Presented by The Revue Cinema in partnership with the American Cinematheque, ‘Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair’ is an annual film festival showcasing some of the greatest works of cinema!
This inaugural Toronto edition of Bleak Week includes 13 films, hailing from 5 countries, including 35mm prints, restoration premieres and various in-person appearances by some our favourite filmmakers of stark cinema. #BleakWeek
I’m hosting a screening of the cult Canadian apocalyptic black comedy-drama #LastNight and a post film Q&A with director Don McKellar at The Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Ave. in Toronto) on June 1!
Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to tune a violin. Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the music doc “Nash the Slash Rises Again!,” the audio horror of “undertone” and the romantic melodrama of “Reminders of Him.”
SYNOPSIS: “Nash the Slash Rises Again!,” a new documentary now playing at Hot Docs, unwraps the story of an enigmatic musical pioneer who borrowed his name from a Laurel and Hardy silent film and hid his face but not his talent behind surgical bandages.
CAST: Jeff Plewman, Iggy Pop, Gary Numan, Youth, Gary Topp, Owen Pallett, Paul Myers, Valerie Buhagiar, Don McKellar, Danielle Dax, Steve Hillage, Nathanael Chadwick, Jaymz Bee, Jeanne Beker, Marilyn Burns, Corpusse, Michael Dent, Rodrigo Gudiño, Gunnar Hansen, Oliver Hardy, Cameron Hawkins, Randy Johnston, Stan Laurel, Tony Malone, Ron Mann, David Marsden, Paul A. Partain, Tom Plewman, Stephen Pollard. Directed by Tim Kowalski.
REVIEW: Nash the Slash, a.k.a. Jeff Plewman, is one of the most singular musical acts to ever emerge from Toronto, or anywhere. A multi-instrumentalist with a focus on electric violin and electric mandolin, he wrapped his face in surgical bandages, à la The Invisible Man, wore dark glasses, and a tuxedo finished off by a top hat.
His theatrical music, usually performed solo when he wasn’t touring with the band FM, was an unholy blend of prog rock, new wave, experimental electronic influenced by everything from Beethoven and Krautrock to Hawkwind and old horror movies. His music, often augmented by synths, drum machines, harmonica, glockenspiel and other sounds, was unclassifiable, groundbreaking and destined for cult status.
A new documentary, “Nash the Slash Rises Again!,” fondly remembers the man behind the mystery, the musician Iggy Pop called “unusual and brilliant.”
Director Tim Kowalski understands that to get to know Nash, you first must understand where he came from. He paints a picture of Toronto, circa 1970s and 80s, as an outwardly staid city, unfriendly to outsiders, particularly the LGBTQ+ community, but with a vibrant underground art scene.
It was from this incubator of rebellion that Nash emerged, a product of classical training, rock ‘n roll and an artistic temperament. Through archival footage, interviews with the man himself and exciting performance footage, Kowalski places Nash in context as a musician who walked his own path, strove for fame but never at the cost of his artistic integrity.
It’s a loving portrait that doesn’t shy away from the darker details, like Nash’s bad temper and an arrest for domestic incident, but it succeeds best as a nostalgic celebration of a trailblazer who didn’t get his due during his lifetime.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, David Cronenberg must be basking in the reflected glow of some pretty serious film fawning. The OG of Body Horror’s influence can be seen in lurid detail in recent movies like the Palme d’Or winner “Titane” and Natalie Portman’s biological thriller “Annihilation” among others.
The Virtuoso of the Grosso Rosso returns to cinemas after an eight-year break with “Crimes of the Future,” an all-star story of eroticized human evolution starring Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux.
Named after an early Cronenberg movie and based on a script the director wrote in the early 2000s, “Crimes of the Future” takes place in a time when “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome” has all but eliminated pain in most humans.
“Desk top surgery” is commonplace and a practice that performance artists Saul Tenser (Mortensen) and former trauma surgeon Caprice (Seydoux) turn into a form of nightclub bio-entertainment.
Saul’s advanced AES enables him to grow new, never-before-seen organs, which Caprice removes as part of their medical-theatrical shows. The gruesome act attracts lots of attention, particularly from Timlin (Kristen Stewart), an investigator from the National Organ Registry who becomes enchanted by Saul. “Surgery is the new sex,” she coos to him. “I wanted you to be cutting onto me.”
There’s more. Transformation activist Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) requests Saul and Caprice perform a public autopsy on his late, eight-year-old son, the New Vice Unit (“There’s no crime like the present!”) investigates the rapidly changing world of body modification while Saul considers entering a literal “inner beauty contest.”
Despite the array of bits and pieces we see on screen, the most important body part in “Crimes of the Future” is the head. Cronenberg’s head. The director has made a cerebral film, one that riffs on his “Videodrome” era “old flesh vs. the new flesh” mantra.
Laden with metaphor, it’s a portrait of a rapidly changing world where bodies are morphing and shadowy government organizations work feverishly to understand the repercussions. They fear too much evolution could lead to insurrection. That eventually we’ll morph into something that isn’t strictly human and wonder what happens when we can’t feel anything anymore.
That last point is the film’s beating heart. When Saul tells Timlin that he’s, “not very good at the old sex,” it signals a search for something new, of different sensations. In a numb world, where do you go for kicks? Is it the performance art of Saul and Caprice, or something else? Is it evolution or revolution, or both? If everything is changing, is anything new?
“Crime of the Future” asks many questions, but stops just short of providing understandable resolutions. Cronenberg is interested in provocation, in world building, in bringing together previously investigated themes (cults, new flesh, odd children) in a new way to add brush strokes to a painting he began with films such as “Shivers” and “Rabid.”
Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises” muse Mortensen gets under the skin of Saul. Charismatic, he’s a rock star of a sort, willing to give of himself for his art. Often hidden under an Ingmar Bergman “Seventh Seal” cloak, he is a reluctant celebrity, a man who spends the bulk of the film reacting to his surroundings, his body and mutations. It’s something different for Mortensen. Saul is a passive, brooding character vulnerable to the whims of his ever-changing body. It’s a quiet yet powerful performance that details a man trying to maintain his humanity, despite the elimination of many of his most human traits, pain chief among them.
Co-star Seydoux’s mix of sensuality, artistry and humanity brings warmth to the film’s cool texture.
Stewart, as the mousy Timlin, is all eagerness. She’s timid but curious, speaking in a strange cadence, as if a hummingbird dubbed her lines.
Both help blunt the edge of the blood-splattered story, bringing feelings to a world drained of such sentiments.
“Crimes of the Future” is an olio of ideas. The neo-noir setting plays host to an unconventional love story, a parable of climate change (characters have a taste for waste in a world where garbage is becoming more accessible than food), evolution and the search to feel something real. The result is a subversive movie that, as Caprice says, is “juicy with meaning,” but perhaps too enigmatic for those unfamiliar with the director’s body horror oeuvre.
The new film “The Middle Man,” a new dark comedy now playing in theatres, is the story of Frank (Pål Sverre Hagen), an unemployed man who takes a job in the accident capital of America.
The setting is Karmac in Any Midwest State, USA. Terrible things happen on an almost daily basis. It’s so grim there the flags at City Hall are permanently at half-mast. The only growth industry in town is accident clean-up, the crew that comes in to tidy up after bad things happen.
The city is going broke, pretty soon they won’t be able to turn on the streetlights, which, says the local doctor (Don McKellar), will lead to even more mishaps, so they need to hire a Middle Man, someone to deliver bad news to the families of the bereaved.
Frank, out of work for three years, applies, even though his only qualifications are a hangdog demeanor and telling his mother that his father fell off a ladder, hit his head and died.
He gets the gig, learns the ropes—”Crying is a privilege that belongs to the next of kin,” says the sheriff (Paul Gross), “not the middle man.”—and forms a bond with receptionist Blenda (Tuva Novotny). When Bob (Trond Fausa Aurvåg), Brenda’s ex-boyfriend and failed Middle Man candidate, strikes and kills Frank’s best friend, it sets into motion of events that causes an overwhelmed Frank to wonder if his new position is right for him or not. “It’s a busy job,” he says, “accidents don’t keep office hours.”
Norwegian director Bent Hamer, who also wrote the script based on a novel by Norwegian-Danish writer Lars Saabye Christensen, may have set the story in the Midwest, but his dark, deadpan humour is purely Scandinavian. This semi-comedic study of loss and grief, is macabre in tone but maintains a quirky, if bleak, sense of itself. Dialing up the farcical aspects of the story may have increased the film’s commercial appeal but may have chipped away at Hamer’s thoughtful consideration of life in a small, unusual town.
“The Middle Man” won’t be for everyone, but viewers with a taste for unconventional but restrained absurdism will find much to enjoy.
The folk horror of “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw,” now on VOD, is set in 1973 but feels very much of the moment.
Divided into chapters like I: The Incantation, II: The Descent, “The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” builds an atmosphere of dread as it tells the tale of a tiny American community settled by fundamentalist Irish Christians in 1873. Isolated from the modern world, they live a simple agricultural and spiritual life frozen in time at the moment the settlers arrived.
Of concern inside this closed-off community is a pestilence that kills children, crops and livestock. The villagers think a 1956 eclipse is the source their problems. They see it as sign from God and feel powerless to do anything about it.
In that same year a baby was born in secret to Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker), an outcast from the local church. Now, seventeen years later that baby, Audrey (Jessica Reynolds), has come of age. Suspicious eyes are cast at the Earnshaw farm which is unaffected by the plague. As the villagers starve, Agatha’s fields are ripe with crops and healthy livestock, leading the frantic locals to accuse the mother and daughter of witchcraft.
“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” breathes the same air as Ari Aster’s “Midsommar,” Robert Eggers “The Witch” and Robin Hardy’s “The Wicker Man” (not the Nic Cage version). Like those other filmmakers, director Thomas Robert Lee uses isolation as an incubator for hysteria and horror. He takes his time with the story, creating the off kilter, claustrophobic feel that goes a long way to create the necessary dread to make this story work.
Lee also leans on two central performances. As Agatha, Walker is fiercely maternal, a mother with a secret to protect. She is a character straight out of H.P. Lovecraft, one of the movie’s other influences. Knowing, yet unknowable, Walker wears her character like a shroud.
Reynolds brings both innocence and a steely edge to Audrey. As she comes of age, she discovers her power and wields it like a sword, seeking revenge on the townsfolk who treated her mother disrespectfully.
“The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw” is ripe with tension and bloody practical special effects that should satisfy the genre lover but more than that it mines the very timely idea of isolation. To varying degrees many of us have been cooped up during the pandemic and while this haunting movie takes place in a very specific place, it showcases the dangers inherent in cutting one’s self off from the world.
“Target Number One” is a Canadian true crime story, but no, it’s not a retelling of Bill Miner’s railway robbery or the great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist of 2012. It’s a gritty look at investigative reporter Victor Malarek’s fight to uncover the truth behind a heroin bust orchestrated the Canadian Security Intelligence Service put an innocent man in jail.
A the-names-have-been-changed-to-protect-the-innocent retelling of the case of Alain Olivier, called Daniel Léger (Antoine Olivier Pilon) in the film, the movie stars Josh Hartnett as Malarek, a Globe and Mail reporter whose dogged determination reveals how the CSIS framed Léger, sending him to a Thai jail for eight years. “I’d be very careful before you print anything about this case,” a high-level cop tells Malarek.
Telling the tale on a broken timeline, director Daniel Roby skip through the details, building both sides of the story simultaneously until the two threads meld, but “Target Number One” isn’t an action movie. There is tension as Léger‘s situation worsens but the compelling part is Malarek’s search for the truth. It’s a procedural the takes its time putting the puzzle pieces in place.
Hartnett does a good impression of the driven reporter and Steven McHattie turns in another of his trademark edgy roles as Frank Cooper, a crooked RCMP officer, but it’s the work of Jim Gaffigan and Pilon that are memorable.
Gaffigan ditches his affable stand-up comic persona to create a medicine portrayal of Glen Picker, a drug dealer and police confidant.
As Léger, Pilon as an arc. From lowlife criminal, whose big score is ripping off a gas station for a full tank, to someone who can navigate survival in a squalid Thai prison, he’s simultaneously vulnerable and edgy and that makes him the film’s most memorable character.
“Target Number One” is a low-key thriller, short on action but long on intrigue.
In theatres now:
Now playing in Vancouver, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
Mina Shum’s “Meditation Park” takes place within a few blocks in East Vancouver but tells an emotional and universal story of the immigrant experience in Canada.
Cheng Pei Pei is Maria, the wife of workaholic Bing (Tzi Ma). A stay-at-home wife and mother, she doesn’t feel confident with her grasp of English and is dependent on Bing for almost everything. When she discovers he is having an affair with a much younger woman and is planning a trip to Japan she, along with the help of her family and neighbours, she asserts her independence and comes out from underneath her overbearing husband’s shadow. “First we obey our fathers,” her friend says. “Then our husbands. When they are gone we obey ourselves.”
“Meditation Park” sees Maria break free of the conservative constraints of her upbringing and family life to assimilate into the wider community. The story of her personal journey is told with a mix of comedy—occasionally bordering on slapstick— and heartfelt emotion but it is the performances, particularly from Cheng Pei Pei, that breathes life into the movie. Her broken heart is palpable but so is the joy on her face as she dances to music only she can hear at a block party.
Strong supporting work from Sandra Oh and Don McKellar highlights the strong support system that helps prop Maria up in her time of need but it is the personal story of awakening that lingers.
“Window Horses” is an animated cultural comedy of errors from Asian-Canadian director Ann Marie Fleming.
Rosie Ming (voiced by Sandra Oh) is a twenty year-old half Chinese, half Iranian fast food worker and poet. Raised by her overprotective Chinese grandparents (voiced by Nancy Kwan and Eddy Ko) following her mother’s death and father’s disappearance, she has dreams of one day visiting France, but so far has never been outside Canada.
When her self-published book of poetry, “My Eye Full, Poems by a Person Who Has Never Been to France,” earns her an invitation a festival she’s thrilled, even if it will take her to Shiraz, Iran, not France. Upon arrival the beret wearing Francophile learns about the father she never met and, through poetry, learns the healing power of art and to embrace a culture she was connected to but knew nothing about.
Fleming uses a variety of animators and a who’s who of Canadian talent, like Ellen Page and Don McKellar, and Iranian film legends Peyman Moaadi and Shohreh Aghdashloo, to bring Rose’s journey to life. It’s a beautifully whimsical about curiosity, finding a voice and staying open.
The director’s avatar—a stick figure that has appeared in her other short animated films—represents Rosie. The character’s lack of expression is more than compensated for in Oh’s vivid vocal performance. Visually she’s a blank slate who grows throughout to become a fully rounded character.
“Window Horses” is a gentle, airy film that cuts through the complicated clutter of everyday life with a simple message of peace, love and understanding.
