It’s hard to find the link, but Toronto Globe & Mail critic James Adams has called Philip Noyce‘s Catch a Fire “a nail biter…a fast paced, compulsively watchable political thriller about what happens when a previously apolitical working man (Derek Luke) decides to join the armed struggle against an oppressive govt, in this case Sout Sfrica’s now defunct apartheid regime.
“Tim Robbins deftly plays a fiendishly clever Boer security agent trying to hold back the growing power of the ANC, but the real stars here are Luke as Patrick, the politicized refinery worker, and Bonnie Henna as the wife whose jealousy has consequences far beyond hearth and home. Based on a true story and shot on location, Noyce’s film is like The Battle of Algiers, unsparing in its portrayal of the many prices everyone pays when the ‘old is dying and the new cannot yet be born’.”

Triumph of Others

That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating “heart” German films I’ve ever seen — the love story that beats at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet this is also a very chilling and gripping film about political terror.
And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — quite emotional, and at times quite sad. But with a deeply touching “up” element at the finale.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate. Ugliness needn’t rule.
It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or unrealistic in an East German political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.
Sony Classics is going to open Others in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (Koch) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy ways.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon, but this is the first absolutely top-drawer film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy, and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and then a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.

For years I’ve been going up to the TIFF volunteers working the VIP rooms (i.e., small 20-seat theatres) at the Varsity plex and asking what’s showing and may I slip in?, etc. But this year they’ve gone all CIA on me, claiming they don’t know what’s showing and suggesting that I speak to the publicist attached to whatever film is showing…except they won’t tell me what’s slated for later in the day. I’m wondering if this new restrictiveness has anything to do witjh a new TIFF program of buyers-only screenings, which the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein explained yesterday.

Variety critic Todd McCarthy‘s glowing review of Roger Michell‘s Venus, posted yesterday from Telluride, Telluride….Telluride! Peter O’Toole, all but locked for a Best Actor nomination, “reigns [with] his first meaty leading film role in perhaps two decades, and the still charismatic and silver-tongued star scores a bull’s-eye.” McCarthy describes this “small-scaled, throughly British entertainment” as “genuinely funny, randy and moving by turns and breezily enjoyable throughout.” The Miramax release has its first press screening today at the Varsity at 4:15 pm. I’ll try and post a reaction sometime this evening…maybe.

I ran into a Bobby disser yesterday afternoon at the “indie” publicist hotel, the Intercontinental. To be specific, he shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and kind of grimaced after mentioning that he’d seen it. The best thing about it, he said with some enthusiasm, is the archival footage of Robert F. Kennedy. The worst thing, he claimed, is Ashton Kutcher‘s performance as a late ’60s hippy-dippy type.

Instead of going to that disastrous Borat midnight screening at the Ryerson last night…oh, that’s right, I haven’t mentioned this yet. Only 20 minutes worth of the film was shown before the friggin’ projector broke down. Sacha Baron Cohen, Michael Moore and director Larry Charles entertained the rowdy (as in hugely pissed off) crowd and promises were mde about the show starting any minute now, etc., but they finally had to cancel the whole show and re-schedule for midnight makeup tonight at the Elgin.
Variety‘s Stephen Zeitchik, David Poland and Justine Elias have provided colorful reportings on the particulars.
There’s a Borat press screening in a couple of hours (12:45 pm) inside a puny little 82-seat theatre at the Varsity plex…brilliant. If the festival had its act together, they’d arrange for a bigger last-minute daytime venue. (Thre’s also a 1:15 pm Saturday screening at the Paramount.)
I started this item by saying instead of going to the damn Borat screening (which I knew wouldn’t get out until 2:15 or 2:30 ayem, and then I’d get to bed at 3:30 ayem), I went to an after-party at Lobby, a narrow, darkly lit club on Bloor Street, for Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It was awful, noisy, repulsive. Wall-to-wall 20- and 30-something nocturnal party types with much-too-loud music and steely-eyed goons at the doorway keeping invited guests from coming in…a festival pigfuck extraordinaire.
I went to a little joint two or three doors down and ran into MPRM’s Jennifer Lopez and Wendy Martino. We shared stories and traded news and generally had a nice wind-down for an hour or so.

IFC Films has picked up …So Goes the Nation, a doc by James Stern and Adam Del Deo about the key battleground state of Ohio during the ’04 Presidential campaign. Any examination of Ohio ’04, of course, means an examination of the long-standing charge that George Bush‘s stooges stole the election by suppressing liberal democratic voters through various underhanded means. This story has been reported and explored quite a lot over the last couple of years, and the response from the right has consistently been “get over it.” …So Goes The Nation is being touted as an even-handed look at what happened, but “even handed” is a code term that sometimes means “bending over backwards to accomodate the bad guys’ point of view.” (Sorry to be judgmental and all, but if you conspire to steal an election, that kinda makes you a “bad guy.” ) A release says that tthe doc “looks at the election and the voting public through lenses large and small, and in doing so, examines both the U.S. voting process and the American national psyche.” The public Toronto Film Festival screenings aren’t until Thursday, 9.14, and Friday, 9.15.

Nothin’s Jumpin’

I sat through one entire film — John Waters and Jeff Garlin‘s This Filthy World, a concert performance doc about Waters doing his act — and portions of three other films during my first six hours of the Toronto Film Festival, and none of them delivered much of a bolt or a jolt.
So things are off to an inauspicious start, but at least there’s that hot German film, The Lives of Others, that everyone was raving about at the close of last weekend’s Telluride Film Festival, showing at 9 pm this evening at the Elgin.
The three so-sos that I saw after the Waters-Garlin doc were Murali K. Thalluri‘s 2:37, Susanne Bier‘s After The Wedding and Rachid Bouchareb‘s Indigenes (i.e., Days of Glory)
For years the rap on Waters has been that he’s much better commentator-comedian than filmmaker. He’s a brilliant idea-and-insight man, but his movies, despite their irreverence and nerve, always feel a bit drab and one-dimensional. The big payoff of This Filthy World is that it’s nothing but Waters the gabbermouth, and that, for me, makes it funnier than A Dirty Shame or Serial Mom or Hairspray or even Pink Flamingoes.
TIFF programmer Noah Cowan‘s production notes are a hoot. “While This Filthy World might be described as an autobiographical stand-up comedy set by John Waters,” he begins, “its real purpose is to document a sardonic lesson in cinema’s decline and fall .” This falls under the heading of pretentious b.s. Well, not entirely, but what person writing or talking about film in any capacity isn’t discussing, in one way or the other, the cinema’s decline and fall, or at least the fact that 85% of the output sucks?
Water is just riffing here like I’ve seen him riff 17 or 18 times — amusingly, wittily — and he’s great at this. But let’s not try and pass him off as the new Voltaire.
Garlin (I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With) pretty much just shoots Waters from a centered mid-audience p.o.v. and that’s that. He keeps the camera in focus and doesn’t get too tricky and barely cuts between Waters and the audience too much. Cowan calls it “an uncluttered approach” — this guy’s a card.
2:37 is a kind of guessing-game movie about a suicide that happens in an Adelaide high school at 2:37 pm. Thalluri, who’s only 21 or thereabouts but directs like a much older pro, acquaints us with five or six (seven?) characters who may turn out to be the kid who’s killed himself. We’re supposed to care about this. I didn’t.
Every high-school kid suffers. A lot of them cope with profound depression of one kind of another — I sure did — but the ones who seriously entertain thoughts of suicide need to get over themselves and that’s that. I never even flirted with the idea, and nobody was sadder, angrier or felt more unloved and repressed and furious at everything than I was at age 15 or 16.
Life can be cold and brutal in high school, yes, but the idea of teenagers suffering profound soul-crushing angst is an overindulged mythology. Kids need to grim up and cut back on the substances and deal with it like Steve McQueen would have.
The influence you can’t ignore throughout 2:37 is Gus Van Sant‘s Elephant, which was also about a sudden tragedy in a high school with various characters either affected by it or contributing to it in some way. I much prefer the constant steadicam tracking and overall stylistic detachment of Van Sant’s film to Thalluri’s. I left 2:37 after a half-hour or so. An Australian exhibitor agreed with me later on that it’s very derivative and that my instinct to bail was entirely correct.
The emotional exposures and raw, dogma-ish acting and shooting styles and in Open Hearts and Brothers made me a huge fan of Bier. But I started to feel distanced from After the Wedding within a half-hour or so, and I bolted after about 45 or 50 minutes. It seemed to me that Anders Thomas Jensen‘s story — about some big primal changes happening to a wealthy Danish family — was forced and labored. It’s very well acted but too much of it feels contrived and histrionic.
The three principal performers — Mads Mikkelsen (who starred in Open Hearts), Sidse Babett Knudsen and Rolf Lassgard — are in excellent form throughout. I need to confess that there’s something about the haunted intensity in Mikkelsen’s high-cheekboned face that’s starting to bother me. Not a fair thing to lay on an actor’s natural mechanism, but there it is.
I guess I just felt that the main story points — it’s about a guy who runs an Indian orphanage finding out that he’s the father of a grown Danish daughter just as her stepfather, a bilionaire, is coping with a fatal disease and needs someone to step and take over, so to speak — were clumsily introduced and over-emphasized. Like Bier was so into achieving emotional fireworks that she allowed her zeal to get the best of her.
Indigenes, a World War II story about four North African guys who enlist in the French army but wind up dealing with a good amoutn of racial discrimination, is well-made and handomsely shot with some ultra-realistic battle scenes. But it’a rote and unexceptional piece, and is not that much different, believe it ot not, from Mark Robson‘s Home of the Brave, a 1949 film which dealt with racial discrimin- ation among U.S. troops during the same war.
It’s not a “bad” film — you get to know the characters, it moves along, it’s saying the right things about who we are and the necessity for dignity in every human life — but it feels too been-there, done-that.

A journo pal has seen Steve Zallian‘s All The King’s Men (Columbia, 9.22), which shows at the Toronto Film Festival in two or three days. He says it has problems but also merit here and there, and that it’s not a washout or a train wreck. He insists that Sean Penn gives a strong, formidable performance as Willie Stark — Oscar-level, he claims — but that Jude Law‘s Southern accent doesn’t cut it at all, and that this naturally impacts his performance. (Speaking about Law prompted him to make a face.) And just to clarify, it’s Mark Ruffalo who plays the part that Shepard Strudwick played (blam!) in the 1949 film.

N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman points out the existence of some obviously insincere anti-Semitic humor in Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (20th Century Fox, 11.3).
Waxman notes that Borat, “a racuous comedy, seems certain to raise hackles and induce squirming by making comic points by seeming to embrace sexism, racism, homophobia and that most risky of social toxins: anti-Semitism.” The operative term, obviously, is “seeming,” as in “putting on” and/or “placing within quotes.” And yet Waxman seems to be absorbing Borat‘s sense of humor in a fairly literal vein.
“In one scene Borat insists on driving to California rather than flying, ‘in case the Jews repeat their attack of 9/11,'” she writes. “As he tours the South, he becomes terrified when he learns that an elderly couple who run an inn are Jewish. When cockroaches crawl under the door of his room, he becomes convinced the innkeepers have transformed themselves into bugs, and throws money at them.
“In another scene Borat returns to his home village and participates in an annual ritual, ‘The Running of the Jews,’ complete with giant Jew puppets that the villagers beat with clubs.
“This anti-Semitic humor is mixed in with other outrageous behavior, including slurs against Gypsies and gays, and a nude wrestling match. But in a world in which resurgent anti-Semitism has become — sometimes literally — an explosive topic, the movie may well hit a particular nerve, especially in Europe.”
I didn’t see Borat at Cannes last May because it played at midnight, and I probably won’t see it tomorrow (Thursday) night at the Toronto Film Festival because it’s playing at midnight. Well, maybe I’ll go if I can find two or three Red Bulls to chug. I just hate getting to bed at 2:30 or 3 ayem and getting up at 7 ayem. Throws off the whole damn day.

“Ordinary parents protect their children; that’s an impulse the public can identify with in the celebrity game. Suri Cruise‘s parents might have gotten more mileage out of releasing a modest family snapshot and leaving it at that, shutting down the media frenzy without inventing a bigger show of their own. A show is clearly what they were looking for, but the entire over-the-top operation” behind the Tom Cruise–Katie Holmes-and-Suri Vanity Fair photo spread “involving the famous photographer and a photo so hyped it was revealed on Katie Couric‘s first newscast as CBS anchor Tuesday — carries a whiff of desperation. It reveals a media circus masquerading as ordinary life, and speaks to the devil’s bargain some celebrities make with the public.” — Caryn James writing in Thursday’s New York Times.

“Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck have crafted an insightful and heartfelt look at the experiences of the Dixie Chicks over the last three years, chronicling the often bizarre consequences of singer Natalie Maines‘ anti-Bush wisecrack on a London stage. Maines’ statement is captured in Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, as are the meetings where they plot how to circumvent the core country audience and, eventually, how to reroute a tour and cancel shows due to poor ticket sales,” writes Variety reviewer Phil Gallo. It’s one of those “rare thorough documentary on a musical act whose dilemmas are faced in the here and now, one that should win over fans of the Chicks on the fence and of music docus and perhaps create a little cultural stir as well.”