Sing City Chronicles

TIFF '12 Preview: Saturday the 15th/Sunday the 16th

I'll eventually be compiling these into one big omnibus preview piece for Ain't It Cool News, but in the meantime here's the day-by-day preview of the hell that is trying to narrow a list of 101 picks into a workable, non-life-threatening 11-day schedule. Yes, I said 101 picks... this year's TIFF program is flat out ridiculous. I've never had a more laughably named 'short list'.

Thursday Sept 6th preview
Friday Sept 7th preview
Saturday Sept 8th preview
Sunday Sept 9th preview
Monday Sept 10th preview
Tuesday Sept 11th preview
Wednesday Sept 12th preview
Thursday Sept 13th preview
Friday Sept 14th preview

Saturday Sept 15th/Sunday Sept 16th:

A dying woman (Vanessa Redgrave) tries to show her bitter husband (Terence Stamp) how to live on after she's gone by forcing him to take her place in a senior's choir in Song For Marion. Before you roll your eyes, keep in mind that said choir has stuff like Ace of Spades and Let's Talk About Sex in their repertoire...
And to close out the fest perhaps the most anticipated Midnight Madness film this year, Don Coscarelli's adaptation of whacked-out cult novel John Dies At the End, in which a couple of drugged-out losers try to thwart an interdimensional invasion, kind of.
Also repeat screenings of Three Kids, Key of Life, The Central Park Five, Cloud Atlas, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, English Vinglish, Hotel Transylvania, More Than Honey, Painless, Artifact, Argo, The We and the I, Peaches Does Herself, The ABCs of Death, Wasteland, The Girl From the South, Imagine, Thale, Far Out Isn't Far Enough, Room 237, The Deflowering of Eva von End, Everybody Has a Plan, Tai Chi 0, Dangerous Liaisons, Come Out and Play, Thermae Romae, Outrage Beyond, Byzantium, Me and You, Frances Ha, Thanks For Sharing and Hellbenders.
And Sunday sees repeats of Pieta, Lore, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God, The Color of the Chameleon, Imogene, A Werewolf Boy, Room 237, The Suicide Shop, London - The Modern Babylon, Penance, Yellow, A Hijacking, Aftershock, What Maisie Knew, Artifact, Here Comes the Devil, Peaches Does Herself, John Dies At the End, The Thieves, Kinshasa Kids, The Master, The Act of Killing, No Place on Earth, Motorway, Reincarnated, Sightseers, Call Girl, The ABCs of Death, Fin, Amour, To the Wonder and How To Make Money Selling Drugs.

TIFF '12 Preview: Friday the 14th

30 Seconds To Mars front man/Fight Club punching bag Jared Leto directs (under a pseudonym no less, Bartholomew Cubbins - because he's wearing a lot of hats, see? Ha! Ha? Sigh) Artifact, about the band's war with EMI. I'm hoping for something as monumentally indulgent as I'm Still Here, only for keepsies.
Legendary Bollywood actress Sridevi returns after a 15-year absence from the screen in English Vinglish, a fish out of water comedy about an Indian mom stranded in Manhattan before her daughter's wedding.
And at Midnight the massive horror anthology The ABCs of Death gets unveiled, as 26 directors turn the letters of the alphabet into excuses for mayhem and carnage.
Also repeat screenings of Much Ado About Nothing, Great Expectations, Motorway, Burn It Up Djassa, Mr. Pip, Blancanieves, Come Out and Play, Therese Desqueyroux, Outrage Beyond, Pieta, No One Lives, The Brass Teapot, Janeane From Des Moines, Ghost Graduation, Penance, The Thieves, in the Name of Love, Greetings From Tim Buckley, Passion and Ginger and Rosa.

TIFF '12 Preview: Thursday the 13th

There may be no pantheon director whose work is more susceptible to conspiratorial interpretations than Kubrick. The Eyes Wide Shut/Trance-formation of America theory alone (it's worth Googling) would push him to the top of that chart, but Room 237 delves deep into all the various theories that have sprouted up in the wake of The Shining, including the idea that it's a coded apology for Kubrick's faking of the moon landing.
Master mindfucker Kiyoshi Kurosawa is back with Penance, a four-hour episodic bit of craziness about a long-grieving mother visiting the schoolgirl chums of her murdered daughter, who may or may not have grown up to be emotional wrecks after witnessing the murder and not being able to help catch the killer.
Peaches Does Herself sees the electroclash queen turn her life story into a Hedwig-esque musical. And while she's in town, she's taking over a local hotspot for a night of boundary-blurring performance art.
South Korean action impressario Choi Dong-hoon brings us The Thieves, a glossy heist flick with the requisite gang of misfits and old scores to be settled.
And finally we get the official Midnight 'creepy Spanish kids' flick, Come Out and Play, about a vacationing couple trapped on an island where the kids have massacred all the adults. It's also directed by the Subcommandante Marcos of horror movies, a guy who calls himself Makinov and hides behind a mask to avoid the ego-trap that comes with being a director. Or something.
Also repeat screenings of Sightseers, A Royal Affair, The Bay, The Secret Disco Revolution, Inescapable, Smashed, Aftershock, More Than Honey, Thale, A Werewolf Boy, The Central Park Five, Passion and Burn It Up Djassa.

TIFF '12 Preview: Wednesday the 12th

Takeshi Kitano, back doing yakuza flicks, cranks out a sequel to 2010's Outrage called Outrage Beyond. While I'm disappointed to see him throttling back his ambitions, hey, it's still Kitano.
Scott Pilgrim's Mary Elizabeth Winstead (what do you mean she was recently in a horror prequel? Lalalalala I'm not listening) gets to flex her acting chops in Smashed, about an alcoholic teacher who tries to straighten out her life while her equally-unsober husband (Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul) tries to keep it crooked.
I think the program note for Thale sums it up nicely: "Two forensic clean-up men discover a deadly mythological siren hidden in the basement of a remote cabin in the Norwegian woods." So, basically, Quentin Tarantino's Splash.
A Royal Affair sees Mads Mikkelsen starring as a German doctor who tore apart the Danish court of Christian VII in the 1700s. Oh, and it's from the screenwriter of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
South Korea's resident demented genius Kim Ki-duk is back with Pieta, about a loan shark's sadistic enforcer who reunites with his long-lost mother. Wherever you think that set-up might go, I can pretty much guarantee it's going to go somewhere else.
Johnnie To produces Motorway, which looks like some sort of Hong Kong mashup of Drive and The Fasts and the Furiouses.
Patrice Leconte, best known for crime-tinged dramas like Monsieur Hire and L'homme du train, turns up with an animated musical that Tim Burton will probably be doing a stop-motion adaptation of any day now, about a family-run Suicide Shop that sells the accoutrements of euthanasia and their optimistic white sheep of a son.
And on a day that features name-brand international directors like Leconte, Kim and Kitano, name-brand American director Barry Levinson does something I never in a million years would have expected from him: namely, make a Midnight Madness film, and a found footage MM film at that. The Bay looks like a mutated hybrid of Slither and Contagion, and I have absolutely no idea what Levinson is up to in making this. That's a good thing.
Also repeat screenings of Great Expectations, Key of Life, Ghost Graduation, Antiviral, The Hunt, Lore, Lords of Salem, Imagine, Here Comes the Devil, In the House and A Hijacking.

August Travesties

Just 12 songs. Sigh.

Changes - David Bowie
Doctor My Eyes - Jackson Browne
Every Rose Has Its Thorn - Poison
Father and Son - Cat Stevens
Fell In Love With a Girl - White Stripes
Great Balls of Fire - Jerry Lee Lewis
Heart-Shaped Box - Nirvana
Instant Karma - John Lennon
Life During Wartime - Talking Heads
Photograph - Def Leppard
Tumbling Dice - Rolling Stones
You'll Never Find - Lou Rawls

TIFF '12 Preview: Tuesday the 11th

Here Comes the Devil is another movie about creepy Spanish kids (there are a lot of them this year) who may or may not have been touched by something evil after disappearing for a day.
From Microcosmos on up, modern camera technology has made recent bug docs true wonders to behold. More Than Honey focuses that lens on the imperiled world of the noble bee.
Inescapable casts ST:DS9 alum Alexander Siddig as a former Syrian dissident who's built a very comfortable life for himself in Canada only to have his daughter disappear in Damascus, forcing him to go back home and be a badass once again. So, basically, a Liam Neeson movie without Liam Neeson.
Many years ago I was a huge fan of Philippine films, and not just because the women in them were crazy hot and they all seemed to be ridiculous melodramas. There was an energy to their film industry that no one seemed to be matching at the time. I'm getting hints that West African films might be about to plug into that same socket... Kinshasa Kids I mentioned earlier, but Burn It Up Djassa is another one I get that vibe from. It looks like a City of God-esque brother-against-brother crime flick from Cote d'Ivoire, from a director named Lonesome Solo (!!!). Buckle up.
In addition to films about creepy Spanish kids, there's also a subset of TIFF movies this year about Japanese bathhouses. Entrant #2 after Thermae Romae is The Key of Life, about a down-on-his-luck actor who swaps identities with a hitman after the hitman slips in a public bathhouse, bumps his head and gets amnesia. So, basically, a Takeshi Kitano comedy without Takeshi Kitano.
A Werewolf Boy is a South Korean film about a poor family with a teenage daughter who take in a feral lad they find in the back yard and try to civilize him. It's described as a 'wistful fantasy'. Sure, what the hell.
Audrey Tautou graces us with her presence in Therese Desqueyroux, Claude Miller's final film and based on a novel that's sort of the French equivalent to Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Anna Karenina.
Kill List director Ben Wheatley is back with a bloody romp across the English countryside that sounds as much like Grant Morrison's Kill Your Boyfriend as it does Bonnie and Clyde in Sightseers.
Since we have a film in Mr. Pip about people who like Great Expectations, it's only fitting that we also get a reverential adaptation of Dickens' classic as well, this one from Mike Newell and starring half the people who appeared in the Harry Potter series: Ralph Fiennes, Robbie Coltrane, Helena Bonham Carter etc etc.
Passion sees Brian DePalma trying to stay relevant by getting Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace to star in a sexually charged thriller set in the advertising world. I'm sure it'll be very DePalma.
And at Midnight, Aftershock casts Eli Roth (who also co-wrote it) as an American tourist caught in the middle of a devastating Chilean earthquake that quickly rips the veneer of civilization off the survivors. The director is Nicolas Lopez, who apparently has films called Fuck My Life and Fuck My Wedding on his resume. I guess he figured calling this one Fuck My Apocalypse might not play internationally.
Also repeat screenings of Byzantium, The Iceman, Greetings From Tim Buckley, Hyde Park On Hudson, Tai Chi 0, Berberian Sound Studio, Dangerous Liaisons, No Place On Earth, The Lesser Blessed, To the Wonder and Hellbenders.

TIFF '12 Preview: Monday the 10th

Cate Shortland, who was here a few years ago with an Aussie coming-of-age story called Somersault that showed a fair amount of promise, shoots the moon with her latest film Lore, an inverse end-of-Sound of Music about a group of children raised by SS parents trying to escape across a war-ravaged Germany in 1945.
Berberian Sound Studio sees Toby Jones as a British sound engineer used to doing nature docs hired to work on an Argento-esque '70s horror film, and slowly losing his grip on reality. So basically, DePalma's Blow Out made a demon spawn baby with In the Mouth of Madness. Sweet.
Vinterberg collaborator Tobias Lindholm makes his directorial debut with A Hijacking, about the taking of a Danish freighter by Somali pirates.
Bill Murray plays FDR in... wait, I'll let that sink in for a moment. Bill Fucking Murray plays Franklin Delano Motherfucking Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, from Notting Hill director Roger Mitchell. (Admittedly, that part's less mind-blowing.)
Casting By shines a spotlight on trailblazing casting director Marion Dougherty, whose name you've seen on more great movies than you realized.
Imagine if Haley Joel Osment's Sixth Sense character grew up and became a sad-sack high school teacher? And that the Breakfast Club ends with them all dying in a giant explosion? Then, provided you're imagining it in Spanish, you're imagining Ghost Graduation.
If you could handle that last mental exercise, try this one: imagine if Matt Murdock gave up being Daredevil, and instead tried to teach a blind Portuguese woman how to 'see' like he does. Then you'd be imagining, umm, Imagine. Yeah, OK, enough of that.
It's becoming clear that David Cronenberg will probably never make another Videodrome, or even another Rabid. Fortunately, he had children, and one of them is now picking up that fleshy, throbbing gauntlet. Son Brandon makes his debut with Antiviral, about a black market for celebrity diseases and the people who procure and inject them. Hot damn.
No Place On Earth pieces together the history of a small band of Jewish escapees who survived the Nazis by hiding in a series of underground caves for 18 months.
Fittingly, along with Lindholm's debut feature A Hijacking (listed above) we also get the latest film he co-wrote with Thomas Vinterberg, The Hunt, about a town torn apart by accusations of pedophilia which stars the always awesome Mads Mikkelsen.
Zhang Ziyi and Cecilia Cheung star as the nice one and the slutty one, respectively, in a '30s Shanghai version of Cruel Intentio... err, I mean Dangerous Liaisons.
The Iceman has Michael Shannon doing what he does best (namely, being a sick, creepy fuck- in this case mob hitman and serial killer Richard Kuklinski).
Terrence Malick enlists Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem and others to help him analyze the mystery of love in To the Wonder.
In the House sees Francois Ozon in fine form, with a story about a teacher who unwittingly invites a bad seed into his home in the form of a prized pupil.
And Rob Zombie's latest for Midnight Madness, Lords of Salem, sounds like an extended Night Gallery episode, with a rock DJ in Salem accidentally awakening witchy evil by playing a cursed record. Or something.
Also repeat screenings of Midnight's Children, The Act of Killing, The Girl From the South, The Company You Keep, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God, Blancanieves, Mr. Pip, The Impossible, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners, Fin, Everybody Has a Plan, The Deflowering of Eva von End, London - The Modern Babylon, The Color of the Chameleon, No One Lives, Quartet, Thanks For Sharing and A Liar's Autobiography.

Oh Lord, My God, Are There No Votes For A Widow's Son?

Huh. I just found out, through Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice, that Paul Ryan is a widow's son.

Maybe picking Ryan was Romney's way sending out the Masonic distress call in code. Goddess knows he needs all the help he can get.

TIFF '12 Preview: Sunday the 9th

Ken Burns returns to Toronto with a doc about a more contemporary subject, The Central Park Five, about the Central Park Jogger case in New York.
Pixar takes their first crack at a 3D film with the Finding Nemo re-release.
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners examines the life and work of scholar, activist, firebrand and (depending on who you talk to) terrorist and traitor Angela Davis.
Hugh Laurie stars as a schoolteacher with a love for Dickens' Great Expectations caught on the fringes of a civil war in Mr. Pip.
Documentary maestro Alex Gibney is back with Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God, a scathing look at the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church.
One of my hunch picks, The Lesser Blessed is a First Nations coming-of-age story set in the Northwest Territories.
Greetings From Tim Buckley recounts the period in Jeff Buckley's life just before he became, well, Jeff Buckley, leading up to a tribute concert for his father.
One of the biggest movers and shakers behind modern pop culture gets the biodoc treatment in American Masters: Inventing David Geffen.
Deepa Mehta adapts Salman Rushdie's acclaimed Midnight's Children, which I'm sure will be all lush and magic realist and whatnot.
Orphanage director Juan Antonio Bayona tackles The Impossible, a ground-level drama about a family caught in the 2004 southeast Asian tsunami starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.
The Deflowering of Eva van End looks kind of like a Dutch Welcome To the Dollhouse, which would be just fine with me.
Neil Jordan gets back to doing weird, Neil Jordan-y stuff with Byzantium, a sexy vampire romp starring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan.
Robert Redford gets back to doing righteous, political, Robert Redford-y stuff with The Company You Keep, about a fugitive former Weather Underground member gone straight who has to go on the run when Shia LeBeouf threatens to expose him. Stupid Shia.
Quartet sees Dustin Hoffman stepping behind a camera for the first time, directing a story of four opera singers reuniting in a retirement home for musicians.
And JT Petty returns to Midnight for the third time with Hellbenders, about a group of badass rogue exorcists led by Clancy Brown.
Also repeat screenings of How To Make Money Selling Drugs, Something In the Air, Silver Livings Playbook, Cloud Atlas, Pusher, Ginger and Rosa, In the Name of Love, Thermae Romae, Much Ado About Nothing, Call Girl, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Janeane From Des Moines, The Brass Teapot, Painless, and Yellow.

TIFF '12 Preview: Saturday the 8th

Japanese box office champ Thermae Romae is about a Roman architect who becomes a hit after accidentally time-slipping back and forth to modern Japan and adopting elements of their public bathhouse culture for his own time period.
Genndy Tartakovsky, the animation genius behind the Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, the Clone Wars and Dexter's Laboratory finally directs a feature, the 3D CGI romp Hotel Transylvania.
Much Ado About Nothing... sigh. Leave it to Joss Whedon to crank out a Shakespeare adaption with all his friends in 12 days while in the middle of shooting a massive Hollywood blockbuster.
The long, sad story of the West Memphis Three gets one more chapter, although not from Berlinger and Sinofsky, with West of Memphis.
There's a very The Man Who Was Thursday vibe about spy thriller The Color of the Chameleon, from first-time Bulgarian director Emil Christov, that has me intrigued.
The Year of Big Screen Snow White Adaptations (which I'm sure is how 2012 will be immortalized by historians) wouldn't be complete without a silent art-house riff, Blancanieves, in which Snow becomes a bullfighter. Because why the hell not.
Video director Ramaa Mosley debuts with the Twilight Zone-ish The Brass Teapot starring Juno Temple.
Viggo Mortensen plays twins with a dark past in the Argentinian thriller Everybody Has a Plan.
The Wachowskis team with Tom Tykwer to film the unfilmable, Fountain-esque Cloud Atlas (Tykwer didn't do too badly with the almost-as-unfilmable Perfume, so I have hope this'll be more than just a spectacle).
[REC] writer Luiso Berdejo co-writes Painless, about a surgeon with a mysterious past and an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War where bizarre experiments were conducted on bizarre children.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is Emma Watson's first big post-Potter chance to show she's worth paying attention to. Oh, and it's also an adaption of a beloved teen novel blah blah blah. We all know why you're really seeing it. You're fooling no one.
David O. Russell, who has yet to make a bad film in his career, returns to more idiosyncratic, Flirting With Disaster/I Heart Huckabees-ish territory with Silver Livings Playbook.
Argentinian doc filmmaker Jose Luis Garcia tries to finish a film he started over twenty years ago, tracking down a North Korean activist who miraculously walked through the DMZ to South Korea in The Girl From the South.
Fin looks like a post-apocalyptic thriller crossed with the Big Chill, from a first-time Spanish director. That's fest-speak for "total wild card that could be anything from great to awful".
Olivier Assayas does a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film set in the wake of the May 1968 Paris protests, Something In the Air.
Julien Temple parades you through his version of the last 100 years of history along the banks of the Thames in London - The Modern Babylon.
The Act of Killing literally made me sit up and shout "Holy shit!" to an empty room when I read the synopsis. Former members of Indonesian death squads (people who have never been brought to justice and see themselves as the heroes of their own stories, since after all their side won) re-enact their crimes as though they were movie scenes, complete with special effects, sets, costumes and extras to gun down. Errol Morris and Werner Herzog apparently had the same reaction I did, since they signed on as executive producers after seeing early footage.
Yellow sees Nick Cassavettes possibly remembering who his father was and ditching his relentlessly middle-brow CV to do a pic about a woman who hallucinates her way through life.
Leave it to Graham Chapman, Monty Python's most subversive member, to narrate his own animated pseudo-biodoc, A Liar's Autobiography, decades after his death.
The Secret Disco Revolution continues a long, proud Canadian mock docs that began with the criminally-underseen The Canadian Conspiracy.
Tai Chi 0 is a cheeky, steampunk-and-anime-infused historical martial arts flick with fight choreography from Sammo Hung. That, folks, is what you call "must fucking see".
Palme d'Or winner Amour sees Michael Haneke trying to make something that isn't agonizingly misanthropic for once, as it portrays an old man watching his wife slowly fade away after suffering a stroke. On second thought, that could easily end up being just as misanthropic as the rest of his filmography...
Mark Ruffalo and Gwyneth Paltrow (Gwynnie-cakes to no one but me) headline Thanks For Sharing, a comedy about sex addiction from Kids Are Alright director Stuart Blemberg
And finally, No One Lives sees Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura pitting kidnappers against backwoods clans against who knows what else at Midnight, with an appropriately high body count.
Also, repeat screenings of Reincarnated, Far Out Isn't Far Enough, Argo, The Place Beyond the Pines, The We and the I, Dredd 3D, Three Kids, What Maisie Knew, Imogene, The Master, Seven Psychopaths, Me and You, Anna Karenina, Frances Ha and Wasteland.