The Film Corner with Greg Klymkiw

Buy this DVD to
AVOID CONSTIPATION!

BAD MILO is one of the funniest, creepiest, goriest comedy horror films of 2013 and it's now available on an extras-packed DVD via VSC (Video Services Corp) in Canada, and now, thanks to a great new multi-picture, multi-platform deal with Magnolia Pictures and its superb specialty arm Magnet Releasing, Canadian fans of this first-rate product will be treated to a myriad of delightful bonbons du cinema. Featuring a genial and, for the most part, info-packed commentary track with writer, director and stars plus a series of genuinely entertaining outtakes, extended scenes, deleted material and, for those so inclined, "making of" featurettes and interviews, this is a genuine must-own DVD - not only for some terrific added value goodies, but best of all, the movie itself. Read on, dear reader. I do believe you'll find plenty of reasons in the prose to follow as to why connoisseurs of delightfully detestable bad taste (in ALL the right ways) will be, uh, crapping themselves with joy, joy, joy!!! BAD MILO is one supremely satisfying cinematic bowel movement.

Bad Milo (2013) ***1/2
Dir. Jacob Vaughan
Starring: Ken Marino, Gillian Jacobs, Peter Stormare, Patrick Warburton, Stephen Root, Mary Kay Place, Kumail Nanjiani, Jonathan Daniel Brown

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Are you fond of scatological humour? Do you find farts, faecal matter and good old fashioned anal action of interest? Do you seek solace in globs of blood and excrement splashing across the screen? Well, hang onto your ass-hats. Bad Milo is the most preposterously priceless gross-out laugh-riot I've seen this year. Furthermore, what is simply inarguable is that this exhilarating, almost rapturous comedy is replete with juicy slabs of exquisitely marbled prime-cut horror, featuring the most odious, stench-ridden, bloodthirsty, flesh-slurping and downright disgusting monster in recent cinema history. That the big-eyed, razor-toothed rectal-cavity-dwelling title creature is also E.T.-Mogwai-cute, is the veritable pièce de résistance of this putridly satisfying vat of raw, untreated sewage. Bad Milo is a glorious non-stop barrage of celluloid wet farts aimed directly at your olfactory senses and leading straight to your funny bone.

At the outset of this crazed cult-classic-in-the-making, screenwriters Benjamin Hayes and Jacob Vaughan plunge us immediately into a terrifying P.O.V. of an angry, growling creature as it chases Ken (Ken Marino), nipping at his heels just before our hero bolts into relative safety and warns his babe-o-licious wife Sarah (Gillian Jacobs) to hide and lock herself in the basement - no matter what happens. As the creature on the other side of the closed door is about to batter its way through, we're zapped back in time as the title cards announce: "123 hours earlier."

A florid aural bleat leads us to a radiologist squirting globs of gelatin on Ken's abdomen to perform an ultrasound. He and Sarah are visiting with a specialist to determine the cause of recent stomach troubles and to see if they're in any way related to Ken's potency issues. The doctor examines the sonogram and asks Ken if he's been under any pressure. Well, aside from the pressure building up in his colon, Ken is rising up the ranks of an accounting corporation under the direct supervision of Phil (Patrick Warburton), a sleazy, loyalty-demanding taskmaster who holds all manner of juicy carrots under the young man's nose to inspire the performance of any number of dubious duties in return for eventual advancement opportunities.

The specialist determines that Ken has a polyp deep inside his poop chute which, he claims, is probably the result of poor stress management. He asks Ken how much time he spends in the bathroom on a daily basis to expunge his faecal matter. Ken responds, “I’m in the bathroom a lot, but it’s not extreme.” The look on Sarah's face says otherwise, so Ken comes clean (so to speak) and admits he averages 90 minutes on the crapper over the course of a day. The specialist utters quite the understatement: "This is hugely concerning."

No matter. The good doctor recommends an Endoscopic polypectomy, an especially horrific experience (to which I can personally attest after a few trips to the appropriately named Rudd Clinic in Toronto) wherein a huge pole is inserted into the anus and a snake-like camera wends its way through the colon until the polyp is spotted and a steel lasso takes hold of the distasteful growth and, in the rather over-zealous specialist's description, "pops it like a plum off a tree."

Ken's job until the procedure is to rest and stay stress-free. This proves easier said than done: things are heating up at work whilst Ken's bowel-movement-and-fertility-obsessed Mom (the legendary Emmy-Award winning Mary Kay Place who portrayed Loretta Haggers on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) drives him completely nuts. Pressures mount so considerably that Ken's nightly trysts with the matrimonial toilet bowl are so fraught with grunts, groans, screams and noisy expulsions of gas that his beautiful wife goes to bed alone, unsatisfied, but at least able to sleep through the cacophonous bowel movement exertions thanks to the wads of foam plugs she jams deep into her ears.

In desperation, Ken agrees to meet with the unconventional New Age therapist Highsmith (Peter Stormare, unforgettable as Steve Buscemi's laconic, psychopathic partner in crime in the Coen Brothers'Fargo). What's discovered here is Ken's worst nightmare. Actually, it would be anyone's worst nightmare. A rare, ages-old demon has manifested itself directly from Ken's stress and is prime to murder anyone causing undue pressure to our hero. When Ken releases the demon, it's like he's taking a really painful crap, but once it's out, great relief follows.

It doesn't take long for the carnage to begin - punctuated every so often with ultra-extreme rectal activity. Though Ken's poop monster is slowly eradicating everyone causing him stress, the last thing our hero wants is for people to die - especially those who are closest to him.

The laughs come fast and furious, the gore is geyser-like and eventually the film builds to a climax that is as hilarious as it is downright suspenseful. Yet, for all its gross-out qualities, you might be shocked to discover that the writing is as clever as it is disgustingly on (and in) the nose - yes, at its core, the movie is both a love story and a father-son story - with poo, bum and fart gags, of course.

Though co-writer Jacob Vaughn's direction might lack the glorious panache of a Sam Raimi or Brian De Palma, he handles both the comedy and suspense with assurance, impeccable craft and exuberance. Someone also had the good taste to secure and encourage the brilliant music by Ted Masur, who delivers a score that's reminiscent of the work of Pino Donaggio, Angelo Badalamenti and John Carpenter all mashed into a glorious casserole of homage, satire and straight-up scary music styling.

Last, but not least, the design and execution of Milo himself is a thing of unparalleled low-budget beauty and ingenuity. He's a great monster. And yes, he kind of looks like a blob of poo - only with eyes, ears, mouth, teeth and various appendages allowing him to claw, scratch, tear and run like the wind. Like poo, when Milo dives into the comfort of Ken's anus, he's gently reminded, "Be safe in there. Don’t rip anything." When we were first told during the 1978 release of Richard Donner's Superman, "You will believe a man can fly,"Bad Milo proclaims: "You will believe that a flesh-eating demon can live comfortably in a man's asshole."

Most importantly, if you ever wanted to see a movie in which the legendary Peter Stormare utters the line: "Maybe your anus is just like a vagina," then I can undoubtedly assure you that Bad Milo is a motion picture that has your name written all over it.

A similar scene to the one experienced by Jim Jarmusch and others in New York during the 70s and 80s and captured in the documentary BLANK CITY as well as many other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" series was happening in Winnipeg wherein a very cool explosion in indie underground cinema that I and many colleagues and friends were involved with was spawned. This period, coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as Prairie Post-Modernism included the works of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Greg Hanec and many others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

BLANK CITY and other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" Series can be accessed here:

The Big Gundown (1966) *****
Dir. Sergio Sollima
Scr. Sergio Donati and Sollima
Starring: Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian, Walter Barnes

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Does it get more basic than the hunter and the hunted in Sergio Sollima's rediscovered classic of Italian western cinema The Big Gundown? Well, on the surface, no, but this is a movie that works tremendously on several layers thanks to a character-driven screenplay by trusted Sergio Leone writer Sergio Donati, Sollima's stalwart, subtle direction with just the right flourishes the tale needs and a superb central performance by the Lee Strasberg-trained Cuban actor Tomas Milian as Cuchillo, a Mexican wanted for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl.

The Hunter is one Jonathan Corbett, played by Lee Van Cleef, the steely-eyed "Bad" of Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. (The moronic ads for the truncated, dubbed American version of The Big Gundown referred to Van Cleef as "The Ugly", the role played in Leone's film by Eli Wallach.) Here, Van Cleef plays a bounty hunter with a difference. He's a man of business who's supplemented his obsession with tracking down and cleaning up the scum of Texas with the proceeds of a saloon he owns. Corbett has NEVER accepted bounties for his quarry and the tale begins when Brokston (Walter Barnes), a powerful land baron, offers Corbett a political career as a Senator on a platter. The prospect of continuing to do the very best for Texas in his august years, without roaming the plains in search of bad guys, is extremely appealing - especially since Corbett recently lost his business holdings in a poker game gone awry.

Brokston, of course, needs one thing from Corbett - a promise that he'll go to Washington and smooth over the magnate's designs upon building a railroad from the U.S. of A. to Mexico. This will make Brokston rich beyond his wildest dreams and though Corbett makes it clear, he's not in the business of making anyone rich, he believes this railroad will be good for Texas, so he agrees to the generous offer. There is, however, one more job Corbett needs to do. A savage sex killer has taken the life of a little girl and there is, to Brokston's mind, only one person who can bring the filth to justice.

With thoughts of a Senate position dancing across his cerebellum, Corbett sets out in search of the aforementioned Cuchillo. Where the narrative deviates from the usual cat and mouse of such a mission, is the political context with which the story is layered. The film is strangely universal and downright contemporary in its exploration of those who have and those who do not and the huge gap between justice for the rich and justice (or lack thereof) for the poor.

Cuchillo turns out to be far more than the garden variety bounty and Corbett is faced with an adversary who manages to outwit him at every turn. Most importantly, Corbett becomes oddly enamoured with the wily sex maniac outlaw - not just because of the bad guy's prowess at getting away, but the lengths to which Cuchillo goes to stay several steps ahead of the law. Most of the hardened criminals Corbett has dealt with are either too stupid and/or tired enough to know when they're beaten and eventually succumb to capture or death, whichever comes first.

Not so, here. Cuchillo is a formidable quarry and damn likeable. He also could have well dispatched Corbett quite handily on several occasions if he so chose to, but he doesn't. Something's definitely rotten in the State of Texas and as the hunter and hunted proceed with the cat and mouse game, Corbett realizes there's more here than what appears to meet his steely eyes.

Though the movie never goes out of its way to hammer home the tale's political implications in a didactic manner, the delineations between rich and poor definitely give the movie the sort of weight truly great westerns are imbued with. As a director, Sollima never gets caught up in his own style and/or cleverness. He tackles the proceedings with yeoman attention to spinning a good yarn first and only indulging in flourishes that are as breathtaking as they are absolutely necessary to advancing the narrative and/or expressing important elements of character.

There are, for example, any number of reveals, pull-backs, cutaways and smash cuts that do knock us on our ass, but nothing ever feels like the sort of style over substance frissons that, say, Leone indulges in with completely over-the-top frequency (albeit stunningly and operatically).

The Big Gundown is also blessed with an Ennio Morricone musical score that might well be one of his very best. There are any number of stirring moments when image, narrative and music combine expertly to create moments of nail-biting suspense as well as gonad-gooseflesh-stirring drive and emotion. The ballad and central theme by Morricone are, frankly, as hummable and unforgettable as anything the great composer ever wrought.

The Big Gundown is finally, without a doubt, one of the greatest westerns ever made in Italy and an extremely worthwhile picture for both film and genre aficionados.

What's truly wonderful here, is that Grindhouse Releasing's complete package (in Canada via VSC) is as first-rate as the very best home entertainment releases from, say, the Criterion Collection label. The wealth of interview material is staggering and deeply enriching, the international marketing media galleries are thoroughly overwhelming and what you get with this package is more than worth its price tag.

There are four - count 'em - FOUR great discs: a gorgeous Blu-Ray of the original director's cut in Italian, the English language and runcated American release version on Blu-Ray, a DVD version of the film which includes a superb CD-Rom supplement that painstakingly takes you through the very interesting differences of the European and American versions and, for lovers of great music, a gorgeous CD of Morricone's soundtrack.

Seeing Sollima's unexpurgated original film would have been quite enough for me, but I have to admit that I was so blown away by the movie that the supplements more than provided the kind of added value material that not so much enhances the experience of seeing the film, as it expertly provides a magnificent combination of scholarly and practical materials that allow you to marvel at the film's artistry and importance.

A gorgeous and nicely written glossy booklet, a nicely designed jacket and slipcase, an attractive and nicely navigable menu plus a delicious bonus of numerous 60s/70s Euro-Grind trailers all contributes to making Grindhouse Releasing/VSC's disc one of the best home entertainment packages of this year.

Gloria (2013) **1/2
Dir. Sebastián Lelio
Starring: Paulina Garcia, Sergio Hernández

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Gloria (Paulina Garcia) is a late-50s divorcee. She's not really looking for long-term romance, but loving to dance and getting some occasional bone is what leads her to trawl singles clubs to fulfill both natural yearnings.

The clubs are full, but the pickings are slim.

One night, our decently-presevered Chilean GMILF catches the roving eye of the old coot Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández). He's a charmer though and before you can say "sopaipilla", his saggy buttocks are thrusting his knotted chorizo into her warm coliza (doggy-style, 'natch) and love, love, love begins wafting though the air.

Of course, happiness will need to be fleeting in order for the movie to be even remotely imbued with conflict and sure enough, the happily boinking oldsters face the sort of challenges that will keep us on the edges of our seats wondering if a happily-ever-after is in the cards. As well, let's not forget that this is no mere romance. That wouldn't do at all.

It is, first and foremost, a tale of long-in-tooth female empowerment so we are treated to much in the way of soul searching, hard choices and eventually, freedom-infused abandon.

Okay, the movie isn't quite as sickening as I've no doubt made it out to be. It's well made, watchable and Garcia, who won the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival, is a fetching leading lady. The script gives her plenty of story twists and character details to allow for a performance that's as occasionally delightful as it's nuanced. As well, in a day and age when so many movies are little more than overblown video games aimed at brain-dead youth, I have to admit that is sure is nice to see movies about, uh, adults.

In spite of this, though, so many of these movies appear to be aimed at those who are a mere few steps away from their graves. In this sense, Gloria offers up few surprises and seems machine-tooled to appeal to old people who don't much go to the movies anymore. In this regard, the movie lacks bite. It has a few gentle nibbles, but it's mostly toothless. Seriously, are blue-rinse types and their squires so in need of innocuous stuff like this to get them out to the movies? Well, most of them don't seem to be interested much in Nebraska, so chances are, movies like Gloria are exactly what they're looking for.

Gloria is in theatrical release for Valentine's Day via Mongrel Media.

Note to low-budget indie filmmakers:
You can never go wrong with some gratuitous lesbo action.

DILF ALERT! DILF ALERT! DILF ALERT!

Here Comes the Devil (2013) ***1/2
Dir. Adrián García Bogliano
Starring: Francisco Barreiro, Laura Caro, Alan Martinez, Michele Garcia

Review By Greg Klymkiw

All those who object to gratuitous lesbo action during the first five minutes of a horror movie, please raise your hands. Nobody? Good. As a respected Canadian film producer born in Eastern Europe (whom I shall allow to remain nameless) once said to an incredulous young indie filmmaker, "The man - he likes to see the woman with the woman, and the woman - she likes to see the woman with the woman, too."

Now, all those who object to some utterly wicked (and gratuitous) bloodshed following said lesbo action in the aforementioned horror movie, please raise your hands. Nobody? Even better. You're now ready to see Adrián García Bogliano's super-creepy Mexican shocker Here Comes the Devil.

Après the aforementioned gratuitous lesbo action and bloodshed (gorgeously photographed, I might add), you're sitting in the cinema wondering - okay, are the filmmakers ever going to be able to top this one? Well, yes and no, but good goddamn they've sure grabbed you by the short and curlies and now you can't get your eyes off the screen even if you tried. (Though, I suppose you could poke your eyes out, but that would kinda be stupid, eh?)

Where the film takes us from here is mega-Creepville, for director Bogliano slows down the pace in all the right ways and before we know it, we're plunged into the lives of a family driving through the hills near Tijuana. Mom and Dad (Francisco Barreiro, Laura Caro) pull over to a roadside stop and agree to let their kids (Alan Martinez, Michele Garcia) explore the nearby caves. This allows the happy couple an opportunity to get in a little backseat bouncing like in their youth and the kiddies get to experience both nature and the local colour. (Thankfully, the family is not passing through Ensenada - the wildlife in some of the more dubious nightspots involves donkeys. 'Nuff said.)

It might have been handy, however, had everyone known about the local legends surrounding the caves. Mom and Dad end up falling into a comfy post-coital snooze while their kids fall into some mighty mysterious goings-on. Thankfully, after some harrowing worries regarding the disappearance of their children, the kids reappear - safe and sound.

Or so everyone thinks.

What follows is utterly horrendous - in more ways than one, and if things don't quite plunge into gratuitous territory, we're not at all disappointed because the movie is genuinely compelling and scary in ways reminiscent of the very best horror films that employ atmosphere and psychological terror. This is not, however, to say that things don't spiral into total sickness. They do. There's no need to spoil this for anyone, save to say that we're served up a number of tasty morsels guaranteed to invoke both gooseflesh and possibly even regurgitation. A check-list of sickness includes some barf-inspirational boffins, some superbly sickening blood letting and a very nice shower scene. 'Nuff said.

(Years ago when I ran my own art cinema in the 'Peg, I used to hand out air sickness bags for certain movies and encourage patrons to vomit. Alas, far too many of them didn't use the air sickness bags and this poor kid who worked for me, one very hard-working, sweet-faced Paulo Rodriguez, was sadly forced to clean up the spillage. Still, it was a great promotion which I tied-in to a heavy metal radio station. I urge Colin Geddes at the Royal Theatre where Here Comes the Devil opens theatrically in Toronto to consider a similar stunt. I can give him Paulo's phone number, or he can just hire my cousin Peter's fine cleaning company Bee-Clean to do the job.)

It's great to see a movie like this is playing theatrically. Far too many terrific genre films these days go straight to home entertainment formats and while this is fine for second helpings, collectors and lazy assholes who don't want to leave home, the rest of us prefer our shocks on the big screen. Here Comes the Devil, though not quite in the same classic territory of the great Val Lewton RKO thrillers, takes a similar cue and keeps us rooted in the more human elements of the story - here, it's family dynamics. Where it deviates, of course, is that we get to have our cake and it too - lots of creepy atmospheric chills, garnished with a few delightful dollops of sex and violence.

An unbeatable combination, to be sure, but it helps that Bogliano helms the proceedings with a sure hand and elicits a clutch of fine performances - especially from the gorgeous Laura Caro as the decidedly concerned (and mouth-wateringly sexy) Mom.

MILF ALERT! MILF ALERT! MILF ALERT! MILF ALERT! MILF ALERT!

"Here Comes the Devil" is a Magnet picture distributed in Canada via the visionary VSC and making its theatrical debut at the wonderful Royal Theatre in Toronto's Little Italy. Hopefully Johnny Lombardi's ghost will be present.

The Disappeared (2013) **1/2
Dir. Shandi Mitchell
Starring: Brian Downey, Gary Levert, Neil Matheson, Billy Campbell, Shawn Doyle, Ryan Doucette

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The usual low budget Canadian film these days is a thriller in a cabin in the woods with psychological terror in place of supernatural horror requiring major special makeup and visual effects. Most of these pictures end up being deathly dull, so I'm somewhat grateful to writer-director Shandi Mitchell for delivering a low budget Canuck picture that veers away from the usual and provides a simple tale of survival in the middle of nowhere.

Six Newfie fishermen wake up on two small boats tethered together after their trawler has apparently gone down the night before. They're floating about the North Atlantic with limited food and water plus harbouring the imprecise knowledge that land is probably a few hundred miles away. They have faith in their stalwart captain, but all of them realize they're in a sticky wicket. A few of the men harbour conflicts and resentments - one of them is a religious nut, his son is at odds with him, another man has contempt for the God-fearing sailor, and yet another is badly hurt and suffering from an infection that requires immediate treatment and/or amputation - whichever can come first to ensure survival.

Rationing becomes the order of the day and given the dynamics of the characters this causes more than a few added tensions. Finally, there is an overwhelming sense of despair and desperation that take over and the film makes bold and valiant attempts to both generate drama outside of the usual box of such survival tales as well as create a natural and realist atmosphere. The result, however, is that the picture has far more than its fair share of longueurs - some of which seems absolutely necessary, but ultimately require stronger elements to allow the audience an opportunity to coast along in a more contemplative manner - one which is more active in terms of the process of engaging in the storytelling rather than being perched just outside of it.

It is admirable that the picture tries to avoid diving into more obvious, exploitative elements that might have goosed things along if, in fact, the intent was to add a layer of the suspense or thriller genres to the proceedings, but as this is clearly not the intent (a la, say Hitchcock's Lifeboat), the movie does lack more substantive philosophical elements that might have plunged it more successfully into a contemplative mode that would have been integral to the dynamics of moving the story ever-forward. Alas, this never quite holds successfully and instead of allowing the film to inspire rumination that's directly relative to the action at hand, an audience is potentially at the disadvantage of moving their thoughts to everything but that which, is on-screen.

Luckily, the film looks great and there's a successful sense of using wide, open space to generate an atmosphere of claustrophobia - certainly not an easy thing to achieve and one that places the film a lot closer to the more mysterious qualities inherent in the early works of Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock) and Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout). The problem, though, is that Mitchell's film attempts to do this, but ultimately falls short since the narrative does not go out of its way to add a layer of mystery to do it. One can see and even admire, somewhat, the attempt, but at the same time, one also yearns for the film to move more strongly in this direction.

That said, a part of me used some of the picture's longueurs to start imagining the potential of Deliverance-styled Pitcairn Island-ish inbred rednecks floating by to mete out some sodomy or Battleship-styled aliens or even some tribe of stereotypical voodoo worshipping aboriginal savages from Greenland with bones through their nostrils not unlike the natives depicted in Peter Jackson's Skull Island portions of his insane King Kong remake. But hey, that's just me. I won't speak for the thoughts cascading through the minds of others during the aforementioned longueurs.

Another bit of weirdness that can be seen as either a blessing or a curse, is that it's nigh-impossible to completely nail down a proper period for this film. Granted, there's an admirable quality inherent in the tale's attempts to be universal, but it's also one of the more flawed elements that occasionally take us out of the story. When one is making a film with such a deliberate pace, that's the last thing one needs.

The performances are all fine and given that the screenplay doles out elements of character and backstory in subtle ways, the actors all do an excellent job at conveying who they are in relation to the events of their predicament. As such, mystery, danger and malevolence take a somewhat surprising and rather huge backseat to the story's beats. Finally, no matter that the film's intent, or aim, is "true", it yields an experience that just isn't as harrowing as it needs to be. Though the film feels worthy, it does so in a way the betrays its rather earnest Canadian approach. Too much is hinted at, but sometimes, one just needs to call a spade a spade in order to generate a film that creates a more solid forward thrust.

"The Disappeared" is in limited theatrical release across Canada and it's next playmate is at the Winnipeg Film Group Cinematheque on Fri Feb 7, 2014 at 9:00 PM, Sat Feb 8, 2014 at 7:00 PM, Sun Feb 9, 2014 at 7:00 PM and Wed Feb 12, 2014 at 7:00 PM. For further information, please visit the WFG website HERE.

I Am DIVINE! (2013) ****
Dir. Jeffrey Schwarz
Starring: Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead), John Waters, Rikki Lake, Tab Hunter, Mink Stole

Review By Greg Klymkiw

THE FILTHIEST PERSON ALIVE!

Most people associate Divine, the 300-pound drag performer with the films of John Waters and in particular, the notorious scene at the end of Pink Flamingos wherein a cute little doggie takes a fresh poop on the sidewalk and the porcine hero proves to the world that his character is indeed the filthiest person alive by scooping up the turd and eating it with lip-smacking relish. Needless to say, there was far more to Divine, or rather, Harris Glenn Milstead than grossing out the world and this lovely feature length biographical documentary by Jeffrey Schwarz (Vito) delivers a portrait of a committed actor and generous human being. Using new interviews, archival footage and a myriad of film clips, Schwarz takes us from Divine's childhood, through to adolescence and then throughout his entire career. To learn he was bullied as a child is no surprise and though he appears to have had a loving girlfriend in his late teens, he was a fun, funny and complex gay man with a definite penchant for performance. His friendship and association with John Waters was formed very early on and clearly the men inspired each other. Waters did indeed create the Divine persona, but Divine took it several steps further and became one of the most beloved figures in underground cinema.

However, what I, and probably many viewers don't know is just how popular and in demand Divine was on the New York stages of off-off-off-VERY-off Broadway. He acted in numerous shows, always in drag and also fashioned a brilliant career as a standup performer. Divine's success in New York led to worldwide tours and he was, in fact, the toast of show business - receiving backstage visits from the likes of Mick Jagger, Jack Nicholson - you name it - a who's who of entertainment royalty.

Of course, every year or so was a new John Waters film and as Waters himself sought to grow as a filmmaker, so did Divine as an actor. Waters cannily crafted ever-shifting roles for Divine and by the time Polyester came around, Waters had Divine playing the frustrated suburban housewife relatively straight - a model 50s style woman who is seduced by none other than former teen heartthrob Tab Hunter. Divine expressed some disappointment at being relegated to a supporting role in Hairspray, but his performance here was so pitch perfect and the film itself a mainstream success that Divine (and Waters) finally reached the widest possible audience of either of their careers.

Schwarz spends a fair bit of time on Divine's starring role in Paul Bartel's Lust in the Dust where he and Lainie Kazan vied for the hearts of stalwart cowboy heroes and we begin to learn even more interesting things about Divine. Though gay, he never considered himself a full-on drag queen and certainly did not relate at all in his private life to adhering to the lifestyle of either a transvestite or transgendered individual. Divine was ALL-MAN and that's how he was happy to keep it.

TROUBLE IN MIND

In fact, his desire to act in "straight" roles AS a man, became increasingly intense and after years of toil in the underground, Alan Rudolph eventually cast him opposite Kris Kristofferson in Trouble in Mind.

Schwarz doesn't neglect Divine's private life, either. We learn of his sad estrangement from his parents, his drug taking (though mostly marijuana) and his endless fight with obesity - so much so that, in spite of endless attempts at dieting, he kept falling off the wagon and gaining the weight back exponentially.

And finally, we're taken to Divine's key point - where all his dreams of being taken seriously as an actor came to fruition and he was cast in a straight comic role on television's hit series "Married With Children".

This is clearly a warm portrait and rightly so. We get a great sense of Divine as both a great artist and as a generous, loving human being. In the end, his obesity and severe obstructive sleep apnea contributed to a massive heart attack that cut his life far too short and while there is much to admire in this documentary in terms of sheer entertainment value and good humour, it is also a tremendously moving experience.

By the end, I defy anyone seeing this terrific picture to have anything resembling a dry eye.

"I Am Divine" is in limited theatrical release across North America and in Canada can next be seen at the Winnipeg Film Group Cinematheque Sat Feb 8, 2014 at 9:00 PM, Thu Feb 13, 2014 at 9:00 PM, Fri Feb 14, 2014 at 9:00 PM, Sat Feb 15, 2014 at 9:00 PM and Thu Feb 20, 2014 at 9:00 PM. For further information, please visit the WFG website HERE.

The TURD

Endless Love (2014) Dir. Shana Feste
LOWEST RATING: "The Turd discovered behind Harry's Charbroil and Dining Lounge"
Starring: Gabriella Wilde, Alex Pettyfer, Bruce Greenwood, Joely Richardson, Robert Patrick

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Each time a song was insultingly coughed up into my face like some lump of technicolor phlegm by one of the infinite number of contemporary performers on the soundtrack of this horrendous 2014 film adaptation of Scott Spencer's magnificent novel, all I kept thinking was how much these gibbering gibbons had less collective talent than an infected cyst lodged deep inside Lionel Richie's ass-crack and a snot-tangled nostril hair poking out of the proboscis of Diana Ross. They were, of course, the duo du jour who crooned a number-one-with-a-bullet duet of the execrable (Oscar-nominated!!!) theme song "Endless Love" from Franco Zeffirelli's abominable 1981 picture which, like this 2014 version, also butchered the same great book. The intrusive pop tunes become so annoying - wedged, as they are into scenes like unwelcome music videos or worse, cascading noisily over dialogue - that they make Christophe's Beck's whiny instrumental score seem just this side of a lobotomized Bernard Herrmann as rendered by the 101 Strings Orchestra.

However, let it be said now, that the 1981 Endless Love which, was a sludge heap of immense proportions, must now surely be considered one of the greatest movies ever made compared to this 2014 bowl of Charles Manson's anal drippings. If Zeffirelli created a cinematic equivalent to an aborted foetus served up on a dollar-store paper plate, then it's clear the idiot-sans-savante, Shana Feste (she of the abysmal Country Strong) and who purportedly directed this version, must surely have outdistanced the cinematic abortionist styling of Zeffirelli and bloody well ripped a foetus from a womb with a rusty coat hanger, then stomped upon the gelatinous blob with the abandon of a lead performer in a crack-fuelled performance of "Lord of the Dance", then took a huge, rancid crap upon it and finally, with a hearty "Voila!", called it a movie.

I really have to ask: Why bother making this movie if the goal was not to improve upon Zeffirelli's? If the goal was to improve upon it, the manner in which its makers went about doing so suggests they must surely be afflicted with (what Borat might call) "the retardation". And, of course, the more pressing question is this: Why even bother to adapt a great book that, given its vivid characters, political subtext, emotional landscape, rich setting and superb story structure - all of it sitting there for even the most unimaginative filmmakers to take advantage of - why, oh why, oh why, butcher and/or patchwork quilt everything that makes the story great in the first place? If any book seemed movie-ready, it was this one and yet, it took not one, but two sets of brick-heads to screw it up within the course of Christ's rather short lifespan, 33 years.

At least Zeffirelli, in his addled fashion, attempted (albeit badly) to inject the movie with something resembling genuine passion and even vaguely acknowledged elements of Spencer's book that anyone with half-a-brain would have to do. Such is not the case here. The gaggle of morons leading the 2014 charge upon Spencer's fine prose appear to have been interested in crafting little more than an innocuous machine-tooled teen romance aimed at a Valentine's Day opening to sucker in as many undiscriminating female viewers as possible. I have no doubt the brain dead little ladies will get exactly what they paid for.

While it is true that every single person involved in the writing, direction and production of Endless Love 2014 is clearly a moron, even they must be bloody Rhodes Scholars compared to the brain-bereft slugs at Universal Pictures who hold all the remake rights to Spencer's book and chose to green light this utterly detestable piece of work in just the manner in which it's been wrought.

Endless Love tells the tale of teen lovers David (Alex Pettyfer) and Jade (Gabriella Wilde). He's poor. She's privileged. He's unsure about his plans after high school graduation. She's headed for university. She's going to be an eminent doctor just like her Dad, Hugh (Bruce Greenwood). Pater is, to make things interesting, protective and controlling to almost psychopathic extremes (with more than a few Oedipal peccadilloes). He clearly disapproves of Jade's boyfriend. Eventually, he places a restraining order against David. Jade moves on, unhappily. Their love, however, is endless. David comes to Hugh's manse to claim the woman he loves. Dad knocks a candle over. The house is soon ablaze. David saves Hugh's life. Hugh comes to accept David. Jade is happy. David is happy. Their love, you see, is endless.

Ugh.

None of this has anything to do with Scott Spencer's novel - a book so romantic, it hurts, literally. The book slashes, scourges, stabs, cuts, saws away at the bone and greedily sucks out the marrow. There isn't a wildly romantic beat that doesn't alternately soar AND emit pain. The novel brilliantly fucks with everyone's notions of romantic love, but does so in a way that we begin to question if its portrait of aching love is really as aberrant as we've been told to believe. Instead we accept, nay - we EMBRACE - that THIS is what love, in fact, MUST be.

Romantic love in its purest state MUST be a sickness. If it doesn't hurt, and hurt BAD, how can there be joy?

Spencer's tale of obsession, familial dysfunction and love is so excruciating, so aching, so debilitating that we, as readers, are plunged into an emotional landscape that's scary beyond belief - mostly because it's so true, so familiar, so real and finally one of the few literary depictions of love to have the courage to proclaim that the purest, most intense form of love borders on the aberrant, the antisocial and yes, even (at least in the eyes of society), the criminal. Spencer's story begins with pain and destruction, with fire - one that rages literally so that we never forget what burns beneath the flesh.

The movie that resides in Spencer's book continues to remain untapped - dormant. Zeffirelli missed the boat, but Feste jumps aboard and just sinks it without even trying. Casting Gabriella Wilde and Alex Pettyfer is the height of stupidity. Both actors are so insipid that neither of them feels like they're in a movie based upon one of the greatest works of literary art in the history of American letters. Instead, they both come across as if they're hitting their marks on some TV soap opera. They're as bland as Wonder Bread and on that basis alone, there's very little reason to care a whit about these people as characters. There is one fine performance in the film and one only wishes that the stunning malevolence, yet odd humanity displayed by Bruce Greenwood could have saved itself for another and better screen adaptation. Alas, he's wasted here.

The best thing about Endless Love, the movie, is the freedom to just skip it.

Just skip it and read Spencer's book. It's so great you won't be able to put it down and after you've read it once, you'll want to go back to it again and again. God knows, I have. For 35 years it's been a book that I am always happy to revisit and experience at various junctures of my life and, most importantly, at ever shifting stages of my life experience. It grows with you and constantly offers its own form of endless love - the ability of art to reflect life and, in turn, give you the sort of nourishment you need to survive - to fill your head and heart with truth and beauty - neither of which are EVER on display in this utterly abhorrent, despicably repugnant and contemptible pile of trash.

See Endless Love at your peril. I can pretty much guarantee the screen will be full of buzzing flies, all seeking resting points to devour the stools deposited by its filmmakers.

"Endless Love" is playing theatrically via Universal Pictures.

The Threat to Putin

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (2013) ****
Dir: Mike Lerner, Maxim Pozdorovkin
Starring:
Nadezhda (Nadia) Tolokonnikova
Yekaterina (Katia) Samutsevich
Maria (Masha) Alyokhina

Review By Greg Klymkiw

On the day Vladimir Putin, the most vile Russian totalitarian leader since Joseph Stalin was allowed to control the country by "appointment", not election, a clutch of intelligent young women immediately formed the Pussy Riot protest movement.

Not unlike the Stalinist show trials of 1937, Nadezhda (Nadia) Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina (Katia) Samutsevich and Maria (Masha) Alyokhina, three members of the Pussy Riot collective were charged with the criminal act of hooliganism, forced to endure months of incarceration between public legal proceedings, tried in what amounted to little more than a kangaroo court and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia. As the world is well aware, their "crime" involved storming the historic Christ the Saviour Cathedral, taking to the altar (where women are not allowed to go, apparently on God's orders) and singing a few bars of their anti-Putin song for about 30 seconds before being dragged away by burly security goons into the shackles of the Moscow police.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Modern Russia!

Unlike Stalin's show trials, Putin's war against women and free speech, completely backfired. Like all sexist, misogynistic Russian patriarchs, Putin and his thugs assumed these young ladies would fold under pressure and display simpering, submissive remorse for their "crimes" and beg for the court's mercy. Instead, the members of Pussy Riot remained defiant, committed and intelligent beyond their years and certainly far more progressive than their brain-dead captors.

Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin's fine documentary feature film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer wastes no time in presenting a stirring portrait of the trial that captured the world's imagination. The picture lays out the political context, the act of defiance itself and the ludicrous legal proceedings wherein the three young women so passionately and intelligently condemn the Totalitarian regime that, in the name of God (and Putin), seeks to keep its populace under the thumb of subjugation by blending the Czarist-style coalition between Church and State with the Terror Tactics of Joseph Stalin's Communist Dictatorship. Utilizing actual trial footage, news reports, archival materials and new interviews, the filmmakers give us a stirring and expertly edited portrait of these women as individuals and though their journey is harrowing, it equally inspirational in spite of the film ending with their final conviction and sentencing.

Though Putin attempted to save face in December by releasing the women from prison, it was clearly a cynical move meant to deflect attention away from his horrendous new laws that seek to discriminate and criminalize homosexuality - this on the eve of the Sochi Olympics. The frustration one feels watching the film is palpable. Putin and his lawmakers are clearly condemning the Stalinist destruction of religion, yet equating the attempts at free speech employed by Pussy Riot with the heinous actions of a Totalitarian Butcher. Anyone familiar with Orthodox Eastern Rite traditions (which - full disclosure - I was brought up with) realizes how backwards and patriarchal the religion actually is. The very nature of organized religions is to subjugate and the Slavic Orthodox traditions are there as a control mechanism. That Putin, a former Communist KGB thug is all of a sudden so concerned with religious freedoms he once repressed seems just so obvious and disingenuous.

To vilify and criminalize the actions of these young women is appalling and there's no doubt the film, though slanted in their favour, is choosing the proper high ground in this controversy. That Putin is using religion to further the subjugation of the Slavic people - not only in Russia, but in Ukraine and other countries - makes perfect sense, but it doesn't make it right. The film might well be detailing the plight of artists and free-thinkers in Russia under this dictatorship, but the film stands as an important testament to how this tactic is being employed right across the board - not just in the East, but the West as well.

The women of Pussy Riot are, frankly, heroes. My own daughter - NOT in Russia, but in a publicly funded school in Canada - was subjected to the most horrendous patriarchal abuse at the hands of Eastern Rite religion. Singled out by a teacher as a sinner, this sweet, bright (then ten-year-old) girl who "dared" to ask questions in an educational institution was ordered to kneel in the centre of the classroom while the rest of the students encircled her and prayed for her soul - to keep her from going to Hell.

(Note: Another example of this idiocy perpetrated against her in a Toronto school is detailed in Alan Zweig's brilliant documentary 15 Reasons To Live, released by Kinosmith.)

What's happening in Russia can and does happen everywhere. Religion is an opiate, but it's becoming, more and more, a weapon. Pussy Riot is a symbol of all women - and men - who refuse to kowtow to the Status Quo, especially in the spurious name of God. Pozdorovkin and Lerner's film is just the sort of weapon free-thinkers will need to battle the scourge attempting to drown all of us.

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer should be required viewing in ALL schools for all young people - as both inspiration and a springboard for greater dialogue as to fighting the forces that want us all to be cogs in a machine - slaves to the power brokers who seek ever more wealth and power.

"Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer" is currently in theatrical release via Kinosmith. It's begun its run at the Bloor Hot Docs Theatre in Toronto and will roll out across the rest of Canada.

The Long Day Closes (1992) *****
Directed By Terence Davies
Starring: Leigh McCormack, Marjorie Yates

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The lighted windows dim
Are fading slowly.
The fire that was so trim
Now quivers lowly.
Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes. - Chorley and Sullivan

The movies really are everything. They're the stuff dreams are made of. They're magic and memory. They're the 24 frames per second that flicker across the carbon-arc bulb that throws moving pictures up onto a glorious screen of silver that in turn bounces back into our hearts and minds through our eyes. They're the warmth and solace we need, infusing our lives with pure, unadulterated joy. They're music for our soul.

And, they are perfection in an imperfect world.

Terence Davies, one of the world's greatest living filmmakers, proves this time and time again with each new work. Even when his films delve into the darker corners of the human heart as in his harrowing first feature Distant Voices, Still Lives with its horrific sequences of physical abuse upon wife and child at the hands of the late, great Pete Postlethwaite or his perfect adaptation of Edith Wharton's genteel expose of savagery amongst the upper crust society of turn-of-the-century New York in The House of Mirth, Davies always finds a way to turn the magic of movies into a stylistic salve.

The Long Day Closes, however, might be Davies' purest expression of joy. His second feature film is a dazzling tone poem that recounts the life of young Bud (Leigh McCormack) and the beginnings of his obsessive and passionate love affair with the movies and burgeoning sexuality. Set against the backdrop of a grey Liverpool lower middle class neighbourhood, Bud continually seeks joy and solace - first in family, but secondly (and with equal fervour), the movies.

The notion of watching people watching movies might seem akin to watching someone hog a really fun video game and being forced to watch them play, but Davies so expertly weaves the process and joy of the movies into the simple narrative that I can think of no other film that comes close to fully capturing - on film - what it means to love film.

Part of the picture's success in this is taking Bud's perspective. If there is a narrative thread in this extremely poetic film, it is a child's awakening sense of himself within a world that will, in many ways, always view him as an outsider and, in equal measure, a young man who will yearn to be a part of the world that he knows he'll always be somewhat outside of. There are, of course, the deep feelings of warmth Bud feels for his almost saintly mother (Marjorie Yates) and the happy family sing-songs, but mostly it's the moments which feel clearly like cinematic renderings of memory - rain dappled alleyways with faded movie posters affixed to the brick walls, sitting in the local cinema as light pours from the projection booth backlighting Bud with as much warmth as the light from the screen bounces back and bathes his glowing face.

Then, there is the sequence in the film that nobody ever forgets where the camera is framed upon the gorgeous patterns of a living room carpet as the sun pours through the window and dapples the fabric - always shifting and dancing with the ever-changing daylight - all in that magical perspective that all children must surely have experienced on lazy days, staring intently at those things of beauty and simplicity that are always there, but that are also so easily taken for granted.

There are, as with any film by Davies, moments of melancholy and downright sadness, but what finally always lifts us and allows us to soar with both the filmmaker and his main character are the simple, beautiful and heart-achingly joyous shreds of time mediated through the pure magic of cinema.

And yes, death, is part of this joy - its regenerative process always present and finally enveloping the film during its concluding sequence of a full moon upon an ever-shifting night sky and the voices - seemingly from heaven - as they sing the lamentations as composed by Henry Chorley and Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and we are carried to the heavens by Davies's haunting images as we feel a kaleidoscope of emotions.

It's a beautiful film.

"The Long Day Closes" is available on a stunning new Criterion Collection dual format DVD/Blu-Ray package complete with an astounding restored 2K digital film transfer supervised by director Terence Davies and director of photography Michael Coulter, an extremely valuable commentary track by Davies and Coulter (easily up there with the very best Scorsese commentaries), a terrific British TV documentary on the film featuring interviews with Davies, footage from the film’s production, and interviews with other members of the cast and crew, all-new interviews with executive producer Colin MacCabe and production designer Christopher Hobbs, the film's evocative trailer and a fine essay by critic Michael Koresky in booklet form.

Rififi (1955) *****
Dir. Jules Dassin
Starring: Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Janine Darcey, Magali Noël

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The major set piece of this extraordinary French crime film by blacklisted American director Jules Dassin is a breathless thirty-minute-long heist sequence that is shot with natural sound, no dialogue and no music.

It's pure cinema!

It's also one of the most nail-bitingly suspenseful scenes in movie history. We've come to know the characters, we understand the high stakes for all of them if they don't pull off the big steal and worst of all, we're well aware of what will happen if they're caught - especially the desperate old man, Tony "le Stéphanois" (Jean Servais). He's just served five years of hard time for a heist gone wrong and his only choices in life amount to petty crime, gambling and/or getting caught and being tossed back into the hoosegow until he's dead (or as close to dead as he'll ever get).

These men are criminals, but we want them to succeed. It's post-war France and the opportunities for men who've known only one way to survive are pretty much non-existent. They live by a strict code of honour and they'll steal, but they won't kill (at least until they are pushed to the limit to do so). There's clearly honour amongst these thieves (save for the slimy, greasy, lazy borderline pimps who weasel into the proceedings later on) and we never once feel like there are viable options for our main characters.

And so, we follow them willingly and almost complicitously into the breach - an insanely daring heist that requires split-second timing, impeccable teamwork and one hell of a massive whack of horseshoes worth of luck stuffed up their respective and collective keisters.

If the heist was only thing Rififi had going for it, there's no doubt the picture would be highly regarded, but that its bookends are as solid and compelling as all get out place Dassin's movie on s pedestal that holds some of the greatest crime pictures ever made. The manner in which Dassin shoots the heist is completely in keeping with his approach to the rest of the movie. Shooting almost exclusively on location captures the naturalistic feeling of the film's hard-boiled tale. Much like his groundbreaking American crime pictures (Naked City, Brute Force) which, broke American cinema out of the studio bound mould and took them onto the streets a la the Italian neorealist movement, Rififi is a glorious blend of stylized frissons within the framework of life itself.

Dassin, of course, had a tiny budget and little time to shoot the film, so he personally scouted all the locations in order to get a strong visual sense in advance to allow for impeccable planning. In many ways, Rififi is a model picture for independent, low budget approaches that are still infused with the highest degree of production value. Within Dassin's impeccable eye for visual detail, he's doubly blessed by working with the genius production designer Alexandre Trauner who manages to deliciously goose the look of the film.

Narratively, the tale is tough-minded and even romantic, but the attention to the details of the lives of the criminals and the heist itself (including the meticulous planning) give it the crank it needs to always keep us glued to the screen. As well, there's no overwhelming (and annoying) sense of the proceedings ever diving into moralistic waters. We believe in these men AND their criminal intent. We want them to succeed and if things go wrong and all becomes futile, Dassin sets the picture up in such a way that we're going to feel and care deeply about whatever plight the characters suffer. It helps, also, that the casting is impeccable - especially Servais as the world weary "le Stéphanois", Dassin himself as the funny, sprightly and finally, almost tragic figure of the ladies' man, as well as the other disparate and memorable members of the team.

The importance of Rififi as both dazzling entertainment, but as well, its place in laying the foundations for crime pictures that followed as well as the whole French New Wave that would come a few years later is, frankly, incalculable. All its historical significance aside, it's one hell of a good show! Rififi is brutal, harrowing and darkly funny and it seldom got better than this. The dames are dames, its heroes noble and the villains are pure filth. Sure, the movie trades in on the tropes of the genre, but does so expertly within its overwhelming naturalism that nothing ever feels cliched and is, in fact, far fresher than most films made today.

"Rififi" is available on a gorgeous Criterion Collection Dual Format Blu-Ray/DVD release complete with New 2K digital restoration, my favourite uncompressed monaural soundtrack, a very inspirational interview with director Jules Dassin, set design drawings by art director Alexandre Trauner, still, trailer, an optional English-dubbed soundtrack (especially handily for additional screenings to just study Dassin's visuals and a terrific essay by Jim Hoberman.

Sex After Kids (2013) *½
Dir. Jeremy Lalonde
Starring: Gordon Pinsent, Zoie Palmer, Paul Amos, Mary Krohnert, Kate Hewlett, Jay Brazeau, Mimi Kuzyk, Katie Boland, Kris Holden-Ried, Amanda Brugel, Peter Keleghan, Shannon Beckner, Ennis Esmer

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I've said it before, I'll say it again: "Who wants to go to the movies to watch TV?" Sadly, there have been any number of lame comedies released during the new millennium - both indie and studio - that are little more than feature-length TV sitcoms and sadder yet, some of them actually do decent numbers at the box-office. This Canadian feature film is probably not the worst, nor especially egregious example of this - Lord knows some of the more disgraceful efforts in this genre of inconsequence have come from entities that should know better.

Some of the all-time worst seem to star the revolting Sarah Jessica Parker - films like Failure to Launch, Did You Hear About the Morgans and, of course, both loathsome Sex and the City movies have rubbed our noses in the dog doo-doo that is the woefully galumphing creature of the equine persuasion who, thankfully, is nowhere to be seen in Sex After Kids, but oddly, about the best that can be said for this trifle of a movie is that one could imagine a bigger budget version of it starring that toothy, horrendous version of Old Paint on two legs.

There is a clearly attractive and talented cast of terrific Canadian actors in this ensemble piece and while it is mildly pleasing to see some of them do their best with the sitcom dialogue to the point where one could imagine some of it being funny, the fact remains that none of it ever is.

The series of stories here all deal with the problems bourgeois couples face in the sack after they have kids. Tying it all together is the almost-funny presence of the wonderful Gordon Pinsent as a sex therapist. I say, "almost" funny only because the idea of the stalwart Canuck having to talk about various sex acts is a lot more amusing than the execution. It's not Pinsent's fault that the funniest thing for me is imagining him use sex terms adorned in his RCMP outfit from "Forest Rangers", but the writing here is generally sub-par - even by the standards of - ahem - CBC-TV comedy. Pinsent gives it the old CBC-try, but I'd frankly rather watch him in The Rowdyman for the umpteenth glorious time.

Basically, what we get here is a clutch of couples post-birth, struggling through the dilemmas of keeping the old-boink-flames going. We have a lesbian couple, various straight couples, single moms, Lothario-types, oldsters with the empty nest syndrome, etc. and we watch them go through the ropes and tropes of their flawed sex lives as the picture grinds away in its by-the-numbers fashion that reminds one of a feature length pilot for a Canadian version of "Love American Style".

And gosh golly gee, they all learn to spice things up and/or get the passion and lovin' back in their inconsequential lives.

That the world pictured is so offensively bourgeois is bad enough, but that we have to see so many good actors wasted is borderline sickening. Given that the movie was made for a crowd-funded pittance makes me feel like I'm kicking a cripple by dumping on it, but the bottom line is that the movie was made, it's out there in the world and it's really not very good.

That said, I reiterate my aforementioned point that the movie is so inconsequential that it might stand a decent enough chance to have the remake rights sold to a studio and then we can get an even more empty version not unlike one of those awful Working Title sitcoms with the likes of Hugh Grant traipsing through the silliness for female audiences comprised of steno-girls, mall workers and their suffering dates. Then they too can get all warm and cuddly, get some boinking in, get married, have their loathsome children and then have the same sex-after-kids problems afflicting the characters of this TV movie.

"Sex After Kids" is inexplicably playing in theatrical venues via Indie-Can Entertainment. Look forward to it on pay-per-view if you miss it on the big screen and maybe, just maybe, we'll see a long-running series on CBC and maybe even a Working Title version with Liam Neeson in the Gordon Pinsent role. I can imagine it now - "You folks better get boinking or I'm going to find you and I'm going to kill you."

Taras Bulba (1962) *****
dir. J. Lee Thompson
Starring: Yul Brynner, Tony Curtis

Review By Greg Klymkiw

“Do not put your faith in a Pole.
Put your faith in your sword and your sword in the Pole!”

Thus spake Taras Bulba – Cossack Chief!
(As played in 1962 by Yul Brynner, ‘natch!)

These days, there are so few truly momentous events for lovers of fine cinema and, frankly, even fewer such momentous events for those of the Ukrainian persuasion. However, film lovers and Ukrainians both have something to celebrate. Especially Ukrainians.

The recent events in Ukraine involving the revolution against Russia are indicative of the events celebrated in the Fox/MGM DVD release of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba is (and will be), without question, as momentous an occasion in the lives of Ukrainians the world over as the execution of Saddam Hussein must have been to the entire Bush family of Texas.

As a pig-fat-eating Cossack-lover, I recall my own virgin helping (at the ripe age of four) of Taras Bulba with my family at the late lamented North Main Drive-Inn Theatre in the sleepy winter city of Winnipeg. Being situated in the ‘Peg’s North End (on the decidedly wrong side of the tracks), everyone of the Ukrainian persuasion was crammed into this drive-inn theatre when Taras Bulba unspooled there for the first time.

A veritable zabava-like atmosphere overtook this huge lot of gravel and speaker posts. (A zabava is a party where Ukrainians place a passionate emphasis on drinking, dining and dancing until they all puke.) Men wore their scalp locks proudly whilst women paraded their braided-hair saucily. Children brandished their plastic sabers pretending to butcher marauding Russians, Turks, Mongols and, of course, as per Gogol's great book, Poles.

Those adults of the superior sex wore baggy pants (held up proudly by the brightly coloured pois) and red boots whilst the weaker sex sported ornately patterned dresses and multi-coloured ribbons in their braided hair.

All were smartly adorned in embroidered white shirts.

Enormous chubs of kovbassa and kishka (all prepared with the finest fat, innards and blood of swine) along with Viking-hefty jugs of home-brew were passed around with wild abandon. Hunchbacked old Babas boiled cabbage-filled varenyky (perogies) over open fires and slopped them straight from the vats of scalding hot water into the slavering mouths of those who required a bit of roughage to go with their swine and rotgut. I fondly recall one of my aunties doling out huge loaves of dark rye bread with vats of salo (salted pig-fat and garlic) and studynets (jellied boiled head of pig with garlic) and pickled eggs for those who had already dined at home and required a mere appetizer.

One might say, it was a carnival-like atmosphere, or, if you will, a true Cossack-style chow-down and juice-up.

However, when the lights above the huge silver screen dimmed, the venerable North Main Drive-Inn Theatre transformed reverently into something resembling the hallowed Saint Vladimir and Olga Cathedral during a Stations of the Cross procession or a panachyda (deferential song/dirge/prayers for the dead) at Korban's Funeral Chapel.

Everyone sat quietly in their cars and glued their Ukrainian eyeballs to the screen as Franz Waxman’s exquisitely romantic and alternately boisterous musical score (rooted firmly in the tradition of Ukrainian folk music) thundered over the opening credits which were emblazoned upon a variety of Technicolor tapestries depicting stars Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis in the garb of Ukraine’s mighty warriors of the steppes.

This screening and the overwhelming feelings infused in those who were there could only be described as an epiphany. Like me (and ultimately, my kind), I can only assume there wasn’t a single Ukrainian alive who didn’t then seek each and every opportunity after their respective virgin screenings to partake – again and again and yet again – in the staggering and overwhelming cinematic splendour that is – and can only be – Taras Bulba.

All this having been said, barbaric garlic-sausage-eating Ukrainian heathen are not the only people who can enjoy this movie. Anyone – and I mean ANYONE – who loves a rousing, astoundingly entertaining, old-fashioned and action-packed costume epic will positively delight in this work of magnificence.

The source material for this terrific picture is the short novel Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, a young Ukrainian writer of Cossack stock who is often considered the father of Russian fiction. He was a contemporary of Pushkin and the two of them were both friends and leaders of the Russian literary scene in St. Petersburg over 150 years ago. Prior to writing Taras Bulba, Gogol (this is the popular Russified version of his name which, in the original Ukrainian would actually be Hohol) dabbled in narrative poetry, held some teaching positions and worked in the Russian bureaucracy.

Gogol’s early fictional works were short satirical stories steeped in the rural roots of his Ukrainian Cossack background. Evenings On A Farm Near The Village of Dykanka (Vechera Na Khutore Blyz Dykanky) was full of magic and folklore in the rustic, yet somewhat mystical world of simple peasants and Cossacks. The material is, even today, refreshing – sardonically funny, yet oddly sentimental. It even made for an excellent cinematic adaptation in Alexander Rou’s early 60s feature made at the famed Gorky Studios and a recent Ukrainian television remake starring the gorgeous pop idol Ani Lorak. Gogol’s vivid characters, sense of humour and attention to realistic detail all added up to supreme suitability for the big screen.

Taras Bulba is no different. The material is made for motion pictures. Alas, several unsatisfying versions pre-dated this 1962 rendering. Luckily, this version is the one that counts thanks to the team of legendary producer Harold Hecht (Marty, The Crimson Pirate and Sweet Smell of Success in addition to being Burt Lancaster’s producing partner), stalwart crime and action director J. Lee Thompson (Cape Fear, The Guns of Navarone) and screenwriters Waldo Salt (who would go on to write Midnight Cowboy, Serpico and Coming Home) and the veteran Karl Tunberg (Ben-Hur, Down Argentine Way, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and fifty or so other scripts).

This, then, was the dream team who were finally able to put Gogol’s Taras Bulba on the silver screen where it ultimately belongs.

For Gogol, Taras Bulba (in spite of the aforementioned literary qualities attributable to his rural stories) took a decidedly different turn than anything that preceded it or followed it in his career as a writer. Bulba sprang, not only from Gogol’s Cossack roots and familiarity with the dumy (songs and ballads of the Cossacks), but interestingly enough, he was greatly inspired by the great Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, of whom he was a big fan.

This, of course, makes perfect sense since Scott’s swashbuckling adventures often dealt with Scottish pride and history at odds with the ruling powers of England. And so too with Taras Bulba.

The film (while deviating slightly from the book) maintains much of the structure, characters and spirit of Gogol’s work. It tells the story of Cossack chieftain Taras Bulba (Yul Brynner) and his desire to make Ukraine free from the oppression of the ruling nation of Poland. Though the Poles subjugate Ukraine, the Cossacks are willing (for a price and booty) to fight alongside the Poles against Turkish invaders. In addition to the pecuniary rewards, the Cossacks also get to use the Poles to help fight one of their enemies. When it comes to paying allegiance to the Poles, Taras steadfastly refuses to do this and, after committing a violent act against one of the Polish generals, the Cossacks all scatter into the hills to regroup and prepare for a time when they can go to war again – but this time, against the Poles.

Secured in their respective mountain hideaways, the Cossacks bide their time. Taras raises two fine and strapping young sons, Andrei (Tony Curtis) and Ostap (Perry Lopez). He sends his boys to Kyiv (the Russified spelling is “Kiev”) to study at the Polish Academy. The Poles wish to tame the Ukrainians, so they offer to educate them. Taras, on the other hand, orders his sons that they must study in order to learn everything they can about the Poles so that someday they can join him in battle against the Poles. At the Polish Academy, the young men learn that Poles are vicious racists who despise Ukrainians and on numerous occasions, both of them are whipped and beaten mercilessly – especially Andrei (because the Dean of the Academy believes Andrei has the greatest possibility of turning Polish and shedding his “barbaric” Ukrainian ways). A hint of Andrei’s turncoat-potential comes when he falls madly in love with Natalia (Christine Kaufmann) a Polish Nobleman’s daughter. When the Poles find out that Andrei has deflowered Natalia, they attempt to castrate him. Luckily, Andrei and Ostap hightail it back to the mountains in time to avoid this unfortunate extrication.

Even more miraculously, the Cossacks have been asked by the Poles to join them in a Holy War against the infidel in the Middle East. Taras has other plans. He joins all the Cossacks together and they march against the Poles rather than with them. The battle comes to a head when the Cossacks have surrounded the Poles in the walled city of Dubno. Taras gets the evil idea to simply let the Poles starve to death rather than charge the city. Soon, Dubno is wracked with starvation, cannibalism and the plague. Andrei, fearing for his Polish lover Natalia secretly enters the city and is soon faced with a very tragic decision – join the Poles against the Cossacks or go back to his father and let Natalia die.

Thanks to a great script and superb direction, this movie really barrels along head first. The battle sequences are stunningly directed and it’s truly amazing to see fully costumed armies comprised of hundreds and even thousands of extras (rather than today’s CGI armies). The romance is suitably syrupy – accompanied by Vaseline smeared iris shots and the humour as robust and full-bodied as one would expect from a movie about Cossacks. Franz Waxman’s score is absolutely out of this world, especially the “Ride to Dubno” (AKA “Ride of the Cossacks”) theme. The music carries the movie with incredible force and power – so much so that even cinema composing God Bernard Herrmann jealously proclaimed it as “the score of a lifetime”.

The movie’s two central performances are outstanding. Though Jack Palance (an actual Ukrainian from Cossack stock) turned the role down, he was replaced with Yul Brynner who, with his Siberian looks and Slavic-Asian countenance seems now to be the only actor who could have played Taras Bulba. Tony Curtis also makes for a fine figure of a Cossack. This strapping leading man of Hungarian-Jewish stock attacks the role with the kind of boyish vigour that one also cannot imagine anyone else playing Andrei (though at one point, Burt Lancaster had considered taking the role for himself since it was his company through Hecht that developed the property). The supporting roles are played by stalwart character actors like Sam Wanamaker as the one Cossack who gives Bulba some grief about fighting the Poles and George MacCready as the evil Polish rival of the Cossacks. Perry Lopez as Ostap is so obviously Latin that he seems a bit uncomfortable in the role of Ostap and Christine Kaufmann as Natalia is not much of an actress, but she’s so stunningly gorgeous that one can see why Curtis cheated on Janet Leigh and had a torrid open affair with Kaufmann during the shoot.

Taras Bulba is one stirring epic adventure picture. And yes, one wishes it took the darker paths that the original book ventured down, but it still manages to have a dollop of tragedy wending its way through this tale of warring fathers and their disobedient sons. And yes, as a Ukrainian, I do wish all the great Cossack songs had NOT been translated into English – especially since Yul Brynner would have been more than up to singing them in the original language. But these are minor quibbles. It’s a first rate, old-fashioned studio epic – big, sprawling, brawling and beautiful.

It’s definitely the cinematic equivalent of one fine coil of garlic sausage. So rip off a chub or two and slurp back the glory of Ukraine.

FEEL FREE TO ORDER THE FOLLOWING TARAS BULBA ITEMS DIRECTLY FROM THE LINKS BELOW AND YOU WILL BE CONTRIBUTING TO THE ONGOING MAINTENANCE OF THIS WEBSITE:

Here's the astounding "Ride to Dubno" sequence from TARAS BULBA with Franz Waxman's stunning score:

And strictly for listening pleasure, here's Franz Waxman's great "Ride to Dubno" theme from TARAS BULBA:

The guy to the left is Alan Greenspan.
I've heard of him, but have no idea who he is
or what he does. I still don't, but he's in this
movie quite a bit, so he must be important.
He appears to know a lot about money which,
I know nothing about and as such, was hoping
I'd learn more about by watching this movie.
Oh, and I have absolutely no fucking idea
who that fat lady on the right is.

Money For Nothing: Inside The Federal Reserve (2013) **½
Dir. Jim Bruce

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I love watching movies about high finance, banks, the stock market and other money-related issues because, frankly, I really don't know anything about them beyond the fact that they all exist and in one way or another affect me. My favourite documentaries, like Chasing Madoff, Inside Job and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room somehow manage to make most of the messy maze clear to me because they basically place an accent on the more disreputable and downright criminal activities and finally, prove all I really need to know which is this: anyone who really gets this stuff has got to be a scumbag since they're really the only ones who gain from this knowledge. Then, there's Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story or Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott's The Corporation which not only provide basic understanding of financing and corporate scumbaggery, but do so in especially delightful and entertainingly inflammatory ways.

As for dramas, I'm pretty happy to cite The Wolf of Wall Street and just leave it at that.

I was really looking forward to seeing Money For Nothing: Inside The Federal Reserve because, though I've heard about the Federal Reserve or, "The Fed" as it's commonly referred to, I will admit to having no fucking idea what it really was until I saw this movie.

For its first half, the movie is purty durn' tootin' innerestin' since it clearly explains what the Federal Reserve actually is (and by extension and osmosis, it explained a bit closer to home what the Bank of Canada is - again, I keep hearing about it, but never bothered to figure out what it was). The Fed is the entity that prints America's money, ties it to precious metals and provides the gold standard, as it were, for the rest of the world to value its currency upon.

Good. Now I know.

The movie also delivers some reasonably helpful information about the actual history of contemporary currency and the Fed's place in all that. This too, I found extremely interesting and engaging.

Unfortunately, as the movie progresses and starts to chart more recent historical events and delves into the minutiae of economics, I must confess I started to get completely lost and this, sadly, is where the movie kind of falls flat on its face. The pacing begins to lag considerably and I felt that I was just trudging through the last half of the film - not really getting much of anything. Basically, I really had no idea what in the hell was going on and the movie did nothing to clear that up for this fella.

If the goal was to eventually take something that, to a complete and utter financial know-nothing seemed very clear and simple, and to then boggle me with so many details and permutations that virtually nothing made sense, then director Jim Bruce did a crackerjack job.

That, I don't think was the intent, though and what we're finally left with is a simple, solid and engaging 40-or-so minutes and then a thoroughly confusing and, frankly, rather dull final 40-minutes-or-so.

About the best I was able to take away from the whole affair was something I already knew: anyone who really understands this stuff has surely got to be amongst the biggest scumbags on the face of the earth.

"Money For Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve" is in limited theatrical release via Kinosmith and begins its life at Toronto's Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

Jules and Jim (1962) *****
Dir. Francois Truffaut
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Though there are many iconic images and sequences one equates with Francois Truffaut's legendary film adaptation of the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, its centrepiece for me, its heart, if you will, is a stunning montage of actual footage from World War I which, occurs in the middle portion of the film.

This evocative encapsulation of the Great War literally and figuratively separates the boys from the men, especially after experiencing a fun, funny, romantic and joyously freewheeling romp through turn of the century Paris with two best friends and the woman they both love.

Then, however, to be faced with the stark, grim realities of savagery among men is not only profoundly moving in and of itself, but reveals a terrible truth that faces the film's central characters and I suspect, as Truffaut hoped, faces all of us.

We witness and indeed experience the disintegration of that which was carefree and celebratory as it transforms into a world of war and death, then further gives way to the reality of post-war aimlessness, restlessness and complacency - perhaps to numb the horrors of war, but to also delineate a void that always existed, but could never be fully recognized until the sense of security youth brings is torn to shreds by facing the grim reality of how cruel life can be and most of all, how we can be little more than pawns on some much larger chessboard manipulated by forces well beyond our control.

Jules and Jim IS a lot of fun, though. We get to experience the "bro-mance" of the good pals (Oskar Werner as the German expat and Henri Serre as a de souche Parisian) whilst they discuss literature, indulge in gentlemanly arts like fencing and, of course, whiling away endless hours and days in outdoor bistros, sipping wine and/or coffee as the hustle and bustle of the world passes them by. And then, there is the ravishing Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) who steps into their lives and the love and friendship, rather than becoming complicated, explodes into pure joy. It's true that Jules and Catherine are lovers and that Jim carries a torch for her, but it's all very civilized as the trio simply enjoy each others' company and spend their days constantly having fun.

Buoyed along by Raoul Coutard's stunning black and white photography and the lush styling of composer Georges Delerue's sumptuously romantic musical score, Truffaut treats us to a 25-year-history of these three people with one dazzling set piece after another including the famous race-across-the-bridge scene which is as pure a cinematic rendering of love and friendship as the movies have given us.

Perhaps a jealousy factor would have eventually crept in, but the idyll of friendship is kept pristine and any conflicts of the heart are cut short by a much greater conflict when France and Germany and, eventually, the whole world goes to war.

The second half of the tale is where we delve into the maturation of the characters, but also experience the lingering effects of separation and war. Truffaut knows enough to keep the romantic fires burning, but he also infuses the tale with a melancholy that is finally what gives the film its heft. His use of the war montage is especially brilliant. He cherry picks actual news and stock footage of the conflict and rather than including any shots of Jules and Jim at all, he wisely and bravely continues with a very literary narration that explains that the characters are on opposing sides of the conflict.

In fact, throughout the film, Truffaut is not afraid to make use of what appears to be third-person descriptive passages as voice-over from Roché's book and he goes further by constantly dropping in establishing shots of both setting and time that are comprised of grainy stock footage. This not only roots the film in a time and place clearly mediated through both memory and cinema, but in so doing, takes the film into the kind of territory that expands its boundaries in all the ways that make the medium so special.

Anchoring a romantic tale by using news footage and narration places the narrative into the context of a kind of Pathé-like newsreel depicting a history of friendship and love against the much larger backdrop of Europe and the eventual conflict that tears it apart. And once again, this is an example of how simplicity is what yields the complexity needed to render a work universal. Truffaut achieves this both stylistically, but also by the passion and commitment he brings to the reality of how great friendships are often founded on common ground and that oftentimes are manifested in the same people being romantically and spiritually attracted to each other in a world where society allows one love and one love only. Truffaut tells a tale so ahead of its time that even now, the world is not quite in a place for the love as depicted here is acceptable to the normally accepted mores of romance.

Thank God, the movies let it happen.

This, of course, is what cinema should be and we can be grateful when artists like Truffaut deliver work that is both entertainment and art of the highest level - work that lives well beyond the ephemeral needs of the marketplace and continues to delight, tantalize and influence. The film is now over 50 years old and yet it feels like it was made just yesterday. Jules and Jim will live for many more decades beyond that which it's already existed.

We owe Truffaut a debt of gratitude for that.

"Jules and Jim" is available on a lovely dual format Criterion Collection package of both DVD and Blu-Ray. Included are such bond bons de added value features as a new, restored 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack, two - COUNT ' EM - TWO commentary tracks: one featuring coscreenwriter Jean Gruault, longtime Truffaut collaborator Suzanne Schiffman, editor Claudine Bouché, and film scholar Annette Insdorf; the other featuring actor Jeanne Moreau and Truffaut biographer Serge Toubiana, excerpts from The Key to “Jules and Jim” (1985), a documentary about author Henri-Pierre Roché and the real-life relationships that inspired the novel and film, interviews with Gruault and cinematographer Raoul Coutard, a conversation between film scholars Robert Stam and Dudley Andrew, an excerpt from a 1965 episode of the French TV program Cinéastes de notre temps dedicated to Truffaut, a segment from a 1969 episode of the French TV show L’invité du dimanche featuring Truffaut, Moreau, and filmmaker Jean Renoir, excerpts from Truffaut’s first appearance on American television, a 1977 interview with New York Film Festival director Richard Roud, excerpts from a 1979 American Film Institute seminar given by Truffaut, a 1980 audio interview with Truffaut, the trailer and a first-rate booklet that includes an excellent essay by John Powers, a 1981 piece by Truffaut on Roché and script notes from Truffaut to co-screenwriter Gruault. This Criterion Collection collector's edition is an ABSOLUTE MUST-OWN item for anyone who genuinely loves cinema.

Taras Bulba (2009) **
dir. Wolodymyr Bortko
Starring: Bohdan Stupka, Ihor Petrenko, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Magdalena Mielcarz, Sergei Dryden

Review By By Greg Klymkiw

In light of the recent events in Ukraine, it seems appropriate to turn our attention to one of the more egregious displays of cinematic propaganda I have seen in a long time. The charge of disinformation is, for once, not levelled against Hollywood, but Russia. This is not the Russia of the butcher Joseph Stalin, but that of contemporary Russia, a country rife with the sad, evil remnants of Stalin in the guise of its leader Vladimir Putin who, in his previous career was a nasty little KGB spy who specialized in rooting out those who opposed the supposed glories of Communism and prior to that, when he, as a teacher and academic, disgracefully used his position to carry out surveillance on students.

The film on view is Taras Bulba, a relatively recent and expensive (by Russian standards) screen adaptation of the legendary Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol’s great novella of the same name and a film that chooses to use Gogol’s pro-Russian version as its base rather than his original manuscript. Gogol bowed to the will of Czarist Russia and delivered a revised product more in keeping with the country’s own version of Manifest Destiny throughout Eastern Europe.

Propaganda in the cinema is nothing new. In fact, many knee-jerkers will look for any excuse to trash Hollywood for this very thing. Since its very beginnings, a common charge against Uncle Sam’s cinema has been the preponderance of propagandistic elements to extol the virtues of truth, glory and the capitalistic American way in terms of cultural/political superiority and to defend the country’s constant need to engage in warfare. One cannot disagree with this common assertion; however, America ALONE has not propagated the myths of their “superiority” using the most powerful medium of artistic expression – the cinema.

The most common example of this would be the vicious work of Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who utilized cinema to spread anti-Semitism with The Eternal Jew, a foul “documentary” that goes so far as to trace and equate the spread of Judaism with that of rats and the spread of the Black Plague. Of course, no mention of Nazi propaganda would be complete without referring to the work of the brilliant Leni Riefenstahl – a truly great artist who delivered one of the most stunning, yet reviled works of the 20th century, her stirring document of the Nuremburg Rallies, The Triumph of the Will.

Strangely, the work of Russian propagandists has not seen the same kind of vitriolic bile heaped upon it and yet, Sergei Eisenstein, (surely as brilliant a filmmaker as Leni Riefenstahl) was happy enough to wear extremely comfortable knee-pads as he knelt before the dictatorial powers of Russia to continually afford him the opportunities to make movies. Eisenstein delivered one film after another that not only propagated the myth of Communism and the notion of Russian superiority, but eventually even extolled the virtues of an even bigger butcher than Hitler, Joseph Stalin. (For more on this, see my review of the Kino DVD release of Battleship Potemkin by visiting HERE.)

This new version of Taras Bulba received a substantial portion of its financing from the Russian Ministry of Culture and while it may bear the trademarks of typical old-Soviet-style propaganda, it is hardly a work that bears the hallmarks of superior filmmaking. At least Eisenstein, Riefenstahl and any number of American directors who generated similar propaganda (Steven Spielberg with Saving Private Ryan is a good example) are great artists who created landmarks of cinema that expanded the boundaries of the medium. The mediocre, though clearly competent television director Wolodymyr Bortko (who prefers the Russian transliteration “Vladimir” in spite of his Ukrainian heritage) serves up some sumptuous production value, elicits some fine performances and seasons his celluloid broth of borscht with all the clichés of epic cinema, but none of the depth one might find in the work of masters of the elephantine genre like David Lean. Bortko’s screenplay adaptation unimaginatively catalogues, almost by rote, the events of Gogol’s Russified version of the novella, but somehow manages to completely miss the spirit of the original writing.

Telling the classical tale of a Cossack Chief, Taras Bulba (majestically portrayed by the great Ukrainian actor Bohdan Stupka) who sends his beloved sons Andriy (Ihor Petrenko) and Ostap (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) to the Polish-ruled university in Ukraine’s capitol city Kyiv to not only get a well rounded education, but to acquaint them with the “enemy”. He eventually takes his sons to the legendary Cossack “Sich” (fortress) of Zaporozhia to train them in the skill of Cossack barbarism.

Bulba’s hatred for Poland flares even more intensely when he learns that his farm has been destroyed and his wife is murdered by the Poles. He manages to get the Cossack nation to march against Poland and soon the Ukrainians are wreaking havoc and decimating their Polish rulers. Things come to a head when Bulba and the Cossacks attack the Ukrainian city of Dubno which is under Polish rule. Unbeknownst to our title character, when Bulba’s most beloved son Andriy was at school in Kyiv, he fell in love with Elzhbeta (the eye-poppingly stunning Magdalena Mielcarz) a member of Polish royalty. As bad luck would have it, her father is now the governor of Dubno and Andriy realizes that he is laying siege to the city of his beloved. Love, it would seem, becomes the ultimate enemy as Andriy betrays his country and father to be with her.

It’s a great story! One of its biggest fans was Ernest Hemingway who proclaimed its genius whenever he could. Too bad, then, that this film version is so by-the-numbers. That said, even a mediocre rendering such as this one is no match for the power of Gogol’s literary prowess and for this we are dealt some tender mercies. Finally though, the movie is a bit of a slog – plodding along its way, but without any of the spark of the original writer. In fact, the tone of the movie is resolutely dour. This is no surprise since screenwriter-director Bortko has chosen to amplify the Russified version of the novella. Without that glorious spark of Gogol’s wonderful sense of boys’ adventure and his delightfully, deliciously and resolutely Ukrainian sense of humour (so beautifully captured in J. Lee Thompson's 1964 Hollywood version), the movie has all the spark of a funeral dirge.

By over-emphasizing the Russification of the original text what we have is a brutal glorification of Russian superiority. This grotesque mockery of a story that, in actuality is a rousing depiction of Ukraine’s never-ending fight for freedom from subjugation leaves us with a very foul taste in our mouths. We are handed one ultra-violent set piece after another – all in the service of boosting Russia’s own notion of might as right. By appropriating this very Ukrainian story by one of its great writers and turning it into grotesque Russian propaganda to try and suggest that the Cossacks and in turn, the Ukrainians, consider themselves little more than barbarians doing the bidding of those who would subjugate, exploit and even perpetrate genocide against them (as Stalin did) is thoroughly reprehensible.

Historically, even the occasional guarded loyalty the Zaporozhian Cossacks paid to the Russian Empire was betrayed by both Czar Peter I and Catherine the Great, the former forcing them to scatter or face death, the latter ordering a full-on genocide of the Zaporozhian Sich. None of this would have been lost on Gogol - especially with his first, but suppressed edition of the novel and even within the Russified version, this healthy distrust of the Empire boils just below the novel's surface.

Bortko’s mediocrity as a director reaches its nadir, however, in his lame handling of the fighting, action and battle scenes which is, in a word, dull. With fabulous locations, thousands of extras and impeccable production and costume design, he cannot direct action. His shooting style is cudgel-like, but it never has the thrilling and freewheeling quality the action needs. Bortko appears to have everything that money can buy – everything that is, except the genuinely distinctive artistic voice that would allow him to rise above his own mediocrity.

I do reiterate, though, that such propagandistic shenanigans would ultimately not be as problematic if this was actually a good movie, but it isn’t. Saddled with a clumsy flashback structure, a lazy use of prose narration from the novel and a dull television-mini-series mise-en-scene, Taras Bulba might stir the loins of Putin-lovers-and-apologists, but it doesn’t come close to mining the stirring potential of the story.

Let’s not forget that Gogol came from Cossack stock and that he was inspired by the very moving Ukrainian nationalist “dumy” (folk ballads) of the Cossacks themselves. Also, one of Hohol/Gogol’s chief literary inspirations was the great Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott and that “Taras Bulba” was conceived as a Ukrainian version of those swashbuckling tales of Scottish Highlanders battling their British oppressors/occupiers (especially notable in "Rob Roy"). A cool historical footnote is that Cossacks themselves might have had some roots in Scotland at a much earlier historical juncture. Another interesting correlation between Scott and Gogol is that both portrayed strong, sympathetic Jewish characters in their respective swashbucklers - Scott created Rebecca in "Ivanhoe" and Gogol gave us Yankel in "Taras Bulba". (The latter character seems to fit the fact that Catherine the Great effected a genocide upon the Ukrainian Cossacks whose administrative power was actually presided over by Ukrainian-Jews - all the record-keeping discovered in archeological digs at the Sich was found to be written in Hebrew.)

Not surprisingly, the best film version of Taras Bulba is the fabulous aforementioned J. Lee Thompson epic from Hollywood in the 1960s. It captures the derring-do, the humour and the stirring, romantic nationalism of the story by adhering the book’s Ukrainian roots as opposed to Bortko’s ill-conceived attempt to please Vladimir Putin. The American treatment of the character of Andriy, the son who betrays father and country is far closer, I think to the spirit of what Gogol intended. Ihor Petrenko’s portrayal of Andriy is so dull and serious. It especially lacks the boyish charm that Tony Curtis with his swarthy Hungarian-Jewish looks and magnificent sense of humour brought to the role.

The other idiotic attempt to Russify this story is how Bortko has commissioned a musical score so lacking in any spirit whatsoever. At least in the Hollywood version, legendary composer Franz Waxman based his entire score on traditional Ukrainian music and delivered a score that was cited by even Bernard Herrman as one of the great scores of all time. (For my full review of the Hollywood version, feel free to visit HERE.)

In fairness to Bortko, however, his screenplay, unlike the Hollywood version restores the odd symbiotic friendship from Gogol’s novella between Bulba and the Jewish money lender Yankel (yielding a stellar performance by Sergei Dryden) and, most importantly, he includes the whole aftermath involving the capture, torture and execution of Ostap at the hands of the Poles and Bulba’s revenge and final noble sacrifice. These are all stirring story beats and while I am grateful for their inclusion, I am less grateful that they are present almost solely to provide Russian propaganda.

This version of Taras Bulba no doubt has poor Gogol spinning in his grave. I’m sure he never would have imagined that so many generations later his work would be bastardized as a piece of propaganda for the country that even now seeks to consume his Motherland whole and tries continually to repress its spirit, culture, language and people.

Worse yet, that it should be a version that reeks of Made-for-TV miniseries mediocrity.

FEEL FREE TO ORDER THE FOLLOWING TARAS BULBA ITEMS DIRECTLY FROM THE LINKS BELOW AND YOU WILL BE CONTRIBUTING TO THE ONGOING MAINTENANCE OF THIS WEBSITE:

Solo (2013) **
Dir. Isaac Cravit
Starring: Annie Clark, Daniel Kash, Richard Clarkin,
Stephen Love, Alyssa Capriotti

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A teen babe with "issues" takes a job as a summer camp counsellor. Part of the required initiation is for new employees to spend two nights alone on a remote island. The island in question was the site of a tragedy many years ago. It is purportedly haunted. Weird shit happens. Those whom you think are psychotic are not. Those whom you think are nice are psychotic. Confrontations occur. Good people die. Some good people are rescued. The evil entity is killed. The teen babe is safe. Movie Finished. 83 precious minutes of your life that you'll never get back.

There you have it. Solo in a nutshell. There's no real reason to see it now.

You see, debut feature films like Solo put me in a really foul mood. Some of these first long form efforts are blessed with an immediate, explosive announcement to the universe that we are dealing with a filmmaker who is endowed with the greatest gift a director can bestow upon the world of cinema - a voice, a distinctive style, an unmistakeable point of view, a sense that this is who the filmmaker really is. Then there's a second category - debut features so awful you might as well have shoved a gun into your mouth and pulled the trigger instead of watching it.

Solo, the debut feature film written and directed by Isaac Cravit is in neither of those categories. It holds a very special place in the pantheon of celluloid dreams - it's bereft of dreams. It has neither an original voice nor one of mind numbing ineptitude. Both have their virtues since both make an audience feel something. Not so for Solo (and so many, many others of its ilk). These are movies which allow you to leave their meagre clasp feeling absolutely nothing. It is the third and perhaps most horrendous category of all debut features. Solo, joins this unenviable pinnacle of competence with all the eagerness of a dog about to get a Milk Bone.

When filmmakers enter the fray with a first feature that actually excites you - not only because of the film itself, but what you sense this director will deliver in the future. Their declarations feel like the following:

The Soska Sisters (Dead Hooker in a Trunk):
"We're going to fuck your ass with a red-hot poker, but you'll enjoy it. We promise."

John Paizs (Crime Wave):
"Laughs derived from silence are golden."

David Lynch (Eraserhead):
"In Heaven, everything is fine..."

John Carpenter (Dark Star):
"I love movies more than life itself - have a fuckin' beer."

Guy Maddin: (Tales From The Gimli Hospital):
"I'm a dreamer, aren't we all?"

Kevin Smith: (Clerks):
"Fuck."

All are unique declarations (mediated through my own interpretive imagination, of course) and I could spend a few hundred more words doing the same for a myriad of debut features that declare themselves with complete originality on the part of the filmmaker.

There is, however, one declaration that depresses me even more than whatever the aforementioned incompetents of the second category of debut works might declare via their sheer inability to make movies. It is a declaration I see and hear far too often these days - especially since filmmaking has been embraced by so many marginally talented, though competent, by-the-numbers types as an - ugh! - career choice (as opposed to a genuine calling). Every single one of these filmmakers in the dreaded third category announces the same thing. They never waiver from it. They are presenting to the world their - double ugh! - calling card.

With Solo, Canadian director Isaac Cravit joins the club of voice-free directors when he declare (by virtue of his debut film):

"Look. I can use a dolly. Look. I can shoot coverage. Look. I am ready to direct series television drama and straight to V.O.D. and home video product for indiscriminating audiences looking to fill their worthless lives with content as opposed to something exceptional."

There's absolutely nothing new, surprising or exciting about this pallid genre effort save for its competence. Solo is blessed with some superb production value, to be sure. The locations are perfect, they're nicely shot by Stephen Chung and the combination of on-location sound and overall mixing and design seems much more exquisite and artful than the movie deserves. The cutting by Adam Locke-Norton, given the dullness of the coverage, manages to keep the proceedings moving at a nice clip. The score by Todor Kobakov is especially superb - rich, dense and one that enhances the film - again - much further beyond the movie's narrow scope. (There's one four note riff in the score that should have been excised by the filmmakers at a very early juncture, but save for that, it's a winner in all respects.)

The small cast is also superb. Thank God they're in the film since they're really one of the few things that do make the otherwise forgettable affair worth seeing.

The camera loves leading lady Annie Clark and she's clearly a fine actress - she makes the most of a hackneyed been-there-done-that babe-in-peril role. Two of Canada's finest character actors - Daniel Kash and Richard Clarkin are always worth looking at. They've got expressive, malleable mugs and like the best of the best, they rise well above the dull competence of the movie.

I especially enjoyed Stephen Love's performance and hope to see more of him - he's got very nice offbeat good looks, a sense of humour, a touch of malevolence and he frankly looks and feels like a young Canuck James Franco.

Is the movie well made? Hell yes! Is it anything special? Will you leave the theatre soaring? Will you even remember it two minutes after you see it? The answer to all those questions is a resounding "No."

Are we all supposed to rejoice and dance a jig just because someone got a movie made?

I'll let you answer that yourself.

"Solo" begins its limited theatrical run February 28 via Indie-Can at the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinema in Toronto. Daily showtimes at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Q&A's with Directer Isaac Cravitt and Cast following the Friday and Sat 7:00 p.m. and Sunday 2:00 p.m. shows.

Here are direct links to purchase books about great Canadian low budget films and then, find a selection of direct links to a bunch of terrific low budget Canadian feature films that you can also purchase directly from this site.

A similar scene to the one experienced by Jim Jarmusch and others in New York during the 70s and 80s and captured in the documentary BLANK CITY as well as many other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" series was happening in Winnipeg. A very cool explosion in indie underground cinema that I and many colleagues and friends were involved with was spawned during these halcyon days. This period, coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as Prairie Post-Modernism included the works of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Greg Hanec and many others.

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

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

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

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

BLANK CITY and other works in the "Forgotten Winnipeg" Series can be accessed here:

In a crazy world, what do the problems of little people ever really amount to?

LOVE DURING WARTIME

Omar (2013) ****
Dir. Hany Abu-Assad
Starring: Adam Bakri, Waleed Zuaiter, Leem Lubany

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In the final moments of his stunning Oscar-nominated thriller Omar, Director Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) slams you with a two-by-four to the face, but good-goddamn, it's satisfying. Knowing this is going to be no spoiler, no surprise, no shock whatsoever since the picture's flesh-curdling slow-burn is punctuated every so often with jolts of breathtaking ferocity.

Violence, however, is always contrasted with sweet and delicate moments of precious humanity which, like oases, lull you under the hot sun of the West Bank - so much so that it's not as if you never expect the conclusion will do anything but knock you on your ass, leaving you both winded and perversely elated. Like the best thrillers, you never see the worst coming. You feel it's an inevitability, to be sure, but even so, it doesn't mean you aren't clutching the arms of your seat, ready for anything at any given moment.

If truth be told, this surely comes as close as we're likely to get on film to what life must be like along the wall that separates the colonized and the colonizers amidst a never-ending conflict that feels omnipresently close to all of us in spite of being worlds away from what one outside of the ongoing deadly dissent is normally used to. Can we ever really know what such a life must be like without actually being there and living it? Of course not, but watching Omar, it's a testament to Abu-Assad's exemplary gifts as a filmmaker that we feel we're as mired in the thick of it as we ever want to be.

Omar (Bakri) is a handsome, sweet-faced young baker who risks being cut down daily by gunfire as he scales the deadly West Bank wall to see Nadia (Lubany), the beautiful woman he so desperately loves. Ah, but if it were only this simple. Life here is anything but. Omar risks life and limb to fight for the emancipation of his people as we find him on the precipice of actively joining the fray of violent political activism. As a burgeoning soldier of the Palestinian revolution, it feels like he has no choice - that he's been born into an eternal struggle against his Israeli oppressors. Joining his best friends on a deadly mission, Omar is caught between a rock and a hard place when he's eventually targeted to turn in his cohorts by Rami (Zuaiter), an Israeli secret agent who offers freedom and protection in exchange for this betrayal. Omar learns quickly that dealing with the devil never ends quickly or easily and in fact, has no end unless he can find a way of playing both sides against the centre to keep himself truly safe. It's cat and mouse all the way, only the odds increase exponentially with every ever-increasing malignancy of a game that feels like a vortex of infinite betrayal.

There's never any doubts as to where our sympathies must lie. The violence, death, deception, terror and torture reside around every paranoid corner and no matter what side of the equation we're on, there can be no doubting that this is no way for any human being to live. It's a movie that feels like there are no false notes and Abu-Assad's artistry and virtuosity as a filmmaker allows for superb performances, complex character study as well as all the edge-of-the-seat suspense any picture can deliver.

The film's greatest triumph, however, is its unwavering humanity in the face of war's utter madness and that for much of the film, we're carried along by both love and commitment to such a degree that Omar is as much a condemnation of this way of life - on both sides - as it is a testament to loyalty in the face of betrayal. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

But, oh, they do. They most certainly do.

"Omar" is in theatrical release via Mongrel Media.

Best Picture - the nominees

American Hustle: I pretty much detested this movie and its inclusion, while not surprising, is still - to my mind - a disgrace. The detestable David O. Russell reduces this period of shameful American activity of entrapment and sweeping vilification of Arabs to little more than a bargain basement Scorsese-influenced trifle overflowing with caricatures rather than characters.

Captain Phillips: God knows I love Paul Greengrass, but I thought this movie was super dull and frankly, I much prefer the really great film A Hijacking which is much better made and deals with similar subject matter WITHOUT stupid American propaganda elements.

Dallas Buyers Club: God knows I WANTED to love this movie and while Matthew McConaughey is never less than engaging, the movie still feels like a crock - especially Jared Leto's overrated performance.

Gravity: There's really not much to enjoy here. Yeah, some of the visual F/X are dazzling, but 2001 still beats the crap out of this in the F/X department. There's also a whack of annoying dialogue, some of it bordering on sickening. There are, however, some nice shots of Sandra 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.

Her: Easily one of the more sickening movies of the year.

Nebraska: This is a solid movie. Is it great? Far from it.

Philomena: This is a surprisingly good movie, but not something worthy of "best" consideration.

12 Years a Slave: Total Oscar-bait and due to McQueen's sledgehammer direction, a major slog to get through.

The Wolf of Wall Street: A genuinely terrific Scorsese picture that treats Wall Street chicanery with the same aplomb and in a similar fashion as any of his great crime pictures.

Nine movies nominated for Best Picture seems ludicrous. Granted, in its early days, the Academy allowed more than five nominations, but the recent decision to allow up to ten nominees makes the horse race in this category a lot less interesting than when the numbers stay down as they did for so many years.

As for the above nominees, the only movie I'd personally consider amongst this over-stuffed category is The Wolf of Wall Street. Movies that deserve to be in this list, but remaining ignored include The Lone Ranger, Inside Llewyn Davis, Fruitvale Station and Child of God. These four, plus The Wolf of Wall Street would be a total class act, but whoever said the Oscars were a class act?

Based on the sorry-aas list of nominees:

What SHOULD win: The Wolf of Wall Street
What WILL win: 12 Years a Slave

Best Actor in a Leading Role - the nominees

Christian Bale (American Hustle) - Good performance, but he's had better roles than this.

Bruce Dern (Nebraska) - A fine performance in an okay movie. A decent sentimental choice.

Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street) - Leo rocks big time in this!!!

Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) - A genuinely great performance wasted in a not-so-good picture.

Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club) - He's always worth watching, but man, this picture blows chunks.

I can live with these nominations even though I think Oscar Isaac for Inside Llewyn Davis, Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty, Child of God's Scott Haze, Robert Redford in All is Lost, Michael B. Jordan for Fruitvale Station, Ali Suliman for The Attack and Gabriel Arcand in Le démantèlement ALL, to varying degrees got hosed by their non-nominations.

What SHOULD win: Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave)
What MIGHT win: Bruce Dern (Nebraska)
What WILL win: Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street)

Best Actress in a Leading Role - the nominees

Amy Adams (American Hustle) - She's fine here, but the movie stinks and she's done better work elsewhere.

Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine) - I pretty much can't stand her, but Woody got probably the best performance out of her that she's ever delivered (or will ever deliver).

Sandra Bullock (Gravity) - As retarded as The Blind Side was, I thought she was pretty great in that picture. Here, she's cute as all get-out, but pretty annoying anyway.

Judi Dench (Philomena) - No great shakes here, but a solid bit o' Dench.

Meryl Streep (August: Osage County) - Ditto.

This was a pretty woeful year for this category, but there were a lot of great female performances in non-American films like Mira Barkhammer in We Are The Best and Katharine Isabelle in American Mary blow all of these out of the water.

What SHOULD win: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)
What WILL win: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine)

Best Actor in a Supporting Role - the nominees

Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips) - Abdi was genuinely brilliant and managed to be far more sympathetic a figure than Tom Hanks in this generally anti-desperate-acts-of-poor-people piece of crap.

Bradley Cooper (American Hustle) - Sorry. This guy is just sickening.

Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave) - He shore whups real purty-like.

Jonah Hill (The Wolf of Wall Street) - Hill continues to dazzle and this was a lovely performance.

Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club) - I'm in the minority here, but I think this clown's performance is full of shit Oscar bait engineered to make Liberals feel good.

What SHOULD win: Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips)
What WILL win: Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club)

Best Actress in a Supporting Role - the nominees

Sally Hawkins (Blue Jasmine) - Solid, non-showy performance.

Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle) - Less sickening than she usually is.

Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave) - Genuinely great performance in a cruddy, overrated movie.

Julia Roberts (August: Osage County) - A solid enough performance in an okay piece o' Southern Gothic.

June Squibb (Nebraska) - This performance knocked me on my ass and I'd love to see her win.

Who SHOULD win: June Squibb (Nebraska)
Who WILL win: Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle)

Best Animated Feature - the nominees

The Croods (Chris Sanders, Kirk DeMicco, Kristine Belson)
Despicable Me 2 (Chris Renaud, Pierre Coffin, Chris Meledandri)
Ernest & Celestine (Benjamin Renner, Didier Brunner)
Frozen (Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, Peter Del Vecho)
The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki)

I hated all of these except for the Miyazaki and since he's planning to retire, I assume…

What SHOULD win: The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki)
What WILL win: The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki)

Best Cinematography - the nominees

The Grandmaster (Philippe Le Sourd)
Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Bruno Delbonnel)
Nebraska (Phedon Papamichael)
Prisoners (Roger A. Deakins)

What SHOULD win: Inside Llewyn Davis (Bruno Delbonnel) or Nebraska (Phedon Papamichael)
What WILL win: Gravity (Emmanuel Lubezki)

Best Costume Design - the nominees

American Hustle (Michael Wilkinson)
The Grandmaster (William Chang Suk Ping)
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin)
The Invisible Woman (Michael O'Connor)
12 Years a Slave (Patricia Norris)

What SHOULD win: 12 Years a Slave (Patricia Norris)
What WILL win: 12 Years a Slave (Patricia Norris)

Best Directing - the nominees

American Hustle (David O. Russell)
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
Nebraska (Alexander Payne)
12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)
The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

Let's be honest here: The Coen Brothers got royally hosed. So did James Franco and any number of fine directors who made far better movies than most of those nominated.

What SHOULD win: The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
What WILL win: Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)

Best Documentary Feature - the nominees

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Signe Byrge Sørensen)
Cutie and the Boxer (Zachary Heinzerling, Lydia Dean Pilcher)
Dirty Wars (Richard Rowley, Jeremy Scahill)
The Square (Jehane Noujaim, Karim Amer)
20 Feet from Stardom

Sarah Polley was hosed BIGTIME for a nominated here with her great documentary Stories We Tell, but this is a respectable enough list of nominees. While The Square has been getting some heat, there's only one picture here that deserves every imaginable award.

What SHOULD win: The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Signe Byrge Sørensen)
What WILL win: The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Signe Byrge Sørensen)

Best Documentary Short

I haven't seen any of these nominees, but one of them is about a Holocaust survivor, so it stands the best chance of winning. Look for The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life (Malcolm Clarke, Nicholas Reed) to collect Oscar.

Best Film Editing - the nominees

American Hustle (Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers, Alan Baumgarten)
Captain Phillips (Christopher Rouse)
Dallas Buyers Club (John Mac McMurphy, Martin Pensa)
Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger)
12 Years a Slave (Joe Walker)

The work here is - to varying degrees - competent, but Thelma got hosed for The Wolf of Wall Street and I suspect the predictable winner amongst these nominees will be the undeserving of any accolades Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, Mark Sanger).

Best Foreign Language Film - the nominees

The Broken Circle Breakdown (Belgium)
The Great Beauty (Italy)
The Hunt (Denmark)
The Missing Picture (Cambodia)
Omar (Palestine)

This is a generally excellent list of nominees. Quite a few foreign pictures got hosed for nomination, but ultimately, there's only one that stands a chance.

What SHOULD win: The Great Beauty (Italy)
What WILL win: The Great Beauty (Italy)

Best Makeup and Hairstyling - the nominees

Dallas Buyers Club (Adruitha Lee, Robin Mathews)
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (Stephen Prouty)
The Lone Ranger (Joel Harlow, Gloria Pasqua-Casny)

I love that a Jackass film scores a nomination, but my personal pick would be The Lone Ranger, a terrific movie that got hosed for nominations, critical accolades, decent box-office and a studio that could have done a way better job marketing it. Of course, the winner will go to the precious load of B.S.

What SHOULD win: The Lone Ranger (Joel Harlow, Gloria Pasqua-Casny)
What WILL win: Dallas Buyers Club (Adruitha Lee, Robin Mathews)

Best Original Score - the nominees

The Book Thief (John Williams)
Gravity (Steven Price)
Her (William Butler, Owen Pallett)
Philomena (Alexandre Desplat)
Saving Mr. Banks (Thomas Newman)

None of these nominees are much good, but if I had to pick . . .

What SHOULD win: Philomena (Alexandre Desplat)
What WILL win: Gravity (Steven Price)

Best Original Song - the nominees

Happy (Despicable Me 2)
Let It Go (Frozen)
The Moon Song (Her)
Ordinary Love (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom)

This has long been the worst category of them all.

What WILL win: The Moon Song (Her)

Best Production Design - the nominees

American Hustle (Judy Becker, Heather Loeffler)
Gravity (Andy Nicholson, Rosie Goodwin, Joanne Woollard)
The Great Gatsby (Catherine Martin, Beverley Dunn)
Her (K.K. Barrett, Gene Serdena)
12 Years a Slave (Adam Stockhausen, Alice Baker)

How The Lone Ranger got hosed here is beyond me.

What WILL win: Gravity (Andy Nicholson, Rosie Goodwin, Joanne Woollard)

Best Animated Short Film

I've seen none of the nominees, nor have I bothered to find out what any of them are about, so I'll pick a winner based solely on the title: The Oscar WILL go to: Feral (Daniel Sousa, Dan Golden)

Best Live Action Short Film

Again,I've seen none of the nominees, nor have I bothered to find out what any of them are about, so I'll pick a winner based solely on the country it appears to be from: The Oscar WILL go to: Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?) (Selma Vilhunen, Kirsikka Saari)

Best Sound Editing - the nominees

All Is Lost (Steve Boeddeker, Richard Hymns)
Captain Phillips (Oliver Tarney)
Gravity (Glenn Freemantle)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Brent Burge, Chris Ward)
Lone Survivor (Wylie Stateman)

What SHOULD win: All Is Lost (Steve Boeddeker, Richard Hymns)
What WILL win: Gravity (Glenn Freemantle)

Best Sound Mixing - the nominees

Captain Phillips (Chris Burdon, Mark Taylor, Mike Prestwood Smith, Chris Munro)
Gravity (Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead, Chris Munro)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Christopher Boyes, Michael Hedges, Michael Semanick, Tony Johnson)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Skip Lievsay, Greg Orloff, Peter F. Kurland)
Lone Survivor (Andy Koyama, Beau Borders, David Brownlow)

What SHOULD win: Inside Llewyn Davis (Skip Lievsay, Greg Orloff, Peter F. Kurland)
What WILL win: Gravity (Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead, Chris Munro)

Best Visual Effects - the nominees

Gravity (Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, Dave Shirk, Neil Corbould)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton, Eric Reynolds)
Iron Man 3 (Christopher Townsend, Guy Williams, Erik Nash, Dan Sudick)
The Lone Ranger (Tim Alexander, Gary Brozenich, Edson Williams, John Frazier)
Star Trek Into Darkness (Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Ben Grossmann, Burt Dalton)

What SHOULD win: The Lone Ranger (Tim Alexander, Gary Brozenich, Edson Williams, John Frazier)
What WILL win: Gravity (Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, Dave Shirk, Neil Corbould)

Best Adapted Screenplay - the nominees

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke)
Captain Phillips (Billy Ray)
Philomena (Steve Coogan, Jeff Pope)
12 Years a Slave (John Ridley)
The Wolf of Wall Street (Terence Winter)

What SHOULD win: The Wolf of Wall Street (Terence Winter)
What WILL win: 12 Years a Slave (John Ridley)

Best Original Screenplay

American Hustle (Eric Warren Singer, David O. Russell)
Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
Dallas Buyers Club (Craig Borten, Melisa Wallack)
Her (Spike Jonze)
Nebraska (Bob Nelson)

What SHOULD win: Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
What WILL win: Her (Spike Jonze)

Well, there you have it - for what it's worth (and it ain't really worth much, but what else are you doing on a Sunday night?)

The Winnipeg Film Group Cinematheque presents a special series of films in conjunction with SPUR and the WSO’s New Music Festival featuring Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm with a brilliant score by Winnipeg-born Mychael Danna, two important films from the New York underground filmmaking scene (Sara Driver's When Pigs Fly and Celine Dahnier's documentary Blank City), Craig Baldwin’s Spectres of the Spectrum (featured to complement WSO’s new opera on genius inventor Nikola Tesla created by composer Phil Kline and film director Jim Jarmusch) and last, but not least: several key works which reflect Winnipeg’s past and often conflicted view of itself - Death by Popcorn: The Tragedy of the Winnipeg Jets (from ATELIER NATIONAL DU MANITOBA - Walter Forsberg, Matthew Rankin, Mike Maryniuk), Forsberg's Fahrenheit 7-Eleven, Rankin's Negativipeg and Ryan McKenna's Survival Stories: The Greg Klymkiw Story (which is - YOU GUESSED IT - about ME! Maybe I'll have the nerve to review it). And, I'm sure you're going to enjoy this: I'm moderating a Panel Discussion on the topic of Forgotten Winnipeg on January 28, from 6-7pm on the Piano Mobile at the Centennial Concert Hall in Winnipeg.

As part of a co-venture between Spur, a festivals of politics, art and ideas and the WSO's New Music Festival, participants will include Bruce Duggan, Deco Dawson, Frank Albo and Esyllt Jones.

Today, let's take a look at BLANK CITY playing WFG's Cinematheque Saturday, Jan. 25 @ 9PM. Be sure to come at 7pm and get tickets for this AND Sara Driver's WHEN PIGS FLY. Jim Jarmusch - IN THE FLESH - will be in attendance to present the 7pm show. BLANK CITY (at 9pm) is a terrific documentary portrait of the New York filmmaking/music scene that paralleled Winnipeg's own scenes at the same time - a Winnipeg forgotten save by those who lived it and the films and music that survive. For further information on how to secure the Winnipeg masterpieces by John Paizs, Greg Hanec and Guy Maddin, check out the links below this article.

Jim Jarmusch on
NYC's 70s No Wave Cinema Movement:

The inspirational thing
was people doing it
because they felt it.

DEBBIE HARRY: OUR LIVES,
IT FELT LIKE OUR LIVES WERE MOVIES.
IT WAS VERY CINEMATIC.

Blank City (2010) ****
dir. Celine Dahnier

Starring: Amos Poe, John Lurie, Steve Buscemi, James Nares, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Sara Driver, Lizzie Borden, Susan Seidelman, Ann Magnuson, Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Beth B. Scott B., Debbie Harry, Lydia Lunch, The Ramones, The Talking Heads, Wayne County

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Blank City is such an immersive, joyous and always thrilling movie experience that a little part of me hopes that audiences not as obsessed with movies, queer culture and punk as I am will get as much pleasure out of it as I did. I think they will, but probably in different ways.

The converted will feel like they've died and gone to Heaven while others will either wish their most formative years as young people had been during the late 60s, 70s and a smidgen of the early 80s or, at the least, they'll come away with a new appreciation for the beginnings of truly DIY cinema and the sheer joy from living as art and art as living.

Director Celine Dahnier and Producer/Editor Vanessa Roworth weave a thoroughly entertaining narrative with a tight three-act structure (beginnings, heydays, end of days), truly inspiring, informative interviews and lots of great clips (with driving music that propels us with considerable force).

We hear and see a lot of Amos Poe - and so we should. Poe is, for many, the Godfather, the spirit, the soul of the entire movement of underground filmmaking in New York - coined by the great film critic Jim Hoberman as "No Wave". Poe describes his early beginnings as a photographer and tells a great story about visiting relatives in Czechoslovakia and how he eventually journeyed deep into "Dracula Country" within the Carpathian Mountains to surreptitiously "steal the souls" of superstitious rural country-folk with a long lens.

Returning to New York after Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to assert their Totalitarian power, Poe, like so many young people in America, especially artists, was ultimately gobsmacked by the sheer devastation within his country. The assassinations of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, the seemingly endless Vietnam War, the lies and corruption of government, the civil unrest, wholesale murder and assaults upon Americans, on American soil by Americans.

In Canada, we felt much of the same strife in other ways - firstly as a trickle-up effect from our neighbours south of the 49th parallel, but secondly, the more insidiously and subtly creepy manner in which the Canadian Government preyed on its most vulnerable, its intelligentsia, its First Nation Peoples, its Queers, its artists and anyone not subscribing to the Status Quo.

Artists Ann Magnuson and James Nares respectively note how punk rock was an ideal response to the remnants of post-war Leave It To Beaver blandness that permeated America, clutching on to control for dear life and emitting death gasps that seemed to signal something all together new waiting in the wings. What this movement became was something that the young artists of New York embraced with a fervour (a "fuck you" movement/scene that, in its own way was happening in Canada at the same time in direct conflict with reigning Protestantism in Toronto and backwards, insular midwestern homogeneity in Winnipeg.)

Amos Poe spent endless nights hanging in bars where friends like Patti Smith, The Talking Heads, The Ramones, Wayne County, Debbie Harry and Television played (initially) in obscurity, save for the "scene" in New York. Poe had long since abandoned his first loves, still cameras and the 8mm home movie camera and hung in these joints shooting the bands on silent black and white 16mm and record their music (not synched, of course) on cassette tape.

Out of this came Poe's highly influential Blank Generation. Once he had all the footage, he needed to edit it. He rented an editing room from the Maysles Brothers (Gimme Shelter) for $40, but was only allowed one straight 24-hour period to cut the film. Poe fuelled himself with speed, cut for 24-hours, then premiered the film the next night at the famed punk bar CBGBs.

From here, underground filmmaking in New York exploded and this was TRULY underground. It had nothing to do with the equally cool, but snobby artistes amongst the experimental film crowd, this was a wave of cinema created out of the punk movement and sought to capture the energy of the "scene", but to also tell stories and, of course, with virtually no money.

They wrote the rules and broke the rules.

The city was bankrupt, and the lower East Side of New York looked like a blasted-out war zone. Whole buildings stood empty and while most "sane" people left NYC, the "freaks" stayed and even more descended upon it.

People wanted to make movies. They had no money, but this mattered not. They made them anyway. James Nares describes how artists could, for virtually nothing, secure astounding digs that served as studios: "We lived like itinerant kings in these broken down palaces." This truly became the antithesis to Hollywood and the mainstream. In fact, there was almost the sense that the Lower East Side WAS a movie studio, but with absolutely nobody in charge.

Blank City blasts through these glorious days and it's so much fun that you as an audience member hope, unrealistically, for it not to end. After all, the movie is a Who's Who of great filmmaking talent. Steve Buscemi seems to be in almost every movie, John Lurie not only makes music, but makes movies. Scott and Beth B, Lizzie Borden, Sara Driver, Susan Seidelman, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Nick Zedd and Richard Kern are but a few of those who flourished here (and are expertly interviewed by the documentary's filmmakers).

And, an end to all good things must come. Blank City reveals how the neighbourhood becomes gentrified and the lives led in a particular place and time are altered forever - as are the films. Some stay, others move on. What doesn't change is that for a glorious time, a scene of talented young people raged against the machine and made movies that captured a way of life and (both the filmmakers and their films) happily live on to influence and inform new generations.

If anything, Blank City is proof positive that Waves in filmmaking (or any great art) cannot be manufactured. They must come from the lifestyle, the gut, the artistry and invention of young passionate artists who find each other, support each other, make movies WITH each other, FOR each other and in so doing create a unique and indelible stamp upon the greatest magic of all.

The magic of movies.

After seeing Blank City on a big screen, it makes for an extra-special keeper disc for filmmakers, film lovers and/or old punks. Anyone who makes movies, cares about movies and can't live without movies must see and own this film. More importantly, after seeing it, do whatever you have to do to see the movie that started it all, Poe's Blank Generation and after you see that, dig up as many of the rest as you can. They make for great viewing. Blank City on Blu-Ray, looks and sounds GREAT. The disc is also chock-full of some superb supplementals. It's via Kino-Lorber.

It would, of course, be remiss of me to ignore the fact that this is an extra-special film for me as it captures an indelible period that parallels a similar scene in Winnipeg that spawned a very cool explosion in indie underground cinema that I and many colleagues and friends were involved with - a period coined by film critic Geoff Pevere as Prairie Post-Modernism that included the works of John Paizs, Guy Maddin, Greg Hanec and many others.

A great selection of early Guy Maddin can be secured directly through the following links:

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

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

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

BAD MILO - DVD Review By Greg Klymkiw - One of 2013's 10 Best Horror Films Now Available on DVD from VSC

FORGOTTEN WINNIPEG FILMS - Report By Greg Klymkiw - This is a brief report on several films and filmmakers who were part of Winnipeg's Prairie Post-Modernist Wave of Cinema who, like Jim Jarmusch and so many others in the NYC underground scene, creating their own indelible stamp upon film culture.

GLORIA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - An innocuous, watchable, well-acted Valentine treat for the blu-rinse set.

HERE COMES THE DEVIL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Mexican Horror Shocker the whole family will love.

THE DISAPPEARED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Rub-a-dub-dub, Six Men in a Tub - Canuck Newfies Survive at Sea

I AM DIVINE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Lovely biographical portrait of actor and John Waters' muse

ENDLESS LOVE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Masterpiece of American Lit destroyed a 2nd time in 33 years.

PUSSY RIOT: A PUNK PRAYER - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Important Documentary details protests against Russia and Vladimir Putin's blending of patriarchal Eastern Rite religious Dogma with the heinous strategies of Joseph Stalin.

THE LONG DAY CLOSES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Terence Davies gets deserving Deluxe Criterion Treatment

RIFIFI - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Greatest Heist Film Ever Made now on Criterion Collection Blu-Ray

SEX AFTER KIDS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Fine Cast Wasted in Lame Bourgeois Feature Length TV Sitcom

MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - What does the Fed do, again?

JULES AND JIM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Truffaut travels to land ofthe ménage à trois on Criterion Blu-Ray

SOLO - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Competence rules the day. Low budget Canuck thriller opens theatrically.

OMAR - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Oases of humanity amidst the Conflict! Oscar-nominated thriller exposes love, loyalty and retribution against Palestinian-Israeli backdrop. There, but by the Grace of God go all of us.

86th Annual Academy Awards - The Oscars 2014: Ruminations, Predictions, Thoughts by Greg Klymkiw

Jim Jarmusch on
NYC's 70s No Wave Cinema Movement:

The inspirational thing
was people doing it
because they felt it.

DEBBIE HARRY: OUR LIVES,
IT FELT LIKE OUR LIVES WERE MOVIES.
IT WAS VERY CINEMATIC.

Jim Jarmusch onNYC's 70s No Wave Cinema Movement:

The inspirational thingwas people doing itbecause they felt it.

DEBBIE HARRY: OUR LIVES,IT FELT LIKE OUR LIVES WERE MOVIES.IT WAS VERY CINEMATIC.

Jim Jarmusch on
NYC's 70s No Wave Cinema Movement:

The inspirational thing
was people doing it
because they felt it.

DEBBIE HARRY: OUR LIVES,
IT FELT LIKE OUR LIVES WERE MOVIES.
IT WAS VERY CINEMATIC.