From @PostCity: With TIFF starting next week, @RichardCrouse shares his guide to some of the top flicks in #Toronto, such as @BarryJenkins’ ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ #TIFF18
“For 10 days each September at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), thousands of miles of film unspool, movie mavens push the limits of their endurance to take it all in and movie stars decorate red carpets…” Read the whole thing HERE!
We all do internet searches everyday but a new film ups the stakes. “Searching” is a high tech missing person’s story.
We first meet dad David (John Cho), mother Pam (Sara Sohn) and daughter Margot (Michelle La) through a cleverly edited montage of their on-line activity. From e-mails and YouTube videos to log-ins and Facebook pages, we learn about their lives including Pam’s cancer diagnosis. The tight family is torn apart by Pam’s illness, with 16-year-old Margot retreating pulling away from her father until one night when she disappears without a trace after a study group meeting. When she fails to answer any of David’s texts he calls the police. Working with Detective Vick (Debra Messing) he sifts through Margot’s online life in a desperate search for clues. The deeper his cyber investigation goes the more twists appear. “I didn’t know my daughter,” he says.
From Google Maps and app controlled surveillance cameras to FaceTime and Instagram, the story is told through a series of browser windows via laptops and iPhones, any device with a screen. It sounds like it will sterile, like an afternoon of web surfing with higher stakes, but director Aneesh Chaganty humanizes the story. Technology tells the tale but the beating heart of the narrative is David’s determination to find his daughter. The film’s style is very specific and very modern but the theme of connection between parents and children is universal.
“Searching” feels like high tech Hitchcock as David uncovers the details of his daughter’s life. The more browsers, the more suspense. Chaganty uses our familiarity with these sites—many of us go to them everyday—to ground the story in reality and underline the alienating quality of social media that fails to fill the hole left by loneliness and grief. Also, who would have thought a Norton antivirus reminder that Pam’s account hasn’t been scanned in 694 days could take on such poignancy?
We’ve seen these screen-shot movies before—2014’s “Unfriended” comes to mind—but none have had the emotional arc of “Searching.” It’s a little too conventional in its climax and conclusion but John Cho’s terrific performance and some genuine thrills elevate the story past its visual gimmick.
“Juliet, Naked,” based on a Nick Hornby novel, is a rom com for adults. Ethan Hawke and Rose Byrne play folks who have lived untidy lives and yet find one more chance at happiness.
Byrne plays Annie, an English woman who dreamed of living a glamorous life in London but settled for taking her father’s old job at a museum in the sleepy coastal town of Sandcliff. She lives with Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), a pop culture obsessed college professor who has built a shrine to 90s emo rocker Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) in the basement. Crowe is an enigma, a Jeff Buckley type who only released one album. He is now the stuff of legend and speculation on a fan site run by Duncan.
When a package arrives one day containing a rare demo Annie opens it and listens to it before Duncan comes home. Displeased he dramatically declares, “I have to leave. It smells like betrayal in here.“ To get even Annie writes a lukewarm review of the demo’s “half-sketched” songs, posts it on Duncan’s site and waits for the reaction. What she doesn’t expect is to hear from Crowe himself. “Bingo,” he replies. “You nailed it. It couldn’t have said it better myself.” The unlikely pair forms a friendship via e-mail, sharing details from their lives. Soon they go from pen pals to real life friends when he comes to England to visit his daughter (Ayoola Smart).
The transatlantic epistolary of the film’s first half gives way to a charming series of scenes that sees the relationship between Annie and Tucker blossom. Director Jesse Peretz avoids most of the clichés that push rom coms into Katherine Heigl territory. Instead he conjures up a situation with lots of moving parts.
Tucker has lots of kids by different mothers, and in one great scene almost all of them arrive to visit him at the same time, with their mothers in tow. Annie is looking back at her life, wondering what might have been different if she had made different choices. “At least you have a past to live up to,” she writes to Tucker, “creative remnants from your life.” On top of that is Duncan, a monomaniac whose fandom approaches toxic levels.
All three are compelling characters brought to life by Hawke, Byrne and O’Dowd. Hawke is a leading man who is also a character actor. He brings a grungy charm to Tucker, a man who has made mistakes and owns up to them. Byrne portrays Annie’s frustration in her life but never allows her to become maudlin. She’s hopeful and you’ll want the best for her as well. O’Dowd’s fixation with Crowe, though over-the-top, is earnest.
“Juliet, Naked” has a great deal of warmth and terrific, charismatic performances. The thing that makes it great is what it doesn’t have. It’s a rom com that doesn’t pander to obvious choices—there’s no airport run or contrived fight that keeps the characters apart—and instead relies on the grown up pleasures the genre can provide.
Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again,” but some people do it anyway. Take Valerie (Sheila McCarthy), protagonist of “Cardinals.” After spending a decade in prison for vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated she returns home to an unexpected reception.
The story begins the night of her crime. Without spoiling the film’s set up I can tell you we see Valerie guzzling vodka in the front seat of her car as a lifeless body is illuminated by her tail lights. Fast-forward ten years. On the day of her release from prison her daughters (Grace Glowicki and Kate Boland) welcome her back. Not everyone is happy to see her, however. Next door neighbour and victim’s son Mark (Noah Reid) has waited ten years to confront her, to find out what, exactly, happened that fateful night. Valerie’s stoicism and lack of contriteness stonewalls Marks’ attempts to uncover the truth. Is there more to this story than he originally thought?
“Cardinals” is a slow burn that focuses on the reaction to Valerie’s actions. She brought tragedy to two familes, Mark lost a father and her daughters lost their mother, but as details are revealed in a harrowing climax, more questions about culpability and consequences are raised. It’s an interesting “Dateline” worthy crime story with an effective central performance from McCarthy.
Emmy winner Lena Waithe and Misty Copeland, the first African American Female Principal Dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre, talk the importance of role models.
Make no mistake, “The Happytime Murders” is not a Muppet movie. Sure, the puppets look like they just wandered in from “Sesame Street,” but the latest Melissa McCarthy film takes place a few blocks away in a much worse part of town.
Set in a Los Angeles where humans and puppets co-exist—imagine “Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s” Toontown with hand puppets—“The Happytime Murders” is an R-rated comedy that sees the felt cast members of ’80s children’s TV show “The Happytime Gang” systematically murdered by a mysterious killer.
Next on the hit list is Jenny (Elizabeth Banks), a burlesque dancer who was the “The Happytime Gang’s” sole human cast member. She’s also the ex-girlfriend of Phil Philips (Bill Barretta), the first puppet to join the LAPD. After a scandal pushed him off the force he became a private investigator but when his older brother and “The Happytime Gang” actor, Larry (Victor Yerrid), is offed, and with Jenny in danger, he teams up with his former partner Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) to find the puppet serial killer. “If it gets crazy,” he says, “I’m going to get crazy.”
Repeat after me, “The Happytime Murders” is not a movie for kids. With the first F- bomb less than thirty seconds in, the tone is set early. By the time we get to the puppet porn shoot and McCarthy snorting ecstasy with down-on their-luck puppets it’s abundantly clear this isn’t your father’s Muppet movie. Trouble is, I’m not sure who it is for. The idea of a raunchy puppet flick isn’t new, “Meet the Feebles,” “Team America” and others have put the ‘R’ in marionette with great success but they did it with wit as well as in-your-face vulgarity. In “The Happytime Murders,” easily the least funny comedy to hit screens this year, the laugh lines mostly get laughs because we’re not used to seeing puppets in… er… ahhh… compromising positions. Watching McCarthy and Maya Rudolph, who plays Phil’s love struck secretary Bubbles, flounder in a sea of felt and unfunny “gags,” is almost as sad as seeing the vaunted Henson name in the opening credits.
You know when someone constantly swears just for the sake of swearing? That’s shock value. “The Happytime Murders” is all shock, very little value.
The remounted “Papillon,” starring Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek in the roles made famous by Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffmann in the original, maintains the brutality of the 1973 film but plays more like a buddy flick than the resilience-of-the-human-spirit epic it should have been.
Based on the “75 percent true” tale of Henri Charrière, a safecracker nicknamed Papillon, the 1930’s era story sees him sent to a hellhole jungle penal colony in French Guyana for a crime he didn’t commit. Sentenced to life in prison with hard labour on Devil’s Island, he begins to plot his escape as soon as he arrives, despite the fact that no one has ever successfully fled the island. To assist and finance his plan he offers protection to Louis Dega (Malek), a spindly, wealthy, white-collar criminal with a relative fortune hidden in a place where the sun don’t shine. Faced with abominable conditions and dictatorial prison guards the pair, along with a couple of others, stages a daring run at freedom.
Leaner and meaner than the original the reboot nonetheless hews fairly closely to the 1973 screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and Dalton Trumbo. Some grisly scenes featuring crocodiles and lepers have been blue-pencilled but the basic idea of the bond between the two men in the face of unimaginable adversity remains. Hunnam and Malek make a good team—with Malek even giving the Degas character more inner life than Hoffmann managed—but the movie itself doesn’t contain the same sense of struggle. Certainly there is violence, Hunnam is frequently covered in blood, mud or worse, but the previous film was grittier, less refined. Dialogue was sparse—in the new one Hunnam and Malek chatter like school kids throughout—and there was a sense of hopelessness that fuelled the need for escape. Here their mission feels pat, like a typical prison drama. It’s less meaningful, simply a run from the violence and horrors of their incarceration, and not a spiritual journey.
“Papillon” gets much right and features nice performances from the leads but feels like an unnecessary revamping of the story.
“Little Italy,” a new rom com starring Hayden Christensen and Emma Roberts, is good hearted enough but feels like it arrived via a marinara sauce splattered time capsule from 1985.
Leo Campo (Christensen) and Nikki Angioli (Roberts) were inseparable while growing up in Toronto’s Little Italy. “To us Little Italy wasn’t just a few blocks, it was our whole world.” Their families were tight, working side by side at the Napoli Pizza Parlour until the Great Pizza War erupted, causing a split that saw the pizza place sliced down the middle, cleaved into two separate businesses. Years pass. “It’s Little Italy’s oldest food fight.” Nikki moves to England to study the culinary arts while Leo stays home, working with his father.
Five years later Nikki returns home to renew her English work visa and is drawn back into the world she thought she had left behind. My Nikki is coming home today,” says mother Dora (Alyssa Milano). “Now we have to find her a husband so she’ll stay.” Will there be amore? Will the moon hit her eye like a big pizza pie or will she return to her cooking career in London?
“Little Italy” is an “I’m not yelling I’m Italian” style rom com. Desperate to establish the flavour of Little Italy it parades stereotypes across the screen speaking in loud exaggerated Italian accents. It’s annoying but it is all played for laughs, tempered with the easy sentimentality of the most rote of rom coms.
Director Donald Petrie, whose “Mystic Pizza” made a superstar out of Roberts’s Aunt Julia, never finds the balance between the slapstick, romance and cliché. Sometimes it feels like sketch comedy, other times like every rom com you’ve ever seen. Either way, it never feels original or particularly likeable. Top it off with a been-there-done-that run to the airport climax that would likely get everyone involved, if this is anything like real life, arrested and you have a movie that is all about love that is anything but loveable.
“Crown and Anchor,” co-written by and starring “Arrow” actor Michael Rowe, is billing itself as a “punk rock drama.” Shot on location in St. John’s Newfoundland, the crime drama embodies punk’s DIY ethic but don’t expect thrash and trash.
To stretch the musical analogy one step further, this well measured movie has more to do with the introspective stripped-down sounds of a band like Television than the loud ‘n fast rush of The Ramones. In other words, it’s like punk with guitar solos.
Rowe plays police officer James Downey, a disciplined man who fled Newfoundland years before to get away from his abusive alcoholic father Gus (Stephen McHattie). Returning for his mother’s funeral he must confront the past he left behind. Gus is safely tucked away behind bars but cousin Danny (Matt Wells) is loose, desperate for money and wallowing in booze and drugs. He’s also involved with some very bad people. Thrown back into the kind of family drama that forced him to leave the island years before, Downey stays put confront the past and present.
Don’t expect a tourism board approved view of Newfoundland and Labrador. “Crown and Anchor” is all about the dark corners. The echoes of the grief, tragedy and violence of James and Danny’s lives reverberate throughout. Director Andrew Rowe is unflinching and uncompromising in his presentation of the underbelly of St. John’s life.
Shot in long takes, often in uninterrupted close ups, “Crown and Anchor” showcases its strong performances. The leads, along with Natalie Brown as Danny’s wife Jessica and Robert Joy, bring authenticity to roles that could have veered into caricature.
“Crown and Anchor” is a slow burn. It takes its time getting where it is going, building tension with long scenes. Rowe gives his scenes room, allowing them to marinade. It’s old school indie, but in our era of frenetic editing it feels fresh and new.
