Canada’s Top Ten 2012: Shorts

If you love short film, I’ll remind you that my next Shorts That Are Not Pants screening will be held on Thursday January 17th at the Carlton Cinemas. We’ll be showing Chloé Robichaud’s very funny Chef de meute from this selection. Advance tickets are on sale already.

On Sunday night, TIFF Bell Lightbox screened all of this year’s shorts named to Canada’s Top Ten. Here are my thoughts on the films (including two I’d seen before, Lingo and Chef de meute).

Lingo

Lingo (Director: Bahar Noorizadeh, 13 minutes)

Lingo uses a static camera and long shots to sort-of tell the story of a young Afghan boy who inadvertently starts a fire that burns down a neighbour’s house. A misunderstanding lands his non-English-speaking mother an uncomfortable interview with a police interpreter. I want to applaud the daring of the filmmaker, because some of the techniques used are pretty alienating to the audience, but the end result communicates a real sense of confusion and disconnection, even when someone is supposedly speaking your language.

Kaspar

Kaspar (Director: Diane Obomsawin, 8 minutes)

Quebec cartoonist Diane Obomsawin animates her 2009 book on the life of Kaspar Hauser, a mysterious young man found living in a German cave in 1828. The subject of several films, including one by Werner Herzog, Hauser’s mysterious origins were never discovered, nor were the circumstances surrounding his mysterious death. Kaspar presents the story in simple clean lines and its character as a trusting innocent. Telling the story in the first person gives the tragic tale additional poignancy.

Reflexions

Reflexions (Director: Martin Thibaudeau, 6 minutes)

An attempt to tell a story visually through reflected images is a clever gimmick, but Thibaudeau’s rather simplistic and heavy-handed portrayal of the funeral of a man who was not what he seemed was the least satisfying of the ten films for me. An interesting concept that needed more subtlety.

Paparmane (Wintergreen)

Paparmane (Wintergreen) (Director: Joëlle Desjardins Paquette, 19 minutes)

Remarkably similar in tone to Chloé Robichaud’s Chef de meute, but featuring a depressed cat instead of an excitable pug, this film was a delight. A lonely parking attendant is mourning his mother’s death, along with her melancholy pet. Things begin to change when he meets an exuberant telegram singer. Filmed near an amusement park closed for the winter, Paparmane uses its setting to great effect. I’m also a big fan of the way the film is able to find humour within its potentially gloomy situations.

Malody

Malody (Director: Phillip Barker, 13 minutes)

Strange things begin to occur inside a diner where a sick girl confronts herself as a little girl. Although visually impressive and full of stylistic flourishes, Malody‘s art film opacity left me unable to connect with its characters.

Crackin' Down Hard

Crackin’ Down Hard (Director: Mike Clattenburg, 10 minutes)

Clattenburg explained to the audience that the idea for the film came to him and his co-writer/star Nicholas Wright when they were visiting Joshua Tree National Park in California. Conceived, written and filmed a scant two weeks later, Crackin’ Down Hard feels like a comedy sketch you’d expect to see on a show like Kids in the Hall. Terry is a guy who comes to the desert to get away from the hectic life he has in the city. While hiking one day, he’s confronted by a strange man who tempts him with hookers. It’s an absurd situation, and all the more hilarious as Terry gradually succumbs to the pimp’s high-pressure sales tactics. The film’s humble origins show in the rather muddy image quality, but the dialogue and comic payoff more than make up for it.

Old Growth

Old Growth (Director: Tess Girard, 5 minutes)

A man’s rural routine comprises this simple piece shot without dialogue. With his wheelbarrow, an old man walks along a windswept road to a forest where he chops firewood. Well-shot and with an especially good use of sound design, Old Growth is more of an experimental piece, since there is almost no focus on the man’s face.

Ne crâne pas sois modeste (Keep a Modest Head)

Ne crâne pas sois modeste (Keep a Modest Head) (Director: deco dawson, 19 minutes)

Canadian-born Jean Benoit was the last member of the Surrealist group of artists. Using archival audio and film footage, dawson constructs a series of vignettes from the artist’s life using his own surrealistic style. Some of these techniques work really well (Benoit as a child jumping between houses and peering in rooftop windows) and some not as well (an almost endless series of zoom-ins on a painting), with the end result being a film worthy of admiration more than love. dawson spoke passionately about Benoit at the screening, and I felt disappointed that some of the quirk seemed to distract from the filmmaker’s clear love of his subject.

Bydlo

Bydlo (Director: Patrick Bouchard, 9 minutes)

Based on a musical piece by Mussorgsky, Bydlo is an innovative animated film that uses images of animals and faceless people to explore the cycles of life, death and labour. The word “bydlo” comes from the Polish word for cattle and is often applied to “the masses” of uneducated, lower-class people. The dramatic use of the musical source material along with the quite amazing animation technique makes this a sobering but fascinating big picture portrayal of the seeming futility of life.

Chef de meute (Herd Leader)

Chef de meute (Herd Leader) (Director: Chloé Robichaud, 13 minutes)

In this comedy, the humour is dark indeed. When Clara’s spinster aunt dies suddenly, her family suggest she take in the older woman’s pug, since, as a single woman herself, she has time to take care of it. When even the dog seems to boss her around, she turns to a dog trainer for help. In a hilarious sendup of The Dog Whisperer, he encourages her to be more assertive. It’s a lesson she takes to her pushy family members. Ève Duranceau plays the put-upon Clara to neurotic perfection, and the pug turns in a pretty impressive performance, too.

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2012 CAST Awards Announcement

Moonrise Kingdom
A convincing win for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom

 

Update: Check out the second annual CASTcast pod­cast organ­ized by the Mamo.ca guys! It’s hosted by our friends over at Row Three. Hear me and six other loud­mouths debate the res­ults for an hour!

I’m very pleased to announce the results of the 3rd edition of the CAST Awards. I received 33 completed ballots from film lovers in the Greater Toronto Area. Here are the CAST Top 25 voted from among all films that had a theatrical or festival release in Toronto during 2012. Voters ranked up to 10 films on their ballot from top to bottom, with first choices receiving 10 points, second choices 9, etc. The Points column lists the total score for each film, the Mentions column indicates the number of ballots it appeared on, and the First column indicates the total number of voters who chose the film as their top choice. I’m proud of the group of critics we’ve gathered, even though I’ve described us elsewhere as “a ragtag group of semi-professional film bloggers, tweeters and Lightbox lobby loiterers.” 122 different films received at least one mention this year, although 71 of those received only one mention.

FILM TITLE
POINTS
MENTIONS
FIRST
1. Moonrise Kingdom 138 20 1
2.The Master 92 13 4
3. Looper 77 13 1
4. Skyfall 67 13 1
5. The Imposter 61 9 2
6. Django Unchained 59 12 0
7. Stories We Tell 56 7 3
8. Argo 56 10 1
9. The Dark Knight Rises 48 9 1
10. Lincoln 46 6 2
11. Amour 43 7 0
12. The Avengers 43 8 2
13. Silver Linings Playbook 43 8 1
14. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia 42 6 1
15. Holy Motors 39 8 1
16. Prometheus 38 6 2
17. Cloud Atlas 38 6 1
18. Life of Pi 28 5 0
19. Les Miserables 26 4 0
20. Beasts of the Southern Wild 23 6 0
21. Killer Joe 22 3 1
22. The Raid: Redemption 21 4 0
23. Compliance 20 3 1
24. Beyond the Hills 20 3 0
25. The Cabin in the Woods 19 5 0


Participants:

Here is a PDF with each person’s ballot and the collated results, with a few more interesting stats included. Voters could opt out of having their ballot included, so you may notice some omissions, but rest assured that each submitted ballot contributed to the overall results.

And for those still reading, here is my very own CAST ballot, with my top ten from 2012.

My CAST Ballot

  1. The Master
  2. Only The Young
  3. The Imposter
  4. Moonrise Kingdom
  5. Looper
  6. Bernie
  7. Indie Game: The Movie
  8. Tchoupitoulas
  9. Sound of My Voice
  10. Beasts of the Southern Wild
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Best Films of 2012

It’s almost impossible for me to make lists, and yet I compulsively am drawn to making them, or reading other people’s. This is especially true with film, where for me the pleasures of discovery outweigh any sense of satisfaction of “keeping up” with all the new releases. I might have seen about 50 films that were theatrically released this year, which is a tiny fraction of the total, so my list is far from bulletproof. I tend to see a lot of my films at festivals, too, which can skew the experience one way or the other. With all that as prologue, here are my top ten films of the year:

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  1. The Master (Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson)
  2. Only The Young (Dirs: Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet)
  3. The Imposter (Dir: Bart Layton)
  4. Moonrise Kingdom (Dir: Wes Anderson)
  5. Looper (Dir: Rian Johnson)
  6. Bernie (Dir: Richard Linklater)
  7. Indie Game: The Movie (Dirs: Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky)
  8. Tchoupitoulas (Dirs: Bill Ross and Turner Ross)
  9. Sound of My Voice (Dir: Zal Batmanglij)
  10. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Dir: Benh Zeitlin)

And because I’m such a huge fan of documentary film, here is the list of top ten docs:

  1. Only The Young (Dirs: Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet)
  2. The Imposter (Dir: Bart Layton)
  3. Indie Game: The Movie (Dirs: Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky)
  4. Tchoupitoulas (Dirs: Bill Ross and Turner Ross)
  5. The House I Live In (Dir: Eugene Jarecki)
  6. ¡Vivan las Antipodas! (Dir: Victor Kossakovsky)
  7. Room 237 (Dir: Rodney Ascher)
  8. Off Label (Dirs: Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher)
  9. The Ambassador (Dir: Mads Brügger)
  10. The World Before Her (Dir: Nisha Pahuja)

Stay tuned for the third annual CAST Awards list which gathers the opinions of Toronto’s “non-professional” critics and cinephiles. That should be ready by next week sometime.

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Blindsided

Just over a year ago, I published an ambitious manifesto of sorts. The Blind Spots Series 2012 was meant to be a way for me to commit to seeing a dozen films that I was somewhat embarrassed not to have seen yet. The response to the idea was fantastic, and a whole bunch of other bloggers seem to have had a great time this year filling in some holes in their cinematic viewing history. Me? Well, at this writing, I’ve seen and written about a measly three films out of my dozen. What happened?

Well, I’ve always been a much better starter than finisher, that’s certain. But then again, lots of other things took my attention in 2012. My shorts screening series, Shorts That Are Not Pants, ran quarterly and has more or less reached its first anniversary by this point. I also took over organizational duties for our monthly pub night gathering of film bloggers. And another of my crazy ideas, the CAST Awards, an annual year-end poll of Toronto “non-professional” film critics, has reached its third edition, with an inaugural TIFF edition added in 2012.

So as always, I seem to have bitten off more than I can chew. As well, my father passed away in late October, and that’s sapped a lot of my energy, both physical and creative. Yet again, I seem to be facing a crippling sense of writer’s block when it comes to analyzing film. This time of year always seems to paralyze me, with all the year-end lists and awards season bickering. Twitter seems to make it worse, too. There’s not much joy in facing off against hundreds of other writers who have already picked over the carcass of the film you’re just getting around to seeing. And I’ve mentioned the feeling of trying to drink from the firehose of new releases before. I’m just not getting a lot of pleasure out of talking about films in the way everyone else seems to be doing.

I think I’d like to find a way to enjoy slowing things down while still being able to come up with crazy ideas now and then. I envy writers who can spend a lot of time with a single director, or even a single film. I want to do more of that kind of writing, and less of the sort that will be the online equivalent of fishwrap within a few weeks. The Blind Spot series idea was meant to encourage that kind of writing, but I’ve let the whole thing slide this year. So I’m going to give things some thought before committing to another dozen (or my unwatched 9 with a few additions) for 2013.

I hope that if you participated in 2012 that you got something out of it, and that you’ll continue next year. I do believe it’s a great idea and one that should be fun. I’m just not sure right now whether I had any fun with it this year. But stay tuned…

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Best Music of 2012

NOTE: I am cross-posting this from my other blog, Consolation Champs because I wanted to try presenting the album covers a little differently. If you’ve already read this post there, pay no attention.

I’m realizing that I haven’t done this for a few years now. Although I love music, I find that it takes longer to absorb a new “release” than my perma-shuffling iPod habits can provide, and so I always find myself scrambling during the month of December to attempt some kind of catching up. Ludicrous, of course, when there are thousands of new bands releasing music each year. So the usual disclaimer applies: this is stuff I just happened to buy/download/hear and is in no way meant to be comprehensive.

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In list form, if you’re not visually inclined:

  1. Beach House – Bloom
  2. DIIV – Oshin
  3. Wild Nothing – Nocturne
  4. Jim Guthrie – Indie Game: The Movie (Soundtrack)
  5. Grimes – Visions
  6. Divine Fits – A Thing Called Divine Fits
  7. Now, Now – Threads
  8. Eternal Summers – Correct Behavior
  9. Lower Dens – Nootropics
  10. Japandroids – Celebration Rock

Honourable Mentions:

  • Bill Fay – Life is People
  • Borko – Born to Be Free
  • Bloc Party – Four
  • Four Tet – Pink

Just for fun, here are some of my previous lists:

How about you? What were some of your favourites?

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