstanding series comes from Canada’s KinoSmith, run by its president, Robin Smith. This innovative independent distributor just added four new titles to its Hot Docs DVD Collection, bringing the series to seven.
The first-wave was: The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, RIP!: A Remix Manifesto and FLicKeR. The new titles are Unmistaken Child, The Bodybuilder and I, Prom Night in Mississippi and The Betrayal. With three more titles due in June (Burma VJ, Collapse and The Unforeseen) and two in July (Army of One and When We Were Boys), the Hot Docs DVD Collection is heating up. For those of us who love docs, it is incendiary.
Hot Docs is a Toronto phenomenon, a filmfest that is as important in its specialized niche in the spring as the Toronto International Film Festival is for all film genres in the fall. KinoSmith’s DVD series takes Hot Docs across Canada. Everyone can participate, at least for these titles.
All major DVD stores can carry these films, or order them in if they do not stock them. But two major chains are on-board with special displays devoted to the collection.
One is HMV, which has always supported docs by celebrating the offbeat, odd and obscure on its shelves. Good on them. The surprise partner is Blockbuster, which has an appalling record of supplying only mainstream fare. Giving the Hot Docs Collection its own focus in many Blockbuster stores is a nice change of pace: Hurrah!
For obvious reasons with documentaries, it is worth knowing what they are about. While filmmaking style is critical to getting the message across, it doesn’t mean much if the message does not intrigue the viewer. So here are capsule takes on the new titles:
One bonus is that KinoSmith will donate a percentage of each sale to the Hot Docs Education Fund for school programs related to documentary films. Youth need not be wasted on the young — if they are learning.
by Bruce Kirkland
Sadly, despite being an exciting art form and a source of enlightenment, documentaries do not travel well through cinemas.
Exceptions such as Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth ($48.8 million worldwide) and Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fahrenheit 9/11 ($222.4 million worldwide) merely prove the rule. Obviously, they were hits as well as controversial catalysts for public debate.
But docs in general are almost dead in theatres.
So it is great news that the genre is alive and well and living on DVD in specialized collections. One outstanding series comes from Canada’s KinoSmith, run by its president, Robin Smith. This innovative independent distributor just added four new titles to its Hot Docs DVD Collection, bringing the series to seven.
The first-wave was: The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, RIP!: A Remix Manifesto and FLicKeR. The new titles are Unmistaken Child, The Bodybuilder and I, Prom Night in Mississippi and The Betrayal. With three more titles due in June (Burma VJ, Collapse and The Unforeseen) and two in July (Army of One and When We Were Boys), the Hot Docs DVD Collection is heating up. For those of us who love docs, it is incendiary.
Hot Docs is a Toronto phenomenon, a filmfest that is as important in its specialized niche in the spring as the Toronto International Film Festival is for all film genres in the fall. KinoSmith’s DVD series takes Hot Docs across Canada. Everyone can participate, at least for these titles.
All major DVD stores can carry these films, or order them in if they do not stock them. But two major chains are on-board with special displays devoted to the collection.
One is HMV, which has always supported docs by celebrating the offbeat, odd and obscure on its shelves. Good on them. The surprise partner is Blockbuster, which has an appalling record of supplying only mainstream fare. Giving the Hot Docs Collection its own focus in many Blockbuster stores is a nice change of pace: Hurrah!
For obvious reasons with documentaries, it is worth knowing what they are about. While filmmaking style is critical to getting the message across, it doesn’t mean much if the message does not intrigue the viewer. So here are capsule takes on the new titles:
- Prom Night in Mississippi: Fuelled by Morgan Freeman’s passion for Civil Rights, this uplifting, life-affirming, Canadian-made doc examines how a high school in Charleston, Miss., was forced to integrate its student population in 1970 but ignorantly refused to allow blacks to go to the senior prom. In 2008, that finally changed when the school finally accepted Freeman’s offer to pay for the prom — if integrated. And, guess what, it became a great experience for all. Directed by Canadian Paul Saltzman.
- Unmistaken Child: When Tibetan Buddhist leader Lama Konchog died in 2001, he left behind a daunting task for another monk: To find his reincarnated being. This Israeli film chronicles the extraordinary, four-year mission. Directed by Nati Baratz.
- The Bodybuilder and I: In this Canadian production, an estranged son, filmmaker Bryan Friedman, rediscovers his father during the elder man’s bizarre odyssey to regain his competitive bodybuilding crown at 59.
- The Betrayal: It took 23 years to film and earned a 2009 Oscar nomination as best documentary feature. Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath’s American-made film shows what compelled Phrasavath’s family to migrate from Laos to New York after America’s dirty Vietnam War spilled over into their home country.
One bonus is that KinoSmith will donate a percentage of each sale to the Hot Docs Education Fund for school programs related to documentary films. Youth need not be wasted on the young — if they are learning.
Friday, April 30, 2010
National Post: Passenger Side
originally published at the National Post
by Vanessa Farquharson (April 29, 2010)
A scene near the end of Passenger Side involves Michael (Adam Scott) trying to figure out whether he's a stupid white guy sadly wasting his life, or a sad white guy stupidly wasting his life.
He concludes it's the former, although if this is true, one must admit that watching a feature-length film about precisely how a stupid white guy sadly wastes his life has never been so entertaining -- or come with a better soundtrack (think Wilco, Leonard Cohen, Dinosaur Jr., Evan Dando and more).
The third effort from Canadian writer-director Matthew Bissonnette, whose 2006 film Who Loves The Sun was nominated for a Genie award, Passenger Side relies very much on its script, achieving that elusive balance of smart, funny and -- most difficult of all -- authentic.
That said, Bissonnette can't take all the credit; his brother Joel, who plays recovering drug addict Tobey, and Scott, in the role of a not-quite-successful writer with a not-quite girlfriend, have clearly spent enough time together off-screen that their chemistry and sense of timing is bang-on. After all, it's one thing to come up with snarky banter and lines like, "I love the future -- in fact, I have a feeling it's going to be the next big thing," but quite another to deliver this with the perfect mix of ennui, defensiveness and bitter sarcasm.
Certain moments seem so natural, it's hard to know whether they were improvised or not -- one, in particular, comes when the guys are standing outside a car wash; Michael compliments Tobey on his new shoes, which are fire-engine red. "They look really good," he says, pausing only for a second before adding, "They match your eyes."
The story itself involves a languorous, day-long drive in and around Los Angeles to find Theresa (Robin Tunney), the love of Tobey's life. A range of bizarre characters end up tumbling in and out of their car (the dog is the only one that sticks around until the end), which makes for some added humour amidst the more serious discussion.
There's a nice twist, too, but it's hardly essential -- audiences will feel as though they could sit in the backseat forever, alternately listening to Guided By Voices (on cassette, of course) and the ramblings of Michael and Tobey as they tackle everything from existentialism to how the Habs will win the Stanley Cup again and whether they'd have sex with Laura Bush or Dick Cheney.
About halfway through the film, they get a flat tire while in the desert -- but just when viewers may be thinking this feels slightly clichéd, Scott's character comments on how flat tires never provide much in the way of plot development.
Clearly, this director is always one step ahead, incredibly self-aware, and even willing to poke fun at himself. These are traits not often found amongst the indie Canadian filmmaking set; hopefully, it leads to more critical recognition and a long road ahead for Bissonnette.
by Vanessa Farquharson (April 29, 2010)
A scene near the end of Passenger Side involves Michael (Adam Scott) trying to figure out whether he's a stupid white guy sadly wasting his life, or a sad white guy stupidly wasting his life.
He concludes it's the former, although if this is true, one must admit that watching a feature-length film about precisely how a stupid white guy sadly wastes his life has never been so entertaining -- or come with a better soundtrack (think Wilco, Leonard Cohen, Dinosaur Jr., Evan Dando and more).
The third effort from Canadian writer-director Matthew Bissonnette, whose 2006 film Who Loves The Sun was nominated for a Genie award, Passenger Side relies very much on its script, achieving that elusive balance of smart, funny and -- most difficult of all -- authentic.
That said, Bissonnette can't take all the credit; his brother Joel, who plays recovering drug addict Tobey, and Scott, in the role of a not-quite-successful writer with a not-quite girlfriend, have clearly spent enough time together off-screen that their chemistry and sense of timing is bang-on. After all, it's one thing to come up with snarky banter and lines like, "I love the future -- in fact, I have a feeling it's going to be the next big thing," but quite another to deliver this with the perfect mix of ennui, defensiveness and bitter sarcasm.
Certain moments seem so natural, it's hard to know whether they were improvised or not -- one, in particular, comes when the guys are standing outside a car wash; Michael compliments Tobey on his new shoes, which are fire-engine red. "They look really good," he says, pausing only for a second before adding, "They match your eyes."
The story itself involves a languorous, day-long drive in and around Los Angeles to find Theresa (Robin Tunney), the love of Tobey's life. A range of bizarre characters end up tumbling in and out of their car (the dog is the only one that sticks around until the end), which makes for some added humour amidst the more serious discussion.
There's a nice twist, too, but it's hardly essential -- audiences will feel as though they could sit in the backseat forever, alternately listening to Guided By Voices (on cassette, of course) and the ramblings of Michael and Tobey as they tackle everything from existentialism to how the Habs will win the Stanley Cup again and whether they'd have sex with Laura Bush or Dick Cheney.
About halfway through the film, they get a flat tire while in the desert -- but just when viewers may be thinking this feels slightly clichéd, Scott's character comments on how flat tires never provide much in the way of plot development.
Clearly, this director is always one step ahead, incredibly self-aware, and even willing to poke fun at himself. These are traits not often found amongst the indie Canadian filmmaking set; hopefully, it leads to more critical recognition and a long road ahead for Bissonnette.
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