Posts Tagged ‘David Lynch’

Metro Canada In Focus: September 11, 2001: The day TIFF stood still

Screen Shot 2015-09-05 at 10.19.33 AMBy Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

Like millions of people I remember exactly what I was doing the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001.

When the first plane hit the World Trade Center I was walking down Bloor Street in Toronto, on my way to the InterContinental hotel to do a day of Toronto International Film Festival coverage.

I didn’t register anything unusual in the air until I got to the hotel. People on the street may have been walking and talking a bit faster, acting a bit more animated than usual, but not so that I noticed.

Entering the hotel was a different story. The halls were eerily silent.

What was usually a cheery beehive of activity with camera crews, stressed publicists and actors roaming around, was now quiet, still.

At 9 a.m. I walked into our makeshift interview suite on the third floor just as the second plane hit. My crew were sitting around the television. Sobs from the rooms next to ours broke the stunned silence.

What the hell was going on?

What was going on was a change in all our lives; a new era where the unthinkable became possible.

It was a confusing day. With no details we, like many others, pressed on with the business at hand.

David Lynch came and went, smoking American Spirits and chatting about his film Mulholland Drive.

A handful of others walked the halls, unsure of what else to do, keeping previously scheduled interview slots.

When I mentioned to New York actress Adrienne Shelly that I couldn’t reach my girlfriend, who was living in Manhattan, she loaned me her cellphone.

“For some reason it seems to get through,” she said.

It did, and after a quick call to make sure she was safe, the full impact of what had just happened sunk in. Sometimes the small stuff, the personal things — like the anxious voice at the other end of the line — help you understand the magnitude of a grim situation.

We cancelled the rest of the day but I stayed put, talking to my hotel neighbours, most of whom were Americans, many from New York.

There were hugs, tears and bafflement in equal measure. TIFF elected to cancel many of the day’s events and tone down the glitz for the rest of the festival.

But the show would go on and in that moment art won over terror.

What we began to hear were stories from New York filmmakers who, with all flights cancelled to and from the city, were loading cans of film into their cars and driving to the festival.

It wasn’t about vanity and it wasn’t about ego.

It was about filmmakers, the storytellers of our times, the people who document our lives, not being silenced.

The rest of the festival was a sombre affair but there was a steeliness uncommon at the usually glitzy event. We gathered, watched films, communicated and healed, sending a message that the uncertainty of the times would not prevent us from expressing ourselves, from sharing stories.

Fourteen years later I think back to those days and realize that terror didn’t win on 9/11.

As long as we don’t allow ourselves to go silent, as long as we breathe life into our stories and experiences on film and elsewhere, we won’t and can’t live in fear.

THE DOUBLE: 3 STARS. “like it was made by David Lynch and Terry Gilliam’s love child.”

126“The Double” plays like a movie made by the love child of David Lynch and Terry Gilliam. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky novella about a man who finds his life being usurped by his doppelgänger, it is a quietly surreal story about the existential misfortune of a man (Jesse Eisenberg) with no sense of himself.

Eisenberg is Simon, an insecure twenty-something trying to make a name for himself, personally and professionally, to no avail. His boss (Wallace Shawn) ignores his ideas and even his mother isn’t a fan. He’s in love with co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives in an apartment across the street from him, but like everyone else Hannah looks right through Simon.

“I have all these things that I want to say to her,” he says, “like how I can tell she’s a lonely person, even if other people can’t. Cause I know what it feels like to be lost and lonely and invisible.”

Everything changes when James (Eisenberg again) is hired at work. Physically he’s Simon’s doppelgänger, an exact match, but personality-wise he a polar opposite. Confident and charismatic, he excels at work and worst of all, Hannah wants to date him.

In front of the camera “The Double” writer-director Richard Ayoade is best known for playing computer nerd Maurice Moss on the much-loved British sitcom “The IT Crowd.” Behind the camera his work takes a much more darkly comedic approach. His first film, “Submarine,” was an edgy coming-of-age story that earned him a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.

“The Double” strays into even stranger territory. Imagine “The Nutty Professor’s” Professor Julius Kelp / Buddy Love filtered through Dostoevsky’s “mystery of spiritual existence.” Ayoade creates a personal dystopia, inhabited by Simon, Hannah and James; a stylized study of paranoia with a few laughs thrown in. It’s an unabashedly weird movie that lets its freak flag fly.

This is Eisenberg’s film. He and Michael Cera (who tread on similar dual character territory in 2009’s “Youth in Revolt”) have made careers playing up the socially awkward nature of their characters, so half of “The Social Network” actor’s performance is no surprise. His work as Simon is something we’ve seen before from him, but his take on James is fresh, accomplished with shifts in body language. He effectively plays two characters in one movie.

In the end  “The Double” stands as a unique movie, rich in Orwellian details and with good performances, but marred by a difficult, confusing story that may alienate less adventurous viewers.

JODOROWSKY’S DUNE: 4 STARS. “more entertaining than the film itself could have been.”

jodorowsky-duneAfter mid-1970s success of two “midnight movies” called “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” renegade director Alejandro Jodorowsky was offered the chance to make any movie he wanted. He toyed with a number of stories, including “Don Quixote,” the story of an hidalgo with lofty, but unrealistic ideas.

Instead the Chilean born Jodorowsky chose to make “Dune,” the science fiction epic by Frank Herbert. As it turns out, however, the director may have been better suited to the story of Cervantes’s impractical idealist than the maker of a giant Hollywood film.

To hear Jodorowsky tell it, his version of “Dune,” which never made it past preproduction due to budget and Hollywood’s reluctance to work with the avant-garde director, would have been more of a mystical journey than a film. He collected “spiritual warriors” like Salvador Dali (who demanded to be paid $100,000 an hour to appear as the Emperor of the Known Universe), Orson Welles (who was promised a private chef), special effects wiz Dan O’Bannon and conceptual designers Chris Foss, H.R. Giger and Jean “Moebius” Giraud, to fulfill his vision, creating an amazingly detailed storyboard of the proposed film.

The story is mostly told by the people who in the room, lead by the 84-year-old Jodorowsky. It’s a talking head doc, punctuated by preproduction art and storyboards. For movie geeks it’s an essential glimpse into the mind of a legend. For others—including fans of Frank Herbert who gets a bit of a short shrift here—it may sound like the ramblings of a madman. Which it is, but an endearing madman who values art and spirituality above all else. He was so committed to making this movie, a movie he says might have changed the very fabric of humanity, that he was prepared to die for it.

Of course, that didn’t happen. David Lynch made the movie and one of the pleasures of “Jodorowsky’s Dune” is watching the elderly director describe his delight in realizing that Lynch’s film was a bit of a disaster.

As for whether or not the director’s vision for “Dune” would have been feasible, we’ll never know. Like many lost or never made films, it feels as though the legend of the project might be more entertaining than the film itself could ever have been.