Worldwide Short Film Festival 2012

Posted on June 4, 2012 by James McNally

(cross-posted from Shorts That Are Not Pants)

From June 5-10, Toronto will become the centre of the short film world (take that, Clermont-Ferrand!) as the 18th annual Worldwide Short Film Festival unspools its tiny masterpieces at venues all over the city. I’m particularly excited about a new program called The Night Shift. It’s a showcase for creepy and freaky genre fare and it’s taking place at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on Saturday June 9th from 11:30pm until 4:00am! Yes indeed, a real midnight madness kind of atmosphere, where the audience will stumble out at dawn, shaken and stirred by the 21 shorts they’ve just seen. Lots of other stuff looks good, too. Here are just a few things I’m excited about:

Men of the Earth

Men of the Earth (Director: Andrew Kavanagh)

Young Australian filmmaker Andrew Kavanagh made the excellent At The Formal in 2010, and this short, also made while he was a student, continues exploring his fascination with ancient rituals juxtaposed with seemingly banal scenes from modern life. Kavanagh just graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne, the same school that produced Ariel Kleiman (who made Deeper than Yesterday, from our first screening). Whatever they’re teaching there, it seems to be working. Look for At The Formal later this summer at a certain short film screening series.

The Umbrella Man

The Umbrella Man (Director: Errol Morris)

Quirky documentarian Morris turns his attention to the little-known mystery surrounding a man with an umbrella who turns up in the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination What was he doing opening an umbrella on a perfectly sunny day in Dallas? Was it a signal to the assassin?

The Twin (Tvillingen)

The Twin (Tvillingen) (Director: Gustav Danielsson)

A man’s unease with his seemingly successful life causes him to wonder if he’s truly happy. Then he receives a visit from the twin brother he never knew he had. With the twin roles played by the director himself and his twin brother (who had never acted before), this short promises to ask some existential questions about the nature of twins.

There are far too many interesting films to highlight (the festival screens 244 films from 35 countries over its six day run), but incredibly, all of the above are from the WHO’S YOUR DADA? program which screens as part of the Official Selection on Wednesday June 6th at 1:30pm and on Saturday June 9th at 7:45pm. Both screenings take place at the Isabel Bader Theatre. Tickets can be purchased online.

Here’s the festival trailer:


oehttp://youtu.be/aw_YQ36FSa8
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Toronto Youth Shorts Festival 2012

Posted on June 1, 2012 by James McNally

This Saturday, Innis Town Hall hosts the 4th edition of the Toronto Youth Shorts Festival, a showcase for young filmmakers to present their work in front of an appreciative audience. This edition features 31 short films broken into three separate screenings. At 4:00pm, the “Young at Heart” programme promises “high energy entertainment that is loaded with bouncy fun.” Following at 5:30pm is “Our Zany Adventures” which features “an exploration of the physical world and some of the more and eccentric characters within it.” Finally at 7:30pm comes “A Different Perspective” featuring “films offering a different perspective of the world.”

I’m proud to be involved as a member of the Online Film Critics’ Jury, along with my friends and colleagues Titania Plant (Classic Flick Chick), Courtney Small (Big Thoughts from a Small Mind), Genevieve Walker (Scene Creek) and Addison Wylie (Film Army). We’ll be presenting one of the awards at the festival, and so I was able to get an advance look at a few of the films. Here are some preliminary thoughts on four of the films (all documentary shorts) that I’ve seen thus far:

Feathers and Roots

Feathers and Roots (Director: Andrew Bundas)

This short portrait of young artist Leo Krykowski features a potentially interesting subject, the artist’s recollection of his mother’s recent death and how it is being reflected in his work. Unfortunately, it suffers from technical rough edges, relying on natural light and handheld camerawork when it could have benefited from controlling the shooting environment more. Leo’s an articulate young man and it’s a real shame we see so little of his artwork. Instead, we spend a bit too long at a session of hypnosis therapy that is meant to help him tap into his grief.

A Slice of Life

A Slice of Life (Director: Emily Powell)

A short documentary about the annual pie-baking contest in Warkworth, Ontario. Something this narrowly focused needs to have an interesting character or two, and when the upstanding grandmothers of Warkworth seem just a bit too vanilla, the director herself steps in, deciding to enter the contest despite a complete lack of baking experience. This helps the film a bit, especially the part where her own pie’s travails lead to some inadvertent swearing, but overall, this just isn’t all that compelling.

Dolime Dilemma: Water Proof?

Dolime Dilemma: Water Proof? (Director: Kristy Neville)

Despite the awkward title, this short issue doc does a pretty great job exploring different aspects of its subject, the potential for contamination of the water table of the city of Guelph by a quarry. The talking head interviews are well-chosen and well-shot, and the editing actually leads the viewer to some insights on the issue. To top it off, the film adds visual interest with some excellent helicopter shots of the quarry and surrounding area. Keeping the story tightly-focused on a local issue makes sense in a short film, and this one gets it just right, despite the fact that nobody from the provincial government agreed to be interviewed.

Tainted

Tainted (Director: Ben Brommell)

In just 8 minutes, this film introduces us to Kyle Freeman, who flaunted the ban on gay men donating blood. Taking on Canadian Blood Services in court, he spent eight years amassing huge legal bills only to lose his case. In his opinion, the benefits to patients outweigh any risks the medical establishment might see. Others see it as simple misguided discrimination against the gay community. Here’s a case where the short format just doesn’t give us enough time to get to know Freeman and his motivations as well as the full range of opinion on this still-divisive issue. This is definitely interesting stuff, but it would really benefit from a fuller treatment, including some voices from the people who support upholding the ban.

Hope to see you at Innis Town Hall on Saturday! Grab some tickets right now and help support the burgeoning careers of the next generation of Canadian filmmakers.

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Goliath

Posted on May 27, 2012 by James McNally
Goliath

Goliath (Directors: David and Nathan Zellner):

“Are you the motherfucker they call Bitchtits?”

This outrageous line of dialogue occurs just when we think our protagonist can’t get any more unlucky. And then the speaker attempts to light his own farts with a butane barbecue lighter. It’s a laugh-out-loud moment in a very funny film that nevertheless has very few laugh-out-loud moments.

Austin filmmakers Nathan and David Zellner have been making their films since 1997 and are remarkably prolific, producing four features and 10 shorts (plus a number of music videos), all while keeping their day jobs.

I remember Goliath playing at South by Southwest back in 2008, but didn’t have a chance to see it. When I spotted it on Netflix a week ago, I was intrigued. I’m a fan of American indie film, and this looked like a fun way to spend 80 minutes. But while I was expecting a light comedy, this is something quite different.

The irony of the line of dialogue I quoted is that we never learn the name of our protagonist, although if there was a modern-day equivalent to the biblical character of Job, this is the guy.

Our man has hit a patch of incredibly bad luck. His wife has left him for reasons we never learn, he’s been demoted at work, and worst of all, his beloved cat Goliath has run away. As the rest of his life crumbles, he’s determined to find Goliath. He drives around at night looking for him. He puts up posters all over the neighbourhood. Knowing how Goliath always came when he heard the sound of the electric can opener, he rigs it up to a battery and takes it out on neighbourhood walks. But nothing works.

Meanwhile, his downward spiral continues. He hates his workmates (or maybe more accurately, they ignore him), his divorce is being finalized, and he doesn’t seem to have any friends or family for support. When he finally finds Goliath, the film takes a much darker turn.

Played to sad-sack perfection by co-director David Zellner, who embues him with just the right amount of pathos, our loser starts looking for plots and conspiracies. When he discovers that a sex offender is living in his neighbourhood, he begins to fixate on him as the target for all of his pent-up rage.

It was here where the film had me the most uncomfortable. Although our protagonist’s journey is painfully funny, I worried about him doing something truly crazy. It’s a thin line (especially in gun-happy America) between comedy and horrific violence, and I think the filmmakers set a deliberately off-kilter tone that makes Zellner’s character equal parts Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate) and Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver). It’s interesting to note that both violence and laughter in film are common forms of releasing the tension from unbearable situations.

Which is where I want to leave things. Goliath is a film that has lingered in my memory, getting better the longer I think about it.



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Blind Spots: L’Atalante

Posted on May 26, 2012 by James McNally
L'Atalante
This post is part of the Blind Spots 2012 series. For background on the series, read the original post

L’Atalante (Director: Jean Vigo): The last film (and only feature) by director Jean Vigo, who died of tuberculosis at the ridiculously young age of 29, L’Atalante has long been on my radar. In fact, I bought the Region 2 edition of The Complete Films of Jean Vigo several years ago, well before Criterion’s 2011 release here in North America. Vigo’s story is tragic, but his influence has been immense.

Vigo was the son of a radical anarchist who was murdered in prison when Jean was just twelve. His adolescence was spent in a rigid boarding school, which became the subject of his film Zéro pour conduite (1933), a surreal tale of student rebellion that inspired later films like Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968). Already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him just a few weeks after its premiere, he began work on L’Atalante, a project based on a short story about barge workers. Unhappy with the original story, he worked it into a uniquely enchanting romance that was grounded in an almost documentary realism.

The film opens on a wedding procession in a small village. The bride and groom are walking ahead of a crowd toward the riverbank, where a barge is anchored. We learn that the groom is Jean (Jean Dasté), skipper of the boat, “L’Atalante.” We also meet his crew, the grizzled Pere Jules (the incomparable Michel Simon) and an unnamed cabin boy, desperately trying to prepare the boat for the couple’s arrival. As Jean and his new bride Juliette (Dita Parlo) adjust to married life, the work of the barge crew continues. There is little in the way of a honeymoon, although Juliette at first finds the rivers a welcome escape from her small town life.

But trouble soon finds them, in the form of Jean’s growing jealousy and Juliette’s desire to see more of life than the cramped quarters of L’Atalante. When they arrive in Paris, she’s eager to see the city but he’s forced to stay on the boat when Pere Jules goes off for a night of carousing. Eventually, Jean takes his wife dancing in a suburb but becomes jealous when a pedlar flirts and dances with her. When he leaves her on the boat to run an errand, the pedlar drops by to beg her to run off to the city with him. Jean returns in time to chase him off, but, feeling stifled, Juliette sneaks away that evening to see the lights for herself. When Jean finds her missing, he impulsively tells Pere Jules to pull up the anchor and start the engine. The period of separation is one of the most poignant sections of the film, and the sequence of the two lovers in separate beds writhing in desire for each other is both daringly erotic and formally inventive. After the separation becomes unbearable, leave it to Pere Jules to go off in search of Juliette.

The film was not handled well by its financiers, who cut it down from 90 to 65 minutes, changed the title and added a popular song in an attempt to make it more appealing to audiences. Despite that, it was a commercial failure, and sadly, Vigo died just a few weeks after it flopped. Over the years, there have been many attempts to restore the film to Vigo’s original vision, and this version, from 2001, seems the most complete. Even so, there are places where it feels like something is missing, and on my copy (from Artifical Eye in the UK), there are quite a few passages of dialogue with no subtitles. Nevertheless, the film manages a rarely-achieved blend of lyricism and documentary realism. Jean and Juliette are young and passionate, romantic and impetuous. They quarrel and then fall into each other’s arms and it never seems artificial. Michel Simon is a force of nature, his character a rollicking and fascinating mess of a human being. He’s seen it all, travelled the world, and yet still has the innocence of a child. His scenes with Juliette are movingly delicate, as in the sequence where he shows her all the treasures he’s collected from his travels. And the sight of him with a tiny kitten perched on his shoulder may well be indelible.

Much of the cinematography is indelible, for that matter, thanks to Vigo’s regular collaborator Boris Kaufman (brother of Soviet documentary innovator Dziga Vertov), who went on to a Hollywood career that included On the Waterfront, for which he won an Oscar®. Combining the documentarist’s careful eye for real people with the surrealist’s gift for finding new angles to shoot from, Kaufman’s work here was influential on many other filmmakers, and he himself carried some of it into his later work for directors like Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet.

It’s amazing that a filmmaker so young, and so aware of the shortness of his time in this world, could make films so playful and yet so grounded in reality. Perhaps knowing his time was limited, he infused his work with enough energy to make it burn that much brighter.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzTN0YnKmOs
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The Queen of Versailles

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Drew Kerr
The Queen of Versailles

The Queen of Versailles (Director: Lauren Greenfield): When director Lauren Greenfield first started filming the family of Florida timeshare billionaire David Siegel (including his wife, Jackie, their seven kids, an adopted niece, and multiple pets), it was to document the building of their colossal 90,000 square foot home that was modeled after France’s Palace of Versailles. The mansion, when completed, would be the largest private residence in the US and include the following: 30 bathrooms, 10 kitchens, a 20 car garage, a two-storey wine cellar, a 7,200 square foot ballroom, a skating rink, a bowling alley, and a full-sized baseball field. After the 2008 economic collapse, the project was put on hold and the Siegels were forced to drastically adjust their opulent lifestyle. The turn of events makes for some fascinating and uncomfortable viewing as the documentary exposes the pitfalls of American excess.

David may be the breadwinner, but Jackie is the film’s star. At 43, she’s 30 years younger than her husband and seems like a character out of one of those Real Housewives shows, with shopaholic tendencies, a love of the camera, and a conspicuous disconnect from the realities that most of us unprivileged folk face. Examples of the latter are shown in hilarious and cringeworthy scenes that occur after David’s financial struggles set in, such as the one where Jackie, now resorting to flying commercial after the family’s private jet becomes too expensive, is taken aback when informed that her rental car doesn’t come with a driver, as she’s accustomed. Then there’s the scene where she’s shopping at Wal-Mart with the family, loading up multiple carts full of things they don’t need. A couple of bicycles are purchased, which beautifully sets up Greenfield’s shot of the family arriving home and entering their sizable house through a garage that’s already littered with plenty of perfectly good bikes. Jackie is a fantastically compelling character, filled with idiosyncrasies and contradictions. She comes from very humble beginnings, yet doesn’t see the madness of making a trip to McDonald’s by herself in a stretch limousine to pick up dinner for the family. The former beauty queen also plays the spacey, buxom blonde role convincingly, but she’s clearly no dummy (and even has a computer engineering degree). The garish taste of Jackie and David on display throughout the film is downright stunning – they’re the sort of wealthy people who have multiple painted portraits of themselves hanging on the walls that depict the couple as characters from romantic novel covers, or posing regally in a Renaissance period setting.

David’s storyline might not be quite as entertaining as Jackie’s, but watching his transformation over the course of the three years that Greenfield and her crew shot is still thoroughly absorbing. Early on in the film, he’s a mildly cranky, ego-filled business kingpin, someone who takes immense pride in having the brightest sign on the Las Vegas strip, where his timeshare holiday tower is being built. He also cryptically takes credit for single-handedly getting George W. Bush elected in 2000. As events unfold and his fortune dwindles, David is forced to become more humble, his personality becomes noticeably more curmudgeonly (witness the scene where he blows up over unused house lights being left on), and the ongoing struggle to hold onto his business seems to take most of the wind out of his sails.

While I’m willing to bet that Greenfield’s original vision would have also produced a great film, the fortuitous timing of her being present during the family’s financial downfall adds extra layers of tragedy and dark comedy to the story that make The Queen of Versailles a standout. Resonating almost as deeply as the film’s document of the Siegels’ American dream on steroids is the amazing honesty and candour Greenfield draws out of her subjects, in both good times and bad (particularly the bad). Although Jackie has a good heart and a fun, larger-than-life personality, it’s difficult to feel too much sympathy for the Siegels’ plight when you’re shown example after example of their reckless spending. It’s also worth considering that the same corrupt financial system that aided David in amassing his fortune also served to eventually undo him.

Interestingly, David sued Greenfield for defamation after The Queen of Versailles‘ world premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival, taking issue with how he was presented in the film (the lawsuit is ongoing). Jackie, however, attended the premiere and has become good friends with the director.

Official site of the film

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