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Some final Hot Docs highs and lows

HOT DOCS: CANADIAN INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL continues to May 8, various locations. $14, some $5 late-night screenings, various passes available. 416-637-5150, hotdocs.ca. See listings


LOVE SHINES (Douglas Arrowsmith, Canada). 87 minutes. Rating: NNNN

He’s been wowing audiences for two decades and is adored by the likes of Elvis Costello and Steve Earle, but Ron Sexsmith has never had a hit record – which, as we discover in Douglas Arrowsmith’s sympathetic profile, is eating away at him like a cancer.

Love Shines follows the singer/songwriter to Los Angeles for the 2009 recording sessions of his album Long Player Late Bloomer, where he’s enlisted mega-producer Bob Rock to infuse his melancholy, introspective songs with pop appeal.

The more time they spend in the studio, the less likely it seems that Rock will succeed. Sexsmith just doesn’t write top 40 material, and his introverted stage presence is another impediment to connecting with the masses. (In the end, as good as Long Player Late Bloomer is, it sounds pretty much like every other Ron Sexsmith album.)

Intercutting Rock’s efforts in the studio with Sexsmith’s 2003 trip home to St. Catharines and his 2006 performance at Massey Hall, Arrowsmith crafts a psychologically dense portrait of an artist whose single-minded pursuit of commercial success threatens to overwhelm his art.

He’s not his own worst enemy, exactly, but he’s not helping the situation either.

NORMAN WILNER

Friday (May 6) and Saturday (May 7), 9:45 pm, Isabel Bader Sunday (May 8), 4 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2.

MIGHTY JEROME (Charles Officer, Canada). 83 minutes. Rating NNN

The sprinter Harry Jerome was a teenage phenom out of Vancouver, tying the world record for the 100-metre dash when he was just 20 years old and winning a bronze medal in the 1964 Olympics. He was also black, which presented a separate set of challenges when he accepted a scholarship to the University of Oregon and started dating a white girl.

Charles Officer’s elegant black-and-white documentary traces the ups and downs of Jerome’s career through the standard blend of contemporary interviews and archival footage, assembled with a striking visual confidence. The use of re-enactments feels a little forced, though Jerome’s personality comes through so strongly that recreations of his life just seem redundant.

NORMAN WILNER

Sunday (May 8), 4:30 pm, Revue.

THE ADVOCATE FOR FAGDOM (Angélique Bosio, France). 92 minutes. Rating: N

How ironic that a documentary about Toronto queer-punk filmmaking provocateur Bruce LaBruce should be so… dull.

French director Angélique Bosio’s movie has no structure, little tension, and her appalling photographed interviews with the shades-wearing subject himself are so unrevealing, they resemble some half-assed film school exercise.

Relying on talking heads like filmmakers Gus Van Sant, Harmony Korine and John Waters (one of the only lively interviewees), Bosio delivers a checklist of topics anyone vaguely familiar with LaBruce’s work will already know: his obsession with punks, his subversion of gay porn tropes (if you say so) and his dabbling in French literary theory.

LaBruce is filled with contradictions: he criticizes gay marriage while being married himself. (We briefly meet his Cuban-Canadian spouse in an interview that tells us nothing.) Bosio never calls him out on that.

Of course, generous clips from LaBruce’s films abound, and there’s a perfunctory look at his early queer zine, J.D.s, but why no interview with its co-founder, G.B. Jones? And why not take LaBruce back to the farming community where he grew up to interview his family and neighbours?

Presumably Bosio finished the film before LaBruce’s L.A. Zombies got banned from a film festival in Melbourne last summer. That incident – and LaBruce’s predictable response – could have provided the doc with a bit of conflict.

GLENN SUMI

Friday (May 6), 9 pm, Bloor Saturday (May 7), 8:45 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2.

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