FILM - THIS JUST IN

An American Carol

2008/10/14

Self-proclaimed "9/11 Republican" David Zucker returns with an ideological comedy that harshly and unsuccessfully uses the trademark zaniness of his Airplane and Naked Gun franchises with a serious-as-cancer, right-leaning political message.

Quarantine

2008/10/14

Since The Blair Witch Project, there has been no shortage of horror films utilizing the handheld-camera conceit. Quarantine’s major contribution to this beyond-played out subgenre is that at one point, the camera — which belongs to a television crew piggybacking on what was supposed to be a routine fire-department call — is actually used to bludgeon a zombie to death.

City of Ember

2008/10/09

Maybe it’s fitting that a global-warming allegory be as concerned about its own environment as it is about the real-world one it mirrors, but the makers of City of Ember seem downright distracted by the unnatural beauty of the on-screen world they’ve created. And, like the incandescent bulbs burning like a thousand tiny, dying stars above the movie’s titular town, the set design, fantastic as it is, uses up so much energy there’s little left to power the story’s filaments.

The Express

2008/10/09

It’s hard not to be moved by the story of Ernie Davis, who in 1962 became the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy as the United States’ best college football player, only to die one year later of leukemia at the age of 23. It’s equally difficult, however, to accept The Express as any sort of fitting tribute: Gary Fleder’s film pumps its subject up well beyond recognizable human proportions while indulging in every inspirational-sports-movie cliché in the post-Remember the Titans playbook.

Eagle Eye

2008/09/25

Eagle Eye plays out as an extended game of “where’s LeBeouf?” (sorry), in which someone or something utilizes every form of communications technology imaginable to keep tabs on our lanky hero. When this unseen, dulcet-toned antagonist wants Shia’s character — a Chicago copy-centre jockey grieving over the death of his twin brother — to do something, (s)he/it flashes instructions on the nearest screen, be it an iPhone display or a second-storey stock ticker.

Video: TIFF Roundtable

2008/09/15

For the last word on TIFF, EYE WEEKLY's Jason Anderson and Adam Nayman host a salon with Variety's Robert Koehler, The Village Voice/L.A. Weekly's Scott Foundas and Cinema Scope's Mark Peranson and Andrew Tracy.

Sticking a fork in TIFF

2008/09/15

Cataloguing the sighs and lows at this year's beleaguered festival

Sept. 13 TIFF video pick: Of Time and the City

2008/09/12

EYE WEEKLY's Jason Anderson previews director Terence Davies' "love song and eulogy to the city of Liverpool" — but one that doesn't include any love for The Beatles. It screens Sept. 13, 6pm, AMC Yonge & Dundas.

TIFF photos: Sept. 10 & 11 premieres

2008/09/12

Mark Ruffalo shows us love at the premiere for What Doesn't Kill You; Ben Kingsley and Rose McGowan step up for 50 Dead Men Walking.

Worst film festival ever

2008/09/12

I'm a stalker of celebrity stalkers... get this TIFF media circus the hell out of here

Sept. 12 TIFF video pick: Only

2008/09/11

EYE WEEKLY's Adam Nayman presents yet another Canadian film about children, but this one — concerning a "Before Sunrise"-style narrative about two pre-teens in Parry Sound — is more charming and authentic than most. It screens Sept. 12, 3:30pm; Sept. 13, 3:15pm, both at AMC Yonge & Dundas.

Sept. 11 TIFF video pick: Che

2008/09/10

EYE WEEKLY's Jason Anderson delves into Steven Soderbergh's four-hour-plus Che Guevera biopic, which won a best actor sward for star Benecio Del Toro at Cannes. Warning: bring your own sandwich. Che part 1 screens Sept. 11, 2:30pm, Elgin; Che part 2 screens Sept. 12, 2:30pm, Elgin.

TIFF photos: Sept. 9 premieres

2008/09/10

Che Guevera or Paris Hilton? Our photographer Dwayne Evens chose both, as he hit the red carpets for Steven Soderbergh's Che and Adria Petty's Paris, Not France, while popping in on the premiere for Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

TIFF photos: Sept. 8 premieres

2008/09/09

EYE WEEKLY photographer Dwayne Evans finds Kate Beckinsdale and Adrien Brody at the Nothing But the Truth screening; Jessica Biel at the premiere of Stephen Elliott's Easy Virtue; and Viggo Mortensen on the red carpet for Good.

TIFF Today

2008/09/09

New reviews of the Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy Management, the Matt Dillon/Kate Beckinsdale political drama Nothing But the Truth and the Viggo Mortensen dud Good, whose totally proves cruelly ironic.

Sept. 10 TIFF video pick: Lorna's Silence

2008/09/09

EYE WEEKLY's Adam Nayman explains how even a disappointing Dardenne brothers effort is still better than anything else you'll likely see at TIFF. It screens Sept. 10, 9:45am, Scotiabank Theatre.

Country Wedding

2008/09/09

This slice-of-Icelandic-life trades in the age-old conceit that there are few things as reliable as a wedding to bring crazy to the surface. Ingibjorg and Bardi are on separate charted buses heading out to a remote — and difficult to locate — country chapel to get hitched in the company of a modest-sized collection of family, friends and total strangers. The film is wry and charming as the bride and groom's two family units quarrel, flirt and redistribute their alliances, but the situations' credibility decreases as the looniness increases. Still, this is a promising directorial debut from a skilled editor who has worked with hotshots like Terrence Malick, Lars van Trier, Harmony Korine, Gus Van Sant and Michel Gondry.

Good

2008/09/09

This European co-production drama, about a literature professor who unwittingly becomes a Nazi stooge in the run up to the Third Reich, doesn’t do much to answer the age-old question of how ordinary individuals can become bound up a collective evil. It does, however, prove illuminating on a comparatively lower-stakes issue — mainly, When Bad Movies Happen to Good Actors. Now, if Viggo Mortensen truly believes that didactic position-paper period pieces — the kind littered with anvil-heavy Cabaret–style foreshadowing (“Hitler is a joke”), German characters speaking in clipped British accents and the inevitable Aryan temptress (who gets so turned on by our bookish patsy’s Party garb that she initiates a blowjob) — are the best use of his talent, that’s his prerogative. But it’s still embarrassing to watch somebody who has given two of the more interesting and inventive lead performances of recent years flailing so hard to elevate something so low.

Nothing but the Truth

2008/09/09

The Contender director Rod Lurie delivers another ripped-from-the-headlines drama full of well-meaning political points that all come printed in big bold type. The Valerie Plame affair serves as the basis for this tale of Rachel Armstrong (Beckinsale), an intrepid reporter and Judith Miller stand-in who writes a story that outs an ambassador’s wife (Vera Farmiga) as a CIA operative. Matt Dillon plays the special prosecutor who pressures her into revealing her source by putting Rachel’s “Vassar ass” in the slammer. However passionate Lurie may be about the need to defend First Amendment rights and question government power, Nothing But the Truth is rarely involving, the true details of the case being variously simplified and sexed up to curiously un-dramatic effect. The last-minute revelation of the source’s identity also seriously undermines the film’s noble stance. The one saving grace is Alan Alda’s marvelous turn as Rachel’s silver-tongued lawyer, a character whose flashes of cynical wit seem all the more vivid given their militantly drab and earnest context.

Management

2008/09/09

Playwright and screenwriter Stephen Belber makes his directorial debut with a relentlessly sweet and hopeful film that is miles away from his best-known play, Tape (adapted for film with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman in 2001), a claustrophobic and viciously dark view of gender relations. Here, nice but useless Mike (Steve Zahn) works at his parents' Arizona motel with a listless boredom until Sue (Jennifer Aniston) and her “great butt” inspire him to ever-more improbable action. After a quickie in the laundry room, Mike pursues Sue across the country and back, his adoration more of a nuisance than a pleasure; he's that guy the woman discounts because he worships her out of proportion to how she sees herself. While the leads are excellent at unearthing fresh breath in familiar characters — hapless manchild who must learn to grow, emotionally hardened woman who must learn to love — the story itself never catches fire as either a comedy or a love story. Nice, but it could use more bite.

Dean Spanley

2008/09/09

Based on a book by Irish fantasy pioneer Lord Dunsany (1878-1957), this tale of a dog reincarnated as an Anglican clergyman is oddly winsome, despite a few moments that veer dangerously close to goofy. Toa Fraser keeps the silliness mostly at bay by making full comic use of his excellent cast — including Peter O'Toole, Jeremy Northram, Bryan Brown and Sam Neill — and grounds the story in the truly poignant father-and-son relationship at its heart. Set in Edwardian England, the sets are lush and everyone looks to be having a good time. In fact, O'Toole appears almost gleeful in his portrayal of a stuffed-shirt curmudgeon who recovers a boyish capacity for warmth. It's one of several fine turns, but to see a master in the twilight of his career play a man accepting his own losses and failures is undeniably affecting — the other gentlemen step back as his performance lifts the story to another level.

Lovely, Still

2008/09/09

The maker of memorable videos for Bright Eyes and The Faint, Omaha-based 24-year-old Nik Fackler buries his feature debut under 10 tons of whimsy. One of the bigger disappointments of the Discovery program, this badly oversweetened fable about a late-life romance aims for an Amelie-like quality of innocence but ends up infantilizing everyone on display to a cringe-inducing degree. As seniors who fall for each other at Christmastime, Martin Landau and Ellen Burstyn seem unclear as to whether their characters are meant to be over 65 or under 13. Fackler presumably means to imply that love makes bashful children of us all but that’s no excuse for the thinness of the characters, the banality of the dialogue, the cutesy musical score (supplied by Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis and Nate Wolcott) or, worst of all, a twist ending that would’ve shamed even M. Night Shyamalan.

And the best swag goes to...

2008/09/09

A rundown on the TIFF gift lounge scene

TIFF photos: Sept. 7 party patrol

2008/09/08

Our sleepless photographer Dwayne Evans hits the premiere for Jennifer Aniston's Management, catches Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes on the red carpet of The Duchess, and then hits the after-parties for Anne Hathaway's Rachel Getting Married and Spike Lee's The Miracle of St. Anna.

Sept. 9 TIFF video pick: Synecdoche, New York

2008/09/08

EYE WEEKLY's Jason Anderson previews the directorial debut from Being John Malkovich/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter Charlie Kaufman — but not before teaching you the correct pronunciation of it. It screens Sept. 9, 8:30pm, Winter Garden Theatre; Sept. 11, 12:15pm, Scotiabank Theatre.