Metro’s Reel Guys columnists Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin take a look at this year’s crop of potential crowd pleasers at the festival.
Richard: Mark, every year I look forward to covering the festival with a mix of dread and anticipation. The dread part comes from knowing how I’m going to feel once the 10 days of 18-hour shifts is finally over. The drooling anticipation part comes along with the slate of films TIFF offers up. This year the new David Cronenberg film is top of my list. In Maps to the Stars, he showcases the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’ gated communities. The idea of debuting a jaundiced look at Hollywood at the biggest film festival in North America appeals to my rebellious side.
Mark: Can’t wait, Richard, for this or any other Cronenberg! I’m also a big fan of Jason Reitman, who consistently delivers movies that plumb the abyss of the zeitgeist. His latest, Men, Women, and Children, should be no exception. Based on one of my favourite novels by Chad Kultgen, it’s a look at how the Internet is warping families, twisting our sexuality and mediating our desires. Oh, and it’s a comedy.
RC: Mark, the sci-fi musical genre has been sadly overlooked at TIFF in past years. That changes with Bang Bang Baby, starring Jane Levy as a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.” Then there’s The Editor, a giallo-comedy tribute to the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento about a one-handed film editor who becomes the prime suspect in a brutal series of murders.
MB: Sounds great, Richard! I’ll stand in line to see the new Denys Arcand film, An Eye For Beauty. Here’s a director not afraid to take a satirical look at our modern mores, but he’s never tackled a love story before. Some of it takes place in Toronto, so I’m expecting a sly gimlet-eyed view from this great Québécois director.
RC: Speaking of great Québécois directors, Jean-Marc Vallée, the Canadian Oscar nominee for Dallas Buyers Club, returns to TIFF with Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon in the story of a woman who finds an escape from her self-destructive ways on a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m also psyched about Haemoo. With a script by Snowpiercer penner Bong Joon-ho, this movie about a fishing crew smuggling illegal immigrants from China to Korea promises wild action and unexpected thrills.
MB: Richard, do you realize all our picks inadvertently turned out to be Canadian directors? I’m looking forward to Black and White by Mike Binder. It promises to be a heartfelt drama about an interracial family with issues. Binder is from Detroit but went to summer camp in Muskoka, so he qualifies as an honorary Canuck.
Susan Smythe-Bishop is not only one of the country’s most talented film publicists, but she is also a mean cake designer and baker and a gifted artist. On her website www.theaccidentalvicepresident.com she showcases her story and her art. Most recently she kindly included Richard on her Wall of Fame, a collection of drawings of “the kind and hard working artists” she has worked with over the years. Other entries include Michael Caine, Bryan Cranston, Jackie Chan, David Cronenberg and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Have a look now before she changes her mind and replaces Richard with David Hasselhoff!
Thanks to Mr. Will Wong for this photo from the Canadian Screen Awards press room. Richard hosted the night backstage, interviewing everyone after they had won their awards. This is David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen with Richard tucked away in the corner. When Cronenberg was asked where the inspiration for his movies come from he looked out at the assembled press and said, “Just standing here is giving me all kinds of ideas for horror films.”
These are the shoes Richard wore to last night’s awards. Thanks to Teddy Wilson for the “F**king dynamite shoes!” tweet and all other who compared them to ruby slippers.
Another press room shot courtesy of Linda Barnard of the Toronto Star:
1.) Technology may have killed off VHS but not before a cursed videotape knocked off a few of its own victims. The Ring, an American adaptation of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ringu, stars Naomi Watts as a journalist investigating the urban legend of a tape that kills viewers seven days after popping it into the VCR. “You start to play it, and it’s like somebody’s nightmare!” No, it’s not a badly dubbed copy of Rhinestone, it’s a series of surreal images from a dead girl’s life. The Ring is creepy and atmospheric until the last half-hour, but that’s when the VCR’s fast forward button comes in handy.
2.) Set in Tromaville, New Jersey The Toxic Avenger is the story of a 90-pound weakling who morphs into the lumpy-headed titular title character. Fighting corruption by spilling loads of fake blood, plunging hands into deep fryers and crushing a head, his methods provide unforgettable b-movie cheap thrills. That last effect—it’s a melon in a wig—is a timeless VHS classic and is actually enhanced by watching it on grainy video tape.
3.) A History of Violence makes the list because it was the last movie to be released on VHS in the golden age of video. Viggo Mortensen is Tom, a mild mannered man who must confront his violent past when local townsfolk start asking, “how come he’s so good at killing people?” An unopened copy of it will set you back $10,000 on eBay, but why would you want an unopened copy of one of director David Cronenberg’s best films?
4.) One of the main benefits of VHS tape is that it always stays at the point at which you left it. Snap it off at the twenty-minute mark, go back to it twenty years later and it will still be EXACTLY where you left off. In a way it’s kind of like hair metal, a genre that has loudly and proudly stayed stalled in the 1980s. Fans of bands like Poison and W.A.S.P. will want to rev up a VHS of The Decline of Western Civilization Part II, The Metal Years, because it rocks too hard to be released on DVD.
5.) The 1980s VHS boom gave us the dreaded direct-to-video movie and produced many bad flicks, countless of which had names that closely echoed those of big theatrical hits. In the down-and-dirty world of the actionsploitation genre, for instance, Schwarzenegger’s hit Commando became Strike Commando—”He’s A War Machine on the Warpath!”—only without the Austrian superstar or a budget for the big action scenes. The lurid cover art is better than the movie, but still, when viewed through a scratchy VHS snowstorm it’s a hoot.
“In honour of the huge David Cronenberg exhibit and retrospective currently happening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto (running until January 19th), Dork Shelf talks to a plethora of film writers, personalities, programmers, podcasters, and filmmakers about what their favourite Cronenberg films are.
“You guys like guest stars? You guys like David Cronenberg? Want to know the favourite DC films from Richard Crouse, Jesse Wente, Thom Ernst and dozens more?
Here’s Richard’s personal take on Videodrome: “I had only lived in Toronto for a few years when Videodrome was released in 1983. Compared to my tiny home town the city was a wonderland; wide open and full of possibilities. CITY-TV was the coolest station in the world, with Baby Blue movies on late at night, music videos in prime time and Mark Daly’s booming voice as the glue that held it all together. I wanted to work there, be part of the something new and different. Something that was steering Toronto the Good into uncharted waters. Then I saw David Cronenberg’s film and read about how it was VERY loosely based on CITY-TV head honcho Moses Znaimer. Somehow this bit of information enhanced the movie for me, as though every time I turned on the television I was engaging in an act of rebellion. For sure the Late Great movies were never going to feature a snuff film, and nor did I want them to, but as a pop culture sponge there was something intoxicating to me about the connection between what I was seeing on the big screen and its relationship, no matter how tenuous, to my real life. Videodrome spoke to me in a way that other films that more closely echoed my experience didn’t. Goin’ Down the Road should have appealed to my Maritime roots, but I didn’t come to Toronto looking for lawyerin’ and doctorin’ jobs, I came for adventure and to be adventourous and that was exactly what Videodrome provided for me.”
Launching November 1 in the HSBC Gallery at TIFF Bell Lightbox, TIFF’s first major original exhibition, David Cronenberg: Evolution, parallels David Cronenberg’s evolution as a filmmaker with his longstanding fascination with the possibilities and perils of human evolution itself. Curated by TIFF Director & CEO Piers Handling and Artistic Director Noah Cowan, and divided into three major sections that provide a loosely chronological overview of Cronenberg’s career, the exhibition traces the development of the director’s evolutionary themes across his filmography through more than sixty original artifacts, visionary designs, and rare and unseen footage.
What did David Cronenberg say after reading “Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils”? Well, let me tell you…
“Reading this book was pure pleasure for me. It made me desperate to see Ken Russell’s gorgeous, crazed epic again — maligned, mutilated, censored, suppressed, tormented though it was — in any form that I could find (bootleg VHS tape from Spain?; flip cards from Cuba?). What could be better than that?”
David Cronenberg’s latest film is a trip into the mind of a severely mentally disturbed man. Institutionalized for twenty years after the death of his mother Dennis “Spider” Cleg (Ralph Fiennes) is released to a halfway house, and tries, shattered though his mind may be, to piece together the shards of his life. Fiennes delivers a fine, virtually dialogue free performance as the title character, but it is Miranda Richardson as several characters – all the women in Spider’s life – who really steals the show. Cronenberg handles the material with elegance, shooting 1950s London in shades of grey and beige, a color scheme that telegraphs the shadowy world that Spider inhabits. A spooky, cerebral thriller.
By Richard Crouse & Mark Breslin – Metro Reel Guys
