The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (Marie Losier) is an unusual portrait of the love affair between performance artist and industrial music groundbreaker Genesis P-Orridge and her muse, Lady Jaye. Shooting with her ancient Bolex – and throwing in some archival footage – Losier establishes a remarkable degree of intimacy while tracking the couple’s domestic life up to and beyond Lady Jaye’s sudden death in 2007. The duo, always devoted to living large, took themselves and their art so seriously that they made their own bodies their primary art project, undergoing cosmetic surgeries in pursuit of the creation of a third gender option, the pandrogyne. There’s nothing judgmental in this playful portrait of endearing characters. Fans of P-Orridge’s infamous 80s industrial outfit Throbbing Gristle be warned: this doc is about a romance, not a rock star. 72 min.
Rating: NNNN (SGC)
Opens Mar 16 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
Payback (Jennifer Baichwal) comes to life thanks to director Baichwal, who finds four human stories to match Margaret Atwood’s intellectually ferocious book about debt. Oppressive farmers pay a “debt” to migrant workers ex-cons describe their life in prison, where they supposedly paid a debt to society British Petroleum owes a whopping debt to the environment and in Albania, a family feuds brutally over an old score. As always in a Baichwal film, the visuals are the stars, more than Atwood herself, who also appears. The director’s the master of the tracking shot, following a farmer tying up a long row of tomato plants, for example. And images – by Ed Burtynsky and especially aerial shots by Daniel Beltrá – of the BP oil spill are spectacular. Taken all together, Payback is both smart and beautiful. Some subtitles. 90 min.
Rating: NNNN (SGC)
Opens Mar 16 at Varsity. See here for times.
21 Jump Street (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller) reboots the 80s television series, where young undercover cops (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) pose as high school students. Thankfully, it never takes itself or its source material very seriously. The meta comedy is all tongue-in-cheek shenanigans that proudly lift a middle finger to the hoary clichés the film recycles. Even Jump Street alum Johnny Depp gets in on the act in a giddy cameo. Hill and Tatum deserve high marks for their enthusiasm, making dick jokes funny again and developing an agreeable onscreen camaraderie. They play the outcast and jock, respectively, who return to the realm of a high school movie and find their social roles reversed in a post-Glee era. The movie’s not brilliant, but it damn sure is a lot of fun. 109 min.
Rating: NNNN (RS)
Opens Mar 16 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.
Casa de Mi Padre (Matt Piedmont) has Will Ferrell speaking Spanish. If that central conceit doesn’t tickle you as it would most of the Sasquatch-sized comedian’s fan base, this will only afford modest pleasures, dry smirks rather than riotous laughter. The parody, brought to you by Ferrell’s Funny Or Die amigos, has the actor sporting a tan and deep-fried hair as a dimwitted ranchero who must protect his father’s land from Mexican drug lords. The throwaway plot is just a means for moderately funny visual gags that ridicule Mexican telenovelas and Zapata westerns, easy fodder for Ferrell and company though not as funny as watching the genuine article. Director Piedmont displays ingenuity behind the camera to produce intentionally poor results, but Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have already affectionately mimicked these genres. 84 min.
Rating: NNN (RS)
Opens Mar 16 at Scotiabank Theatre. See here for times.
Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (Alex Stapleton) celebrates producer Roger Corman, whose lusty, cheesy B movies dominated the drive-ins and grindhouses from the 1950s through the 1970s – and conquered home video and cable in the subsequent decades. Along the way, he gave significant breaks to the likes of Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Joe Dante, Pam Grier, William Shatner and some hippie named Jack Nicholson. Stapleton’s documentary is an entirely conventional collection of talking heads and archival footage, but when the stories are as good as these, substance easily trumps style. 95 min.
Rating: NNN (NW)
Opens Mar 16 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb) is an attractive if slightly undercooked documentary about sushi master Jiro Ono, who rose from humble Japanese roots to become the only sushi chef to receive a three-star restaurant rating in the Michelin Guide. In his mid-80s, he still presides over his modest 10-seat Tokyo restaurant, but he’s not yet ready to hand over the shop to his son, who’s been patiently working there for decades. Gelb takes us through each step of the sushi-making process, from getting the best ingredients (a visit to Tokyo’s famed Tsukiji Fish Market is a highlight) to the patient grilling of nori. Ono isn’t very talkative – his mischievous eyes tell us more than his words – so it helps to have food critic Masuhiro Yamamoto put the man’s achievements in perspective. But Gelb never builds momentum, instead repeating (hypnotically gorgeous) images to bits of familiar movie soundtracks and classical music. The omission of any mention of Ono’s wife sticks out like a rogue grain of rice on an otherwise impeccable plate. 81 min.
Rating: NNN (GS)
Opens Mar 16 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
King of Devil’s Island (Marius Holst) is a competent but inelegant prison drama that – apart from all the Norwegian snow – won’t seem particularly new to an audience familiar with Jules Dassin’s Brute Force or The Shawshank Redemption. Based on a true story involving a riot in 1915, clumsily recreated here, the film follows the relationship between Erling (Benjamin Helstad), a rebellious new inmate who may be guilty of murder, and Olav (Trond Nilssen), a dutiful ward on the cusp of release. Though they initially don’t get along, the two teens find a common enemy in a corrupt prison system that fosters brutality and sexual abuse under the rule of a morally unsound governor (Stellan Skarsgård, typically good at being ominous). Helstad’s Erling is a one-dimensional compassionate brute, the easiest person to root for in any movie. More original is Nilssen’s Olav, who personifies the broken humanity in a totalitarian system. Subtitled. 120 min.
Rating: NNN (RS)
Opens Mar 16 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.
Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey (Constance Marks) is a sweet but tension-free documentary about a boy who followed his dream. Kevin Clash grew up in Baltimore so obsessed with puppets that he once cut up his father’s trench coat to make one. Working on a local TV show helped him hone his craft (and silence any school bullies), but it wasn’t until meeting Sesame Street’s puppet designer, Kermit Love, that his life changed for good. That eventually led him to puppetmaster Jim Henson and working on Sesame Street, where Clash transformed the shaggy red muppet Elmo into a cultural icon. Unfortunately, when his hand isn’t stuffed in a puppet, Clash is simply a pleasant man who wishes he’d spent more time with his daughter. Director Marks doesn’t delve deeply into anything, including the importance of Clash’s African-American background on a show that from the start was gloriously diverse. There’s little momentum and not much at stake. 85 min.
Rating: NN (GS)
Opens Mar 16 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.
Being Flynn (Paul Weitz) turns Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, into a cookie-cutter drama about a young shelter worker who learns a valid lesson about stability from a homeless person. The twist is that the homeless person is the young man’s father, reappeared after nearly two decades. Paul Dano is the younger Flynn and Robert De Niro the elder, and that’s a problem right there, as Dano’s introverted performance crumples in the face of De Niro’s grandstanding turn. We’re supposed to be watching the younger man come to terms with his father and himself, but his dad keeps sucking all the air out of the room. 95 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Mar 16 at Varsity. See here for times.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home (Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass) finds the directors of The Puffy Chair, Baghead and Cyrus going fully Hollywood with a tale of a 30-year-old layabout (Jason Segel) whose conviction that the universe is sending him signals leads him on a convoluted journey through Baton Rouge accompanied by his dickish older brother (Ed Helms). The Duplasses are great at creating tiny flashes of character-based comedy, and Segel’s lumbering presence is used to terrific effect – as is a marvellous Judy Greer as the possibly unfaithful wife of Helms’s character. But their style just doesn’t lend itself to a studio project, and the atonal influence of producer Jason Reitman can be felt all over the picture’s second half. (No other filmmaker relies on pop music to sell emotional catharsis as nakedly as Reitman – though in fairness, it often works in his own movies.) The result is a film trapped irresolvably between the idiosyncrasies it loves and the desire to draw a mass audience. 83 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Mar 16 at Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, Varsity. See here for times.
Off World (Mateo Guez) barely feels like a movie. Lucky, a Toronto man (Marc Abaya) who returns to the Philippines in search of his identity, finds his long-lost brother (Marco Morales) working as a transvestite hooker in the Manila slum of Smokey Mountain. The tale blends fictional storytelling and ethnographic travelogue, but the actors can’t carry the drama and the documentary material is poorly organized and fairly superficial. Writer-director Guez tries to bolster the narrative by giving Lucky a poetic inner monologue, delivered on the soundtrack by David Usher, leaving us wondering why the character is so halting and inarticulate in his conversations with everyone around him, and why he never discusses the poverty and hopelessness that so bothers him. Some subtitles. 76 min.
Rating: NN (NW)
Opens Mar 16 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.
I Am Bruce Lee (Pete McCormack) is a documentary about iconic action star Lee, featuring rare archival footage and interviews with people like Kobe Bryant, Mickey Rourke and others. 90 min.
Opens Mar 17 at Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview. See here for times.
Labyrinth (Jim Henson) is a digital screening of Henson’s puppet-based fantasy starring David Bowie and a young Jennifer Connelly. 101 min.
Opens Mar 19 at Coliseum Mississauga, Colossus, Scotiabank Theatre. See here for times.
William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a broadcast of Stratford’s splashy 2011 production of the classic comedy directed by Des McAnuff and starring Brian Dennehy, Andrea Runge and Stephen Ouimette. 171 min.
Opens Mar 21 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, Varsity. See here for times.
