The Film Corner with Greg Klymkiw

Surgical Shenanigans - Cronenberg Style, of course

Shivers (1975) Dir. David Cronenberg *****
TIFF 2013 - Cinematheque Restoration
Starring: Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Barbara Steele, Lynn Lowry, Susan Petrie, Alan Migicovsky
Review By Greg Klymkiw

David Cronenberg is responsible for my teenage delinquency. I desperately wanted to see "Shivers" when it opened first-run. Alas, I couldn't gain entrance to the cinema because it was slapped with a Restricted Adult rating (the Manitoba equivalent to an X-rating). This peeved me to no end. The ads, featuring a gorgeous woman hanging upside down from a bathtub with a grimace of utter horror attached to her face tantalized me to no end. That the movie starred my favourite scream queen Barbara Steele was icing on the cake. I tried to get in, but was turned away by the cashier for not having the necessary I.D. So what's a red-blooded hoser movie geek to do? Well, I did what any North End wrong-side-of-the-tracks Ukrainian boy in Winnipeg would do - I painstakingly forged my own fake I.D. It worked so well, I not only gained entrance to "Shivers", but discovered that it successfully got me past Fat April, the door-lady who kept watch at the Kildonan Motor Hotel Beverage Room. Soon, I went into business. I began to forge fake I.D.s all the way through high school. My reputation for fine forgeries extended far and wide. Needless to say, my illicit activities proved to be most lucrative. For years I longed to relay this tidbit to Mr. Cronenberg. I finally got my chance at a small dinner party. I was introduced to him and I immediately launched into my tale of forgery, deception and entrepreneurial initiative - crediting him solely for my corruption. His response, however, was quite unexpected. Mr. Cronenberg looked at me blankly for a moment, turned around and walked away. Disappointing as this proved to be, I eventually chalked it up to the fact that perhaps his tummy was infested with an orgy of blood parasites.

*****

Imagine you're a delivery boy strolling down the hallway of a brand new luxury high-rise. A grotesquely corpulent old woman with moles and hairs on her face (stained with cheap, smudged makeup and blood stains sustained during a parasite attack in the laundry room), pokes her head out of a doorway and moans at you lasciviously: "I'm hungry." She waits for the response you're too shocked to give. "I'm hungry!" she intones almost desperately. Again, you're too agog to say anything. Lunging violently at you, her teeth bared, she screams, "I'm hungry for love!"

The violation you suffer as she sates her unholy desires, will last only as long as it takes for you to succumb to the gooey, gelatinous blood parasite she deposits down your throat as she sucks face with you. Within minutes - perhaps even seconds - you'll be mounting the porky old sow and ramming your pulsating rod of manhood into her thatch of hair pie.

And it will be glorious!

MIGICOVSKY the MIGHTY

Welcome to David Cronenberg's Shivers, his first commercial feature film that took the world by storm while inspiring incredulous Canuck pundits to demand government accountability as this film represented a very early investment from the federal agency that eventually became known as Telefilm Canada. Pundits and politicians be damned, however. Shivers was not only a huge hit, but it immediately established Cronenberg as a true talent to be reckoned with.

It's a great picture and still holds a place, after more helpings than I could ever possibly imagine, as my all time favourite David Cronenberg film. Other work might be more polished, but nothing Cronenberg ever did even begins to approach the mad, hilarious, repugnant and utterly horrifying experience he served up to audiences the same way one might offer up a soiled, steaming barf bag to a stewardess after a bout of air sickness.

The first time I ever saw the movie, I was thoroughly flabbergasted. Every few minutes, a story beat moved the picture ever-forward into territory of the most increasing, mounting and almost delectably foul kind.

The movie never once lets up - and even between scenes of carnage, Cronenberg served up some of the strangest and most downright creepy goings-on I'd ever seen and even now, it's still up there on the regurgitation meter.

MORE MIGICOVSKY ACTION THAN
YOU CAN SHAKE A STICK AT!!!

Most importantly, the picture is not only a scare-fest, but it's replete with all manner of nasty, dark laughs. Not that the humour is ever tongue-in-cheek - all of it comes naturally out of the utterly unnatural situation. Pre-dating the AIDS crisis, Cronenberg links sex with death. It's a delightfully simple tale involving a selection of residents and employees of an ultra high rise complex on an island on the St. Lawrence in Montreal. A new form of parasitical venereal disease begins to spread like wildfire within this luxury community gated by its island borders. The disease turns its victims into homicidal sex maniacs.

I kid you not. Allow me to repeat that:

HOMICIDAL SEX MANIACS.

And what a frothy concoction Shivers truly is with all manner of viscous emissions - blood parasites being vomited from a balcony onto an old lady's clear plastic umbrella, parasites roiling and bubbling just under the surface of Alan Migicovsky's sexy, hairy belly, a lithe, nude body of a lassie formerly adorned in a school uniform who gets her midriff sliced open, the insides then drenched in acid and, of course a magnificent 70s cast of terrific actors (notably, the wonderful late Joe Silver as the deli-loving doctor and Alan Migicovsky as the ultra-creepy philandering hubby) PLUS a whole whack o' babes (from pretty Susan Petrie as the weepy wifey, Lynn Lowry as the drop-dead gorgeous nurse and the heart-stoppingly sexy British scream queen Barbara Steele who appeared in so many 60s horror classics).

Of course, anyone interested in seeing the beginnings of Cronenberg's career-long obsession with finding horror in the human body, it doesn't get better than this - plenty of fat for eggheads to nibble on here.

The best news is that the movie has been restored and probably hasn't looked as gorgeous since Cronenberg himself had to approve final colour timings on the very first prints run at the lab back in the 70s. Shivers got so much play throughout the 70s and early 80s that I don't recall ever seeing a 35mm film print that wasn't caked in dirt, scratches and splices.

Stunningly, Cronenberg manages, in one salient area, to match the great Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Hitch, of course, infused utter terror in the minds of millions who dared to take a shower. In Shivers, Cronenberg delivers one of the most horrendous bathtub violations ever committed to celluloid. Best of all, the sequence involves the horror goddess revered by every adolescent boy in the 70s - Barbara Steele. In Mario Bava's Black Sunday, Steele had a metallic mask of Satan with humungous spikes inside of it pounded brutally into her pretty face. As horrific as that was, it's kid stuff to what Steele endures in Shivers.

And to that - a toast! God bless you, Mr. Cronenberg, God bless you!!!

The restored print of "Shivers" (colour correction personally supervised by David Cronenberg) has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013) as a precursor to a major TIFF retrospective devoted to his work and the exciting new exhibition "Cronenberg: Evolution", both of which will unveil at TIFF Bell Lightbox later in the Fall Season. For tickets visit the TIFF website HERE.

TIFF 2013 - GALA PRESENTATION
Parkland (2013) *1/2
Dir. Peter Landesman
Starring: James Badge Dale, Zac Efron, Marcia Gay Harden, Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, Jacki Weaver, Jackie Earle Haley
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Even at age of four I knew what was happening on our murky black and white television with rabbit ears and why my mother was crying. President John F. Kennedy was genuinely larger than life and the impact of his assassination on November 22, 1963 was felt all over the world. Fifty years later, nobody believes the spurious findings of the Warren Commission and there is enough evidence to suggest that the President was murdered by forces much larger than the lone patsy Lee Harvey Oswald. That's why I really don't understand the necessity of a film like Parkland (the title signifying the name of the hospital in Dallas where both JFK and Oswald were unsuccessfully operated upon). Shot in urgent annoying shaky-cam and blended with actual stock and news footage of the time, the film details the preparations leading up to Kennedy's visit to Dallas, his assassination, all the chaos of getting him to the hospital, the desperate unsuccessful attempts to keep him alive, the various law enforcement gymnastics with respect to the FBI, CIA, Dallas Police and the Secret Service, the assessment of the Zapruder 8mm home movie footage, the capture of Oswald, the subsequent shooting of Oswald, the unsuccessful attempt to keep him alive in the hospital and finally, juxtaposing the opulent state funeral of the slain president with the threadbare proceedings afforded to the purported assassin.

Though the reasons for this film's existence is a mystery, the ponderous James Newton Howard musical score which alternates between militaristic solemnity and a kind of bargain basement John Williams bombast, reminds us that the intentions of the filmmaker are very serious - though at face value, one couldn't begin to imagine what those intentions actually were. In fact, one of the most offensive things about this movie is that it's structured to avoid the notions of conspiracy in JFK's murder. If anyone was watching this film without a whole lot of knowledge on the subject (sadly, not as surprising as one would think), they'd be leaving this film convinced that the Warren Commission findings were NOT a load of utter horse shit.

Screenwriter-Director Landesman used Vincent Bugliosi's book "Four Days in November" as the primary source material, but one really has no idea why he chose to re-enact a hodgepodge of all the above, with an all-star cast instead of, perhaps, choosing one or two interesting threads, sticking with them, and maybe creating a sustained narrative with actual characters instead of what amounts to extended cameos. It's actually more than a little bit ludicrous to have former teen heartthrob Zac Ephron trying to act as the bewildered inexperienced resident in the president's operating room with dewy-eyed nurse Marcia Gay Harden relieving a weeping Jackie Kennedy of chunks of the President's skull and brains and to then drag Jackie Earle Haley on screen as a priest to administer the last rites.

Not unlike the George Stevens all-star Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told, I half expected John Wayne to wander into the Parkland Memorial Hospital in full Roman Centurion garb and stand over JFK's corpse and intone: "Truly this Man was the son of God," before realizing he'd stepped onto the wrong sound stage via some kind of Time Machine or wormhole. Well, if only this film was even a pubic hair as good as the Stevens picture (which was pretty rank to begin with), then maybe one might have been able to ignore the messy inconsequence of Parkland and perhaps embrace the genuinely fine (albeit wasted) performances of Paul Giamatti as Zapruder and James Badge Dale as Oswald's brother. But no, instead of choosing to focus on either one of those characters, we're given a parade of cameos and scenes that are only marginally a cut above those cheesy dramatic recreations inserted into lower-drawer TV "documentaries" for cable.

In fairness to Landesman and his abysmal misfire of a movie, one must give him some credit for allowing the inimitable Jacki Weaver to shred every stitch of the scenery with her ludicrously overwrought performance as Oswald's crazy mother. Weaver is every bit the quintessential crazy Southern belle/harridan that if anyone was planning a remake of gothic white trash classics like God's Little Acre or Baby Doll, or for that matter, one of those Robert Aldrich old lady slugfests like Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, then one look-see at this movie and they'll know Weaver is their go-to gal.

"Parkland" is a Gala Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013). For tickets, visit the TIFF website HERE. Opening theatrically via Remstar just in time to celebrate JFK's assassination.

TIFF 2013 - DISCOVERY
Ilo Ilo (2013) ****
Dir. Anthony Chen
Starring: Koh Jia Ler, Angeli Bayani

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Kida can really be horrid little things. Ten-year-old Jiale (Koh Jia Ler) is no exception to the rule.

It's 1997 and Asia's economy is crumbling. Jiale's Mom and Dad are struggling to make ends meet as it is, but they're determined to do so at a level that will maintain a solid lifestyle - not only for themselves and their son, but in anticipation of the new child growing in Mom's belly. Both parents are working full time and they hire Terry (Angeli Bayani, in a performance of staggering power and sensitivity), a nanny from the Philippines to help out.

Jiale is prone to acting out his brattier instincts at the best of times, but with a new nanny in the home, the floodgates open and he becomes a holy terror - most of all to Terry. That said, one of the extraordinary aspects of first time feature director Anthony Chen's direction is the delicate and subtle manner in which he builds the myriad of "small" things in a child's life that can seem so huge and insurmountable.

We experience and discover all of this through Chen's observant lens and narratively, we seamlessly, effortlessly shift our point of view between Jiale and Terry - allowing for maximum dramatic impact.

The relationship of genuine love and friendship between nanny and child shifts gradually into the deeply felt, but also confusing emotions which begin to develop as the lines between care worker and surrogate parent begin to blur – especially given the mounting pressures Jiale’s parents must deal with. Jiale can tell something is not right, but as a child he can’t possibly understand why he feels distance between himself and his parents and an ever-intensifying bond with Terry.

It doesn’t help that his parents are trying to mask these pressures. Jiale’s father loses his job and in secret, he shamefully takes on whatever he can to bring money into the home, while his mother continues in the employ of a company that treats its employees – especially female secretaries – like slaves and yet she too tries to keep her troubles to herself.

The physical and psychological hardships his parents experience affects Jiale – at first in the adversarial stance he takes against Terry, but eventually as his dependence and love upon her grows. Terry herself seems soulful almost beyond words, but she too has a breaking point with Jiale’s nasty behaviour and she needs to make it very clear to the child that she’s not going to take it.

Ilo Ilo is one of the best films about childhood I've seen in quite some time. It's a movie that feels like it comes straight from the heart and its storytelling techniques are so simple and pure that one feels you're in the hands of a master filmmaker. The emotions are never mawkish or contrived in obvious ways, but there are several big set pieces that alternate between rich, full bodied human comedy and deeply moving, gorgeously observed and downright heartbreaking moments designed to wrench tears from you. These moments are honest, however, and they feel like the stuff of life.

Sometimes the pain of childhood is the realization of love when you least expect it and in ways you could never have imagined and sometimes events conspire to snatch away newly discovered joy and warm memories offer only fleeting solace - it's like that which soothes you aches and gnaws at your very being in the face of losing it.

"Ilo Ilo" is enjoying its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 (TIFF #13). For tickets, visit the TIFF website HERE. The film is distributed by Film Movement.

Child of God (2013) *****
Dir. James Franco
Starring: Scott Haze, Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Parrack

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Everybody knows you never go full retard...Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man,' look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho'. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, 'Forrest Gump.' Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. Peter Sellers, "Being There." Infantile, yes. Retarded, no. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, "I Am Sam." Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed..." - Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder

Scott Haze as Lester Ballard, the inbred, slow-witted Tennessee cracker-barrel hero of James Franco's stunning film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's great novel Child of God, takes a huge crap on-screen, wipes his poopy-butt with a stick, delivers plenty of nice flashes of buttock (replete with ass-crack) and dolls himself up in the most hideous drag regalia ever wrought on the silver screen, but he most surely, undoubtedly and definitely does not serve up the aforementioned "full retard". In spite of Haze's genuinely affecting and often downright bravely brilliant performance, there might be something a tad more egregious than "full retardation" to keep him from a date with Oscar.

You see, Lester's pappy's gone and done hung hissef' and in the process, left his son with nothing and nobody. The family farm has been auctioned off and our hero, shotgun in hand, takes to an old hunting shack in the deep woods where he lives out his life on game (he's a durn' tootin' crack shot) and the occasional stolen chicken from the prissy, white-haired gentleman farmer who now owns the former Ballard plantation. Sheriff Fate (Tim Black Nelson) and Deputy Cotton (Jim Parrack) keep a healthy watch on Lester since the boy occasionally flies off the handle and needs to be given some quality rest time in a padded cell.

They seem oddly sympathetic to Lester, but ultimately, what can they really do when mysteriously naughty shenanigans occur in the county? They've gotta target someone. After all, our boy Lester is just plumb crazy.

Lester is also a full-bodied young lad and when he discovers a lovers' lane area in the backwoods, he develops a healthy penchant for peeping through the back seat windows of parked cars. As the vehicles bob up and down with the strokes of amore, the dulcet tones of grunts and moans wafting through the air, Lester handily (so to speak) beats his meat to the proceedings.

One morning, he spies a vehicle still running. In the back seat are the bodies of a young couple locked in a lovers' embrace and they are stone-cold from carbon monoxide poisoning. With keen interest, Lester notices that the young lady is awful purty. Hmmm. What's an ornery country boy with a hard-on supposed to do in a situation like this?

Well, he does what no Oscar-winning performance will ever be acknowledged for. And he does it repeatedly - only subsequent recipients of his man-juice are not stupid enough to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Luckily for Lester, he's mighty handy with a shotgun.

Franco has managed to do the near impossible. He renders a character - especially via Haze's performance, who gains our empathy to a point where we even get the "Oh, for Christ's sake, Lester, ya' shouldn't oughtta be doin' that" feeling.

Child of God is a genuine triumph. Franco handles the picture with verve and style. He even manages to utilize chunks of McCarthy's prose in a series of odd "conversational" voice-overs and literal title cards splashing across the screen. I loved this technique. It was fun AND rooted the film in the glorious American literary tradition of Southern Gothic. Franco elicits a wide range of great performances and his actual coverage and composition of the dramatic action feels like the work of someone who's been directing movies his whole career.

The movie is grotesque, at times sickening and often shocking, but it is rooted in genuine humanity and is easily one of the best movies of the year.

"Child of God" is a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013). Part of me wishes it was a Gala. I'd have paid premium scalper prices to witness the stuffed-shirt-richie-rich response of some of the assholes who go to those things. In the meantime, this is one hot ticket item and feel free to visit the TIFF website HERE to secure a shot at seeing this great movie.

Le démantèlement (2013) *****
Dir. Sébastien Pilote
Starring: Gabriel Arcand, Sophie Desmarais, Lucie Laurier, Gilles Renaud, Pierre-Luc Brillant, Dominique Leduc

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Who is Sébastien Pilote?

Seriously. Who the hell is this guy, anyway?

These were questions I first asked myself upon seeing his extraordinary first feature film Le Vendeur. This stunning Quebecois kitchen-sink drama was so raw, real and infused with a seldom-paralleled acute pain that the film's quiet power betrayed its creator's cinematic genius. Starring the great Gilberte Sicotte as an ace car salesman in a small factory town in Quebec on the brink of total financial collapse, this staggeringly powerful, exquisitely-acted and beautifully written motion picture was, for me, the first genuine Quebecois heir apparent to the beautiful-yet-not-so-beautiful-loser genre of English-Canadian cinema of the 60s and 70s (best exemplified by films like Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road, Peter Pearson's Paperback Hero and Zale Dalen's Skip Tracer). As if making a modern masterpiece of Quebec cinema as a first feature wasn't enough, I eventually caught up with Pilote's earlier short film DUST BOWL HA! HA! which featured Andre Bouchard as a hard-working family man in small-town Quebec who stoically maintains his dignity in a world where nothing and nobody escapes the crushing weight of the financial crisis. This turned out to be one of the best short films I had ever seen - period - a phenomenal portrait of humanity, so graceful and so simple, that upon first seeing it I felt about as winded as I did after I first saw Le Vendeur.

So now I have even more reason to ask: Who the fuck is Sébastien Pilote? His second feature film Le démantèlemen completely and utterly knocked me on my ass. Starring the legendary Gabriel Arcand as a Quebec sheep farmer extraordinarily blends a neo-realist sensibility with the sort of pace one takes while appreciating a great work of visual art and as such, is not only great, thought-provoking drama but visually astonishing - gorgeously lit and composed by cinematographer Michel La Veaux in a classical tradition not unlike that of Haskell Wexler's heartbreakingly beautiful work in Bound For Glory.

Gaby Gagnon (Arcand) has worked the family farm his whole life - long after his brothers abandoned rural life, long after his wife left him to say farewell to a suffocating existence and now he continues to painstakingly toil away, often missing, but seldom seeing the daughters he loves so dearly and who live far away in Montreal. He has friends - his loyal pal and accountant (Gilles Renaud) who brings good humour, fellowship and counsel into his life (along with an unwanted clunker of a computer), a neighbouring widow (Dominique Leduc) who endows him with warmth and commiseration and, he has a sweet-eyed ten-year-old dog who sticks to his side faithfully. They all offer some solace to Gaby's isolation, but when his accountant pal speaks disapprovingly about how the family seems to have all but abandoned him, Gaby shrugs it all off as being an inevitability. Thanks to Arcand's extraordinary performance we don't really buy his expectations of abandonment and disappointment.

If anything provides Gaby with genuine solace it is the work itself. During the first third of the film, Pilote painstakingly details the drudgery of Gaby's daily chores - almost to the point where one feels like the movie could be a sumptuously photographed documentary about sheep farming in rural Quebec (instilling avid interest in the rearing of mutton to the unlikeliest candidates for such tutelage). I might be insane, but I could have watched Gabriel Arcand tending to this farm in Frederick Wiseman-like breadth and girth for hours. (I reiterate, however, my mental state on such matters.)

It is in this section of the film we get such an acute sense that Gaby's heart and soul is farming - so much so that when we eventually get to the action of the film's title we're devastated in extremis. This is where another aspect of Pilote's brilliant storytelling approach sneaks stealthily upon us - we not only understand why Gaby would never imagine another life, but it seems like there isn't a single shot or story beat employed in which we don't fall in love with the world of the farm either. There's nothing overtly sentimental about this approach - Pilote never tempers his gaze upon the hardships and/or challenges of farm life, but in fact creates a sense of life's infinite give and take. To put too fine of a point on it: climbing Mt. Everest is full of pain, hardship and requires a meticulous attention to every detail, but Good Goddamn (!) it's worth it!

When Gaby gets a visit from his oldest daughter Marie (Lucie Laurier), he gets the bad news that her marriage is over and she needs a $200,000 loan to buy out her debt-ridden husband's share of her home. For both her sake and her kids, he agrees to look into finding the money for her by using his farm as collateral. His youngest daughter Frédérique (an exquisitely radiant Sophie Desmarais), who enjoys a carefree career as a stage actress, actually seems to have more sense than her older sister and points out to Gaby that he's being taken advantage of if he risks the farm.

And like all good fathers, he shrugs and admits he knows this.

Almost as painstaking in its detail as the recreation of farm life is the "dismantlement" and it is here where the elements of tragedy kick into high gear - there are, after all, several allusions in the film to Shakespeare's "King Lear" - and I defy any audience member to not be moved to tears on several occasions throughout this emotionally devastating series of events. There are sequences of almost unbearable pain. A visit to an animal shelter to "take care" of the dog nobody wants, rivals the old man's visit to the dog pound gas chambers in DeSica's Umberto D and a scene where Gaby tours a decrepit low income housing unit is equally fraught with the same grim, stark power generated by the Italian neorealists. The final half of the film is thoroughly heart-wrenching - but most astoundingly, it is here where Pilote demonstrates such world-wise maturity that we come to recognize and accept with both sadness and joy that death yields regeneration.

And what soaring, truthful and deeply moving regeneration the film offers.

Who is Sebastien Pilote?

One of the greatest filmmakers of Quebec and that means something - a lot, actually.

"Le démantèlement" is part of the Toronto International Film Festival's (TIFF 2013) Contemporary World Cinema series. GET A TICKET HERE.

TIFF #13 TIFF DOCS
Burt's Buzz (2013) ***
Dir: Jody Shapiro
Starring: Burt Shavitz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Jody Shapiro began his career in film as one of the truly genuine creative producers in Canada, or rather, as a producer, he was always easy to look upon as a filmmaker (as opposed to the annoying assumption that a filmmaker and a producer are two different things).

Working with Guy Maddin in the latter stages of the great surrealist's career, Shapiro brought his artistic instincts to bear and was never shy about leaping into the fray with a movie camera and shooting like a madman. That Shapiro went on to be Isabella Rossellini's chief collaborator as a co-director and producer on her utterly insane Green Porno series of shorts speaks volumes about why he might have been the perfect director to document the life of Burt Shavitz.

Any producer attracted to as many eccentric projects and working closely with as many genuine eccentrics as Maddin and Rossellini has proven indeed that Shavitz could not have been luckier than to have someone like Shapiro infuse Burt's Buzz with his keen eye for the joys of, well, eccentricity. Shapiro's feature documentary is a loving portrait of the famed old bearded hippie whose face has adorned the packaging of the Health Store mainstay products "Burt's Bees". Though Shapiro interviews associates, sponsors and family, the film is mostly all Burt all the time - which is great because the camera loves him and he has a nice low key irascibility.

Shapiro delivers all the fascinating biographical details of how this city boy made his way to the backwoods of Maine and eventually became an avid beekeeper. With the assistance of the woman he loved, the company grew to gargantuan proportions. There's a melancholy to the tale also since Burt by his own admission was not happy nor especially cut out for corporate life and he sadly sold his shares in the company and his "brand" for peanuts. Considering Burt's Bees sold to the Clorox Corp. (I kid you not!), the sale was worth over 900 million dollars. Burt's not seen a cent of that and makes his living as a kind of travelling personal appearance spokesman.

Shapiro bounces between the solace of Burt on his farm and the genuine adulation he receives during live appearances. This is a simple, but effective juxtaposition and was the wisest way to present contrast, conflict and the two sides of the current coin that is Burt Shavitz.

Given the ubiquity of the Burt's Bees brand, you'd think we were dealing with a typical hippie-turned-corporate-sellout, but Shavitz is anything but that. He's a man of nature who's happiest on his farm in Maine and it's within the context of this that Shapiro trains his camera. Though there's probably a film to be made about a natural health company being owned by one of the most heinous producers of environmentally unfriendly consumer goods - this is NOT that film.

It's a sweet, funny and loving portrait of a man, his dog and his farm and how he needs to drag himself out to trade shows and malls to do a horse and pony act for the privilege of living a life of solitude amongst the hills and the trees.

And, of course, his bees.

He might not be a multi-millonaire, but you know, it could be worse.

"Burt's Buzz" is n the TIFF DOCS series of the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 (TIFF 13) and feel free to visit the festival website to get your tickets HERE.

TIFF 2013 - Special Presentation
GRAVITY (2013) **
Dir. Alfonso Cuarón
Starring:
Sandra Bullock,
George Clooney

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In addition to his electrifying first feature Y Tu Mamá También and the overwrought, but powerful dystopian science fiction thriller Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón has the distinction of making the ONLY good Harry Potter film. The dull and dreadfully directed film franchise based upon the miserable J.K. Rowling kid-lit has always been helmed by the most style-bereft hacks, but Cuarón brought such magic and a genuinely personal voice to Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban that I continue to scratch my head over the number of losers who keep being enlisted to camera jockey most of these blockbuster franchises when clearly, hiring a REAL filmmaker adds so much value to the proceedings.

Cuarón will hopefully get a chance to make films nearer and dearer to his heart, but his studio output has, at least, been blessed with his distinctive touch - bringing genuine aesthetic chops of the highest order to create work that is not JUST hit material in an ephemeral sense, but blessed with considerable shelf life.

Gravity is far from being the best outer space thriller - I'll always have a special place in my heart for John Sturges's Marooned - but it's way above Ron (I'm a dull camera jockey) Howard's Apollo 13. Ultimately though, Gravity is really not much good and would be much worse without Cuarón's visual flourishes.

It's basically a two-hander involving George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as AMERICAN space station astronauts who get bombarded by a storm of debris from a nearby satellite that's been nuked by its NON-AMERICAN overlords because it's no longer working properly. As we all know, America NEVER does stupid things like that because AMERICA is NEVER responsible for creating any form of interstellar (or Earthly) polluton and once again, it is AMERICANS who are placed at risk by goddamned FOREIGNERS.

The result of the incompetence of foreigners is that Bullock gets separated from her tie-cord. Luckily, Clooney rescues her. Unluckily, when he realizes that only one person can properly get into the space station and escape, he sacrifices himself and goes hurtling into space whilst Bullock - on her own - tries to kick start the escape pod.

From here, it's all Bullock all the time.

Sort of.

She's trying desperately to get to a Chinese space station and, goddamn it, they're babbling on the radio in Chinese. Jesus Christ! Can't they speak American? The girl is in trouble.

Goddamn foreigners!

The screenplay, such as it is, doesn't work too hard at providing ideal "characters" for our stars to inhabit. Clooney is handsome, charming and funny and Bullock is reserved and committed to her work. Bullock, you see, is nursing the hurt she feels over the death of her only child. This is supposed to make us feel for her. Poor Sandy - her daughter died. Poor Sandy - she meets a guy she could fall for and he jettisons himself into deep space. Somehow, she needs an extra shot of confidence to defy all odds and get home safely. Will she do it? Will some surprise event occur to make everything right again?

There isn't a single moment that we don't know what the outcome will be. I saw the BIG SURPRISE coming a few light years away and in fact, I pretty much knew what every major story beat was going to be after about 20 minutes. All that was left to enjoy were some dazzling visuals, a lot of annoying dialogue - some of it bordering on sickening - and some nice shots of Bullock floating around in her skin-tight astronaut undies. The latter is probably, for some, worth the price of admission. I, for one, will not take away that pleasure from anyone.

Knock yourself out.

"Gravity" is a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 (TIFF #13). Get your tickets HERE.

TIFF 2013 Special Presentation
(La Grande Bellezza) The Great Beauty (2013) *****
Dir. Paolo Sorrentino
Starring: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, Carlo Buccirosso, Iaia Forte, Pamela Villoresi, Galatea Ranz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty opens with a bang - literally. A cannon blasts right into our faces - its explosive force signalling the beginning of the greatest party sequence - bar none - in movie history. Not a single screen revelry comes even close. The first few minutes of this movie throbs and pulsates with the most gorgeous, dazzling, opulent images of triumphant excess ever to strut and swagger before our eyes. This polychromatic orgy of beautiful people and their devil-may-care debauchery is the kind of sordid, celebratory saturnalia that the movies seem to have been invented for.

The party isn't just debauchery for debauchery's sake (though I'd settle for that), but the sequence actually builds deftly to the utterly astounding entrance of the film's main character. On just the right hit of music, at just the right cut-point, our eyes catch the tell-tale jiggle of the delectable jowls of the smiling, long-faced, twinkle-eyed and unequalled sexiest-ugly movie star of our time. We are dazzled, delighted and tempted to cheer as his presence comes like an explosion as great as the aforementioned cannon blast.

Playing the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Toni Servillo knocked us on our collective butts in Sorrentino's Il Divo. Here, Servillo continues to electrify - this time etching a very different "Il Divo" - Jep Gambardella, the crown prince of Roman journalism. Jep is a one-novel-wonder, resting on the literary laurels of a single work of genius from his youth, who now, at this august stage of existence, has earned celebrity as a hack scribe of gossipy, sardonic puff pieces for one of Italy's most influential rags.

Jep is surrounded by a seemingly infinite number of losers who think they're winners, as well as a veritable army of the rich and famous and their hangers-on. We find Jep at the epicentre of the aforementioned on-screen party - one we wish would never end. Alas it must - at least until the next one. Rest assured there will be plenty more revelries, but between the indulgences, we follow the powerful and bored-with-his-power Jep as he reaches a crisis point in his 65th year of life. He knows he's not lived up to his promise, but he's still a master wordsmith and puffs himself up with his dazzling prose and his expertise at self-puffery.

He's surrounded by worshippers, but their adulation means nothing to him. Gorgeous women throw themselves at Jep, but he doesn't even much enjoy sex. He longs for a love that escaped him in his youth and tries to find it in the rapturously beautiful daughter of a pimp. His best friend, as best a friend that someone like Jep could ever hope for, is desperate to make a mark for himself as a literary figure but can only think of using Jep as a subject for a book.

Most of all, Jep seems happiest when he's alone. That said, even when he's surrounded by slavering hangers-on, he appears even more solitary than when he's by himself, but at least his private brand of emptiness is more palatable than the sheer nothingness of those in his ultimately pathetic coterie of nothingness - the nothingness of a ruling class who take and take and take all the excess there is to be had, and then some. Italy is on the brink of ruin, but the ruling class is in denial so long as they can cling to celebrity - even if that celebrity is in their own minds.

With The Great Beauty, Sorrentino is clearly paying homage to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (with dollops of 8-and-a-1/2), but this is no mere nod to cinematic mastery - he explores a world the late maestro visited half-a-century ago and uses it as a springboard into contemporary Italy and most importantly, as a flagrantly florid rumination upon the decline of culture, the long-ago loss of youthful ideals and the deep melancholy that sets in from Jep seeking answers to why the woman he loved the most left him behind to his own devices. Set against the backdrop of a historic Rome in ruins, the empire that fell so mightily, we plunged into a dizzying nocturnal world as blank and vacant as the eyes of a ruling class that rules nothingness.

Jep is clearly set upon an odyssey by Sorrentino - one that might have been avoided if he could only recognize what he sees in a mirror. Men like Jep, however, have a hard time recognizing the clear reality that stares them in the face and the final third of Sorrentino's masterpiece plunges Jep and the audience through a looking glass in search of a truth they (nor, for that matter, we) might never find.

But the ride will have been worth it.

"The Great Beauty" is a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013). For tickets, visit the TIFF website HERE. The film will soon be released theatrically by Mongrel Media.

Beyond The Edge (2013) **1/2
Dir. Leanne Pooley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There aren't many stories of sheer endurance for endurance's sake as awe-inspiring as Sir Edmund Hillary's legendary climb to the top of Mt. Everest in 1953. I wish I could say that Leanne Pooley's film, Beyond The Edge, is better than it is since it comes to us on the 60th anniversary of Sir Eddie's achievement.

The film - on one level is a fine coming-together of technical wizardry, exhaustive research and a very challenging approach to storytelling. Poole had seemingly unrestricted access to all manner of archival material - gorgeous 16mm colour footage, Alf Gregory's legendary 35mm stills and what seems like every audio interview with the participants that's ever been laid down to tape. This is all to the good. Adding to the mix is newly-shot footage in the Southern Alps that recreates key points of the expedition. Though I will confess to not being a big fan of recreations, I must concede that Poole does a fine job matching every aspect of the new stuff with all the archival material both narratively (very good) and visually (well, close but no cigar).

From a story standpoint, the movie will grip you in ways that many other movies could not have possibly achieved. Kudos to Poole's writing and direction on this front. Unfortunately, one is constantly taken out of the story by two things - the use of the abominable 3-D process for one, and the attempts to match the myriad of audio-visual materials in terms of the actual colour grading.

To the first point - 3-D seldom adds to the genuine enjoyment of a picture. The process is still flawed as it requires wearing uncomfortable glasses and worse, the glasses are polarized and darken EVERYTHING to distraction. Where this hurts the most, frankly, is in the 16mm motion picture and 35mm still footage - the colours of which are so heartbreakingly vibrant that in 3-D, they pale in comparison to what you know is there. Just try popping the glasses off periodically and you'll see precisely how egregious the process is. In fact, you can do this for pretty much ANY 3-D movie, but it hurts the most when utilized with real film footage from a time when colours were naturally more vibrant than what we're used to seeing now.

As well, some form of digital enhancement would have had to be employed to render these period images in 3-D and the images blown up (even when the original aspect ratio is maintained) feel horrendously compromised. For me, making "old" look "new" or "better" can often result in it looking far less stellar than it should.

To the overall colour timing, I'm even more disappointed as the attempts to match everything add another layer of muting which is continually disappointing. For me, I'd have been perfectly fine if the filmmaker did NOT try to match things in the colour grading and perhaps added some post-modernist layer to the proceedings for us to accept it. This, however, was NOT the intent. In terms of intent, I suspect it's state of the art - or, as state of the art as it's ever going to be.

Where I plan to give the film another chance is at home, on flat (not 3-D) Blu-Ray. I suspect for a whack-job like me, it will work beautifully. For everyone else, especially those who are more (wrongly and indiscriminately, I'm afraid) accepting of the 3-D process, they will no doubt not be bothered by this and hopefully can concentrate on the storytelling.

For me, the storytelling suffers.

"Beyond The Edge" is part of the TIFF DOCS series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 (#TIFF13) and you can order tickets directly for the TIFF website HERE.

TIFF VANGUARD - #TIFF 2013
Programmed By Colin Geddes
The Sacrament (2013) ***1/2
Dir. Ti West
Starring: Joe Swanberg, AJ Bowen, Kentucker Audley, Amy Seimetz, Gene Jones

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Why would a Christian commune, dedicated to the creation of a Heaven on Earth in homage to the pacifist principles of Jesus Christ, require armed guards? Are they there to keep people out or keep them in? Well, as we discover during the creepy slow burn of Ti West's new thriller The Sacrament, it's clearly a little of both. The name of the game in Eden Parish is secrecy which, like all religious cults (including most mainstream organized religions), is what keeps them powerful. Indoctrination, coercion, exploitation, deception and brainwashing are the key elements of all faith-based ministries or, if you will, industries. Some, however. are more extremist than most and such is the case with the religion/cult that Patrick's (Kentucker Audley) sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz) has fallen in with. Accompanied by Sam (AJ Bowen) and Jake (Joe Swanberg), two pals/colleagues from a major online multimedia news outlet, the trio journey to a strange, undisclosed island on foreign soil to investigate her whereabouts and well-being.

Armed only with cameras, the three men are initially freaked out by the surly and burly machine-gun-toting guards who guide them into the compound, but as they explore the inner workings of the camp - populated with those like Caroline who lost their way in the world through various addictions and found their way back to what seems to be a clean and green way of life - it begins to seem like Eden Parish is not without merit.

The silver lining, however, is just that. Tranquility in the parish is only skin deep. As they slowly begin to notice an alarming number of aberrations, they fear for their own lives as well as those who are not quite fitting in to the extremist views of the charismatic cult leader, Father (Gene Jones). In addition to being charming, persuasive and highly intelligent, Father, an oft-cool-shades-adorned fleshy orator with definite fascist undertones is a downright creep - a skilfully malevolent manipulator and exploiter.

This is one chilling, scary-ass movie that grabs you very early in the proceedings and doesn't let up - steadily mounting in its intensity until a climax that will have you begging for mercy. There are no cheap shocks and the violence is always muted, roiling jus below the surface. I doubt Mr. West is a student of the late, great Val Lewton (most young contemporary filmmakers have yet to make his acquaintance), but if he is, I'm not surprised and if he isn't, he should be since he still has a few tricks to learn from a real master. (God knows, Scorsese, Friedkin and many other greats continue to acknowledge their debt to Lewton.) With this film and his previous effort, the fun and scary paranormal thriller The Innkeepers, West is proving to be a potential master of finding chills, thrills and evil in dark, yet unlikely corners and like Lewton, his genre indulgences are about so much more than the simple, but effective narrative coat hangers he adorns his explorations of humanity on.

One element that doesn't quite hold up in the movie is the inconsistencies with respect to the film within the film - the documentary that the trio is making on Eden Parish. Most of the time, we're carried along by the sheer force of West's fine direction, but occasionally, we're ripped out of the proceedings by some of the intrusive title cards that remind us we're watching a finished product that's already gone viral. It occasionally takes us a bit of time to get back into the otherwise riveting trajectory of the tale. It also suggests that someone will escape the evil, though in fairness, we're never sure who and just how many are getting out.

This is, though, a bit of a drag because the movie has a kind of paranoia-infused 70s sensibility that suggests we might be cascading into a completely hope-bereft conclusion. That we're treated to a tiny taste of hope so early and so consistently doesn't quite fit the form. I even wondered if, at any point during the post-production process, West and his team gave the old college try to mute the film within the film stuff, toss the title cards and use the more obvious doc-styled footage "naturally" within the narrative and actions of the characters rather than the manner in which they are employed. Part of me thinks, based upon the coverage that appears onscreen, that this might have been a worthy pursuit. Then again, I wasn't sitting in the fucking edit suite, so what the fuck do I know? Maybe it was a consideration and didn't work, but I do hate to think it wasn't at least tried.

My only other quarrel with the picture is that it's full of babes and there's a fair bit of talk and suggestion of boink-o-rama activity in Eden Parish. No offence, but the issue of sex within the compound is brought up and that we get nary a flash of said activity is a bit like introducing a loaded gun into a scene and not firing it. Let's not forget the immortal nude harvest dance in the original 70s The Wicker Man - totally creepy and hubba-hubba-sexy.

But, I digress.

Happily, the performances from all the leads in The Sacrament are top of the line and it's to West's undying credit and great eye that the picture features the finest use of extras and background performers I've seen in any recent movie. If, however, there is anything resembling justice, Jesus and/or the God of Abraham on Planet Hollywood, Gene Jones as Father deserves as many supporting actor accolades as it is possible to bestow upon someone - including an Oscar nomination. This is no chew-the-scenery nonsense that so many more established stars will barf up when they play a villain - Jones is malevolence-incarnate because his performance is brilliantly muted.

The camera loves the guy and it's impossible to take your eyes off him whenever he's onscreen - not just the hallmark of any charismatic cult leader, but he brings a depth of intelligence and understanding to the character that makes us (almost) like him. He also infuses the performance with an element of tragedy - he's no mere manipulator, but rather, a man who has come to believe so strongly in his beliefs that he's managed to convince even himself that his might is right and it's that very element of self-faith and self-love that Jones steadfastly nails to a cross that convinces us why such individuals are alternately on top of the world just as clearly as they're on a fast-track to destruction.

You might remember Gene Jones from the Coen Brothers'No Country For Old Men during the famous coin-toss scene which, for me, was the performance in that movie that set the bar and proved the old adage: "There are no small parts..." Here, though, West has given Gene Jones the role of a lifetime. I sincerely hope Jones's work in The Sacrament is recognized, acknowledged and propulsive. The world needs more character actors of his calibre and I demand that he become as gloriously ubiquitous as Edward Arnold, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Charles Durning, Ned Beatty, Hume Cronyn, Paul Giamatti and every other great actor who more than propped up their fair share of pictures, but also created a myriad of living, breathing human beings who somehow, with their very appearance made their own work and that of everyone else touched with a bit of that old silver screen immortality.

All in all, The Sacrament is a terrific little thriller and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. Maybe that will be enough to change my curmudgeonly nattering about the film within the film elements and the lack of sex. Probably not, but it won't matter. I like the picture - a lot!!!

"The Sacrament" is programmed by the brilliant Colin Geddes in the TIFF Vanguard series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 (#TIFF13). Get your tickets at the TIFF website HERE.

Tracks (2013) **1/2
Dir. John Curran
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Adam Driver

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Robyn Davidson (Mia Wasikowska) was an Aussie hippie chick who abandoned a formal post-secondary education and instead lived with a bunch of radical animal science types n Adelaide (where she learned a whole ton about God's creatures). She subsequently joined a left-wing organization of wanker egghead fruitcakes in Sydney (that included the likes of Germaine Greer) where she grooved the Bohemia electric. In the 70s she settled in the middle of nowhere and learned everything she always wanted to know about camels (and was, decidedly, not afraid to ask). Her first experience was with a brutal camel farmer who exploited her until finally, she met and worked for a kindly camel expert who taught her a great deal and partially bankrolled what was to become her biggest challenge.

Davidson's ultimate goal was to trek 1700 miles alone across the deserts of Western Oz from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. Well, she wasn't completely alone - she had her faithful mutt and a handful of ornery, but loyal camels. Since her trip was financed by the National Geographic Society, she was occasionally in the company of Rick Smolan (Adam Driver), a photographer who would add the pictorial materials to Robyn's eventual story in the famous wildlife magazine. The two enjoyed an on-again-off-again love affair and eventually Robyn wrote the full length memoir that this film is based upon.

This is by no means a dreadful film. Wasikowska is a pleasing screen presence and very easy on the eyes. When the film focuses upon Robyn and the camels, it's pretty engaging - especially in the first third of the movie. Unfortunately, something is off about the period detail in terms of the performance of the genuinely annoying Adam Driver who seems completely miscast and throws the picture off balance anytime he's on-screen.

Even the picture's sense of place seems off. The movie feels like a Walt Disney True Life Nature Adventure set in the wilds of Australia (with occasionally chaste boinking). Tracks certainly doesn't have the richness in both period and ethnographic detail that is so infused in works like Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright. We never really feel any danger or mystery in the proceedings and other than the early going, the central conflict has no real punch.

This is more than a bit surpising since John Curran's direction of the exquisite film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil was so rich in period detail and observational attention to character nuance. Here, howeve, the leading actors wear everything on their respective sleeves and we're left with little more than a girl and her camels, doggie and an occasonal poke under the desert sky from an enormously unappealing actor.

The movie clips along amiably enough and the scenery is almost always a saving grace, but somehow the whole thing feels a touch inconsequential. While it might provide momentary and relatively inoffensive entertainment as a girls' adventure tale, Tracks doesn't stick to your cerebellum, but rather, sticks to your craw.

"Tracks" is part of the TIFF Special Presentation series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF website HERE. The film is distributed by Mongrel Media.

TIFF 2013
L'intrepido (2013) *
Dir. Gianni Amelio
Starring: Antonio Albanese, Livia Rossi, Gabriele Rendina
Review By
Greg Klymkiw

When someone really annoys you, tell me you don't want to just deck him, right? I mean, really fuckin' deck him - just cold-cock the sonofabitch with a solid roundhouse to the face. It's perfectly understandable, yes? Alas, life and art are the great divide. In life, if you encounter someone like that, you do what you've been put on this planet to do - you knock him flat on his ass. Art is another story. You're watching a movie and a character appears on-screen that you'd really prefer not to have to look at, never mind imagine that someone like him might actually exist. What're you gonna do? Put your fist through the screen? No! Of course not. That'd land you in the hoosegow for sure. Yet, here I was, watching Gianni Amelio's latest movie - bad enough, I know - and what, pray tell am I faced with? (Aside from another damn Gianni Amelio picture, that is.) I'm sitting in a theatre face to face with a character I want to punch in the face.

Let me then introduce you to Antonio (Antonio Albanese). This guy's a real piece of work. His eyes are always sparkling and he's usually got a stupid half-smile plastered on his face. Life has dealt the loser with more than his fair share of crummy cards, but he's so gosh-darn kind and cheerful all the time that your first impulse is to, well, you know - smash the fucker square in the face.

He's a great intellect, yet Italy is in such a financial mess that there's no decent place for a middle-aged man like him to ply any reasonable sort of craft. He works everyday like a mule at a myriad of menial jobs to keep himself going. His wife has left him recently - gee, I wonder why - and his only real hope is that his artiste son (who's also insufferably kind and positive) will hit the big time as a sax player.

Antonio is a "replacement" worker. A local gangster performs a much-needed service to the community and acts as a pseudo employment agent who plops losers like Antonio into a variety of jobs whenever a regular worker needs time off. The gangster, of course, takes a cut of the already low wages and even balks at paying up when he's supposed to.

No matter. Antonio is a happy fellow. Even when some scumbags steal pizzas out of his delivery container, he shrugs it off, goes back to the pizza joint, barters for more pizzas, delivers them to a bunch of old ladies in a sewing factory and upon realizing that he might have a problem getting the dough he's owed from these ravenously pizza-slurping harpies, he dazzles them with his charm and - God Help Me - his prowess at the sewing machine.

Ugh!

Where things get especially grotesque is when Antonio meets cute with a gorgeous young babe. Obviously, it's only in Italy (or a Gianni Amelio movie) where grinning, balding, middleaged losers with no secure employment seem to have no problem charming the pants off hot young fillies. Ah, sweet mystery of life. This, however, being a Gianni Amelio movie - he of the "I believe in the indomitable spirit of the EVERYMAN" school of proletarian boosting - it's not going to be all peaches and cream for our hero. Sweetness will be tempered with bitterness, but goddamnit, we're all going to learn a good lesson.

Frankly, the only lesson I want is how to cold-cock a movie character who lives on-screen and/or in the mind of the insufferable director who's foisted him upon us. I probably also need a lesson in avoiding films by directors I can't stand. Until then, maybe I'll just find someone on the street who bugs me enough to lay into him. Better yet, it'll be someone in a film festival line up, whacking me with his goddamn knapsack, shovelling granola down his throat and talking loudly with his detestable mouth open to his barefoot, granny-glasses-adorned hippie-chick girlfriend who smells like she hasn't seen a bathtub in weeks.

Yeah, that sounds good. It'll keep my sanity intact whilst keeping me out of the hoosegow for vandalizing a movie theatre screen by punching a huge hole in it.

"L'intrepido" is part of the TIFF Special Presentation series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF website HERE.

TIFF Discovery Series - #TIFF 2013
Programmed By Piers Handling
Border (2013) ***1/2
Dir. Alessio Cremonini
Starring: Dana Keilani, Sara El debuch, Wasim Abo azan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Of course it's been oft-noted that what we don't see is often more powerful than what we can see, but clearly one cannot exist without the other. What drives a narrative forward is every element used to enhance the journey of the characters and by extension, the audience's participation in said journey. When the issue of self-determination and choice is what drives every element of the story and the narrative itself is set-up in a way where we (both characters and audience) know what conflicts await and furthermore, when the choices, no matter how considered can lead to disaster, we're all the more aware of being in classic storytelling territory. However, what ultimately makes the expected unexpected is the telling of the story from a stylistic standpoint.

Fatima is a new bride. Her husband has gone to war and she lives a quiet life with her sister Aya in the conjugal flat. The sisters are extremely devout and spend a great deal of their time devoted to practising their faith. When news comes that Fatima's husband has left the Syrian Army to join the Free Army of "rebels", they have very little time to react. What they do know is that they will suffer the repercussions of the actions taken by Fatima's husband - actions they are both in concurrence with. Aya is already a survivor of gang rape, torture and incarceration and while she understands what could well await them, she's also wary of the complete stranger sent by Fatima's husband to whisk them out of Syria to safety and freedom in Turkey. Still, there's really no choice for either woman. The actions of a Totalitarian government and, to an extent, by Fatima's husband has petty much removed any vestige of self determination in the matter.

After hurriedly throwing together a few essentials, they are plunged into following a man they do not know through "enemy" territory. The only real choice they make, and it's at great risk to their safety, is that both women refuse to remove their religious headgear which, while on the road, could well give them away. The trip is fraught with several unexpected turns that keep them from moving moving forward as quickly as anyone had hoped. Deception, double-crosses and danger lie around every corner.

When they discover a recently tortured and slaughtered family deep in a Syrian forest, the stark, brutal reality really hits home, but upon finding a lone survivor of the massacre, the women both realize that this might well be the symbolic hope they need to find safety. In so doing, however, they will also have to protect the newly discovered survivor. There are no false notes in Border. The superb performances, the exquisitely structured screenplay (by director Cremonini and Susan Dabbous) and finally, Cremonini's terse helmsmanship of the action creates a tension that, at times, becomes far more unbearable if the story had been presented in some overtly overwrought manner (as might have been the case if directed by an American).

Border is, in its own way, a kind of celebration of self-determination in a world where so much is awry due the war-mongering of men and where every step these women must take might be one step closer to the most unimaginable horrors.

"Border" is part of the TIFF Discovery series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF website HERE.

TIFF MASTERS -
#TIFF 2013

Programmed By
Steve Gravestock

Concrete Night
(2013) ****

Dir. Pirjo Honkasalo
Starring:
Johannes Brotherus,
Jari Virman,
Juhan Ulfsak,
Anneli Karppinen

Review By
Greg Klymkiw

The sins of our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers before them have a way of swimming about the viscous fluids of creation as aberrant DNA and if the sins of society offer no escape, the cycles of aimlessness, desperation, pain, poverty, and violence keep repeating themselves ad infinitum.

Such is life in Helsinki.

Such is the portrait of despair painted with murkily exquisite monochrome by master Finnish filmmaker Pirjo Honkasalo, who last delivered The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, a devastatingly moving 2004 documentary portrait of the effects of the Chechen War upon the children of both Chechnya and Russia. In that documentary, she brought an extremely formal beauty to the proceedings - stunning compositions, gorgeous lighting (though most likely practical lights) and finally an overall sensitivity that indelibly captured the despair of the world by aestheticising it to such a degree that we could not help be plunged into the "3 Rooms" in a way that taking our eyes away from the frame was a near impossibility.

The more traditional documentary approach is a simpler, direct cinema style, but Honkasalo bravely and quite brilliantly made us feel her hand every stretch of the way. Within the context of presenting a drama, Concrete Night seems to allow for even greater stylized approaches to the material - never, in recent memory (save perhaps for that of Ulrich Seidl), has ugliness and despair seemed so beautiful.

Concrete Night is based upon the 1981 novel of the same name by Pirkko Saisio. Honkasalo wrote the screenplay adaptation to update the period to the present, though to be blunt, the movie feels like it's set in some kind of timeless never-never land. Shot in a striking monochrome by cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg, the movie pulses with squalid expressionism and a kind of street poetry that feels like a cross between Charles Bukowski and a skewed Byronic romanticism. This is, of course, exemplified by the film's main character Simo (Johannes Brotherus), a young man who lives in a horrendously cramped apartment with his alcoholic single mother (Anneli Karppinen) and his older brother Ikko (Jari Virman). Simo is plagued by nightmares of suffocation and drowning whilst Ikko and his mother seek the solace of booze. In Finland, it would seem that despair is a family affair - as it should be!

Much of the film takes place over the course of one day and night. Ikko is about to serve a prison term on a drug charge and Simo's duty is to keep a kind of suicide watch over his older brother. Ikko imparts fatherly wisdom upon Simo, though none of it is especially progressive, but rooted in both selfishness and fatalism. As the brothers journey into the heart of a dark Helsinki night, the portent becomes almost unbearable and it's only a matter of time before we're plunged into an explosion of numbing, excruciatingly vicious violence. Most extraordinary of all is how Honkasalo drags us over the hot coals in such a cerebral manner and yet, for every clear touch of her directorial hand, we never feel like we're watching anything less than something raw and real.

Part of this is probably due to Simo's point of view - that of an artistic sensibility that will never have a chance to exploit itself outside of this nasty, brutish world of poverty and dog-eat-dog. The other, is how clearly Honkasalo explores several layers of utter self loathing amongst these characters who all represent differing levels of said hatred. Her mise-en-scène throughout all this is rife with mirror imagery - most of it tied to Simo, but when he chooses to acknowledge his own reflection, his expression is blank - as if he's not even sure what he's supposed to be looking for within himself.

His only hope lies in choosing one of three roads - one of the imagination, another of self-destruction and yet another representing the snuffing out of anything even remotely threatening. So often, though, his expression betrays a void.

We, however, sit watching the film in utter dread - hoping that of all the characters in it, Simo does make the right choice. Life, of course, is never that simple. Then again, neither are great films. Yes, they all begin with a relatively simple framework to allow solid support for the necessary layering, but in the case of Concrete Night, nothing is as it seems. Thankfully, filmmakers like Honkasalo still exist to remind all of us that cinema, as a reflection of life, should never offer an easy way out. Sometimes, for viewers to hold on to what is dear, we need to stumble out of the cinema infused with the horror, the unalterable truth that cycles of violence, poverty and abuse are seldom broken - that in order to break free requires more than personal choice, it demands societal intervention.

And that, is often easier said, than done.

"Concrete Night" is part of the TIFF Masters series at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF #2013). Visit the TIFF website HERE.

Blue Ruin (2013) ***
Dir. Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Macon Blair

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Vengeance is always a fine motive for any movie character. It delivers the kind of cathartic kick to the stomach that many of us enjoy receiving. Though many such tales come attached with a sense of loss and/or remorse, there are just as many that celebrate the actions of the vigilante without too many strings attached.

Blue Ruin gets to have its cake and eat it too. Such storytelling gluttony can easily belch up work that bites off far more than it can chew, but here, the narrative manages to tuck away its disparate elements with modesty so that we are happily engaged for a good deal of the picture's running time and occasionally confounded in the satisfying ways one might hope for. With this, his sophomore feature effort, the loaded-writer-director-cinematographer-bases Jeremy Saulnier holds, don't quite benefit from a grand slam, but a couple of decent hits yield enough good play that we're engaged by a relatively fresh take on the genre.

Saulnier's direction is always taut, though his script feels occasionally too clever for its own good. At times we can see the stitching of his desire to take us in unexpected directions - so much so, that we're occasionally taken out of the narrative's trajectory because we become a bit too conscious of wondering just how Saulnier will surprise us. Granted, I'd prefer to find fault in writing that works overtime, but I lament equally that Saulnier pays a bit of a price for this. It's the sort of minor flaw that feels like I'm griping about an embarrassment of riches.

So be it - the tale feels one polish short of a kind of perfection the film deserves. Though, give me this complaint anytime, thanks. It beats complaining about no originality or ambition.

Dwight (Macon Blair) is our vengeance-seeking hero. As introduced to us, he's a most unlikely Paul Kersey (architect-tuned-NYC-vigilante in Death Wish) or Buford Pusser (the big-stick-wielding Tennessee Sheriff of Walking Tall), but rather, a kind of Virginia Ratso Rizzo living off garbage and spending his nights in a rust-bucket on the beach. Upon receiving information about an imminent prison release, he desperately and haphazardly commits an act of revenge that is as bumbling as it is jaw dropping in its ferocious brutality.

He errs, however, in leading those closest to the person he extracts vengeance from straight in the direction of some innocent people. The entire reason for his violent actions turns itself inside out and we become witness to a terrifying cat and mouse of mounting payback. Amidst the carnage, we're treated to a telling reflection of American gun culture as well as a kind of scathing matter-of-fact exploration of White Trash loyalties rooted as they are in survival and a sense of entitlement at all costs.

Macon Blair's performance as the hapless Dwight is a marvel of balance - we're constantly empathetic with this sad, beaten man who gains a sense of self respect in the most misplaced action imaginable and finally must gird his loins to the challenges of an ever deepening chasm of violence. The hole he digs for himself is somewhat reminiscent of William H. Macy's spiralling actions in Fargo, but Dwight, unlike Jerry the car salesman, is far from lazy and just plain stupid. Blair shows us a genuine sensitivity and intelligence in a man debilitated by an initial perpetration of violence against him that sets him into a spiral of depression and obsession which, furthermore plunges him into making one horrible mistake after another.

Finally, he's faced with a myriad of loose ends that can mean only the worst thing imaginable for those who deserve it least. Someone needs to tie them up and Dwight is finally the only one who can. Any initial feelings of elation we might have received from the vengeance extracted transform to utter disbelief in a world that does indeed seem to be responsible for forcing people into living by codes that should have been left to myth rather than the reality of practise.

Saulnier's picture is yet another that says, "Welcome to America," and in so doing leaves us speechless.

"Blue Ruin" is part of the TIFF Vanguard Series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF website HERE.

The Major (2013) ***
Dir. Yuri Bykov
Starring: Denis Shvedov, Yuri Bykov, Irina Nizin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Did you know corruption runs rampant in Russia? Gotta tell ya', it sure came as a surprise to me. I always assumed a country run by a Totalitarian ex-KGB agent like, say, Vladimir Putin, would be clean - fresh as a handi-napped baby's anus. Alas, the truth of the matter has left me crestfallen - especially with the newly-gleaned tidbit that Russia's corruption extends even to the police force. Corruption in the police force? Yes, even in Mother Russia. Thanks, of course, to the art of cinema, we all get to learn something new everyday and what I really learned from the new movie The Major is the extent to which Russian cops will go to protect each other. Policemen protecting each other? In Russia? Sure. Let's take police major Sergey Sobolev (Denis Shvedov). Learning his wife's in labour, he hightails it to the hospital, blasting down an icy highway like it's his personal Indy 500. If truth be told, his aggressive behind-the-wheel shenanigans are typical of Russian drivers, but because he's a cop, he's not blind drunk like the civilians most certainly are.

As (bad) luck would have it, he sees a kid crossing the road. Instead of slowing down, he honks his horn, pedal to the metal. The child stops in his tracks - confused, disoriented and scared. In a matter of seconds, Sergey ploughs into the kid and turns the burgeoning proletarian into a huge wad of hamburger meat in front of his babe-o-licious Mom (Irina Nizin). Sergey does what any good police officer in Russia would do - he locks the sobbing, screaming mother into his car (keeping her from being with the child during his last burbles of life), then calls his loyal partner Kroshunov (writer-director Bykov) and waits for the true magic of Mother Russia to work its miracles.

And what magnificent Russkie magic Kroshunov orchestrates! Mom is plied with booze before a blood test is taken, the length of the skid marks are falsified, Mom's threatened with being a negligent parent (she was "drunk" after all) and then she watches her husband beaten to a pulp and facing arrest for assaulting a police officer. With her child's shredded slab o' pulp in the morgue, the distraught Mom signs a statement relieving Sergey of all responsibility and agrees her child moronically darted out in front of the vehicle.

Just when things look bright, Sergey shocks strings of undigested cabbage out of his colleagues butt holes when he announces he wants to face the music. Redemption is the salvation he now seeks. If his overwhelming guilt is allowed to be indulged, a lot of cops, including his superiors, are going down. As if this wasn't enough, the dead kid's Dad storms the police station bearing arms and proceeds to take hostages.

The real shit storm is only just beginning.

Director Bykov has pulled out all the stops and The Major is a tautly directed cop thriller that generates anxiety and cuticle-gnawing suspense. Even when Bykov's screenplay injects a potentially unearned redemption and slightly hard-to-swallow change of heart in Sergey's character, the action is as sharp as a Cossack's sabre and things clip along with such grim force that you almost don't notice a few of the gaping holes in the story's logic. Shvedov's intense performance is the one thing that makes the speed at which his character arrives to his unpopular decision a bit less bitter a pill to swallow. In fact, the overall mise en scène powerfully captures the genuine underbelly and reality of today's Russia - drab, lifeless backdrops with alternating harsh and murky lighting.

This is one grim thriller. Though the script falters a touch, the direction and performances always deliver a nasty, break-neck ride with plenty of 70s-style American genre tropes applied to the jaw-droppingly horrendous reality of contemporary Russia - a country run by gangsters with badges - the descendants of both Czarist extremes and Stalinist brutality. The players might change, but the song always remains the same.

"The Major" is part of the TIFF Contemporary World Cinema series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF website HERE.

GREG KLYMKIW'S EEGA MANIFESTO (and review)

SAMANTHA PRABHU - EEGA BABE

EEGA (2012/2013) ***** Dir. S. S. Rajamouli
Starring: Sudeep, Samantha Prabhu, Nani
Review By Greg Klymkiw

EEGA is such a fresh, original and wonderful movie entertainment, I issue the following WARNINGS to all who know NOTHING about it. BEFORE SEEING EEGA:

1. DO NOT READ ANYTHING ABOUT IT EXCEPT THIS REVIEW - AVOID ARTICLES, REVIEWS, THE PROGRAM NOTES AT ANY FILM FESTIVAL, THE MAGNIFICENT WEBSITE, THE IMDB, ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET (INCLUDING FACEBOOK, TWITTER, GOOGLE +, PINTEREST ETC. NOTHING!READ THEM ONLY AFTER YOU SEEEEGA!

2. DO NOT LOOK AT ANY STILLS (SAVE FOR THOSE INCLUDED HERE) OR POSTERS OR ADS OR BILLBOARDS OR ANYTHING FROM EEGA. AGAIN, YOU CAN AND WILL WANT TO DO SO AFTER YOU SEE EEGA!

3. DO NOT WATCH ANY TRAILERS FOR EEGA. IF A TRAILER PLAYS ANYWHERE, CLOSE YOUR EYES, PLUG YOUR EARS AND SING "WE WILL ROCK YOU" AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS!

NANI & SAMANTHA PRABHU
EEGA HUNK and EEGA BABE

4. IF ANYONE DARES TALK TO YOU ABOUT EEGAPLUG YOUR EARS AND SING "WE WILL ROCK YOU" AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS!

5. IF YOU'RE AT A FILM FESTIVAL SCREENING (SAY, FOR EXAMPLE, THE TORONTO AFTER DARK FILM FESTIVAL 2013) AND, GOD FORBID, ONE OF THE FINE REPRESENTATIVES FROM THE FESTIVAL (SAY, FOR EXAMPLE, THE DELIGHTFUL ADAM LOPEZ OR A TADFF COLLEAGUE) DARES SAY TOO MUCH ABOUT EEGA DURING AN ON-STAGE ANNOUNCEMENT IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO ITS UNVEILING, SIMPLY PLUG YOUR EARS AND SING "WE WILL ROCK YOU" AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS!

6. IF YOU ARE AT A FILM FESTIVAL SCREENING ON THE DAY AND VERY SHOWEEGA PLAYS (SAY, FOR EXAMPLE, THE TORONTO AFTER DARK FILM FESTIVAL 2013) AND, GOD FORBID, ONE OF THE FINE REPS FROM THE FESTIVAL (SAY, FOR EXAMPLE, THE DELIGHTFUL ADAM LOPEZ OR A TADFF COLLEAGUE) DARES SAY TOO MUCH ABOUT EEGA DURING AN ON-STAGE INTRODUCTION TO THE FILM, SIMPLY PLUG YOUR EARS AND SING "WE WILL ROCK YOU" AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS!

7. IF YOU UNDERSTAND TELUGU, IGNORE THE TITLE.

I saw EEGA knowing nothing save for its inclusion in the 2013 edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TADFF). This afforded me the luxury of experiencing one of the most joyful, endearing, romantic, hilarious and utterly heart-rending tales of vengeance I have ever experienced in my life. That the film is the ONLY joyful, endearing, romantic, hilarious and utterly heart-rending tale of vengeance I have ever experienced in my life is but the extra infusions of jaggery and ghee in my Poornalu.

The stunningly gorgeous Samantha Prabhu plays the sweet, innocent, intelligent, good-humoured and committed Bindu. By day, she devotes herself to bringing educational supplies to the poor of India and by night, she is a highly skilled micro artist. She has been romantically pursued by the charming, goofy Nani for two whole years and she is on the cusp of finally accepting his professions of love. Sudeep is a powerful corporate chieftain who holds investors by the short and curly hairs with his brilliance and prowess at commercial real estate development. He is also a handsome, sexy Cocksman of the highest order and ALWAYS gets whatever woman he wants. Always.

This trio comprises a love triangle that is about to turn deadly. When the unthinkable happens - all seems lost, but good Karma rears its happy head and soon we become embroiled in one of the most relentless tales of vengeance imaginable. Throughout the proceedings there is much danger, but there is also considerable tears, romance and hilarity.

Oh yes, and there are grand musical numbers.

The number of vengeance-filled activities in this film seems almost incalculable. We experience revenge like it's never been experienced before and a good deal of the film's running time is devoted to every conceivable form of payback extraction. The final third of the film is also unbearably suspenseful - so much so that I was desperate to relieve myself of certain viscous fluids, but clenched myself with a fury I did not realize was even possible. I could not take my eyes off the screen for one moment.

There isn't a single element of the film that isn't absolutely first-rate. The trio of star performances are pitched to utter perfection, Rajamouli's direction is so astoundingly buoyant and skilful he gives Steven Spielberg a good run for his money, the screenplay co-written by Rajamouli and Janardhan Maharshi (with expert script doctoring by S.S. Kanchi) delivers one delicious narrative surprise after another, K.K. Senthil Kumar's exuberant cinematography is always impeccably lit and composed, Kotagiri Venkateswara Rao's cutting delivers superbly on all the visual story beats with aplomb, the special effects by Makuta VFX are always thrilling, imaginative and imbued with a lovely days-gone-by quality rendered in cutting edge style and the musical score by the great M.M.Keeravani renders one magnificent tune after another.

EEGA is a class act all the way. You'll definitely leave the cinema agreeing with me that you'll have NEVER quite seen anything like it - the picture soars with supreme entertainment value and for a movie overflowing with vengeance, I'm happy to report that it's also A-1 entertainment for everyone - yes, the WHOLE FAMILY!!!

Telugu is the second largest language following Hindi in India and its film industry, oft-referred to as Tollywood, might technically be considered second to Bollywood, but if EEGA is any indication of the sheer joy, invention and entertainment value employed in this region of India, I suspect we'll be looking - not to HOLLYWOOD or BOLLYWOOD for tremendous bigger-than-life entertainment, but Tollywood. And leading the charge is a Telugu-speaking director who has all the potential to make Steven Spielberg so much dust in the wind.

Oh, even if you have an inkling what EEGA is about, you'll still love it.

"EEGA" is playing at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013. Visit the TADFF website for more details HERE.

The Most Obnoxious Romantic Duo EVER!!!
Chekhov from the awful STAR TREK reboot
and director Stephen Sommers's daughter!
Guaranteed to sicken you!

Odd Thomas (2013) *
Dir. Stephen Sommers
Starring: Anton Yelchin,
Ashley Sommers, Willem Dafoe
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Imagine a brain-bereft Joss (Buffy) Whedon, dollops of Stephanie (Twilight) Meyer-like pustules, a few worthless truckloads of Suzanne (Hunger Games) Collins progenitorial chaff, plus pretty much every other safe, tween-teen-oriented, potential-franchise genre-turds served up with globs of Rushmore and additional excretions of Wes Anderson's whimsical ilk, tossed into a blender with a hack director, a dull, derivative screenplay adaptation of a ho-hum Dean R. Koontz book, a less-than-compelling cast and lickety-split, you've got all the fixins' for a fantastical quirk-fest to ensure a rank, bilious expulsion.

Worst of all, the occasional hack competence of Stephen (The Mummy, The Mummy Returns) Sommers is woefully gone the way of the Dodo Bird here and we get something closer to the mess that was Van Helsing (or, God Help Us, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra). This might be the worst piece of direction Sommers has ever displayed. The movie's absurd rat-a-tat-tat pace pathetically attempts to render Howard Hawks-like ping-ponging line readings amidst a willy-nilly, scattershot approach to tossing out more scenes and turgid twists than one might find in the absolute rock-bottom Bollywood melodramas.

The whole affair feels as if it's been directed by someone who's ingested a few fields-full of the Khat plant - a sort-of Somali pirate school of helmsmanship.

Anton Yelchin (Chekhov from J.J. Abrams's awful Star Trek reboots) plays a small-town loser soda-counter server with the most obnoxious girlfriend ever conceived (a performance belched up by director Stephen Sommers's daughter Ashley). Not that Yelchin's character is much of a prize himself. He's a smugly one-note clairvoyant who assists a local police detective (played by a sleepy-eyed Willem Dafoe cashing a paycheque). Yelchin sees dead people and they, in turn, point the way to their killers. Yelchin and Sommers make such a disgustingly twee couple, you just feel like punching them in the face - repeatedly - with vigour and a kind of evil glee.

Oh, and "Odd Thomas" is not his nickname, it's his name - period - Odd being his first name and Thomas being his surname. Yup, the title character no less. I bet you're laughing already. Isn't that so, uh quirky?

When our hero begins seeing more than the dearly departed, it turns out there's a whole supernatural species of creature that's going to be wreaking far more havoc than anyone could imagine and he needs to gird his loins to face a most formidable foe - especially since he'll need to accomplish this at break-neck speeds rivalling that of the speed of light itself.

Everything in this movie is pitched to such extremes, that there's no scares, suspense and certainly, no laughs. The picture would have you believe it's got plenty of those elements, but the screenplay is such a mess of annoyingly endless subplots, overwrought dialogue (and narration) and all of it is manically juggled by Sommers's direction - puked up, it seems, from some hack directors' purgatory.

Finally, the only thing truly odd about Odd Thomas is how and why it was made at all and even more egregious than the dreadful script and direction is an overall feeling of cheapness - none of it endearing in a fun, no-to-low-budget manner, but rather it's a movie that's just plain ugly to look at. There's no "good" or intentional ugly here. It's just plain incompetence from its miserable beginning to woeful end.

"Odd Thomas" is one of the few truly rank pictures you're going to see at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013. If you must, you can get more ticket info at the TADFF website HERE.

Stalled (2013) *
Dir. Christian James
Starring: Dan Palmer, Antonia Bernath

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Three things are getting mighty lame, mighty fast. First of all, zombie comedies. Secondly, zilch-budgeted genre films set in one room. Thirdly, one-joke, one-note, one-trick-pony zilch-to-low budgeted movies that rely too heavily upon a gimmick or, God Help Us All, an ironic and/or stupid punchline.

To the first, there is, in my humble estimation, no such thing anymore as horror comedies - period - at least none that are any good. The last truly great horror comedy was Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948 and a handful of good ones sprinkled throughout the late 50s and early 60s (1955's Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and Roger Corman's 1963 Poe-inspired knee-slapper The Raven). I don't consider Mel Brooks's 1974 Young Frankenstein as a horror comedy, per se. For me, it's a comedy that happens to have selected the genre of horror to spoof and pay homage to (particularly the James Whale Universal Frankenstein pictures from the 30s). There are good horror movies with humour in them - especially when the humour comes naturally out of the drama and, more often than not, intrinsically linked to a filmmaker's directorial style wherein he is blessed with a great sense of humour. I consider Shaun of the Dead to emanate from this category and most notably, almost everything by the likes of Sam Raimi, Brian DePalma and Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead. These are movies (and/or directors) that scare the shit out of you and make you laugh. As for my second and third gripes, the writing and/or filmmaking need to be exceptional. If not, the experience can be both interminable and annoying. The new no-budget British film, Stalled, is pretty dreadful. Ten minutes into the picture (after very little of interest has actually transpired), we get some decent lesbo action. Though this perks things up a tad and suggests we might be in for a treat after all, our hopes are dashed as the rest of the picture becomes as dull and incompetent as the pre-sapphic shenanigans.

What you're in for, should you dare see this movie, is a nebbish maintenance slob credited as only W.C. ("screenwriter" and "star" Dan Palmer) who retires to a ladies room to collect himself after robbing a whack of dough from an office Christmas Party raging on the floor above. Two hot babes enter. Our hero hides in a stall. He watches them make out until one of them turns into a zombie and attacks the other one. He eventually has to dispatch the zombie babe and does so by smashing her head open with a toilet bowl seat. More zombies wander in and more and even more and he's stuck in the stall (Stalled, get it?) with no way out. It turns out that a young woman (Antonia Bernath) had earlier hidden in the toilet prior to his arrival and she's locked in a couple of cubicles down from him. While zombies mill about, W.C. and the woman talk. And talk, and talk and talk. Two lonely people who can't even see each other make a strong emotional connection.

Can things possibly get anymore sickening than this?

Indeed.

It turns out, the woman is a porker who is always made fun of by her co-workers. W.C. could care less if she's a sow because she "sounds" really cool. Given that the woman is voiced by Antonia Bernath, a genuine babe (she's played Priscilla Presley in a TV movie, after all), it's a bit hard to swallow. Even harder to swallow is when the bovine miss sacrifices herself so our loser hero can escape.

This ia a good thing too, since the script has one ironic twist up its sleeve that will induce groans - especially since we've already been served up plenty of mawkish touches with Miss Piggy and we get one whopper of a sickeningly sentimental wrap-up as our hero makes a call to his Mommy on a pay phone whilst he's surrounded by hundreds of zombies before the final cut to black signifies the movie is over (and we've happily been put out of our misery).

I feel like I'm picking on a cripple here since these filmmakers had so little in the way of dollars to make the picture, but I ultimately can't feel too bad, because it was made and has been put out in the world for people to pay hard-earned dough to see it. The movie is sloppily directed - with no sense of comic timing (for the purported laughs) and absolutely no talent is on display in terms of generating suspense.

The movie is paced like a State Funeral, the writing is severely lacking humour or invention, the screenwriter is also the lead actor and as such he's bereft of anything resembling screen presence, nor is he even capable of rendering a comic performance. The entire affair is badly shot to boot with ugly lighting and uninspired compositions. The soundscape is especially egregious since there's no consistency to capturing the sounds beyond W.C.'s stall - it's hollow and full of echoes. The zombie makeup and gore is serviceable, but hardly makes up for how otherwise loathsome the movie is.

This picture stinks (I'll refrain from making any toilet jokes here), however it avoids my infamous pubic hair rating because of the lesbo action - a tender mercy if there ever was one. By the way, if you ever want to see a GREAT horror movie with offscreen zombies (or, if you will, infected and deadly mutants), take a look at Bruce McDonald's brilliant Pontypool, written superbly by Tony Burgess - a craggy old D.J. and a babe are locked in a remote radio station as hell breaks loose outdoors.

Now that's how you do it, kids.

"Stalled" is playing at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013. Visit the website HERE.

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 "keep-moving-like-a-shark" attitude is what keeps them alive and his insistence 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. 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 I think the jury is still out, one feels he's going to eventually emerge supreme.

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 this movie flirts with, but never goes the distance with. For example, the overall atmosphere of the picture is so bleak - capturing zombies to practice killing them, 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 know we're in for the de rigueur bleak ending. It's inevitable, really, and given that it is, there's so much arty wheel-spinning going on, that I wished the filmmaker might have found other instances to match 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 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: Debut and/or follow-up features that truly push 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 at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013. Visit the TADFF2013 website HERE.

SHIVERS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Cinematheque Restoration - An Orgy of Canuck Carnage!!!

PARKLAND - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Before, during and after November 22, 1963 in Dallas.

ILO ILO - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - In childhood, solace is fleeting and that which soothes, aches in the face of losing it. Stunning feature length debut from young director from Singapore.

CHILD OF GOD - Review By Greg Klymkiw - # TIFF 2013 - "You never go full retard." - Tropic Thunder

Le démantèlement - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - King Lear visits the farm (Quebec style)

BURT'S BUZZ - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 13 Jody Shapiro Trains His Lens Upon the Immortal Burt Shavitz

GRAVITY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 13 - Sandy Bullock in her astronaut undies is not without merit.

THE GREAT BEAUTY (La Grande Bellezza) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 13 - La Dolce Vita Sorrentino Style

BEYOND THE EDGE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF13 - Edmund Hillary Mt. Everest recreation ruined by 3-D.

THE SACRAMENT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Scary-ass religious-cult thriller blessed with malevolence galore and an astonishing Oscar-calibre performance from the genuinely great character actor Gene Jones!!!

TRACKS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Cute Babe, Cute Camels, Cute Dog, Cute Movie

L'INTREPIDO - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Do you ever want to cold-cock someone who bugs you?

BORDER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - The horrors suffered by the innocent are mostly off-screen, but as such, are even more harrowing as we imagine the fate that faces two women fleeing Syria.

CONCRETE NIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Helsinki Hopes. Helsinki Dreams. Helsinki Despair.

BLUE RUIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Vengeance is mine Sayeth the Storyteller, so bugger off!

THE MAJOR - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - Did you know corruption exists in Russia? Now you do!

EEGA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013 - A Joyous Warning About EEGA

ODD THOMAS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013 - QUIRKY rank incompetence!

STALLED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013 - Awful zombie comedy from Blighty not scary or funny.

THE BATTERY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013 - Slackers Vs. Zombies