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Movies & TV

Film Friday: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Wagner File’s, Antisocial and more

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes) indulges philosopher Slavoj i ek as he excitedly slurs through mini-sermons on pet subjects: desire, “the paradox of Coke,” John Carpenter’s They Live, Kinder Eggs, etc. Deconstructing i ek, as usual, proves as dicey an enterprise as parsing statements like “A commodity is an object full of theological, even metaphysical, niceties. Its presence always reflects an invisible transcendence.” But questioning his political radical bona fides and his ideas for solutions to the problem of late capitalism always feels beside the point. He’s as much an entertainer as a thinker, and it’s enjoyable to get lost in the eddies of i ek’s thought, swept up in the rhetorical currents even he seems to get lost in. 136 min.

Rating: NNNN (JS)

Opens Dec 13 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.


Wagner File’s (Ralf Pleger) is a documentary about 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner that borrows techniques from modern espionage films, graphic novels and 1950s melodrama. It all adds up to a respectful and informative portrait: think Robert Ludlum meets Douglas Sirk, or The Wagner Identity. Director Pleger uses style to enhance content, depicting the composer’s frenzied trek through Europe to flee his creditors with Bourne Identity-style computer graphics and his symbiotic relationship with his second wife, Cosima, in passionate scenes featuring actors Samuel Finzi and Pegah Ferydoni. Half a dozen experts guide us through Wagner’s complex life, spending lots of time on his infamous anti-Semitism, his relationship with his chief patron, Bavaria’s King Ludwig, and his fetish for silk and roses. Of course his gorgeous music underscores everything, making this a must-see for classical music fans and an entertaining intro for Wagner neophytes. Subtitled. 90 min.

Rating: NNNN (GS)

Opens Dec 13 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner (Cindy Kleine) is an absorbing but shapeless documentary about avant-garde theatre artist Gregory, who’s probably best known for the 1981 art house smash My Dinner With André. Now in his late 70s, with an aristocratic air, seductive voice and mischievous spark, he’s a witty raconteur who continues to push theatrical boundaries. Kleine has lots of access because she’s also Gregory’s wife they met when she was 39 and he was 63. So she captures him in rehearsals, goofing around the house and, in one of the film’s more intriguing threads, Skyping with scholars to see if his European, upper-class Jewish family once collaborated with Nazis before emigrating to America. Gregory is self-aware and candid enough to consider how his ambivalent feelings about his parents have affected his approach to making art. But Kleine’s musings about her own family are less compelling, and she doesn’t call her husband on the fact that his inherited wealth contributed to his artistic freedom. 108 min.

Rating: NNN (GS)

Opens Dec 13 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Blood Brother (Steve Hoover) profiles Rocky Braat, a young American who discovers his vocation as a volunteer at an Indian orphanage for children with HIV/AIDS. Adventurous and naive, Rocky went looking for “authenticity.” Instead he found great suffering tempered by the irrepressible joy of the children for whom he would become an inexhaustible caregiver and honorary big brother. The directorial debut of Rocky’s best friend Hoover, this earnest first-person documentary is frequently both spectacular and moving. But aside from some backstory off the top and a wedding at the end, it’s also fairly shapeless and could have benefited from greater context, critical distance and closer attention to structure. Hoover comes to his emotional wallops honestly. I just wish he’d asked tougher questions along the way. 92 min.

Rating: NNN (José Teodoro)

Opens Dec 13 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


The Crash Reel (Lucy Walker) wants to enlighten and inform audiences about the dangers of traumatic brain injuries, which would seem to conflict with the feel-good arc of injured snowboarder Kevin Pearce enduring rehab so he can get back to the powder. But director Walker (Blindsight, Waste Land) never finds a way to highlight the contradictions in the stories she’s telling, or even to acknowledge them. She’s a talented filmmaker, but this feels as though it was thrown together on the run, a documentary about the awesomeness of Kevin Pearce that turned into a documentary about his traumatic brain injury. It could stand to lose half an hour of snowboarding footage, but who’d want to see it then? 108 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Dec 13 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.


The Punk Syndrome (Jukka Kärkkäinen, Jani-Petteri Passi) trembles constantly on the edge of exploitation. The film profiles Finnish punk band Pertti Kurkian Nimipäivät (Pertti Kurikka’s Name Day), a four-piece made up of developmentally disabled middle-aged men. They clearly enjoy playing together, but it’s tricky to tell how their fans, and the filmmakers, perceive the group. Scenes filmed in a voyeuristic “gotcha!” style of band members cleaning their asses in the shower or pissing with the door open feel leering and mean-spirited, like something dusted up from the cutting-room floor of Lars von Trier’s art house spasploitation flick The Idiots. Elsewhere, the movie proves impressively tender and even-handed, suggesting that even the idea that films about the handicapped are inherently exploitative is a kind of ableist prejudice, one proceeding from the viewer’s own discomfort. Subtitled. 85 min.

Rating: NNN (JS)

Opens Dec 13 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Antisocial (Cody Calahan) is another zombie movie – shot in Guelph and Toronto – about a group of friends whose New Year’s Eve house party goes to hell when a mysterious rage plague breaks out around the world. Could the strangely addictive, not-at-all-like-Facebook site TheSocialRedroom.com have anything to do with it? Writer/director Calahan seems to think he’s breaking new ground with the social-media angle, but it’s basically just warmed-over Romero and Raimi with one really nifty visual concept (with which, sadly, nothing is ever done) and a third act that’s both dull and ridiculous. A sequel is promised. Swell. 90 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Dec 13 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Friend 2: The Legacy (Kwak Kyung-taek) is a self-important, melodramatic sequel to the 2001 South Korean crime drama Friend. Picking up 17 years after the original, a crime boss (Yoo On-Seong) wraps up his prison sentence for ordering a hit on his best friend/rival gang leader. Reuniting with his Busan crime family only to discover that the new leadership isn’t too keen on returning control, he mounts a violent takeover effort with a prison mate (Kim Woo-bin), a young firecracker in desperate need of a father figure. The pair’s emotional entanglements give this sequel some much-needed heft, and Kim’s fine performance especially enlivens the derivative material. Subtitled. 124 min.

Rating: NN (RS)

Opens Dec 13 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Peter Jackson) is another two hours and 40 minutes of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his dwarf allies encountering giant spiders and orcs and elves and more orcs (or possibly the same orcs again) and a soupçon of political treachery on the way to the mountain where the dragon Smaug lies sleeping in his plundered gold. You may ask yourself why this isn’t the end of it. There isn’t enough story for three Hobbit movies, so Jackson’s had to invent new characters and new subplots – fan service to Tolkien diehards who need to actually see the rise of Sauron (also irrelevant to the story of The Hobbit), or to Jackson himself, whose swooping camera movements and elaborate single-take action sequences are starting to feel a little creaky and self-indulgent. Of course, making a nine-hour movie out of a short novel is pretty self-indulgent in itself. Some subtitles. 161 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Dec 13 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale. See here for times.


The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers (Richard Trank) is an unabashedly pro-Zionist doc based on the memoirs of Yehuda Avner, who worked with Israeli PMs from David Ben-Gurion to Golda Meir and plays every propaganda trick in the book. First: pretend there’s no issue, only cause for celebration Palestinians are completely invisible. Second: find an avuncular talking head – Avner, the only interviewee in the film – to give the piece some authority. (Even another staunch Zionist would have added much-needed texture.) Third: pull the celebrity-loving public on board by getting Hollywood A-Listers to voice the prime ministers, including Michael Douglas as Yitzhak Rabin and Sandra Bullock (!) as Golda Meir. Fourth: let the music swell to punctuate the stories of Jewish survival. The decision to program this puff piece may be explained by its decent stock footage and Avner’s inside dish on meetings with the egotistical Lyndon Johnson and a possibly inebriated Richard Nixon. But this doc is strictly for hardcore Zionists who haven’t noticed that the Middle East is deeply contested terrain. 114 min.

Rating: NN (SGC)

Opens Dec 13 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


Saving Mr. Banks (John Lee Hancock) covers the last several months of the 20-plus years that Walt Disney (Tom Hanks, who’s terrific) spent convincing author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to sell him the rights to Mary Poppins. Charming Walt gets the prickly author in a room with composers Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman), who try to win her over with their cheery tunes, but unfortunately, she has daddy issues. The narrative moves between 1961 L.A. and Travers’s childhood in Australia where the alcoholic father she loves (Colin Farrell) dies. The older Travers is portrayed as an old lonely prune who only lightens up after she’s been in Disney’s orbit. I don’t expect a Disney pic to highlight Travers’s lesbian love life or her very serious spiritual pursuits, but this rendering is insulting. It’s is all about burnishing Disney’s personal reputation. 125 min.

Rating: NN (SGC)

Opens Dec 13 at Varsity. See here for times.


Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (Adam McKay) catches up with Will Ferrell, Christina Applegate, Paul Rudd, Steve Carell and others from the hit 2004 comedy. See interview and review in next week’s issue. 119 min.

Opens Dec 18 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Humber Cinemas, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Her (Spike Jonze) stars Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely writer who falls in love with his computer’s operating system. See review in next week’s issue. 120 min.

Opens Dec 18 at Varsity. See here for times.


Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion (Yukihiro Miyamoto, Akiyuki Shinbo) is an animé feature about the fate of a group of magical girls. 123 min.

Opens Dec 15 at Coliseum Scarborough, Courtney Park 16, Queensway, SilverCity Fairview, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


The Metropolitan Opera: Falstaff is a live high-def broadcast of Robert Carsen’s new production of Verdi’s comic opera. 200 min.

Opens Dec 14 at Beach Cinemas, Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Yonge. See here for times.


The Nutcracker – Royal Opera House Live is a high-def screening of the Royal Ballet’s production of the seasonal Tchaikovsky ballet. 1150 min.

Opens Dec 12 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas (Tyler Perry) is a seasonal comedy starring Renaissance man Perry. No press screening – see review December 14 at nowtoronto.com/movies. 105 min.

Opens Dec 13 at 401 & Morningside, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


WWE TLC: Tables, Ladders and Chairs is is a high-def screening of a match featuring WWE superstars John Cena, CM Punk, Daniel Bryan and others.

Opens Dec 15 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.

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