Opening today is the new Drew Barrymore/Justin Long romantic comedy, Going the Distance, about a bi-coastal couple (she’s based in San Fran, he’s in NYC) who try and make a go of a long-distance relationship despite the odds.
Buffalo-born director Nanette Burstein’s film has many salient details that set it apart from the standard genre piece. For one thing, both Barrymore’s Erin and Long’s Garrett work in once-thriving, now-famously-dying industries (newspaper and record company, respectively) which seriously complicates relocation plans since neither can land another job.
Also, Erin and Garrett’s dialog is swift and snappy and rings true throughout the film, especially in matters of sex. While both characters boast the proverbial smart-mouthed sidekicks – Erin’s cynical sister (Christina Applegate) and Garrett’s best buds (Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis) - the film really belongs to the leads, who were real-life lovers during its making. The natural chemistry shows.
Hollywood North sat down with director Burstein in Toronto recently to discuss this most unusual romantic comedy and how a documentary filmmaker with a serious pedigree ended up directing a fabled love story.
Hollywood North: When you were researching this film, did you take any cues from the modern dating scene?
Nanette Burstein: I have a lot of friends with very busy lives all over the places so they end up online dating or being involved in long-distance relationships. I myself have had long-distance relationships, so I think it’s so relate-able that the film just came from life experience.
HN: Even though this is a romantic comedy, it seems to come largely from the guy’s point of view.
NB: The intention was to represent both points of view. The character of Erin has her sister [as a sounding board] and Garrett has his guy friends and the film has two equal main characters. However, I would say that Garrett's character probably makes the biggest change; his is the biggest arc in the story, so maybe it is weighted a little more towards him. HN: Drew Barrymore seems cast against type as the salty, outspoken Erin.
NB: It's interesting because Drew has always gravitated more towards the sort of fairytale romantic comedies and she's been great in those because she has this natural charisma. But I think the real Drew Barrymore at this age (35 off-screen, 31 in this character) is related more to this kind of character because it's a very honest depiction of how one talks about sex and how one curses at times and how one falls in love and try and figure it.
HN: Drew Barrymore and Justin Long were a real-life couple when this film was being made. What impact did that have on the set?
NB: Positive I think because they were very comfortable with each other and had great natural chemistry that you can really see on the screen.
HN: You have been quite successful as a documentary filmmaker (see the terrific Robert Evans biopic, The Kid Stays in the Picture)… why move to the so-called dark side with feature films?
NB: The film industry in the States has changed dramatically in the last few years and there are very few art-house distributors. It's very tough to get any kind of independent film made, especially non-fiction. Plus they're not really programmed very well on television, so in fact it's actually a very hard time to be a documentary filmmaker and actually make a living doing it. Or to get money to make the films or to have people see them. Plus I always wanted to make fiction films. I always wanted to do both - that was always a goal of mine. So this seemed like a good time.
The Bang Bang Club presents a series of snapshots assembled in the final bloody days of South African apartheid. As colourful and lively as it is discomfiting, The Bang Bang Club follows the real-life exploits of four photographers (Greg Marinovich, Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva) as they document the violence and strife around them.
Ryan Phillipe offers a measured performance as newcomer photog Greg Marinovich, while Taylor Kitsch is pure charisma as his shutter-buddy, Kevin Carter. Also starring Torontonian Malin Akerman as the photo editor who ensures their daring pictures are published, The Bang Bang Club is both a tribute to the bravery and artistry of the group's work and a deliberation on the photographer’s role in conflict. It’s also a raucous history lesson and an uncomfortable, but ultimately meaningful film set to a killer soundtrack.
The Bang Bang Club poses the question: what is the photographer’s responsibility when documenting tragedy? Ultimately the film leaves it viewers to find their own answers, ensuring the attempt will be as difficult and morally ambiguous for us as it is for its protagonists. Highly recommended.
TIFF Review: Bad Faith
“I don’t know whether I’m slowly waking up or slowly falling asleep”, says Mona (Sonja Richter) the protagonist of Bad Faith, and viewers of this surreal, dreamlike thriller from Swedish director Kristian Petri, may find themselves feeling the same.
In the aftermath of a murder, Mona encounters the bloodied victim, becoming obsessed with finding his killer. What follows is a strange journey, as she becomes observer, stalker, vigilante and victim of her own imagination. Surrounded by snoopy neighbours, and comforted by a mysterious new friend, Mona begins questioning her own reality while relentlessly pursuing the killer.
As dark and cold as Swedish winter, Bad Faith is a beautifully composed, eerie film whose central questions—Who is Mona? What does she want?— linger long after it’s over.
Writer/director Michael Goldbach deserves enormous credit for pulling off a film like Daydream Nation, which shouldn’t work but somehow does despite being more like five films in one and completely contradictory of its essential premise: that is, that these characters are motivated by tedium brought on by their hick town. If most small towns had this much action, big cities would be dustbowls.
We follow preternaturally mature and vaguely unpleasant teen Caroline Wexler as she deliberately creates an icky love triangle between her hunky high school teacher and knock-kneed classmate in her adopted town where a fire burns ceaselessly and a killer roams. As a host of other characters fall in and out of love in coming-of-age fashion complete with drug use, clumsy make-out sessions and assorted parental run-ins, Caroline stomps fearlessly through the action, guiding us towards a white-knuckle climax that’s completely unforeseen and possibly ludicrous.
Daydream Nation has heaps of quality humour and some winking insider references, not least to NYC art-rockers Sonic Youth. And while it doesn’t exactly add up in the end (or persuade us that any teenager on planet Earth could be as confidently prepossessing as Kat Denning’s Caroline Wexler), it’s a pretty darn entertaining way to spend 98 minutes.
TIFF Review: I Am Slave
A tale inspired by actual events evidently taking place in contemporary society, this dark UK drama follows an African girl kidnapped from her Sudanese homeland and sold into slavery. She eventually lands with an upper class Muslin family in modern-day London; from there, she plans her escape despite horrendous odds (wicked ‘masters,’ no passport, money or contacts on the ground).
Director Gabriel Range, best known for the controversial quasi-documentary Death of a President, doesn’t exactly have a light touch and the film’s lingering pallor is staggeringly grim. Forewarned is forearmed.
Dubbing a film ridiculously charming may not seem like much of an endorsement but it is with Modra, especially considering the storyline is primarily shouldered by two unknown teens acting like actual, warts-and-all teens.
On the cusp of a brief summer vacation to Slovakia to hang with extended family, 17-year-old Lina is dumped by boyfriend Tyler, who was set to come along. On a whim, Lina invites school acquaintance Leco to take Tyler’s place. That the pair doesn’t really know each other is secondary to the notion of just... like, you know, splitting.
The rural Slovakian town of Modra and Lina’s adoring family, who assume Leco is the boyfriend, push the action subtly forward. But it’s Lina and Leco’s discoveries and awakenings - of each other, of the parallel universe that is small-town European life, of the value of family – propelling the action. And, yup, it’s all really darn charming.
Nothing blows up in Modra, but Toronto-based director/writer Ingrid Veninger sure knows how to capture the life-affirming essence of a teenage holiday overseas. In this case, that’s story enough.
You wouldn’t expect one of the most intelligent, moving and resonant stories of female friendship to come from a man. But director Bruce McDonald’s Trigger – which follows two childhood friends and former bandmates as they clumsily reconnect years later – rarely hits a false note.
Molly Parker and the late Tracy Wright (in what might be a career-best performance) play dysfunctional former sisters-in-arms still struggling to find purpose years after addictions, detours and other small catastrophes drove them apart. Easier said than done, and as the two make their way through a long night packed with equal parts laughs, discomfiting memories and bitter recriminations, the shades of grey between their differences and similarities become apparent.
Fans of McDonald’s raucous earlier films such as Highway 61, Roadkill and Hard Core Logo will need to recalibrate their expectations with Trigger, which though just 78 minutes long, takes ample time to establish its characters and then stands back and lets them breathe. Absorbing, sharp-eyed and spectacularly well-acted, Trigger is near-perfect. Somewhere, Nancy Meyers is weeping into her chardonnay.
TIFF Review: Amazon Falls
Hollywood is an ugly town full of beautiful people with blistered souls. And it’s uniquely capable of crushing expectations, friendships and especially dreams. That’s the sad, sad lesson learned by Jana (April Telek) a would-be movie star whose best role to date was as a B-movie Amazon and whose just-celebrated 40th birthday all but guarantees it will remain that way.
Jana struggles to remain optimistic, acting as cheerleader to a much younger cocktail waitress co-worker with movie star dreams of her own. But the savagery of the business, combined with Jana’s stubborn refusal to scream uncle and give up the game, guarantees more pain ahead. Add in a mean, druggy boyfriend, a sharp-tempered boss and a weirdly smitten stranger with designs on our girl and the result is… well, you’ll just have to see for yourself. This story has been told before, but seldom with such chilling, unadorned clarity. A cautionary tale for the ages.
Now just 10 days away, the Toronto International Film Festival is eclipsing everything in sight, making normally sane publicists demented with stress while forcing even the most gluttonous movie-goer to make potentially painful choices on what to see and (gulp) what to miss.
Amid last week's hoopla about confirmed TIFF attendees - from Clint Eastwood to Ryan Gosling, Woody Allen to Eva Mendes and literally hundreds more besides - it was easy to overlook subtler announcements, such as Bruce Springsteen attending in support of the doc The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.
In addition to (presumably) making the rounds and being professionally fabulous, the Boss will be interviewed about the film and the eponymous album by actor Edward Norton.
Also worthy of note: NBA All-Star and Olympic athlete Steve Nash presents the world premiere of Into the Wind, his film about Terry Fox, followed by an extended conversation about sports, cinema and inspiration. Few dry eyes are expected in the house post-screening.
Precisely this kind of programming - at once germane to contemporary film and yet existing slightly outside the realm - is what makes TIFF such a thrill year after year. You can't get stale when you're constantly evolving, which explains TIFF's continued relevance after an astounding 35 years.
And starting tomorrow, watch this space for ongoing and constantly updated mini-reviews of films screening during the fest. It's darn hard to choose which movies to see when the list reaches into the hundreds. Hopefully, inMovies recommended hits and misses will help intrepid filmgoers make solid choices.
Vancouver and Toronto audiences have first crack at a fascinating new documentary by actor-turned-director Adrian Grenier, best known for his role in Entourage.
His new film Teenage Paparazzo - which features Matt Damon, Paris Hilton, Alec Baldwin and Whoopi Goldberg - tells the story of Austin Visschedyk, a 14-year-old who morphed into an actual, working paparazzo, though how he manages to keep up with the big boys is anyone's guess. Speed on his feet maybe.
Apparently, Grenier met the kiddo with the killer lens during a night on the town and decided to start filming him in order to document his ultra-competitive, topsy-turvy world. As mentioned, the film opens today Toronto and Vancouver; the trailer is pending but a tantalizing clip is below.
Also below an interview with Grenier on New Zealand TV about the film. It’s longish (6-plus minutes) but well worth watching if you're keen to learn more about the film.
It's a lead good enough to steal (and from a press release no less) so I'm just going to go ahead and steal it.
"A superhero, a samurai, gun runners, vampire hunters and" - wait for it - "hosers stalk the night during the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness programme. [This] year's line-up of feature premieres delivers the thrills and chills that devoted audiences have come to expect and love from Midnight Madness."
No lie that. Indeed some of the films planned for Midnight Madness - from directors like horror master John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) and actors as diverse as Halifax-born Ellen Page, Woody Harrelson, Josh Hartnett, Canuck Hayden Christensen and Kevin Bacon - guarantee this is going to be a very memorable year.
As first reported at Hollywood North, the sequel to 2002's near-genius cult comedy classic Fubar II takes opening night honours. Once again, audiences can chuckle along with headbangers Terry and Dean as they quest for less talk, more rock, yummier beers a more meaningful life, this time in the wilds of Alberta. Just give'r eh? Trailer below.
But hosers are only part of the equation. As alluded to in that rockin' good above-written lead, other gems include the promisingly titled Stake Land: "In the aftermath of a vampire epidemic, a teen is taken in by a grizzled vampire hunter on a roadtrip through a post-apocalyptic America, battling both the bloodsuckers and a fundamentalist militia that interprets the plague as the Lord's work."
And then there is director James Gunn's SUPER: "After his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for a drug dealer (Kevin Bacon), a frustrated husband (Rainn Wilson) decides he will win her back as Crimson Bolt, a costumed vigilante armed with a monkey wrench. His actions bring him an admirer, and overeager comic store clerk (Ellen Page) who wants to be his sidekick."
Check out The Ward from director John Carpenter: "The acclaimed director makes his long-awaited return to the screen with a thriller about a young woman (Amber Heard) in a 1960s mental institution who becomes terrorized by malevolent unseen forces."
Finally (for me at least; there is a total of nice Midnight Madness films slated), there is Bunraku: "In a world with no guns, a mysterious drifter (Josh Hartnett pictured above with Woody Harrelson), a young samurai and a bartender plot revenge against a ruthless leader and his army of thugs, headed by nine diverse and deadly assassins."
Mmmm, sounds like something Tarantino would direct - but no, it belongs to Guy Moshe.
Anyhoo, the Midnight Madness package can be had for $157 ($100 students and seniors) via TIFF.
In other breaking TIFF news, the list of celebrity attendees has been announced - keep eyes peeled for Nicole Kidman, Clint Eastwood, Megan Fox, Natalie Portman, Robert De Niro, Ryan Gosling, Zack Galifianakis, Keanu Reeves, Clive Owen, Javier Bardem, Jon Hamm (mmm Jon Hamm!) and Robert Redford among others.
Also, the Mavericks series at TIFF this year has a great lineup of celebrity interviews.
Highlights include Edward Norton interviewing Bruce Springsteen about the doc The Promise, chronicling the making of Darkness of the Edge of Town (premiering at TIFF); Michael Moore going head-to-head with guerilla filmmakers Ken Loach and Paul Laverty; and Canada AM host Seamus O'Regan chatting up Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose feature directorial debut, Jack Goes Boating, also premieres at TIFF.
Stop the presses! Despite the presence of the (almost) always awesome Paul Gross in the title role, the Canuckified comedy/western Gunless pretty much took it on the chin critically when it was released earlier this year.
Indeed, film ratings aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes files the film squarely under "rotten" based on negative reviews from the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, eye Weekly and others. But sometimes films that fall flat on the big screen gain traction in DVD format.
That seems to be the case with Gunless, just released on DVD and Blu-ray. Bruce Kirkland, writing breathlessly about the film for the Toronto Sun last Friday, is positively effusive about the thing, calling it "joyously Canadian," praising its cinematography as "gorgeous," adding that "the real genius [of the film] rests in the tone and the effortless delivery," and even conjuring the great Clint Eastwood.
Personally, on the subject of Gunless, I fall somewhere between Kirkland's knock-kneed love and, say, Globe columnist Rick Groen's pithy assertion that "Gunless is harmless, the sort of pop entertainment that sets its sights low and doesn't underachieve."
No question that it's worth a rental for fans of Gross, comedic westerns or, uh, Bruce Kirkland. Trailer below.
Some other odds and ends worth reporting:
Hollywood North will feature an interview with Going the Distance director Nanette Burstein to coincide with the opening of the film on September 3. Though originally slated to open August 27, web scuttlebutt suggest marketers behind the Drew Barrymore/Justin Long rom-com wanted to create some distance between their film and the Jennifer Aniston flick, The Switch. They needn't have bothered - The Switch struggled to secure eighth place this past weekend, miles behind The Expendables, Eat Pray Love and bloodsucker spoof Vampires Suck among others.
The much-anticpated (only?) hockey musical, inventively titled Score: A Hockey Musical - starring Olivia Newton-John, Noah Reid, half of Canadian media in cameo roles and debuting this fall at TIFF - is confirmed for wide release October 22. Could be great or could be awful - you decide. Trailer below.
Finally, in anticipation of the DVD release of the Ridley Scott film, Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe, Canadian actor Kevin Durand (Little John) and Great Big Sea leader Alan Doyle (who also has a role in the film) sat down last week with Hollywood North to discuss this most interesting of movies. Ever wonder what an "aging department" does on a film set? Find out when we publish our interview with Doyle and Durand next month.
You know the blockbuster summer movie season is waning when the big new Friday releases are a Jennifer Aniston rom-com (The Switch, the plot of which, in typical Jennifer Aniston style, mirrors Jennifer Aniston's life) and a kid's movie about a buck-toothed Nanny with magic powers. Which, honestly, looks to be the better of the two, The Infidel notwithstanding.
But not to fear, for a dearth of new goodies at the box office just means movie fans can look elsewhere for quality stuff with a whiff of Canadiana. Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, starring awesome Brampton-born Michael Cera in the title role, continues on big screens.
The little-seen but awesome bio-pic The Runaways - about the all-girl band that launched the career of Joan Jett and directed by Hamilton's Floria Sigismondi - was released recently on DVD and is well worth a peek for film and music fans alike.
Looking ahead, Toronto-based film fans hoping to make the most of TIFF - but finding themselves a little light in the wallet - can plan their September schedule around a bunch of free screenings slated for the new TIFF Bell Lightbox.
The program, TIFF For Free, cherry-picks titles from past festivals and looks pretty darn solid; trailers from a few personal faves are below:
Outrageous!, Richard Benner Tuesday, September 14 at 7 pm
American Beauty, Sam Mendes Wednesday, September 15 at 5:30 pm
Roadkill, Bruce McDonald Thursday, September 16 at 10 pm
Water, Deepa Mehta Friday, September 17 at 10 pm
Away From Her, Sarah Polley Saturday, September 18 at 7 pm
Crash, Paul Haggis Saturday, September 18 at 9 pm
The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasdan Sunday, September 19 at 7 pm
The Princess Bride, Rob Reiner Sunday, September 19 at 10 pm
Of course, look to InMovies and Hollywood North for comprehensive TIFF coverage - mini-reviews, interviews, red carpet surveys etc - throughout the festival.
