Rating: NNNNN
CODE BREAKER
CRITICS’ picks indicates 4- and 5-N reviews
Festival series are abbreviated as follows:
CR — Canadian Retrospective: Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Vidéaste
CWC — Contemporary World Cinema
DIAL — Dialogues
DISC — Discovery
GALA — Gala
MAST — Masters
MM — Midnight Madness
NORD — Nordic Visions
OV — Open Vault
PA — Planet Africa
PC — Perspective Canada
R2R — Real To Reel
SPEC — Special Presentation
SPOT — Spotlight: Ulrich Seidl
WAVE — Wavelengths
Sunday, September 9
AS WHITE AS IN SNOWNORD D: Jan Troell w/ Amanda Ooms, Rikard Wolff. Sweden/Denmark. 164 mins. Sunday, September 9, noon ISABEL BADER THEATRE Tuesday, September 11, 9:15 am VARSITY 1. Rating: NN
Lovely to look at but with little substance beneath its pretty veneer, Swedish director Troell’s (Emigrants) film is the visual equivalent of a Harlequin romance. Set in the bucolic countryside, it follows Elsa (Ooms), a determined young woman who, despite all obstacles – family objections, a sexist military, the love of a dashing pilot – becomes Sweden’s first aviatrix. Heavy-handed symbolism (in an early scene, Elsa tears the wings off a butterfly trapped in a spider’s web) and too-long running time make Snow as dull as melting ice. SD
PROMISES R2R D: Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg, Carlos Bolado. U.S. 100 mins. Sunday, September 9, noon VISA SCREENING ROOM (ELGIN) Tuesday, September 11, 9:15 pm VARSITY 4 Tuesday, September 11, 9:15 pm VARSITY 5. Rating: NNN
Shot over three years during a period of relative Israeli-Palestinian calm, this American doc looks at this decades-old conflict through the eyes of children from both factions. Some Jewish kids are more hard-line than others. Same with the Arabs. One of the flick’s most troubling scenes contrasts this inbred hatred – it’s truly shocking to see 10-year-olds decked out in a backwards baseball caps and Disney T-shirts parroting political and religious dogma while thumping their chests and pledging undying vengeance to those who killed their fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers. After a while, a few of the less militant subjects want to meet those who live on the other side of the barbed wire and machine guns that divide them. Despite the past, some briefly become friends. SD
CYBERMAN PC D: Peter Lynch. 95 mins. Sunday, September 9, 3 pm VARSITY 8 Wednesday, September 12, 7 pm VARSITY 8. Rating: NN
Lynch reached a mainstream audience with his hilarious and inspired documentary Project Grizzly (about obsessed anti-bear-suit inventor Troy Hurtibise), so it makes sense he’d look for another oddball character for his follow-up. Meet University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, who wears miniature computers and cameras to transmit his vision of the world to anyone who wants to see. But where Hurtibise was an eccentric hoser on a quest, Mann comes across as an annoying techno-geek whose frustration at a world inundated with advertising and technology doesn’t hold a lot of weight when you consider how he uses technology to create his own self-indulgent cyber-wasteland. IR
KARMEN
PA D: Joseph Gaï Ramaka w/ Djeïnaba Diop Gaï, Stephanie Biddle. France/Senegal/Canada. 83 mins. Sunday, September 9, 7:30 pm VARSITY 8 Tuesday, September 11, 1:45 pm CUMBERLAND 3. Rating: N
Take Bizet’s Carmen, strip it of music, focus on the opera’s contrived plot instead of the spectacle, set it in a Senegalese Caged Heat-style women’s prison complete with softcore sapphic sex and you’ll end up with this disappointing mess. The opening seductive dance sequence between enigmatic Karmen (Gaï) and her butch jailer (Biddle) is the picture’s sole electrifying moment. From that high, Karmen crashes, with more booty-shaking than a Jay-Z video and fragments of song that never gel. Memorable dialogue: “Arrest that slut!” SD
THE DEVIL’S BACKBONESPEC D: Guillermo del Toro w/ Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Frederico Luppi. Spain/Mexico. 106 mins. Sunday, September 9, 9 pm UPTOWN 2 Monday, September 10, 9:15 am CUMBERLAND 2. Rating: NNN
Stylish Mexican frightmeister del Toro (who’s loved monsters since before he could walk) broadens his range to include political horror in this allegorical ghost story set in a boys’ orphanage during the Spanish Civil War. Melodramatic and surreal, it’s a chilling, gothic tale of terrified 11-year-olds that wears its phantasms on its sleeve. Despite the unexploded bomb on their doorstep and the imminent arrival of Franco’s forces, the boys are more concerned with the whispers they keep hearing that seem to be connected to bizarre fatalities, none of which could be as bizarre as the accidents Hollywood’s already steered del Toro into.PE
LATE MARRIAGECWC D: Dover Kosashvili w/ Lior Louie Ashkenazi, Ronit Elkabetz. Israel/France. 100 mins. Sunday, September 9, 9:15 pm VARSITY 1 Sunday, September 9, 9:15 pm VARSITY 6 Tuesday, September 11, 2:30 pm UPTOWN 3. Rating: NNN
This semi-autobiographical first film by the Georgian-born Israeli writer/director follows a 30-something bachelor’s search for a beautiful virgin. He needs a wife. His parents need a daughter-in-law. She should be from a good family, preferably rich. But our hero’s already got a girlfriend, a headstrong divorcee with a child, who knows exactly which of his buttons to push. Enriching this film is the culture clash between traditional Georgian Jews and modern Israelis. The actors are Hebrew-speaking professionals who don’t speak a word of Georgian and Georgians with no acting experience. To top it off, Kosashvili cast his own mother as the hero’s mother. But, as he later realized, who really wants to go to work with his mother every day?PE
JOY RIDESPEC D: John Dahl w/ Paul Walker, Steve Zahn, Leelee Sobieski. U.S. 106 min. Sunday, September 9, 9:35 pm UPTOWN 1 Tuesday, September 11, 9:30 am CUMBERLAND 2. Rating: NNN
Duel meets the serial killer genre. Walker (The Fast And The Furious) and Zahn play brothers who start playing radio games with a trucker who turns out to have a loose driveshaft. How special is a film that’s been sitting on the shelf for almost two years? Not terribly. But Joy Ride is a not-bad little road thriller by a director who’s done better (Last Seduction, Rounders). Odd note: was the scene where the brothers pick up Sobieski filmed long after the rest of the film? She looks a year older and even more like Helen Hunt in that scene than in the rest of the movie. JH
TROUBLE EVERY DAYMAST D: Claire Denis w/ Vincent Gallo, Béatrice Dalle, Alex Descas. France. 102 mins. Sunday, September 9, 9:45 pm VARSITY 8 Tuesday, September 11, 4 pm CUMBERLAND 3. Rating: N
The always surprising Denis (Beau Travail, I Can’t Sleep, Nenette Et Boni) stumbles with this pointlessly obscure, pretentious, almost unendurably gory and ultimately quite silly tale of a very bloody and cannibalistic honeymoon in Paris. Two viewers fainted at the Cannes premiere, probably the only thing worth noting about this dragging film that wallows in its own repulsiveness and purports to dissect the mechanisms of hunger and desire while managing to convey neither. Shock value and French intellectualism make an unhappy mix. JC
WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?CWC D: Tsai Ming-liang w/ Shiang-chyi Chen, Kang-sheng Lee. Taiwan. 116 mins. Sunday, September 9, 10 pm UPTOWN 3 Monday, September 10, 11:45 am CUMBERLAND 2. Rating: N
A Taipei street vendor sells a watch to a beautiful exchange student with whom he falls in love even though she is about to leave for Paris. Meanwhile, very odd things are happening around the house, involving his aging mom and the ghost of his father – which isn’t quite as funny as you’d think it would be. There are two schools of thought on What Time Is It There? The first says that the film’s themes come together beautifully in the last 45 minutes. The second says, well, sure they do, but you have to sit through the first 75 minutes to get there. JH
