Category: TIFF

Thank You For Smoking (UK, director Jason Reitman): At the film festival a few years back, I saw an incredibly accomplished short film called In God We Trust, and I vowed that if young Jason Reitman (son of Canadian director Ivan Reitman) ever made a feature film, I’d run out and see it. I kept my promise, and Reitman delivers on his.

Aaron Eckhart is Nick Naylor, the tobacco industry’s spin doctor. He is very good at what he does, and manages to be likable while saying and doing despicable things. In this biting satire, Eckhart doesn’t really have any epiphanies, but he thinks he does. After an ill-advised affair with the reporter doing a profile on him, his secrets get out and he loses his job. But after a bravura performance at some Senate hearings, Big Tobacco wants him back. Claiming to have a “responsibility” to his young son, he refuses the job. Instead, by the end, he’s set himself up in business advising all sorts of other icky corporations.

The film is stuffed with very smart laughs, and I liked the fact that Nick emerges unrepentant at the end. It just sharpens the satire, that this man actually thinks he’s now a better person. The tone of the film reminded me quite a bit of Alexander Payne’s Election, though the comedy is much broader.

Reitman loses his deft touch slightly near the end of the film. Up to this point, no one has been seen actually smoking in the film. After a bizarre attempt on his life, Nick is told that he has to quit smoking. It’s a bit incongruous and it’s never mentioned again. I suspect that this is much funnier in the novel by Christopher Buckley on which the film is based.

I would definitely recommend this film, not only for its skewering of the tobacco industry (standing in for all corporations, really), but also for its jabs at Washington and Hollywood as well. No one is spared. You’ll even get to see Rob Lowe in a kimono!

(9/10)

Brothers Of The Head (UK, directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe): Based on a novella by science-fiction author Brian Aldiss, this film attempts to tell the story of Tom and Barry Howe, conjoined twins who are plucked from their family by an impresario in order to form a rock band.

Almost deliberately gimmicky, the film is also too clever by half (if you’ll pardon the pun). By mixing genres, styles and moods, the directors (whose previous film was the excellent documentary Lost In La Mancha) lose their way pretty quickly. I was never sure whether I was meant to take it all seriously or not. Flashbacks, dream sequences, it was all just a bit much. Plus, the promised rock and roll just didn’t move me. I was reminded a bit too much at times of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a film I found original and moving. But in this case, the songs just weren’t as good, nor were the main characters sympathetic. A more unfavourable comparison would be the similarly disappointing Velvet Goldmine.

(4/10)

We Feed The World (Austria, director Erwin Wagenhofer): I would call this film a Mondovino for food. By which I mean it is an examination of how globalization and the growth of the power of corporations has affected the production of food. The director dispassionately takes us to farms in Romania and Brazil, a fishing boat in Brittany, a greenhouse in southern Spain, and a chicken processing plant in Austria.

In all these places, we see traditional practices being abandoned in favour of giant factory operations. In each place, someone on camera asserts that flavour is not as important as price or appearance. So we see hothouse tomatoes being driven 2500 kilometres to be sold, we see rainforest cleared to grow soybeans, even though the soil is unsuitable, and we see the entire eight-week life cycle of thousands of chickens, raised to supply the incessant demands of the world for cheap food. Watching factory-farmed chickens being “processed” might be enough to turn some people into vegetarians. Except for the fact that our vegetables are really no better.

There is some interesting information about GM (genetically modified) crops which are resistant to herbicides like Monsanto‘s Roundup and the growing use of hybrid seed. Unlike regular seed, which farmers used to save from year to year, hybrid seed cannot be used to raise a second crop, forcing farmers to keep buying seed from large seed firms like Pioneer. This raises all kinds of issues, and I really think the film could have spent more time here.

The film ends with an interview with the CEO of Nestlé, the largest food manufacturer in the world, who muses on “attaching a value” to water, and calls the position of the NGOs, that access to clean water is a human right, “extreme”. After bragging how many jobs his corporation is creating, and how many families it is supporting, he glances at an informational video of one of Nestlé’s Japanese factories, and marvels how it is so roboticized. “Hardly any people,” he crows.

The only significant weakness to this documentary was its unrelenting gloom. I would have liked to have been given some ammunition or to have seen some success stories, or at least some rebellion. But there wasn’t any. Since I have an interest in this area, I can point you to the Slow Food organization, which is trying to encourage more consumption of local products and the preservation of disappearing foodstuffs. But I really wish the director had done it instead.

(8/10)

Capote (USA, director Bennett Miller): Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of my favourite actors, period. But he’s usually known for character roles, and so he’s not quite the household name he deserves to be. And sadly, because this film probably won’t have wide appeal, he might remain that way. The truth is that he’s one of the finest actors working today, and this film is a tour de force. Hoffman inhabits the role of Truman Capote, nailing everything from his childlike voice to his fey mannerisms, even down to his facial tics. He’s almost too good, which may distract a bit from the other charms of this film.

If focusses rather narrowly on the time Truman Capote spent writing his most famous book, In Cold Blood. After a family of four is murdered in their remote farmhouse in Kansas, Capote decides to write an article for The New Yorker. After the two murderers are apprehended, Capote begins to form a bond with one of the men, Perry Smith (portrayed with amazing subtlety by Clifton Collins Jr.), drawing parallels between his own troubled childhood and that of the career criminal. The proposed article is abandoned, as Capote realizes he has the material for a book. And not just any kind of book, but a whole new kind of writing, what Capote calls “the nonfiction novel.”

As the months drag on after the men’s convictions, Capote keeps trying to draw Smith out, asking him to tell him about the night of the killings. When he finally does, it’s uncomfortable to watch, not only for the brutality of the murders, but also for the way that Capote uses Smith for his own ends. It’s clear that there is an inner conflict going on in Capote’s mind. On one level, he really does befriend this killer. But he also uses him for material so he can feed his huge ambition and ego. His duplicitous nature is just another thing he has in common with Smith.

But after several years of research, at the end of all the legal appeals to spare the killers’ lives, Capote is relieved to hear they’ll finally be hanged. It’s the only way he can finish his book. However, the experience of actually watching the executions shakes him deeply. His jumbled mixture of feelings and motivations went on to have a profound effect on Capote, and although the book does go on to become his most successful, he never finishes another. The film ends by quoting the epigraph to his final, unfinished manuscript, Unanswered Prayers. It was Christian mystic Teresa of Avila who said that “answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.”

Film’s Web Site: http://www.sonyclassics.com/capote/

(9/10)

Linda Linda Linda (Japan, director Nobuhiro Yamashita): Named for a song by legendary Japanese “punks” The Blue Hearts, this film tells the story of four girls who form a band for an end-of-year high school festival. They decide to play covers by The Blue Hearts, and although the film only covers a few frantic days of practice, the pace is sometimes glacial. I’m not sure that this is a bad thing, though it felt like the film wanted to go in two directions. On the one hand, it was a typically sentimental Japanese film about the passing of youth, and the director gives us a few shots of each of the girls smiling wistfully while gazing off in the distance. On the other hand, it’s a film about a thrown-together-for-the-hell-of-it cover band, and it could have used a bit more of that kinetic attitude. That being said, it was hugely enjoyable (though probably a good 15 minutes too long), and Bae Doo Na, who plays the gawky Korean exchange student, literally steals the film. Her transformation from gawky outsider to sassy singer, though unrealistically quick, is endearing. And only in a Japanese film would someone get to sing the lyrics, “Like a rat, I want to be beautiful” and make it sound heartfelt. I’m giving it a 7.5/10 (2.5 per chord!), even though my graphic below can’t handle half-points.

9/14/05: After harbouring suspicion for a few days, I finally checked and confirmed that this film is NOT directed by the same guy that brought us Waterboys in 2001. That was Shinobu Yaguchi. But the two films are very similar, and equally fun.

Film’s Web Site (Japanese): http://www.linda3.com/

Bae Doo Na’s Web Site (Korean): http://www.doona.net/

(7.5/10)

P.S. This film just made me want to listen to some good old-fashioned DIY three-chord rock and roll on the way home. Here’s what my iPod offered up:

• Spoon – You Gotta Feel It
• Teenage Head – Total Love
• Guided By Voices – A Good Flying Bird

Brilliant. Now I just have to find “Linda Linda Linda” by The Blue Hearts!

P.P.S. I was pleasantly surprised to see in the credits that the film’s music was by James Iha, ex-Smashing Pumpkins.