The Film Corner with Greg Klymkiw

Tarantula (1955) ***½
dir. Jack Arnold
Starring: John Agar, Mara Corday, Leo G. Carroll,
Raymond Bailey, Clint Eastwood

Review By Greg Klymkiw

They say the best science fiction is rooted in “good science”, a view with some merit, but I'd assert that the science should at least seem credible or, at the very least, reveal some sort of truth about the world and/or humanity as we know it. Such is the case with Jack Arnold’s Tarantula, the classic Universal Pictures big-bug picture.

Like his other legendary sci-fi thrillers: The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Creature From The Black Lagoon and, among others, It Came From Outer Space, the science is dubious, but the exploration of issues and themes which touch (or plague, if you will) all of us, even today, Tarantula is as much ahead of its time as it is a product of its time.

The theme of world hunger and the need to find ways to successfully address it is something that hangs over the picture with significant heft. The fact that this issue is something that plagued the world in the 50s, especially during America's post-war/cold-war prosperity within the McCarthy witch hunt hysteria, is what places Tarantula firmly in the pantheon of pictures that truly deserve their classic status. Set in a sleepy Arizona desert town, the resident doctor (played with characteristic stalwartness by the ex-Mr. Shirley Temple, John Agar) investigates the mysterious death of someone who was working as a researcher on the outskirts of this hot and definitely dusty Southwestern hamlet. The Doc suspects there’s more to this death than meets the eye, but his suspicions are ignored.

As these things go in 50s thrillers, the town’s sheriff prefers to believe the bogus diagnosis proposed by the head of the research lab, a respected local scientist (played with delectable aplomb by the venerable ham Leo G. Carroll). You see, the estimable old coot is trying to solve world hunger by making animals bigger - much, much bigger, actually - so that more flesh can be rendered from slaughtered beasts to fill the empty bellies of those without. He takes on a new assistant, a fetching, young female scientist (the drool-inciting Mara Corday) who not only provides him with ample support (in, uh, more ways than one), but is also an amorous target for Doc Agar.

When Doc Leo is exposed to the formula he’s been using on tarantulas, guinea pigs, bunnies and other assorted small animals, he himself slowly transforms into a crazed, deformed monstrosity whilst the increasingly mysterious deaths and disappearances in the vicinity are attributed to a tarantula who’s been chowing down a wee bit too much growth juice.

On the surface, Leo G. Carroll’s character is from a long line of mad scientists, but his obsession is not in any way tinged with self-interest. He's not seeking wealth or power. Doc Leo's goals are honourably altruistic. His suffering is all the more poignant because his desire to bestow good upon the world is a life’s work that ends his life and the lives of others. His failure – given that his experiments result in something destructive – is especially frustrating and finally, very moving – tragic, even.

The movie is replete with admirable qualities. The performances are all superb (within the framework and context of the genre) and the writing is more than serviceable. Though the screenplay doesn’t quite reach the transcendent heights of Richard Matheson’s work on The Incredible Shrinking Man, it does feature more than a few great lines of dialogue that are genuinely campy – genuine because they are INTENTIONALLY cheesy and NOT a result of being dated.

Most impressive are the optical effects involving the enlargement of actual tarantula footage. Clifford Stine’s work on the special effects is as effective as some of today’s best digital work. Sure, the effects occasionally fall short, but then, so do many digital effects these days. At least optical effects are infused with a warmth that's decidedly lacking in digital. Yup, even in the movies, it boils down to the grand old vinyl vs. CD debate. At the end of the day, we let the picture work its considerable magic.

One fun note of trivia is that Clint Eastwood appears in a tiny, but important role during the climax of the picture. It seems thoroughly appropriate that it is Eastwood who commands all his bombers to let rip and decimate the brick-shithouse that is the Tarantula. And, even more interesting, is that Tarantula’s fetching leading lady Mara Corday was cast years later by Eastwood as the wise-acre waitress who signals Harry Callahan that danger is afoot in her café in the now-almost-classic Sudden Impact.

Tarantula is an absolute must-see. It holds up admirably and will also provide great entertainment for the kiddies (of ALL ages). Most importantly, like all great sci-fi thrillers, it provides big emotions, food for thought AND one hell of a rollercoaster ride.

Tarantula is available in a superb box set of ten 50s classics entitled "The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection Volumes 1 and 2" from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

The Galapagos Affair:
Satan Came To Eden
Dir. Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine (2013) ***
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Diane Kruger, Connie Nielsen, Sebastian Koch, Thomas Kretschmann, Gustaf Skarsgard, Josh Radnor

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"...I looked and saw the sand. Alive, all alive, as the new hatched sea turtles made their dash to the sea, the birds hovered and swooped to attack, and hovered and swooped to attack, they were diving down on the sea turtles, turning them over to expose their soft undersides, tearing their undersides open, and rending and eating their flesh." - Mrs. Venable from the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly Last Summer

When the negative to Alfred Hitchcock's The Empress of Floreana was lost to a fire in a shed on the backlot of Paramount Pictures, the Master of Suspense would rue the day he had his trusty camera assistant dispatch the precious materials to this secret location. Hitch feared that the studio's already cold feet about the daring film would become even more frigid and he simply did not trust leaving any of it to the care of the climate controlled vaults. He even ordered all still negatives be stored there too, along with screen tests, all the requisite costume and lighting tests and even the storyboards. With only two-thirds of the film in the can, Paramount ordered the production to wrap and instead, cashed-in on the insurance policy to cover the losses.

Able to apportion company overhead to the policy, Paramount actually profited on the claim. The studio's gain, so to speak, was cinema's loss. Brimming with sex, sadomasochism, adultery, violence and, of course, murder most foul, the film was based upon the true story of Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Cary Grant in a dyed blonde flattop haircut), an obsessive Nietzschean philosopher and scientist who fled German society in the 1920s with his devoted, subservient mistress Dore Strauch (Joan Fontaine) and settled on the uninhabited Galapagos island paradise of Floreana. Here the couple's once passionate love dwindles as Ritter transforms into a controlling, mean-spirited introvert and Dore is forced to seek companionship with the only living thing on the island that will pay attention to her - a donkey.

Unfortunately, word of the couple's flight made it back to the Fatherland and soon, another German family, the Wittmers (Joseph Cotten and Claudette Colbert), decide to follow in their footsteps. Ritter sees this is as the ultimate intrusion upon his desire to be free of all human interaction - so much so, that when the pregnant Mrs. Wittmer experiences a painful, dangerous labour in the cavern Ritter has set them up in as a home, he only grudgingly, and at the last minute, agrees to help - in spite of the fact that he's a skilled physician who swore to the Hippocratic Oath.

Adding insult to injury, a third party invades the island, the Baroness Von Wagner (Grace Kelly) and her two boy-toys (Tab Hunter and Martin Landau). The Baroness has plans to erect a massive tourist hotel on the island, though as the tale progresses, it's suspected that she's a fraud, a con artist on the lam. Tension intensifies as the Baroness begins to make eyes at Ritter and Mr. Wittmer. This infuriates their significant other and wife, as well as the boy toys. All are plunged into the roiling, seething waters of jealousy and betrayal.

Floreana also becomes host to Captain Alan Hancock (Thomas Mitchell), a well-heeled commander of a shipping vessel who fancies himself a filmmaker of exotic locales in the Schoedsack and Cooper tradition (both of whom were amalgamated into the Carl Denham character in the legendary RKO production of King Kong). Hancock decides to make a movie about the Baroness in which she stars as herself. Neither Strauch nor Mrs. Wittmer will participate in the other female role, so the Baroness convinces one of her boy toys (the one played by Martin Landau) to take the other female role in drag. Hancock's film, The Empress of Floreana is shot, much to everyone else's consternation.

The tropical vat of illicit couplings and envy boils over and soon, the horizon is clearly pointing to murder.

That this is a true story is all the more phenomenal. What would have been even more phenomenal is if the events described above actually were the contents of a lost Hitchcock film (or even one that was truly made). No, dear reader, that bit is a flight of Key To Reserva fancy on my part. (Reserva is Martin Scorsese's 2007 extended promotional film for Freixenet Cava champagne that presented a "lost" Hitchcock film and so superbly done, it fooled even the biggest movie geeks - myself included.)

All that said, everything described, save for my imaginary dream cast (and director, 'natch), is the compelling mystery thriller of a documentary that's been expertly crafted by directors Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. Using the writings of the principal participants in this genuine adventure in the Encantatas (and voiced superbly by a fine cast including Cate Blanchett), a wealth of archival materials, still photos, newspaper/magazine clippings, actual home movie footage (including that shot by the real Captain Hancock), The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden is a documentary feature that has you sliding off the edge of your seat as you follow this astonishing, riveting tale (with your jaw occasionally hitting the floor).

The movie incorporates newly shot footage of life in the Gslapagos now, including interviews with current residents and even several living descendants of the aforementioned parties. Though there's some great stuff in these sequences, the lurid narrative employing the archival materials and narration almost seems like it would have been enough to render a terrific picture. Alas, the modern stuff, more often than not, just seems to put occasional stops to the otherwise gorgeous flow of the proceedings.

This, however, is not enough to drag the movie down irreparably and you'll be treated to a very strange, creepy and often suspenseful picture. And yes, there is a movie buried in here that Hitch himself would have done wonders with, but Geller and Goldfine acquit themselves admirably enough in presenting a torrid real-life melodrama that keeps you fascinated and guessing to the end.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden is a Kinosmith Release which opens at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on April 11-18, 2014 and throughout the rest of Canada on a platform release. For further info, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.

Oculus (2014) ****
Dir. Mike Flanagan
Starring: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane, Annalise Basso, Garrett Ryan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Okay, so it's official. I have yet another terrific independent American director to add to my list of supremely talented artists who are making really cool shit in genres of the fantastical. I passionately loved Mike Flanagan's 2011 shocker Absentia (in spite of a few niggling drops of the ball on a narrative level). It fuelled my need for first-rate direction that exceeded mere craft and displayed an original voice and it mostly did what I love horror movies to do by mining the creepy crawly in normal everyday life and deliver jolts of terror in ways first developed by the Master and Father of Horror, RKO's legendary Val Lewton.

Oculus is a cinematic equivalent to the paralyzing effects of batrachotoxin in those pesky South American dart frogs. It doesn't take long for you to be infected with the movie's power to shut down all the neurons, rendering you immobile and susceptible to its power to induce cardiac arrest. Worst of all, or rather, BEST of all, is that the picture is so riveting you'll feel like Alex in A Clockwork Orange during his "treatment". Appropriately, given the picture's title, your oculi are pretty much Krazy-glued to the screen and once you're sitting there, means of escape simply don't exist.

On one hand, the movie is rooted in one of the oldest horror story tropes in the book - the mirror that forces its characters to indulge in the most insidious, malevolent behaviour. On the other hand, Flanagan orchestrates the proceedings with such aplomb that you'll feel like you're watching a horror movie of incredibly rich originality which, of course, it is. Flanagan takes all the tropes and turns them on their head, forcing the blood to rush to the top of your cranium whilst marvelling at how fresh and vital the picture feels.

Set mostly over the course of one supremely disquieting evening, Oculus tells the spooky story of Kaylie (Karen Gillan) and her younger brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) as they square off against an antique mirror which, during their childhood, turned Daddy (Rory Cochrane) into a hot-headed abuser and their Hot Mama (Katee Sackhoff) into a victim who is beaten and tortured by hubbles. In retaliation. young Tim (Garrett Ryan) commits a brutal, merciless crime of passion which sends him to the nuthouse and forces his young Sis (Annalise Basso) into foster care. It's years later and upon Bro's release from the booby hatch, Lil Sis sets things up to destroy the evil once and for all, but also capture the events on multiple cameras to prove, first to Bro' that he was not responsible for the tragedy and to also convince the world he was innocent.

Once Hunky Brother and Babe-o-licious Sister are locked in that house with the mirror, the movie is so consistently hair-raising that you'll be wishing you'd thought to wear a pair of Depends during the screening. Reality is never what it seems and the picture veers from flashback to flash forward and back again whilst straddling real and imagined assaults on the senses of the characters (and us).

I especially love how Big Sis rigs the whole house up with audio visual aids and temperature sensors. It's a nice nod to the first Paranormal Activity (a genuinely terrific picture in spite of the sequels and the endless, mostly awful rip-offs it inspired), but it's also fun getting the added perspectives of screens in plain view during the proceedings. Sometimes, we get to see shit, the characters DON'T see when they're not looking when WE are.

Flanagan also edits the film himself which I'm always happy to see when genuine filmmakers, as opposed to the usual camera jockeys recruited to helm so many contemporary genre films. He clearly and efficiently has a great eye for what he needs to builds slow creepy scares as well as the de rigueur shock cuts. The latter are especially well handled in terms of knowing when to utilize sound, often a few frames before actual picture cuts for maximum impact. His compositions are also first rate. Flanagan and cinematographer Michael Fimognari obviously had a great rapport since the frame is always the way it needs to be for maximum narrative impact and I especially loved the appropriately evocative lighting.

The cast, right across the board, is first rate also. Not only are the performances right on the money, I'm going to be a pig here and say how wonderful it is that he casts a trio of actors who are not only first-rate thespians, but frankly, it's always a bonus when the female leads are major drool-inducers and even better, when the picture delivers the cherry on the sundae of a super cute young fella as the male lead.

Try to see Oculus on a big screen while you can. Though I often hate sitting with real people, this movie is a genuine crowd pleaser and it was fun sitting in a massive cinema with a whack of folks screaming, jumping and shuddering with utter delight. In fact, it's probably a great idea to see the movie during the first or second week before it's moved into smaller-screened venues. The picture really looks gorgeous and on a humungous screen, you'll get mega-bang for the buck.

Oculus is in wide release and in Canada it's being distributed by VVS Films.

The Terminal Man (1974) ****
dir. Mike Hodges

Starring: George Segal, Joan Hackett, Richard A. Dysart, Jill Clayburgh, Donald Moffat, Matt Clark,
Michael C. Gwynne, James B. Sikking,
William Hansen

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Forces increasingly dominate us beyond our control.

In this respect, Mike Hodges’s brilliant 1974 science fiction thriller The Terminal Man, adapted from Michael Crichton’s chilling novel of the same name, seems more scary and necessary than ever. A few nitpicking details from when the film was made over 35-years-ago – outmoded robots and doctors puffing away on cigarettes in a hospital – are not enough to seriously date it. This is a picture that displays a keen ahead-of-its-time sophistication in both execution and subject matter.

Harry Benson (George Segal) is a brilliant young computer scientist. He suffers from epileptic blackouts wherein aberrant behaviour, including vicious uncontrollable acts of violence lead to criminal incarceration. Adding to this mix is Harry’s paranoia-fuelled mistrust of computers themselves – an especially queer fear for someone considered above the curve in terms of his research. In seeming desperation, Harry agrees to become a human guinea pig for a group of surgeons who believe behaviour can be controlled by implanting chips and electrodes in the brain, which, in turn, are connected to a mini-computer within the body.

Like any great Frankenstein tale, shit goes wrong - horribly wrong.

Screenwriter-director Mike Hodges is working at the peak of his powers here. Having just rendered Get Carter, the extraordinary and deliciously nasty British crime thriller with Michael Caine), Hodges infuses this sci-fi nerve-jangler with an ultra-creepy mise-en-scene that, for its first half, keeps you super-glued to your seat, eyeballs locked firmly on the screen.

What gets to you is how quiet the movie is. The hollow, late evening reverberations permeating the hospital wherein much of the movie is set, slither deeply into your guts so that every sound you DO hear is fraught with urgency so that the hushed tones of doctors and nurses infuse everything with paranoia.

One of the stranger cutaways in the picture is when Hodges occasionally directs us to a group of proletarian orderlies guffawing away as they disparage their charges. It’s an odd visual and aural juxtaposition between opposite ends of the hospital hierarchy. Those on the “bottom” are upfront about their contempt while those on “top” hold their proverbial cards close to their chests. On one hand, this seems like an obvious directorial touch. And yes, it is obvious. Importantly it doesn’t take you out of the drama, but forces you at the proper juncture in the story to come to this juxtapositional conclusion and, in fact, adds to the overall feeling of manipulation that is directed at Harry. It also suggests that the world is increasingly fraught with a lack of caring and where self-preservation and contempt are perfectly comfortable bedfellows.

There is also no traditional musical score save for the occasional use of Glenn Gould tinkling his creepy ivories with one of the Goldberg Variations and a brief moment when hospital Muzak filters onto the soundtrack and into Harry’s brain as he is wheeled into the operating theatre. Lack of a full-bodied orchestral score for a thriller was – even in the 70s – a brave, unconventional move. These days – when every thriller is replete with herky-jerky cutting and bombast – such a touch is virtually unheard of (much, I think to the detriment of the genre, audiences and cinema on the whole). Val Lewton’s thrillers for RKO in the 40s were a perfect example of how true horror could be found in the dark and by what you didn’t see. With The Terminal Man, it’s what you don’t HEAR that adds to the terror.

One of the more grotesque elements of Hodges’s terrific picture is how so much of the film is set in a hospital, but even more intense is the inclusion of a brilliant sequence when the operation itself is performed upon Harry. He keeps his lens trained on virtually every pre-op, post-op and during-op moment – the sweat, the rubber gloves, the clamps, the needles, the scalpels, the blinding lights, the fluorescent glare and the ever-present view of white-coated officials viewing the proceedings from above behind glass.

The look of the film also adds to the creep factor. The movie is drained of primary colour – white rules, as does the darkness, the black shroud of evil. The only colours to ever punch out are (appropriately enough) red (during several shocking punctuations of blood-letting) and a typically sad 70s climax/conclusion set amidst the grey tombstones in a lush, green cemetery. Hodges's compositions are straight forward and many of the shots play long - allowing for maximum dramatic impact. One of the more chilling shots that recurs throughout the film is an eye through a peephole, surrounded only by pitch black and framed so that our eyes are drawn immediately to the exposed image and stay there - almost as if we were one the other side being examined.

The cast is first-rate. The gorgeous Joan Hackett provides a bit of offbeat warmth as a psychiatrist who doesn’t trust the operation being performed on Harry. She is surrounded by stalwart 70s character actors like Richard A. Dysart, Matt Clark, Michael C. Gwynne, James B. Sikking and Donald Moffat all delivering their cold, calculating best as the raft of bureaucrats, doctors and scientists. There’s a terrific cameo from the great William Hansen as a doctor from the “old school” who delivers a stirring condemnation of the use of surgery for mental illness and a very young and hot Jill Clayburgh briefly lights up the screen as Harry’s sex kitten girlfriend.

As the title character, George Segal is the true revelation. He was the go-to guy for 70s romantic comedies – in fact, a whole whack of great comedies, my favourite being the thoroughly insane black comedy Where’s Poppa where Ruth Gordon pulls down his pants to kiss his “tuschy”. Segal was, and still is, a great actor and certainly, as he proves in this picture, no mere lightweight. He always had an edge that many comic actors lacked. His performance as Nick in the Mike Nichols film version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf proved that in spades. Here, he blends his edgier qualities with his lighter leading man qualities to present a character we’re with from beginning to end.

The Terminal Man suffers slightly from inevitabilities inherent in both the genre and narrative itself. The movie is a Frankenstein story, after all, and it's only a matter of time before Harry runs amuck and must be hunted down. The journey to get there, however, is tremendously compelling.

Mike Hodges is a ludicrously underrated director. Not only is it worth seeing The Terminal Man, but I highly recommend the aforementioned Get Carter, his strange crime comedy Pulp, the wonderful Flash Gordon, a joyous 80s celebration of sci-fi cheese with a score (no-less) by Queen and one of the best British films of the past couple of decades, Croupier.

The Terminal Man is available via on-demand special order from Warner Home Entertainment via the Warner Archives collection. You’ll also find it for sale or rent in specialty video stores. In Toronto, Canada the only retail outlet that carries a wide selection of these titles is the flagship store of Sunrise Records at Yonge and Dundas. As per usual with the archives, the item a simple on-demand package. The DVD-R features the movie and the trailer. The transfer is from best available materials. One can see the reel change markers every so often, so it has obviously been taken from a solid archival print. The colours – when Hodges allows them – are vivid and the whites are suitably stark. I was especially impressed, as I have been with many of the Warner Archives transfers, with the grain. It’s there!!! And it’s doing its magical dance as only grain can. I’m thankful no over-zealous control room hack has taken the time to mute it.

I’m disturbed, however, that Warner Bros. has chosen not to release this film properly. It’s a sci-fi picture that the core audience – especially of a certain age – absolutely love. Those who missed it the first time (I was a 15-year-old genre geek when I saw it first-run in the 70s on a big screen), will love it. As well, a whole new generation of geeks deserves to experience it. Given that director Mike Hodges, stars George Segal, Richard A. Dysart, Michael C. Gwynne, Donald Moffat and Matt Clark are all still alive and also given the film’s many admirers (one of whom is Terrence Malick), I’m sure there would be a huge audience if the movie was properly transferred to Blu-Ray (where I think it would look magnificent) and featuring a solid Laurent Bouzereau-styled documentary and one or two commentary tracks.

Warner Home Entertainment: ARE YOU LISTENING?

The film (in addition to some other cool period sci-fi) is available online at the various Amazon sites which you can order directly from these links and, in so doing, assist with the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner:

And here is a selection of some terrific Mike Hodges movies:

THIS MAN IS A SCUMBAG, BUT WHAT A MAN,
WHAT A SCUMBAG!

Here's a treat for Torontonians. See the Oscar-Winning thriller on a big screen from the 4K digital restoration used for the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray. SEE IT ON A BIG SCREEN @TIFF CINEMATHEQUE SPECIAL SCREENINGS SPRING 2014 - 1 SHOW ONLY, APRIL 17, 9:30pm, TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX. THEN BUY THE MOVIE ON BRD WITH ALL THE DELECTABLE CRITERION COLLECTION TRIMMINGS TO ENJOY FOREVER.

Fetishes Galore! Sex, Murder and Vinyl. Always, Vinyl.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) ****
Dir. Elio Petri
Starring: Gian Maria Volonté, Florinda Bolkan

Review By
Greg Klymkiw

A homicide detective on the eve of his promotion to head the department of domestic terrorism plays one final fetishistic sex-and-death-game with the sexy mistress who gets off on the morbid rituals as intensely as he does. Things go according to his perverse plan, but when part of the thrill is to commit a ghastly crime and load up as many clues as possible pointing in his own direction, nobody will presume he's guilty. Class will ALWAYS shield the sinful and he is, after all, a citizen of distinction and hence, above suspicion...so much of what occurs in this film - just a few years shy of being half a century old - has the kind of resonance so many cinematic post-9/11 indictments approach with mere kid gloves in comparison...In any age, this would have proven to be a deeply disturbing film, but now, somehow, it's beyond that which is merely unsettling. We could well be watching a movie set in the here and now and realize that what we're watching is not far at all from the terrible truth of the world we live in.

READ MY FULL REVIEW FROM DECEMBER 8, 2013 HERE.

For further info and tickets, visit the TIFF website HERE.

Here's some info on the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray. You can order it directly from the links below and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

"Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" is currently available in a first-rate dual format (Blu-Ray and DVD) edition from the Criterion Collection. The film not only looks and sounds great, but the added value extra features are so bountiful and illuminating that this is definitely a must-own title for all true aficionados and collectors of fine cinema. The package is replete with all the bells and whistles including a 4K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural sound, a revealing archival interview with director Elio Petri, a tremendous feature length documentary entitled "Elio Petri: Notes About a Filmmaker", an interview with scholar Camilla Zamboni, a fifty-minute doc on the star of Petri's film "Investigation of a Citizen Named Volonté" and a superb interview with composer Ennio Morricone. Add to this the requisite trailers, new English subtitle translation, a lovely booklet packed with great written material and one Blu-ray and two DVDs all in attractive packaging.

Just a little higher & this fella's getting an unwanted penile implant
or a very uncomfortable butt-plug.

This is a very sick man.
VERY, VERY sick.

Stress Position (2013) ***
Dir. A.J. Bond, Scr. A.J. Bond
Starring: A.J. Bond, David Amito, Margeurite Moreau

Review By Greg Klymkiw

At first you think you're possibly watching an Ulrich Seidl-inspired documentary with delightfully youthful pretensions as two young gentlemen face each other in gorgeously lit and composed profile shots. They engage in a casual conversation about who they are, how they met, what they do and how they've been inspired to engage in a perverse psychological experiment. Their inspiration to plunge into this experiential enterprise was borne out of previous conversations about enhanced torture methods in the notorious Guantanamo Bay and how they might be able to conduct and survive such inhuman and immoral torments. A.J. (writer-director Bond) happily wins a rock, paper, scissors toss and his pal David (David Amito) must be the first to succumb to the torture. There is a substantial cash prize at stake, but also the strength of character victory achieved by the person who doesn't crack first. When we enter an elaborately designed movie set with a bizarre metallic (and delectably phallic) structure in the middle of a blazing white room, adorned with a huge two-way mirror and populated with hooded figures manning a variety of cameras, we pretty much abandon the notion of this being a twee mock-doc and feel we're entering the world of a nasty thriller - a kind of Michael Haneke on crack, if you will. And then, the torture begins.

It's harrowingly vicious and personal. From simple spitting in the face, through to denial of washroom privileges to bondage and demands of self-inflicted pain to generate self portraits upon the white floor with bodily parts and, uh, fluids. As the torture intensifies, the friendship between the men appears to have a lot left unsaid until now.

Entering the mix is a chilly babe-o-licious ice goddess (Margeurite Moreau) behind the scenes. She's A.J.'s partner in torture and she's the arbiter of what's real and what isn't. She pushes A.J. to not fake it, so that David will, in turn, not be faking it. She demands that she has to believe what she's seeing. A.J. comes to his senses (if one wishes to call them that) and begins to push the torture to such extremes that even our Valkyrie-like babe is taken aback.

Eventually, the tables turn.

And it ain't pretty.

Seriously.
This man is a sick-fuck!

Stress Position is, for the most part an effective and entertaining thriller. It's unfortunate that the tale doesn't push the political implications of the two male characters and their actions within the bourgeois context they're both clearly derived from. There's a sense of a wasted opportunity to take this so much further. As well, it sometimes feel like the film is actually holding back on really going the distance in terms of the sick-o-meter.

Given that it's a low budget affair with little of the usual nonsense that plagues even indies, one keeps waiting for us to travel along the paths of true demented nastiness like, for example, the brilliant Carré blanc by Jean-Baptiste Léonetti or the Soska Sisters' astonishing American Mary. By hammering home both their respective political bents with utter extremities of depravity, both of those movies take us to genuinely shocking places that eventually yield surprising cores of humanity. Stress Position never goes there and yet it feels like a movie that wants to go there. In the end, the movie feels a lot colder and clinical than I think it needed to be.

In spite of this, though, the movie is dazzlingly shot and designed and the performances, especially by Bond (this guy could surely moonlight as a character actor in roles of total scumbaggery), are always engaging. Even more happily, the film is bereft of that horrendous Canadian tweeness that plagues so much of the country's output and importantly, one feels like we're watching the work of a filmmaker with a voice as opposed to that annoying tendency of too many Canadian directors looking to generate their "Look Ma, I can use a dolly and direct series television" calling card nonsense.

Watching the film, you at least feel you're on the ground floor of a filmmaker who's new and exciting, rather than some competent loser-hack looking for a gig.

Stress Position opens theatrically at the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinema in Toronto on April 18, 2014 and will hopefully roll out across the rest of the country soon.

The Battery (2013) **1/2
Dir. Jeremy Gardner
Starring: Jeremy Gardner, Adam Cronheim, Niels Bolle, Alana O'Brien

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Before the New England zombie apocalypse, Ben (Jeremy Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) were pro baseball players, but these days they're moving surreptitiously through the woods and backroads, their only contact with anything resembling a human being is the occasional zombie which, of course, will need to be dispatched. Predictably, the guys are polar opposites. Ben's no-nonsense "gotta-keep-moving-like-a-shark" attitude is what keeps them alive and his insistence that they always make time for games of pitch-and-catch is what keeps them human. For Ben, baseball, or at least the vestiges of the once great unifying force of America is the only thing as important as staying alive. The sheer relaxing physicality of it offers a kind of Zen to their seemingly pointless lives.

Ben is also a killer - of zombies, that is. This contrasts wildly with Mickey. He can't bring himself to kill and constantly dons headphones to pipe dreadful angst-ridden contemporary indie rock into his oh-so sensitive consciousness. If Ben's goal is to keep moving to stay alive, Mickey's involves searching for all the things that once made life worth living - home, family, a woman - or, quite simply, stability. The two men are at odds (surprise, surprise), yet they develop a special bond (surprise, surprise) as they move ever-closer to each other (surprise, surprise) and, as they are slackers in a post apocalyptic world, they head ever-closer to nowhere.

Upon hearing a woman's voice over a walkie talkie, Mickey is determined to find her. Ben insists they heed the woman's dire warning about staying away - no use going where they're not wanted. Besides, Ben is concerned that if they were ever separated or if he needed Mickey's help, that his tender-footed companion will be too inexperienced and/or weak-willed to do what needs to be done. Like baseball, practise makes perfect, especially when one must kill or be killed.

There's much to admire in the picture - in theory, anyway. To my mind, artistic ambition is always to be welcomed and certainly The Battery has ambition to burn. Alas, it's just not always an engaging movie. For one, we know it's yet another no-budget horror movie - a zombie movie to boot - and that for damn sure we're going to spend plenty of time in the middle of nowhere having to listen to these guys arguing until they inevitably find their common ground (if, in fact they ever do find it). The movie veers far too dangerously into the dreaded mumblecore territory that far too many untalented indie directors use as an excuse (consciously or unconsciously) to mask their inherent ineptitude as filmmakers. Gardner is not in this category. Though the jury is still out, one feels he's going to eventually emerge supreme with his next picture or two.

However, he needs to do more than tried and true variations of genre. For example, we are well aware that the woman's voice over the two-way signal is coming from a survivalist compound, but because the picture is so obviously made on the cheap, we know we're never going to get there because that's going to cost money that this movie simply doesn't have. I hate to say it, but when I think about the myriad of truly great no-to-low-budget cult films over the decades, the recent preponderance of shooting in one room or the middle of nowhere with story choices that are obviously rooted to budget issues is becoming increasingly and frustratingly boring and/or annoying.

The only thing that can battle this are elements the movie flirts with, but never goes the distance with. For example, the overall atmosphere of the picture is so bleak - capturing zombies, killing practice, jerking off to hot zombie chicks in wet t-shirts, plenty of staring into space and the aforementioned indie soundtrack that drips ever-so horrifically with ennui - we feel we're in for the de rigueur bleak ending. It's inevitable, really, and given this certitude, plus all the arty wheel-spinning going on, I wished the filmmaker might have found other instances to match the cool brilliance of the killing practice sessions and the masturbation scene.

I can imagine it now - a tagline that reads: "I pull my schwance to dead people." Where that movie?

The potential for Gardner's picture to have moved even deeper into a chasm of sickness and despair is the very thing that could have put it over the top and would have had audiences so charged they'd be clamouring for more. The movie could well have upped the ante on this front without losing its compellingly slow pace.

The predictable element that really disappoints in all this is the inevitability that one of the two is going to get bitten by a zombie and will need to be dispatched before he "turns". Chances are that it's going to be the soulful young man who survives as he appears to have the surface elements of humanity. Or would that be too obvious and lazy? This is, after all, a movie with ambition, or, to put it another way, a whole lotta pretentiousness goin' on.

The screenplay by director and star Gardner isn't especially egregious - the familiar tale takes a few interesting turns, much of the dialogue has a feeling of authenticity and the occasionally perverse frissons add a bit of cache to the now-cliched tropes of the zero budgeted zombie movie. The real question, though, is - do we really need another one of these things? Frankly, I think not - unless, like first-time filmmakers before them - burgeoning directors like Gardner tear a page from the likes of Maestro Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, David Lynch, George Romero (of course), John Waters, Sam Raimi, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky - the list goes on. All the aforementioned generated debut and/or follow-up features that truly pushed envelopes. The Battery, merely nudges said envelopes. Movies, especially those with no money, need a lot more than mere nudging.

And now, allow me to veer into broken record territory - I've said this before and I'm going to say it again. I'm especially getting sick and bloody tired of no-budget zombie movies (and other no-budget genre pictures) that force us to watch 90 minutes of hairy, smelly guys. Even Lynch's Eraserhead gave us the hot hooker babe living across from Henry, Mary and their deformed baby and, lest we forget, the super-cute Lady in the Radiator with testicle cheeks and a winning smile as she squashed the huge, milky, pus-filled spermatozoa dropping from the ceiling. Have any of these filmmakers ever heard of writing roles to populate with babes?

Women are finally so much more interesting and challenging to write for - especially considering that nobody is much interested in more movies solely about slacker guys. Yes, The Battery delivers the previously mentioned sexy zombie chick in a wet T-shirt pressing her shapely boobies against the car window and I give Gardner mega-salutes for that, but the only living babe we get is over a walkie-talkie and when we finally do meet her, she becomes the very thing we suspect she'll become - not to mention that her presence is ultimately too little, too late.

Gardner clearly has talent, though, and I'm really looking forward to what he can do with either more money and/or if he really lets himself cut loose. He needs a good dose of creative Ex-Lax, because The Battery, for all it has going for it, has way too much material that's bunging him up.

Let 'er rip, dear boy, let 'er rip

The Battery screens Thursday, April 17, 2014 | 7:30pm during the visionary Raven Banner's fantastic Sinister Cinema series which brings a series of independent horror films to 28 theatres across Canada. The films will include unique content, and in some cases, special appearances, including live question and answer sessions with directors, pre-recorded interviews and more. Tickets are available at participating theatre box offices. You can see The Battery in the following venues:

Scotiabank Theatre Chinook - Calgary, AB
Scotiabank Theatre Edmonton - Edmonton, AB
Cineplex Cinemas Saint John - Saint John, NB
Cineplex Cinemas Avalon Mall - St. John's, NL
Cineplex Odeon Victoria Cinemas - Victoria, BC
SilverCity Riverport Cinemas - Richmond, BC
Galaxy Cinemas Nanaimo - Nanaimo, BC
Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas - Vancouver, BC
Colossus Langley Cinemas - Langley, BC
SilverCity Polo Park Cinemas- Winnipeg, MB
SilverCity Sudbury Cinemas- Sudbury, ON
Galaxy Cinemas Regina - Regina, SK
Galaxy Cinemas Saskatoon - Saskatoon, SK
SilverCity Fairview Mall Cinemas - Toronto, ON
Cineplex Odeon Winston Churchill Cinemas - Oakville, ON
Cineplex Cinemas Yonge -Dundas Cinemas - Toronto, ON
Cineplex Odeon Eglinton Town Centre Cinemas - Scarborough, ON
Cineplex Cinemas Queensway and VIP - Etobicoke, ON
Colossus Vaughan Cinemas - Woodbridge, ON
Cineplex Cinemas Mississauga - Mississauga, ON
Coliseum Ottawa Cinemas - Ottawa, ON
SilverCity Gloucester Cinemas - Ottawa, ON
Cineplex Cinemas Bayers Lake - Halifax, NS
Cineplex Odeon Forum Cinemas - Montreal, QC
Cineplex Odeon Devonshire Mall Cinemas - Windsor, ON
Galaxy Cinemas Waterloo - Waterloo, ON
SilverCity Hamilton Cinemas - Hamilton, ON
SilverCity London Cinemas - London, ON

Alcatraz Mugshot of Boston Mob Boss Whitey Bulger

Whitey: The United States of America V. James J. Bulger
Dir. Joe Berlinger (2014) *****

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Movies seldom open with the kind of chilling first few minutes that Joe Berlinger's new picture delivers. Stephen Rakes, a gentle white haired teddy bear of a man speaks with a born and bred South Boston accent - the tail-end "r" becomes the telltale "ah", "ing" is always the contraction "'in" and the letter "o", a slightly elongated "aahh". His first few words are an immediately identifiable amalgam of long-ago-lost hope and sadness:

"30 years ago my wife and I purchased a liquor licence and we had the liquor store up and runnin' by Christmas. We poured our heart and soul into it."

A young couple's dream come true becomes a nightmare.

Then lo and behold I gets a knock on my door one night. I'm at the house and my wife is down at the liquor store workin'. And there's Kevin Weeks and Whitey Bulger at the door. . . what the hell did they want? He [Whitey] says 'Ya gotta problem.' I says, 'What problem?' He says, 'Listen, we were hired to kill you. . . you gotta understand, the other liquor stores, they hired us to kill you. . . but what we're gonna do instead of that is we're gonna become your partners.'

Deadly tools of the trade

I says, 'No, you're not becomin' my partners.' And Bulger's just starin' at me and he's grindin' his teeth: 'You don't understand, we're takin' the fuckin' liquor store.' I says, 'It's not for sale.' [Then he says] 'I'll fuckin' kill you. I'll stab you and then I'll kill you.' And then they pulled out a gun and I was like, 'Holy Fuck'. They picked up my kid, my daughter's only a year old. He says, 'It'd be terrible for this kid to grow up without a Father.'"

Stephen Rakes Imitates Whitey Bulger

From here, we're slam-bang even deeper into one of the most harrowing crime pictures ever made. This is no drama, however, but it's certainly imbued with a compulsive narrative expertly unfurled by ace documentary filmmaker Berlinger, co-director with Bruce Sinofsky of the classic West Memphis Three trilogy: Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) and his powerful solo effort Crude (that exposed Chevron and its part in destroying the health and lives of tens of thousands of Ecuadorians when a huge chunk of the Rain Forest was irretrievably polluted by oil drilling).

Focusing on the extraordinary trial of Whitey Bulger, Berlinger's new film film works on several levels. First and foremost, it's a savage indictment of the extent to which the F.B.I.'s involvement in Bulger's crime kingdom went far over the line and, in fact, assisted with his reign of terror. Secondly, Berlinger has seemingly unfettered access to archival footage, F.B.I. surveillance film, the prosecution and defence teams, key witnesses (including Bulger's trusty right hand, killer Kevin Weeks) and the myriad of Bulger's victims. Finally, the picture's the shocking rags-to-riches rise of Bulger - an epic, Scorsese-like crime thriller presented with the rat-a-tat-tat of a 30s Warner Bros' Slavko Vorkapitch/Robert Wise-edited Gangster movie montages and a kind of jack-hammering "News On The March" coldcock to the face.

This is a picture that leaves you breathlessly agog at both the brutality and corruption of a system that allowed a monster like Bulger to get away with his crimes for so long. The human factor, as represented by Bulger's victims, is often heartbreaking to the point where one is moved to tears. Even more stunning is that Berlinger followed the convoluted trial for so long and with such dogged persistence, that we, the filmmaker and a friend of a key witness are actually present for the sickening on-camera revelation that a victim of Bulger's evil is rubbed out before he gets a chance to testify.

Bulger's kingdom of crime lasted 30 years without a single indictment thanks to the corruption of America's Federal Bureau of Investigation. It's a blight upon the institutional crime fighting apparatus of a government long notorious for looking the other way when it served the most nefarious needs for both individuals to feather their own nests and to shield a country fraught with pure evil in its highest echelons of power and supposed enforcement.

Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity, indeed.

Whitey: The United States of America V. James J. Bulger, already has masterpiece status affixed to it and will, no doubt remain a classic of great American cinema long after all of us have gone from this Earth. It's what cinema should be - it's for the ages.

On the heels of its world premiere at Sundance, the visionary Canadian company VSC (Video Services Corp.) presents the film's international premiere at Hot Docs 2014. For further information about playmates, showtimes and tickets, please contact the Hot Docs website HERE.

Here is a lovely selection of VSC (Video Service Corp.) titles you buy directly from the links below, and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner:

1775 - Concord, Massachusetts - The Shot Heard Round The World

Divide in Concord
(2014) Dir. Kris Kaczor ***1/2
Review By Greg Klymkiw

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Throughout the 20th Century, the quaint burgh of Concord, Massachusetts was as peaceful and bucolic as the late 19th Century when Henry David Thoreau experienced and eloquently wrote about nearby Walden Pond, bringing environmental concerns into the consciousness of thinking people the world over.

It wasn't always this way, though.

In 1775 the famous "shot heard round the world" rang out there, signalling the beginning of the American Revolution. As such, its cairns, monuments and flags waving in the wind are ultimately representative of America's sanguineous birth.

The 21st Century, however, yielded the firing of an altogether new shot in this fancifully historic tourist-magnet and one that will, no doubt, be heard round the world thanks to Divide in Concord, an inspiring and vital feature documentary by Kris Kaczor. Focusing upon the trigger finger belonging to the unlikeliest of all candidates to lead an altogether new Blue Coat charge, the film's protagonist Jean Hill looks, at first glance, like she'd be more at ease baking pies for the church, knitting sweaters for loved ones and presiding over quilting bees. These stereotypes melt away as we follow her tenacious battle to get her hometown to become a leader in the beginnings of an environmental revolution that will ban the sale of single-serve plastic bottles of water.

Jill Appel and Jean Hill
2012 - Concord, Massachusetts
Hit the World With Their Best Shot

Jean Hill, the octogenarian Mom and Granny is a firebrand. She's aided by her young friend, lawyer Jill Appel in going up against a massive corporate lobby, downright hostile Concord citizenry and stubborn retailers who are blind to the blight of plastic bottle pollution outside of the narrow parameters of greed and convenience. Jean Hill believes Concord can become an important example to other communities and get the ball rolling on eradicating what is, perhaps, the most egregious contribution to pollution from plastic bottles. Jean Hill is 110% right on this. What is the point of manufacturing, selling and consuming single serving bottles of WATER. Water, for God's sake, the elixir of life. How can something so pure and nourishing be contained in these environmentally hazardous receptacles?

As a philanthropist, a mommy,
a model, a celebrity publicist and an
AMERICAN
I believe in choice and I choose
SINGLE SERVE PLASTIC BOTTLES

For me, it's not rocket science. I was on Jean's side within seconds of hearing her plea in the film. Not that I've ever wasted money on single serving plastic bottles of anything. Being a cheap Ukrainian, I believe in filtered tap water, one's own non-plastic receptacle to place it in and for other beverages, the bigger the receptacle, the CHEAPER it is to buy. (As well, for much of the year, I consume nice fresh well water when I'm up at the farm and away from the filthy concrete hole that Toronto is.)

For two years running, Jean has unsuccessfully presented a bylaw to the municipal council during an open town hall assembly. That said, her second bid was lost by a mere seven votes. She feels like 2012 is her year to help Concord make history by being the first community in the world to ban the sale of single bottles. Given how close she came to winning in 2011, her adversaries not only bare their sharpened fangs and claws, but they're going to use them.

The movie's villains are, on one hand, faceless corporations represented by the ominous sounding International Bottled Water Association which uses all its money and power to mount a huge marketing and publicity campaign against Jean. The real antagonist is embodied by a kind of Yummy-Mommy Cruella De Ville, one Adriana Cohen. Her place in this world, in the following order, is thus: Philanthropist, mother, model and celebrity publicist. Let's ignore the last three. They're not that significant for our discussion, save maybe for the "publicist" part, which comes in mighty handy when she chews Jean to bits on a right-wing talk radio show. In all reality, though, it's the "Philanthropist" label that irks me. Who in this world can even begin to identify themselves as a "Philanthropist" first?

Uh, like, rich people, eh.

And, wow! What a mouthpiece for privilege this woman turns out to be. Like some broken record she keeps spouting the same tune: that the rights of Americans to have and make choices are paramount over Hill's environmental concerns. At one point she even argues that if people are against the use of single-serving plastic bottles they can make the choice not to buy them. Yeah, right on, babe! Kinda like homeless people, right? They can make the choice NOT to be homeless.

Ugh.

The ebbs and flows of this battle are exhaustively captured, yet smartly and pointedly edited into a thoroughly captivating true-life drama. Surprises abound, but so do a few shockers. The movie genuinely hits us in the solar plexus with the sort of things that dazzlingly raise us up, but also drag us down.

Divide in Concord is yet another important film in the ongoing canon of environmental feature documentaries, but in some ways, it cleverly places itself at the beginnings of a movement that must truly expand - not to just single-serving plastic bottles, but to the horrendous, disposable use of plastic and not just in a small community like Concord, but worldwide. The film presents some pretty irrefutable evidence as to how our world is being destroyed by these useless receptacles. Many of us know this. We know that much of the plastic is NOT properly recycled. We also know it's one of a myriad of things that are going to kill the world (and in so doing, all of humanity).

Sadly, too many are ignorant to this, but even worse are those who would dare place convenience and profits before survival. Jean Hill is a Saint. And this, is her story.

Divide in Concord is enjoying its World Premiere at Hot Docs 2014. For ticket, time, venue and playdate information, please visit the festival's website HERE.

Adam and Peter. One is Tanzanian, the other Canadian.
Both have albinism. One's called a ghost, the other's a businessman.
Together they're a formidable force against
Ignorance, Hatred and Prejudice.

The Boy From Geita (2014) Dir. Vic Sarin ***½
Review By Greg Klymkiw

In Tanzania, if you're born with albinism, a rare genetic condition that severely lightens the pigmentation of your skin and renders you susceptible to dangerous, damaging effects from the sun's rays, you are less than zero. You're considered a living ghost and the only thing you're good for is what can be extricated from you in death by witch doctors who make use of your body parts for all manner of good luck potions. For as long as albinos have existed in this part of the African continent, they have been subject to prejudice at best and at worst, mutilation or murder.

Call me a Western Colonial Pig, if you will, but from where I sit, there's simply no room in the world for this sort of ignorance and hatred. I don't care how intellectually or financially impoverished the nation is, I don't care about the cultural significance of superstition in said nation. I am sickened by the rampant inhuman beliefs that foster the agony of prejudice. Through the world's kaleidoscopic shards of horrific actions inspired by religion, culture and/or belief systems, the butchery of those suffering from a medical condition is possibly one of the most, if not THE most stomach-churning abominations inflicted by man towards his fellow man.

The legendary cinematographer and filmmaker Vic Sarin presents a story that is, at once appallingly grotesque, yet also, out of the dark side of the human spirit is a tale of profound and deep compassion. The Boy From Geita focuses upon Adam, a 12-year-old albino who is attacked in the middle of the night whilst his father stands nearby and does nothing as his son is hacked mercilessly with a machete. The child miraculously survives this atrocity, but he has been mutilated so severely that if he's not attacked and killed again, he will live a life of the most unbearable hardship.

On the other side of the world in Canada, we meet the successful businessman Peter Ash. Like Adam, he is also afflicted with albinism. Though he recounts the sort of prejudices he faced in childhood, we also learn of his early tenacity and eventual ability to live triumphantly with this condition - how the unconditional love and acceptance via his mother and educational opportunities both allowed him the freedom to surmount all challenges.

These two extraordinary men, against all odds, find each other and the journey we take with them is deeply and profoundly moving.

Heartbreak, however, is a huge component of this tale and there are several moments where I defy anyone to not be wracked with sobs when we hear the stories recounted by albinos who have survived the most vicious attacks - always with machetes. We also share several huge moments of almost nail-biting suspense where we hope against hope that the opportunities to alter the lives of those who've suffered so horribly can come to fruition.

This is a superbly crafted motion picture that finally instills in us and its subjects some semblance of hope for the future. I can think of no better reason to praise the art of cinema for allowing such work to live and breathe so that we all can embrace the true joy inherent in humanity.

The Boy From Geita will enjoy its World Premiere at Hot Docs 2014. For further info, visit the festival website HERE.

The Condemned (2014) *****
Dir. Nick Read
Review By Greg Klymkiw

The screen is pitch black and the sickening sounds of a metal door clanging shut are followed by the hollow echo of footsteps upon a concrete floor and the jangling of keys that are opening yet another door.

Under the malevolent seemingly single note score, slowly and subtly increasing with a nerve-jangling intensity, a voice from the deep chasm of dishearteningly grim opacity chills us to the bone:

"All of a sudden,
I feel a wave of horror.
I dreamt I was with my friends."

As we fade up upon a bleak view of chain link fences adorned with barbed wire and snow-covered barracks and a sky brimming with a tell-tale sub-arctic blue, the voice continues:

"How could they be alive?"

Another fade to black and then a quick fade up on an image distinguished only by a patch of murky light, the sounds of more keys and footsteps accompany the final sickening words:

"I'd killed them."

We are in Russia, or if you will, Hell. For many who are enclosed within the perimeter of fencing and locked gates, this will be their Purgatory until death takes them to the fiery eternal abode of Mephistopheles. Those who are not here for life, came in as young men and will leave as old men. This is the Federal Penal Colony No. 56 in Central Russia, surrounded by hundreds of square miles of deep forest in the Russian taiga. There's only one road in and one road out. The nearest populated community is a seven-hour drive away. The temperatures here frequently dip to 40 below zero.

There's no escape.

Director/Cinematographer Nick Read and producer Mark Franchetti introduce us to two sets of prisoners in this compulsive, staggeringly well crafted and downright great film. The Condemned are split between the most dangerous and the dangerous-but-less-so. The former live in solitary confinement, monitored by video 24-hours per day, not allowed to rest on their bed during the day time, forced to an eternity of pacing back and forth in the tiniest cell imaginable and allowed one hour per day of being outdoors in an chilly outdoor chicken run-styled enclosure not much bigger than their cells. The latter group live in a communal compound wherein they endure endless hard labour and an extremely rigid caste system that reduces many of the men to lives that are perhaps even more worthless than they could already be living.

Aside from capturing the day-to-day drudgery and monotony, Read expertly gets the prisoners to open up and bare their souls about the crimes they committed, their victims, their families, their thoughts and philosophies on forgiveness and redemption. Even more powerful is how the men give us personal glimpses into how they continue to live in a world that is, for the most part, hopeless and how some construct life out of what they can within the rigid construct of the penal system.

A great many of the men were originally on death row, but when Russia abolished capital punishment in 1997, their sentences were commuted to life. What a life. The Russian parliament made sure to enact specific wording in the laws so that daily, gruelling punishment is the order of these men's lives. Even worse is how so many of them men committed their crimes in that period when communism collapsed and the poverty was so overwhelming that the only mode of survival was crime or worse, numbing their pain with so much booze and drugs that many of their violent crimes occurred under the influence.

What's impossible to ignore in this powerful and moving film is a sense of humanity within the most inhuman/inhumane conditions. A handful of scenes involving visitations from family are downright wrenching. Even more brutal is discovering how so many of the prisoners are men of thought and intellect. The discourse of many is not the stereotypical tough-guy talk we expect, but is in fact, deeply thoughtful and philosophical.

There have been many documentaries about prison life, but almost none of them are produced with the kind of eye for cinematic artistry that The Condemned is imbued with. Part of this success comes from Read's direction which is coupled with his superb visual eye as a cinematographer, but also the meticulous pace and cutting from editor Jay Taylor who astoundingly makes monotony compelling and, on occasion, treats us to cuts that are breathtaking in their virtuosity.

The film drains us physically, but what remains is pure spirituality as we are allowed to connect with the souls of men whose actions on the outside include some of the most horrendous acts of violence. This might be the film's greatest strength and one that pretty much ensures its life as a masterpiece - a picture that will live long beyond the usual ephemeral concerns of most movies today.

The Condemned is screening at Hot Docs 2014 in Toronto. For further info, visit the festival website HERE. World Sales by Films Transit International.

Is this Willy Loman? Nope. It's art philanthropist Mark Landis.
In the parlance of The Blues Brothers, he's "on a mission from God."

The Good Father prepares...

Art and Craft (2014) ****
Dir. Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman
Co-Dir/Editor: Mark Becker

Review By Greg Klymkiw

For thirty years, Mark Landis travelled the highways and byways of the United States of America in his big, old red cadillac, donating priceless works of art to innumerable prestigious galleries. In return, he asked for nothing. He wanted neither recognition nor money. Hell, he didn't even want tax breaks. All Landis wanted was to give. And damn, he gave! He gave, in the Red Cross parlance, ever-so generously. Curators, administrators and various art mavens were happy to accept his donations and mount the works of art in their galleries. Everything from Picasso to Matisse to Charles Courtney Curran graced their walls. The list, it seems, goes on and on.

And on. And on. And on. But here's the rub.

American Impressionist makes for fine forgery.

Mark Landis never donated the work as Mark Landis. He used a variety of aliases, replete with elaborate backstories and costumes. His most dynamic pseudonym was that of a solemn, black-robed Father Arthur Scott (replete with a pin of the Jesuit Order).

And if it's a rub, you're looking for, here's the MEGA-rub: Every single work of art he donated was a forgery of the highest order.

And if that's not rub-a-dub-dub-rub-enough for you, Mark Landis was the forger.

So, here's the question:

If you forge great works of art to the point where even the experts are bamboozled and you donate the works pseudonymously with no financial remuneration or even credit, does this make you a criminal? Or better yet, are you any less an artist because of it? Well, let's just say the movie doesn't go out of its way to answer these queries directly, but I suspect most viewers will have no problem drawing their own conclusions.

Art and Craft is the stuff movies (and by extension, dreams) are made of. Filmmakers Cullman, Grausman and Becker have fashioned a thoroughly engaging portrait of an artist as an old man, but not just any garden variety artist. Landis is a sweet, committed, meticulous and gentle craftsman of the highest order. In fact, he's no mere copy cat, he is an artist - reproducing with astonishing detail work that touches and moves, not only himself, but millions. Furthermore, he might well be the ultimate performance artist insofar as his entire life seems like a veritable work of art and certainly, his "cons" in costume are also art of the highest order.

Like any great story, though, there is always an antagonist and much of the film details the cat and mouse game between Landis and Matthew Leininger, a former Cincinnati art registrar who caught on to the wily, old forger. He became so obsessed with tracking him down and exposing the fraud that he eventually lost his job and continued his dogged detective work as a stay-at-home Dad. This was, for me, one of the more interesting elements of the tale - not just for its dramatic conflict, but because it presents a portrait of the two sides of that coin known as the art world.

Landis always comes across as a genuinely brilliant and creative force. Leininger, on the other hand, seems typical of the administrative side of the art world: a petty stickler who plays strictly by the rules and in so doing, displays the kind of frustrating, unimaginative Kafkaesque paper pushing that makes the art world a much lesser place than it could be. That said, Leininger scores a few points for being such a persnickety schlub that his compulsion comes close to destroying his own career via this dogged pursuit.

Landis, of course, is nothing less than a delight - a kind of Willy Loman of art forgery and philanthropy. Wisely, the film fleshes out his life and provides ample information about his strange, lonely childhood, his complicated but loving relationships with his parents and his struggles with mental illness. No fascinating stone is left unturned in the film and the whole experience is never less than enthralling.

Art and Craft proves once again that truth is stranger than fiction, but that a good story is never enough to make a good film, but that it must be a story well told. The filmmakers acquit themselves to this pursuit more than admirably. The movie is as compelling as it is inspiring and happily, it offers some genuine surprises along the way which go straight for the heart and deliver moments as deeply moving as a lot of the art that clearly touches the soul of its protagonist, artist Mark Landis.

Art and Craft is playing at Toronto's Hot Docs 2014. For ticket info, visit the festival website HERE.

STOCKWELL DAY:
CREATIONIST, SPORTSMAN, POLITICIAN
A MAN AMONG MEN

The Secret Trial 5 (2014) Dir. Amar Wala ****

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Before we take some time to consider Amar Wala's chilling and important motion picture The Secret Trial 5, which details the Canadian government's horrendous abuse of five men who were incarcerated for spurious and most likely racist reasons, let us consider Stockwell Day. He ultimately plays a large role in this film since he held the lofty Minister of Public Safety position during a crucial time in the lives of these men, their families and, frankly, all of Canada.

Stockwell Day was an avid supporter of the idiotic security certificate, a 50-year-old immigration tool that can imprison non-Canadians living in Canada for reasons of - ahem - national security. Evidence is never fully revealed, trials are held in secret and the real hope is that those arrested under them, will agree to just go back to whatever country it is they came from.

Unfortunately, since the security certificate became an anti-terrorism tool in Canada after 9/11, people arrested under their auspices would have been committing suicide by agreeing to scurry back. We're talking about political refugees here. Going back meant, and still means, torture and execution. Besides, these were people who'd already made lives here with family, friends, bright futures and contributing to the fabric of Canada's multicultural society.

In the film, however, we're treated to numerous instances of Stockwell Day defending the use of the security certificate and even finding ways to get around a Supreme Court decision that these tools were (and are) constitutional. The bottom line for those like Day and his ilk is that these people are under arrest, stripped of their freedom and pretty much have to rot until they make the "right decision" and bugger off.

Stockwell Day, an avid sportsman, preacher and believer in Creationism (Yup, mankind walking with the dinosaurs) was the Minister presiding over the horrendous incarceration of these five men at a time when they needed a champion in that portfolio instead of an enemy. Then again, this was the same man who suggested that legalizing abortion could lead to child abuse. Injusticebusters.org quotes Day from the Calgary Herald with the following tidbit:

"If you can cut a child to pieces or burn them alive with salt solution while they're still in the womb, what's wrong with knocking them around a little when they're outside the womb."

On homosexuality, the same source quotes Day from the Edmonton Journal with the following nugget of wisdom:

"Homosexuality is a mental disorder that can be cured by counselling [and is] not condoned by God."

Day also expressed that sex education might lead to teen pregnancy:

"There is a growing body of literature suggesting that, as sex education becomes more comprehensive, there is a corresponding increase in sexual activity."

These five guys never had a chance.

Watching this stunning film, I was actually feeling ashamed to be Canadian. That our country could be governed by the likes of Day and the other fascists currently in power is simply beyond the pale. We watch, helplessly, as the film details the abuses these men suffered. Adil Charkaoui, was incarcerated for 21 months and forced to live under house arrest for four years - WITHOUT CHARGES. Hassan Almrei was in jail for seven years, plus forced into three more years under house arrest - WITH NO CHARGES LAID. Mahmoud Jaballah was working as a principal in a Scarborough school when he was arrested, then incarcerated for six years and continues to live under house arrest - AGAIN, NO CHARGES WHATSOVER!!! Mohamed Harkat spent a relatively breezy 43 months in jail and has lived under house arrest since 2006!!!!! Guess what? No charges. The fifth individual, Mohammad Zeki Mahjoub, chose not to participate in the film, but we learn that he was imprisoned for seven years and has continued to live under the strictest house arrest since 2007.

The house arrest is especially harrowing to experience while watching the film. For an individual to be forced to suffer the indignities the film details is yet another aspect that made me ashamed to be Canadian. The aforementioned non-participant in the film has publicly requested to be returned to prison, insisting the cruel and unusual suffering under house arrest is worse than incarceration in a jail. What the film details here in the house arrest of the other participants is indeed, so sickening, it's almost impossible to blame him.

Sometimes, the importance of a film can take precedence over its importance as film art. Such is not the case here. Wala's picture is meticulously researched, surprisingly balanced (given its cinematic activism) and superbly crafted. But most of all, it IS an important work. On the eve of yet another Supreme Court challenge to the unconstitutionality of security certificates that could hopefully result in the release of Mohamed Harkat, every Canadian needs to see this film and raise the hugest ruckus imaginable.

In fact, audiences all over the world need to see this film. It's proof that IF a so-called benign democratic stronghold like Canada is willing to engage in such fascist activities, imagine just how horrendous the whole wide world is becoming with respect to the thug-like imposition of Orwellian measures to keep everyone in their place.

The Secret Trial 5 premieres at Toronto's Hot Docs 2014. For ticket info, contact the festival website HERE.

Olga - To My Friends (2013) Dir. Paul Anders-Simma ***

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Life in Lapland's Russian district has its own special pace. Oft-ascribed stereotypes like "slow as molasses" might spring to mind when considering its day-in-day-out solitude, but the reality is something else altogether. Paul-Anders Simma's gorgeously photographed Olga - To My Friends captures the beauty of silence through the eyes and words of its title protagonist.

Dumped in an orphanage and raised there for most of her childhood and early adolescence, Olga was eventually removed by her Mother when it became convenient for her to "provide" for the family. For some time, Olga has worked in the northernmost reaches of the continent and the film focuses upon her time working with trappers, hunters and herdsman in an isolated outpost. Her primary duties include keeping the food supplies secure and general upkeep. These duties don't necessarily take an eternity, so it seems Olga has plenty of time on her hands.

This is a good deal for both Olga and the audience. It allows her a lot of time to contemplate the north and her life in it (before and beyond). Furthermore, the film allows us to share in these few glimpses into both her inner life and the world that surrounds it. This is a special opportunity because Olga is very sweet, down-to-earth. Her stocky solid frame puts her in good stead to handle the more arduous tasks and her eyes, so sparkling and alive, betray a soul at peace with the world and herself.

We get a few sad glimpses into her past life (one heartbreaking tale from the orphanage moves us to tears), but she doesn't dwell on unhappiness for too long, nor does she ever display the kind of self-pity someone in her position might. She loves the north, she loves nature and she even seems to love the revolving door of solitary men passing through on their way to somewhere, anywhere - just so long as they're not in one place too long - and we're allowed to love all this too.

Simma's picture is barely an hour long. Its running time feels perfectly appropriate as we never feel like it has overstayed its welcome. If anything, the entire experience is so uplifting and engaging, it seems like maybe we don't get as much time as we'd like.

This is another good thing. The best artists always understand the value of leaving an audience wanting more.

Olga - To My Friends plays Toronto's Hot Docs 2014. For further information, contact the festival website HERE.

The Engineer (2014) ****
Dir. Juan Passarelli, Mathew Charles

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In a country with the highest murder rate in the world, most of it gang-related, how does the government prove they're winning the war on crime when they're not? Well, it's simple, really. The majority of gangland slayings, especially in said country, involve dumping the bodies in old wells and septic tanks all over the country, not to mention the fine assortment of unpopulated bush areas, perfect for shallow graves. If bodies aren't found, there can't possibly be as many murders, hence more positive statistics. How then does the country make absolutely sure the stats continue in this fashion? Easy. Make sure the entire country has only one - COUNT 'EM - ONE (!!!) forensic criminologist.

It's through the eyes of the central subject of The Engineer, Israel Ticas, that we learn the aforementioned tidbits and more. With his criminology background in addition to systems engineering, Israel has been charged with the important job of tracking down the bodies of all those who have gone missing. He's pretty savvy to the near-futility of the efforts, but he attacks his duties with passion and meticulous attention to detail - not with any special duty to his country, but to the mothers and grandmothers of all the sons and husbands and fathers of his country who are being murdered, then disappeared into the black holes of this godforsaken, ignored and almost-forgotten corner of the planet.

We are, of course, talking about El Salvador, the physically tiny, but densely populated Central American country that suffered during a bloody civil war that raged through the 80s and early 90s, resulting in a massive genocide perpetrated against its left wing by (who else?) the American-financed military dictatorship. In its wake was a country even more divided and poverty-stricken. Thanks again, America! We couldn't keep making people suffer without you.

Gratefully, it is the bravery and fortitude of filmmakers like directors Passarelli and Charles, in addition to their entire producing team and crew, that we have this superbly wrought motion picture to focus upon one horrific aspect of America's legacy in this country. The suffering experienced in El Salvador these days is palpable. The country is ruled, on one hand, by a corrupt, inept, nest-feathering government and on the other, powerful criminal gangs - engaged in major turf battles to control the underground economy of crime. As the murder rate laughably goes down, the missing person rates climb astronomically.

Israel Ticas is up to the challenge, though. He attacks every exhumation with the careful attention to detail an archaeologist might bring to their work. Israel personifies all the bodies he finds and brings to the surface. His meticulous methods are not only to merely extract corpses, but do so in such a way that he can get a sense of how the body was disposed of, in what shape it was in when it was dumped, how long it took to die, how it died - all this and more provides the details needed to both identify the corpse and amass the information needed just in case someone might want to launch a criminal investigation.

Especially poignant to me is how the film captures Israel's careful, considered work in such a manner that one is overcome with the strange feeling of wanting to get a sense of the body as a living spirit just before death. One thinks about the loving families left behind and wonders what thoughts might have cascaded at the speed of light through the victim's mind just before death and/or disposal? We not only feel this, but sense this is something Israel is grasping for himself.

If Israel were merely a proud man rather than the humanitarian he is, one senses he pride himself, aside from his astonishingly detailed, brilliant work, on his relationship with the survivors of the victims. Every grandmother and mother in every town and city he visits, knows they can talk to him directly about their missing sons, husbands and grandsons. They hope he will recover the missing bodies. He listens and makes note of what they have to say. He WANTS to find the bodies for THEM. The humanity he displays, the commitment he makes to all these victims seems almost superhuman.

And so it is. In a world of madness, poverty and violence, sometimes it's precisely what mankind needs - someone who will listen, care and do everything in his power to help - above and beyond the call of mere duty. In a place like El Salvador. where life is cheaper than the dirt a body will rot in, compassion at a level Israel Ticas displays - especially from someone in government and law enforcement - seems like natural grounds for canonization.

Screw the comic book heroes, Israel Ticas is the real thing.

So's the film.

The Engineer plays at Toronto's Hot Docs 2014. For ticket info visit the festival website HERE.

UKRAINE AND WOMEN at Hot Docs 2014 - PART ONE: LOVE ME

Beyond the myriad of films focusing upon Ukraine that are screening in the Toronto Hot Docs 2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema, the past few years have yielded a ludicrous number of pictures training their lens upon the beleaguered nation. For all intents and purposes, Ukraine has always remained a colonized entity, even in its years of "freedom" since the fall of communism. With the recent and miraculous revolution in Kyiv's Maidan and the subsequent assault upon Ukraine's borders by Russia, the country's most powerful enemy (and frankly, the greatest threat to all of Eastern Europe), one can only imagine the floodgates opening full throttle on Ukraine-centred docs. My hope, however, is that two of the very best films to focus on Ukraine, Love Me, by Jonathon Narducci and Ukraine is Not a Brothel, by Kitty Green, stay first and foremost ahead of what is, and will be, an over-crowded pack.

Love Me (2014) ****
Dir. Jonathon Narducci

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The world of mail-order brides is the focus of Jonathon Narducci's thorough and affecting film. Using the online dating service "A Foreign Affair" as the door into this world, Love Me focuses upon five men (3 schlubs, 2 not-so-much) who dump thousands upon thousands of dollars on the company's services. From membership fees to per-transaction fees for the online aspect of the service to the actual whirlwind guided tours to Ukraine, Narducci expertly wends his way through a massive amount of material and subjects, but does so with impeccable skill and movie-making savvy.

The company is run by a real-life married couple (the fella's American, the lady's his Russian "mail-order" bride) and it surely looks like a license to print money with all the come-hither ads of scrumptious young Ukrainian ladies beckoning Western fellas to marry them. And in case anyone has any doubt prior to gazing at the swimsuit photos of these Babunya-to-be, let's never forget the Beatles' immortal lines from the song "Back in the U.S.S.R." which clearly declares:

"Those Ukraine girls really knock me out, they leave the West behind…"

Well, in the case of a few of the Ukrainian gals the movie focuses upon, they literally leave the West behind since a great many of these braided-ladies adorned in veenoks-masquerading-as-devil-horns are clearly looking for Western men to come over, dump wads of dough on them, then dump the guys when things get way too serious. Yes, it's a scam, but given the poverty in Ukraine as well as the country's backwards patriarchy, I couldn't actually blame these ladies as they scored scads of greenbacks from mostly middle-aged, paunchy Mama's Boys from North America.

One of the men is from Australia and the manner in which he gets taken for a ride is so ludicrous (on his part) that it's almost laughable. Not that Narducci is ever unfairly slanting his POV to engender feelings of mockery and/or derision at these men (and the old Aussie in particular). His camera rolls from a perfectly positioned fencepost and captures the obvious that seems beyond the purview of the fellas.

The woman who takes the Oz-dweller for a ride is, in every shot, so clearly bored, contemptuous, disgusted and borderline hateful towards him, you keep saying to yourself, "Uh, mate, are you really that blind?" When she has to hug or kiss him, she's in total recoil-mode. In a horrific sequence where they actually get married, her utterance of the matrimonial vows might as well be, "Well, let's toss another kubassa on the barbie." However, when our mate from Down Under eventually reveals, long after the wedding and not hearing from her for months after she stays in Ukraine, that he's a trifle concerned that the marriage has never been consummated, I can't say I felt at all sorry for him. Then again, I've seen first-hand the horrific conditions many Ukrainian women live in over there, the exploitation and lack of regard for them as human, so perhaps I'm a tad biased when well-to-do old men from the Western World get soaked. My only response was, "Well, let's chalk up another win for Ukrainian women."

I do, however, place a bit too much emphasis on the scam-aspect of the mail-order business, though, because Narducci also features a couple of prominent examples where the service provided by "A Foreign Affair" actually works. Chemistry and luck play a humungous part in the process and this, frankly, is how it works out in real life anyway. Using "A Foreign Affair", however, can speed up the luck and chemistry thing by presenting an atmosphere for romance to blossom. One couple seem genuinely suited to each other and though there might be a bit more "convenience" going on for both parties than deep love, there's certainly compatibility taking front seat and for now, in terms of what we experience within the context of the film, the new hubby and wife look like they're going to be happy - at least for awhile.

The highlight of the film, though, is a genuine Prince Charming and Cinderella romance which is so tender, so sweet, so moving, that it feels like it has Hollywood chick-flick written all over it. The gent is handsome, well-to-do, good-humoured and intelligent. The lady is his female counterpart in all these things. One sequence has her visiting the Lavra (a kind of Orthodox Vatican in Kyiv) to offer blessings and prayers of thanks to God when it is clear she's on her way to a new life in American with a man she really loves. It's so damn moving, I know at least one Ukrainian film critic from Canada who squirted geysers of tears.

I suspect there might be a few others who will also shed a few pickle-barrels full of tears and they don't necessarily have to be Ukrainian, nor film critics.

Love Me is playing at Toronto's Hot Docs 2014. ALL UKRAINIANS BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW. UKRAINIANS MUST, AS THEY ALWAYS DO, BUY EVERY AVAILABLE TICKET, THEN THEY MUST, AS UKRAINIANS ALWAYS DO, SHOW UP AT THE CINEMA SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE THE SHOW BEGINS, LINE-UP, AND THEN, TAKE THEIR SEATS THE SECOND THE DOORS OPEN AND SIT THERE UNTIL THE BITTER END. HOWEVER, UNLIKE EVENTS IN UKRAINIAN CHURCH BASEMENTS, THERE WILL NOT BE TORTES AND KAVA SERVED UP, SO BRING YOUR OWN TO EAT IN THE LOBBY AFTER THE MOVIE. UKRAINIANS WHO ACTUALLY HAVE INTERNET, CAN BUY THEIR TICKETS by visiting the Hot Docs website HERE. UKRAINIANS WITHOUT INTERNET MUST GO DOWNTOWN TO THE HOT DOCS BOXOFFICE AND BUY THEIR TICKETS IN PERSON. (Then again, those Ukrainians without internet won't be reading this, so perhaps there will be plenty of tickets for NON-Ukrainians.)

GLOSSARY TO UKRAINIAN TERMS USED IN REVIEW ABOVE:

BABUNYA

VEENOK

KOVBASSA
TORTE
are you a moron?
this is not a Uke word
KAVA

UKRAINE AND WOMEN at Hot Docs 2014 PART TWO: UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL

Beyond the myriad of films focusing upon Ukraine that are screening in the Toronto Hot Docs 2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema, the past few years have yielded a ludicrous number of pictures training their lens upon the beleaguered nation. For all intents and purposes, Ukraine has always remained a colonized entity, even in its years of "freedom" since the fall of communism. With the recent and miraculous revolution in Kyiv's Maidan and the subsequent assault upon Ukraine's borders by Russia, the country's most powerful enemy (and frankly, the greatest threat to all of Eastern Europe), one can only imagine the floodgates opening full throttle on Ukraine-centred docs. My hope, however, is that two of the very best films to focus on Ukraine, Ukraine is Not a Brothel, by Kitty Green and Love Me by Jonathon Narducci stay first and foremost ahead of what is, and will be, an over-crowded pack.

Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2014) ****
Dir. Kitty Green

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Preamble 1 - The Bug
So there we were in "the Old Country". Upon entering a nondescript government office building in Kyiv, my wife and I both required immediate use of the, uh, facilities. I spotted the Men's washroom at once, its door adorned with the telltale Cyrillic letter pronounced "Ch" for "Choloveek" (Man), but I couldn't see where the women's washroom was. I asked Sasha, our fixer-translator-driver (don't go to Ukraine without one) the whereabouts of the ladies'"convenience". He pointed down the hallway. "When you get to end, turn right," he said in slightly broken English, then laughed and added, "Look for bug." I guffawed heartily in response. It's a good, old fashioned joke amongst Ukrainian men. The Cyrillic letter emblazoned upon the doors of female water closets represents the Ukrainian word "zheenka". Pronounced "zh", the word's first letter, printed or hand-written, does indeed look like a bug. Most tellingly, the word "zheenka" not only means "woman", but is in fact the word used for "wife". They are, essentially, one and the same. If you're married or otherwise significantly-othered, your wife is your woman. Yes, in a virulently patriarchal society and culture, women in Ukraine, at least in abbreviation, are little more than bugs - to be squashed, of course, as Sasha's "look for bug" joke suggested. "This is my woman," you would say whilst introducing someone to your wife if, in fact, you bothered to introduce your "bug" at all.

Preamble 2 - Sexual Slavery
Ukraine's sex industry since the collapse of Communism was huge. Brothels and strip clubs filled (and continue to fill) every city. All of it is run by gangsters (or, if you will, most government officials). The sex slavery business, as first identified in Victor Malarek's seminal book "The Natashas" was, during most of the 90s and early 2000s, especially prevalent in snatching its victims from Ukraine. Poverty runs rampant and women are often looked upon as property. During those dark days, we personally observed the especially horrific sex slave underground running out of the nation's orphanages where pimps and their vans, the windows painted black in the rear holding areas, would wait daily for the latest teenage girls being officially released into a world of poverty. As they'd stagger, stunned and terrified, into a brave new world, the pimps would herd them into the vans and off they'd go - sold into sex slavery the world over.

Preamble 3 - Femen
This, then, is the world that inspired "Femen", one of the most influential performance art and activist movements in the world. "Femen" gained fame and notoriety for their protests in public places. This clutch of gorgeous, young Ukrainian women, a la Russia's "Pussy Riot", but somehow far bolder and decidedly feminist in their approach, would show up in places often tied to Ukraine's patriarchy (the bell tower at Kyiv's Orthodox Vatican-styled ancient city, The Lavra, for instance) and tear their clothes off and nakedly, brazenly, bare their breasts in the name of Ukrainian womanhood to declare, first and foremost, that Ukraine is NOT a brothel.

The Film - Kitty Green's brave, inspiring and ultimately shocking film Ukraine is Not a Brothel feels, for its first half, like a fun and freewheeling look at these cool, young Ukrainian women with a profoundly pro-female-empowerment message. Opening with the ballistic missile fire of Boney M's "(Rah, Rah) Rasputin" and the aforementioned breast-baring protest shenanigans, Green's got us hooked (line and sinker) into the rhyme, reason and rhythm of this delectable bevy of "Ukraine Girls (to borrow from the Beatles) who leave the West behind." For much of its running time, the picture's as fun, fresh and provocative as one would expect - nay, demand, of any movie entitled Ukraine is Not a Brothel.

This is a beautifully shot and finely observed film that takes us behind the scenes as the women prepare for their protests, then follows them to a variety of said protests, covers the savage responses of both the public and authorities and is finally, chockfull of insightful interviews dolloped throughout, zeroing in on these clearly very intelligent and vibrant young women.

The politics and feminism are freewheeling and fun, but as the movie progresses, danger does lurk behind every corner. Protest patriarchy in a patriarchal (and frankly corrupt, if not downright criminal) society, trouble is sure to follow, especially as demonstrated upon discovering the horrific tale of Femen's protest field trip to Belarus where the ladies are stripped naked and shoved into a forest on the border of Ukraine - forced at gunpoint to march their way back to their homeland.

Where the film begins to shock - yes, at least for me - is with the introduction of a genuinely malevolent force behind the Femen movement. There are hints throughout, to be sure, but we tend to file them under, "Yeah, let's ignore this and have fun with the lassies instead." Once the noxious influence is revealed in its full and grotesquely foul form, we begin to realize that something is a tad rotten in the state of the birthplace of Kyivan-Rus. What's revealed to us (as it was, ultimately to Green as she was making the film), seems diabolically nefarious. The activities of Femen become infused with the sort of foul patriarchal manipulations that began to remind me of the horrendous discoveries I was making in Ukraine during my own sojourns. What's revealed as the motivating force behind the feminist performance artists feels like the very thing designed to keep women in their place in Ukraine.

Once we come face to face with a Rasputin-like evil (no more "rah, rah"), Ukraine is Not a Brothel becomes sickeningly creepy. This, of course, is what makes for great drama and great cinema - when the bed of roses is growing from within a fetid fertilizer of rank manipulation.

In spite of this surprising element, director Green, girds all her resolve and plunges forward, taking her exploration of these women well beyond the unexpected creep factor. Finally, she sticks to the women with a loyalty that can ONLY come from building enough trust in her subjects that she can begin to ask EXTREMELY tough questions.

The answers the Femen ladies provide are full of self reflection, self analysis and the sort of intelligence we first fell for - in spite of what we discover about them a little past the halfway point. If anything, the film is almost perfectly structured to mirror the actual events that transpired in chronological order. The film transforms, quite miraculously and once we become aware of it. we're cascaded along with the kind of magic that's not only unique to the form of documentary, but organically inherent in cinema at its most profound levels. Green's film is, finally, as much an exploration for us, as it is for its filmmaker and most profoundly, for the brilliant young women of Femen.

Ukraine is currently on the precipice of disaster or glory. If Green's film proves anything (and believe me, it proves a whole LOT), it especially suggests that Ukraine's future MUST include both women and youth. The old shackles of patriarchy need to be shaken free and if anything, it's women who might well be the force necessary to maintain Ukraine's freedom in the face of the greatest threat to the nation's sovereignty.

Shevchenko's Kateryna
No beguiling Mona Lisa smile

One of the most profound artistic symbols of Ukraine is the astonishing work by the legendary visual artist and great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. "Kateryna" is probably the closest Ukrainian equivalent to the mysterious "Mona Lisa" in terms of its artistry, cultural significance to Ukraine and overall impact in terms of capturing a sense of Ukrainian womanhood. There is, however, no beguiling "Mona Lisa" smile, but a sense of almost complacent sorrow in the subject's face. She is front and centre, barefoot upon the rich earth of Ukraine and bookended by two masculine entities - a dashing soldier riding off to war and the stay-at-home lout, smoking, drinking and ogling her lazily in repose. Painted in 1842, this is the image that has endured - perhaps more significantly than any other work of Ukrainian visual art, save perhaps for the quiet impressionism of Olexandr Murashko and his notable 1911 "Annunciation" portrait which presents a young woman cast as the angel Gabriel, telling yet another about the birth of Christ.

In both these seminal works, Ukrainian women are either flanked by patriarchs, or indeed, represent patriarchal elements of Christianity. In contrast to this, the performance art as activism of Femen might well be the future of art and its place as a weapon, the final blow, if you will, against Ukraine's patriarchal dominance that keeps, not only its women at bay, but by extension, its youth, its very future.

Murashko's Annunciation, Shevechenko's Kateryna
Patriarchy all consuming: Imbuing the spirit,
surrounding the body of Ukrainian womanhood

In this sense, both the film and subjects of Ukraine is Not a Brothel, via the commitment and artistry of the movie's director, indeed seeks, I think, to prove that Ukraine is not ONLY not a brothel, but a country as a state of being rooted in its real power. Ukraine, personified as matriarchal, rather than patriarchal, is possibly the key to its future survival. As such, the country must not be bought and sold, but will need, in order to stave off the horse trading at every level, the kind of commitment and political will to change all that might only come via very concerted efforts to reflect upon what the goals must be and how to achieve them beyond all shackles, beyond all influence, save for that which comes from within.

Ukraine is Not a Brothel plays Toronto's Hot Docs 2014. For tickets, showtimes and playmates, visit the festival's website HERE. Distributed by Kinosmith.

Idiot Food Stores Reject Edible Food Because Idiot Customers
want the food to LOOK aesthetically pleasing. All this goes to a landfill
because there are simply far too many stupid people in the world.

Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story (2014) ***
Dir. Grant Baldwin, Prod. Jenny Rustemeyer

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Vancouver residents Grant Baldwin and Jenny Rustemeyer seem like your normal garden variety bourgeois couple, replete with a fix-it-upper older home with trendily remade/remodelled interior design/decor, so why, you might ask, do they eat from garbage bins? Well, to make this film, of course.

Appalled by the statistics of how much perfectly edible food is wasted in both farms and retail outlets, they undertake a grand and thoroughly worthwhile six-month-long experiment to not consume any food they have to buy. Along the way, we experience their endless search for good quality food dumped by stores in bins, product headed for dumping on the final best-before date and on occasion, seeing director Baldwin and producer Rustemeyer paying for severely marked down food that will be dumped if not purchased (this is the one exception to the "do-not-buy" rule).

Some stores refuse to give and/or sell the food, using the stupid excuse that their policy is to sell only the freshest product. Some of them even deliver the bald-faced lie that it's a healthy department by-law (which does not, for all intents and purposes actually exist). Chances are that many of the grocers dump perfectly good food in the moronic fear that they'll be liable for lawsuits if the food has gone bad. Of course, the food we see, has not gone bad at all. One of my local grocers - a franchise chain owned by Sobey's - slaps a "manager's special" sticker on such food and I buy it all the time. I'm not dead yet and as I write this, my fridge is stocked with several cartons of freshly squeezed orange juice, not from concentrate, all past the best-before date. They set me back a whopping $1.79 per carton and taste just fine. They'll continue to do so until every last drop goes down my family's gullets - unless, of course, I guzzle them all back first.

If I have a tiny quarrel with the movie, it's that it doesn't clearly identify the stores that pull this sort of crap and part of me wishes there was some Roger and Me-styled stalking and shooting of CEOs of the chain stores that encourage blatant food waste. It's not really enough to get worker-dweebs and store managers to address the issue - the big boys need to been taken down a few notches. The movie is a mere 75 minutes and I suspect no audience would have had an objection to a slightly longer running time if one could have had the added value of nailing the corporate dicks to a few crosses.

At the farms, the film demonstrates how perfectly fine vegetables and fruits are dumped strictly for "aesthetic" reasons. If the food doesn't "look" good, retailers won't buy it because most of their stupid customers won't buy anything with slight bumps, bruises, "off" colouring or even worse, that don't look identical to all the other foodstuffs available.

The movie introduces us to a variety of experts in the field of ecology and it's here we get a sense of just how ridiculous the waste of food actually is in North America. The worst part is that the tossed edibles are not even properly recycled as compost, but end up in landfills.

Yeah, really great for the environment, dork-wads.

An entire dumpster full of hummus.
Best Before Dates A-Okay!

Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story is an informative and entertaining look at an environmental issue so many of us might never think about. I must admit, though, that as an el-cheapo Ukrainian, I'm always looking for stuff at reduced prices once it's past the best before date. El-cheapos are often the best environmentalists. One of the most shocking things to see in the movie - especially to me, because I love the stuff - is when Baldwin comes across an ENTIRE dumpster full of hummus that's NOT even past the best before date.

You know, most people who sell food and those who shop for it, are complete and utter morons. For those of us who aren't, hopefully the movie will be a massive clarion call to do exactly what our filmmaking couple do. You'll save a ton of dough AND help the environment. Better yet, let's hope the movie cracks open the craniums of those who have little brain to begin with and allows the importance and urgency of this issue to filter through their dim-bulb cerebella.

Better yet, ask your grocery store what they do with stuff on or past the best-before date. If they lie and say it's a health department issue, (or worse, simply use the "best quality product" policy excuse) boycott the store. Let them know you're doing it, though. You might get some coupon incentives, gift cards and/or other valuable incentives to keep shopping there. Use up the freebies and discounts, to be sure, but keep shopping loyally at stores that give you what you want. It works for me!!!

Just Eat It: A Food Waste Story is playing at Hot Docs 2014. Visit the festival website for ticket, playmate and venue info HERE.

Pine Ridge (2013) *****
Dir. Anna Eborn

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Preamble - South Dakota Dreaming
In 1992 I found myself travelling through South Dakota during the opening weekend of Michael Apted's Thunderheart, a fictional rendering of Incident at Oglala, his feature documentary released the same year. I saw the former title in Rapid City, South Dakota which is not far from the incidents depicted in both of the Apted pictures. My wife and I were in a packed movie theatre and it seemed like we were the only non-Native-Americans present. Starring Val Kilmer and Graham Greene, it reduced the horrific events on the Oglala Reservation to little more than a glorified feature length procedural, though as such, I recall it being reasonably well made and genuinely stirring. The reaction of the audience was far more interesting. The buzz in the auditorium was palpable and though my response to the film in retrospect is tepid at best, I do recall my visceral feelings at that specific time and place as being highly influenced by an audience reacting on very emotional levels to fictionalized events that occurred in the very backyards of those in attendance. In particular, these were the sort of events seldom tackled by Hollywood in its 100+ years of the art form's history. Native Americans suffered the stereotypes of endless westerns which painted them as bloodthirsty "savages" who impeded the goals of "civilized" Americans and on the few occasions, "positive" portraits were attempted, they were oft-infused with the stereotype of the "noble savage" and/or focused upon the "negative" aspects of contemporary North American Native life. Movies are made by what's called a dream factory and, in fact, might well be the greatest gift to artistic expression.

As Chariots of Fire, The Mission, The Killing Fields and Local Hero producer David Puttnam says in his great book "Movies and Money":
" . . . from its earliest beginnings, [film's] real magic has been its ability to conjure up and sustain the dreams of ordinary men and women . . . the human race needs those dreams now, as much as at any time in its history."
The dreams Hollywood offered the Native Peoples of North America and others who have suffered the indignities of racism, ethnocentrism and exploitation have mostly been skewed as nightmares and certainly fly in the face of Puttnam's own output as a visionary producer whose work has focused respectively (in the aforementioned titles) upon issues as diverse as anti-semitism, colonization, genocide and the corporate rape of indigenous small communities. Puttnam adds that filmmakers are charged with creating work that must live beyond the ephemeral needs of industry and contribute, in no small measure to how we all can peer into a celluloid mirror and indeed reap the benefits of artistic expression and its relationship to our own lives. The line between that which helps and that which hinders is, however, thin indeed. To quote Puttnam:
"Stories and images are among the principal means by which human society has always transmitted its values and beliefs, from generation to generation and community to community. Movies, along with all the other activities driven by stories and the images and characters that flow from them, are now at the very heart of the way we run our economies and live our lives. If we fail to use them responsibly and creatively, if we treat them simply as so many consumer industries rather than as complex cultural phenomena, then we are likely to damage irreversibly the health and vitality of our own society."
Though Puttnam acknowledges he's "not naive enough to pretend that on its own cinema can capture the very soul of significant social and cultural problems," I certainly would like to believe it can come damn close.

Pine Ridge - The Film
Watching Anna Eborn's fine documentary Pine Ridge, I'm reminded of cinema's power to capture the dreams, lives and landscape by which humanity can have a conduit into their own existence. She expertly blends two profound elements of the documentary genre and in so doing, creates both a stirring narrative and cinematic poetry of the highest order. Mostly utilizing the tenets of the Direct Cinema movement (essentially invented and developed during the "Quiet Revolution" by Quebecois filmmakers working out of the Montreal studio of Canada's National Film Board [NFB] during the 50s and 60s), Eborn's kino-eye focuses upon the lives of youthful Native Americans of the Oglala Lakota Nation living on the Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota.

For the most part, Eborn let's the words and actions of her subjects speak for themselves in a fly on the wall tradition, though she departs occasionally from the raw visual qualities of Direct Cinema by shooting the material with stunning compositions and often painting cinematic tapestries of the highest order. Using both natural and practical sources of light, reminiscent of the exquisite visuals of such contemporary masters as Austria's Ulrich Seidl, Finland's Pirjo Honkasalo and certainly that of Honkasalo's Finnish colleague Paul-Anders Simma (whose Olga is also screening at Hot Docs 2014 in Toronto), Eborn's flourishes could well be mistaken for misplaced sentimentality though I'd be amongst the first to vigorously disagree.

Some purists tend to quarrel with utilizing the full aesthetic beauty inherent in film, especially when applied to Direct Cinema when capturing some of the more harrowing aspects of the human condition, but I'd argue that the use of shaky-cam and raw lighting effects are just as much an imposition of the filmmaker upon their subjects as that which tends to do so with elegance. For me, there is considerable validity in bringing beauty of an impressionistic nature to bear upon lives led at what some might term as the outer fringes of our world.

Eborn seeks, right at the beginning of her film to knock us on our collective duffers by keeping us literally in the deep black of a rich ebony screen while we hear an unidentified male voice offer what seems like the thesis of her film, but also a stirring personal perspective from one of many of her film's subjects. These young people are, after all, the descendants of those who suffered the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre (300 Native Americans, including women and children, butchered by the U.S. Cavalry), as well as those who fought during the 1973 standoff in Pine Ridge to protest the horrendous policies of the American government and, lest we forget, the American government's reign of terror which pitted "Americanized" Sioux thugs against "traditional" Native Americans, resulting in over 50 unsolved murders during the mid-70s. For many of the descendants, life has not improved in spite of the blood of their ancestors and progenitors soaking the soil of Pine Ridge.

The words that greet us in black are as follows:

"Most people think we still live in tipis. Fuck, we have houses, man. It's just stupid, man. We have houses to live in. We have trailers. We have houses and trailers. You'd think about fuckin' ghettos in fuckin' L.A. and New York? Our whole fuckin' town is a big old fuckin' ghetto. I can bet you one hundred bucks, that everyone that lives on the reservation wants to get the fuck out of there, you know? No one wants to live there. Who would? We all try to grow up and make some money to get the fuck out of there, man. We pray for our people to get better, man. Everyday. Every fuckin' day, man, we try, man, but you know it's our land, you know. It's what the white people gave us. Gave us fuckin' shit, a shitty ass fuckin' spot to live in."

As the monologue ends, Eborn slams the title of the picture into our line of vision and delves into a series of wonderful fly on the wall moments - one involving a young man trying to sell a new tent to anyone who will listen as he approaches them in a gas/convenience store and the other featuring two young men hanging "Bill and Ted-like" at the same location, commenting wryly upon those who pull in and out under the harsh glare of outdoor lamps and fluorescent lights. She then segues, quite seamlessly, into a vaguely Cinéma vérité sequence (where "truth" is overtly manipulated) with m.o.s. shots of a young man in a diner as we hear his alternately sad and hopeful off-camera narration involving a recounting of all the siblings he's lost to imprisonment, death and just-plain moving away as well as his hope for a better life - one that he imagines could see him as an architect.

From here. Eborn treats us to a series of fascinating set-pieces involving a cast of youthful subjects involved in a variety of day-to-day activities including splashing about in a water hole, breaking horses whilst preparing for a rodeo, being Moms and in one sequence, using a variety of firearms supplied by an old cowpoke war veteran who teaches the boys how to hit targets. And though, the weight of Wounded Knee and Oglala loom largely, Eborn lets her subjects speak of this, if not in words, but by their actions. (We do, however, sojourn with Eborn to a Wounded Knee museum which seems impossible to ignore in such a portrait of life unfolding on the Pine Ridge Reservation.)

As per her overall mise-en-scène, Eborn continues to pull us from Cinema Direct territory to that of Cinéma vérité, focusing upon one young woman in a series of decidedly non-fly-on-the-wall interviews and a stirring ceremonial dance performed against the South Dakota Badlands by the same young lady adorned in traditional garb.

Life is what ultimately pulsates at the heart of this extraordinary film and though its subjects yearn for an existence beyond the reservation, Eborn's powerful evocation of the land's stunning natural beauty is mirrored in the light of her subjects' eyes. Moving on seems to be the only desire for some, while others look forward to assuming and/or resuming an itinerant exploration of the world beyond, but always acknowledging the pull of the reservation to bring them back to a home, grudgingly given to them with the spilling of blood. For others yet, they're as inextricably linked to a place that they know, love and detest with equal measure. On the surface, these all seem like aspects of life that might affect young people everywhere, but unlike the youth of the Pine Ridge Reservation, they're not the living, breathing remnants of a legacy of colonialism, genocide and a government indifferent to the benign apartheid of reservation life.

Pine Ridge is a film that conjures all the magic of cinema to give us several lives that could have been so much better lived and yet others, that seem very well lived indeed, but both exist in the shadow of shameful actions and events that continue to darken the doors of the colonizers and the colonized. We're reminded that answers have never come easily, nor, alas will they ever.

Pine Ridge is co-presented at Hot Docs 2014 in Toronto by the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival. Tickets, playmates and showtimes are available at the Hot Docs website HERE.

FREE STREAMING SCREENING OF SURVIVAL LESSONS: THE GREG KLYMKIW STORY by clicking HERE

GUY MADDIN on his Longtime Producer GREG KLYMKIW:
"As roommates, occasional nude sightings are inevitable.
One day I spied Greggy sleeping naked, his posterior facing me.
He looked like one of those cute clubbed baby seals."

Survival Lessons: The Greg Klymkiw Story (2013) ****
Dir. Ryan McKenna
Starring: Greg Klymkiw, Guy Maddin, George Toles, Bruce Duggan, Tracy Traeger, Dave Barber, Matthew Rankin, Patrick Lowe

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It's a grey day in Toronto. What other days can there be in the capitol of Canadian pole-up-the-ass presbyterianism? The camera focuses in tight on the scowling face of a moustachioed, chain-smoking misanthrope in a dog park. Someone off-camera interrupts his interview to compliment him on his off-camera dog. "Yeah," he mutters under his breath. "Really nice dog I have here. Come a little closer and she'll take your fuckin' stupid hand off."

This is Greg Klymkiw - film producer, writer and long-time senior creative consultant at Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre - and he's the subject of Ryan McKenna's one-hour documentary about the early days of Winnipeg's prairie post-modernist new wave of indigenous, independent cinema. Blending interviews with the man himself, friends, colleagues and a generous supply of film clips and archival footage, McKenna presents a funny, unbridled portrait of the curmudgeonly film obsessed pioneer of indie production in the middle of nowhere - Winnipeg.

The movie follows Klymkiw's life as a North End lad who alternated between programming rep cinemas, buying films for small town movie theatres, writing uncompromising (and according to screenwriter George Toles, "incendiary") film reviews, conceiving, producing and starring in the perverse community cable cult hit "Survival", producing all the great early films of Guy Maddin and John Paizs and last, but not least, creating an entire mythology around the films being made in Winnipeg as the Director of Distribution and Marketing for the Winnipeg Film Group wherein he masterminded a marketing campaign to bring the films of Winnipeg to the entire world.

Okay, I'm sure you've gathered I'm reviewing a movie that's about, uh, me. It's a strange thing to do, but I have to admit that even though it is about me, I can genuinely attest to its quality, entertainment value and the filmmaking prowess of the talented young director Ryan McKenna who insanely decided I was worthy of my own documentary portrait.

When I first saw the finished product, to say I was delighted and flattered is an understatement. However, I needed to know myself, if the movie was really any good. So, I girded my loins and applied every single element of critical analysis that I'd volley mercilessly upon the shitloads of films I had to mentor at the Canadian Film Centre over thirteen years. The results of this stripping-away of my biases were, I'm happy to report, successful enough to be able to proclaim that, yes indeed, it's a fucking terrific little movie - especially for anyone interested in making independent, indigenous films in the middle of the second armpit of Canada (the first smelly, hairy armpit being Regina).

The real proof in the pudding for me was watching the film with a few audiences. Good deal here. Big laughs were had by all, pretty much from beginning to end.

The most important thing to note, though, is that Survival Lessons: The Greg Klymkiw Story is playing within the context of a film festival co-presented by SPUR, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival and the Winnipeg Film Group Cinematheque as part of the ongoing series entitled "Forgotten Winnipeg". The film fits the thematic elements of this event like a glove. We're essentially dealing with a biographical portrait that wallows in the mythology of a guy (me) who loves mythology so much that he spends most of his professional life as someone who creates mythologies of all kinds and is finally a proponent of the famous credo John Ford proclaimed loudly and clearly at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: When the truth becomes legend, what do you ultimately print. The legend or the truth?

The legend, of course.

You never let the truth get in the way of telling a good story. McKenna expertly plays with this throughout and as such, creates a pretty indelible portrait of friendship, mutual love for cinema, the absurd and finally, the realties of actually making and marketing movies that nobody cares about - until, of course, someone creates an atmosphere of "must-see" that lays down a fluffy, inviting blanket for all to dive into with relish and anticipation.

So, if you're in the mood to celebrate Canada Film Day, you could do a lot worse than seeing this FREE.

"Survival Lessons: The Greg Klymkiw Story" is FREE for a limited time until May 3, 2014 over at Vimeo in celebration of Canada Film Day. The free streaming link is HERE

A great selection of early Guy Maddin, many of which that I produced and were written by George Toles, can be secured directly through the following links:

Another great film from Winnipeg during this period is Greg Hanec's extraordinary DOWNTIME which has the distinction of being a parallel cinematic universe to Jim Jarmusch's "STRANGER THAN PARADISE". Both films were made at the same time in two completely different cities and scenes and both Hanec and Jarmusch premiered their films at the same time at the Berlin Film Festival. One's famous, the other isn't - but now that the "lost" and "found" DOWNTIME has been remastered from original elements to DVD, it can now be purchased directly online.

Order DOWNTIME directly from the film's new website by clicking HERE

Perhaps the greatest Canadian independent underground filmmaker of all-time is Winnipeg's John Paizs. It's virtually impossible to secure copies of his astounding work which, frankly, is responsible for influencing the work of Guy Maddin, David Lynch, Bruce McDonald and an endless number of great indie filmmakers the world over. Paizs' great short film SPRINGTIME IN GREENLAND is available for purchase in a beautiful remastered edition from a fan website, the inimitable Frank Norman. Norman has Paizs' blessing to provide copies of the film, so feel free to directly make your request to Mr. Norman by clicking HERE.

Visit Frank Norman's CRIME WAVE
fan site by clicking HERE

Alas, it's super-impossible to get a copy of Paizs' masterpiece CRIME WAVE (not to be confused with the super-awful Coen Bros/Sam Raimi film of the same name that was released the same year Paizs' film was NOT released properly by its scumbag Canadian distributor Norstar Releasing, which eventually became Alliance Films (where the boneheads sat on the film and turned down several excellent offers from small indie companies to release the film properly on DVD in super-deluxe special editions because they lazily purported to be negotiating a massive package deal on its catalogue titles with some tiny scumbag public domain company that, as far as I can tell, has neither purchased nor released the film). This truly great and highly influential film is, no doubt, languishing in some boneheaded distribution purgatory within the deep anal cavities of the new owner of Alliance Films, a humungous mega-corporation called E-One. Feel free to repeatedly bug their stinking asses and demand a proper release. In the meantime, VHS copies of CRIME WAVE can still be found with the ludicrous title THE BIG CRIME WAVE. Here's a copy available on Amazon:

BLANK CITY and other works from the Winnipeg Film Group, SPUR and Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra New Music Festival's "Forgotten Winnipeg" Series in January can be accessed here:

TARANTULA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Food, Glorious Food, Turns Tables and Seeks Food

THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Trouble in Nietzschean Paradise

OCULUS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - "ABSENTIA" Director delivers more creepy crawly and jolts of terror.

THE TERMINAL MAN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Neglected 70s Science Fiction Classic by Mike Hodges

INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION - Petri's Classic 70s Thriller - TIFF CINEMATHEQUE SPECIAL SCREENINGS: SPRING 2014 - 1 SHOW ONLY: APRIL 17 @ 9:30pm @ TIFF BELL LIGHTBOX - Review By Greg Klymkiw

THE BATTERY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Clearly talented director offers somewhat constipated zombie movie. Flawed, but worth seeing on a big screen at Raven Banner's Sinister Cinema series on April 17, 2014.

WHITEY: THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. JAMES J. BULGER, Review By Greg Klymkiw, HotDocs2014: MustSee#1

DIVIDE IN CONCORD - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Film Details the Important Environmental Revolution in America led by an 84-Year-Old Granny in the heart of where the American Revolution began.

THE BOY FROM GEITA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Harrowing Tale of Tanzanian Albino Killings

THE CONDEMNED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Hot Docs 2014 - Russian Prison Doc a Hot Docs 2014 MUST-SEE

ART AND CRAFT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Philanthropic Artist yields a HOT DOCS MUST-SEE

THE SECRET TRIAL 5 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Legacy of Canada's Thinly Veiled Fascists. This chilling, important documentary that details Unconstitutional Incarceration is a HOT DOCS 2014 MUST-SEE

OLGA, TO MY FRIENDS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Visually sumptuous contemplations.

THE ENGINEER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Excavation inEl Salvador, Hot Docs Must-See Powerful Documentary executive producedby none other than Wikileaks' Julian Assange.

LOVE ME - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Ukrainian Mail OrderBrides a HOT DOCS MUST-SEE

UKRAINE IS NOT A BROTHEL Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014, Breasts VS Patriarchy, HotDocsMustSee

JUST EAT IT: A FOOD WASTE STORY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - Experiment an eye-opener.

PINE RIDGE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2014 - The Hearts and Minds that soar above Wounded Knee - Blend of Direct Cinema with poetic dollops of Cinéma vérité, explores daily life of the Oglala Lakota Nation.