There’s a lot to cover this week but you would do well to also check out the Cinematheque website for two series they’re running. First there are eight films by France’s much lauded auteur Claire Denis. That series started last night and runs off and on until the 20th. I wrote a bit about it last week.
On Thursday a festival of Icelandic films starts up and may offer some evidence for this question: How could such a small country produce such a vibrant cinema? That series runs off and on until the 28th and ends with Rams that marvelous film about feuding brother farmers. It won a big award at Cannes four years ago and started people asking the question. The website is http://www.thecinematheque.ca/
Meanwhile, these are new in town:
Dark Phoenix: 3 stars
The Secret Life of Pets 2: 3 stars
Wild Nights with Emily: 3
Pavarotti: 3 ½
Framing John DeLorean: 4
The Souvenir: 4
The Tomorrow Man: 2 ½
DARK PHOENIX: Twenty years of X-Men movies (this is the 12th) brings us to this better than average entry. It’s speedy, robust and involving if you can gloss over problems of logic and consistency. It tells the story of Jean Grey for a second time. She’s one of Marvel’s most popular characters because she’s so conflicted. Her mutant powers are telekinesis and telepathy (she can read minds and move objects with her mind) and she has a dark as well as a good side. It took four years of comic books to tell her story and in the movies she’s died twice. We get her whole history this time, from her causing a family car crash as a girl, to an outer space mission as part of the X-men and transformation by a cosmic flare into the split-personality (Dissociative identity disorder, if you will.)
Sophie Turner, best known for Game of Thrones, is the second actor to play her and Jessica Chastain hovers around as the shadowy character named Vuk, urging her to let her malevolent powers out. The others, including James McAvoy as Charles Xavier, Michael Fassbender as Magneto, Nicholas Hoult as Beast and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, have to figure out how to control her. That’s hard because she’s enraged when she finds out she’s been lied to about how she got to be at Xavier’s school and part of his group in the first place. “Who are we? Can we evolve?” she asks. The movie doesn’t do much with the theme but it does mount some tense scenes and, at the climax, a spectacular action sequence on a train. That makes up for a lot of overly momentous dialogue that comes earlier. (Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS 2: It’s close but not as good as the first one that was such a mammoth hit three years ago. It breezes along with non-stop jokes that don’t feel as fresh this time. The writers worked too hard to create them and cram them in. You can feel the deliberations they might have gone through with each one. The best ones again riff on how pets behave in our homes. Got a cat that wakes you up in the morning demanding to be fed? It happens in here too, one time with a gross add-on.
Scenes like that are funny because they build on what’s familiar to us. It’s when the film stretches beyond that it strains. There are three stories. Max, the dog now voiced by Patton Oswalt, develops a nervous tic because his owners have a new baby. He gets one of those plastic cones around his head and is taken on a visit to a farm where he meets hostile animals and a gruff alpha dog voiced by Harrison Ford. He gets terse advice from him in the film’s freshest scenes. Meanwhile, Gidget the cat (Jenny Slate) has lost a favorite toy and has to retrieve it from an old lady’s apartment where dozens of cats live and don’t welcome the intrusion. And Snowball the rabbit who thinks he’s a super-hero (Kevin Hart) and Daisy the Shih Tzu (Tiffany Haddish) team up to rescue a tiger from a mean circus owner named Sergei who sends four snarling wolves after them. Action and comedy galore. Fun for the kids. Intermittent for you. (International Village, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
WILD NIGHTS WITH EMILY: That’s Emily Dickinson, the American poet of the 19th century famous for having been a recluse as well as a writer. Mostly, unpublished during her lifetime. But who also wrote this: "Wild nights - Wild nights! Were I with thee Wild nights should be Our luxury!" Filmmaker Madeleine Olnek inspects the contradiction between the image and those words in this playful re-imagining of Dickinson based on a theory that’s been discussed since about 1951 and given more credibility by recent research: that she had a long sexual relationship with her sister in-law who had been a childhood friend and as a married woman lived next door. Molly Shannon plays her; Susan Ziegler plays her lover.
I’m conflicted about this. It’s speculation based on a few facts that are filled out with a feminist agenda. So is it true? How much does it matter? It both diminishes her and explains how her reputation was harmed. Her later editor, Mabel Todd, cleaned up her image and made her seem almost a hermit. The film brings life back into her picture. That’s good, if accurate, and comes with short readings from her work. There’s much focus on how men who controlled publishing held her back. There’s quite a bit of comedy to depict that. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly, for instance, is portrayed as a stuffy condescending sort. There’s even slapstick at times. More problematic is the look of the film. The actors seem to be walking into sets, not real rooms, and that makes parts of the film feel like a school pageant. So, I find it more of an interesting curio than a convincing re-interpretation. (VanCity Theatre, (Mon to Thurs) 3 out of 5
PAVAROTTI: Wives, lovers, children, music business types all talk about the great opera singer’s art but I think Bono, the U-2 front man describes it best. Pavarotti makes you feel that he’s lived the songs he sings; he’s felt the passion. That same tone oozes throughout this documentary by Ron Howard. It depicts a man living his life with joy and without moderation. He burst on the scene in the early 1960s and by 1968 sang LaBoheme at the Met and by the 1980s performed in huge stadium concerts. A promoter describes hiring him after one of them to replace a Bruce Springsteen date that fell through. Pavarotti staged charity fund-raisers in his hometown in Italy where he brought rock stars on stage with him. His popularizing of opera continued as part of the Three Tenors. The film documents all that as well as his personal life.
His secretary became his second wife. He had three daughters in four years with his first. There were dalliances which the film doesn’t dwell on, only suggests. The focus is squarely on his music, with generous samples heard from throughout his career. There’s quite a bit about vocal technique, correct breaths, achieving High C, and so on, enough to satisfy opera fans but not too much for people just wanting to know more about a celebrity. Both get enough. It’s hardly a probing documentary, but it is informative. (International Village, 5th Avenue and a few suburban theatres) 3 ½ out of 5
FRAMING JOHN DeLOREAN: If only the Back to the Future movies had come out a little earlier this man’s car might have been a success. In the movies it gained iconic status because Doc used it as a time machine. In real life, it didn’t sell because of quality problems and economic recession and survives only as collectors’ treasure. The story, as told in this documentary, is much more complex than that, though. It’s also riveting and told with lots of news footage, archived and new interviews and key
He was a star engineer at General Motors with a keen eye for consumer needs. He introduced the Pontiac GTO but was retired from the company after criticizing quality standards. He started his own company to produce a sporty car for the masses. He got England to subsidize a factory in Northern Ireland but thanks to Margaret Thatcher got no further help when he needed it. He agreed to a drug deal to raise money; it turned out to be a set-up and he was prosecuted for it. The film basically takes the defense argument that he was set up. It skips over a lot of details about his career and his company but there’s enough there to make this story as involving as any fictional movie. (International Village, once a day but at varying times. Check the Cineplex website). 4 out of 5
THE SOUVENIR: This is personal film making at its best and no surprise then that it won a big award at Sundance. English director Joanna Hogg wrote it based on her own life in the 1980s (as recounted in a big New Yorker article recently). Her central character is an aspiring film maker and during a pitch session at film school is advised to write about a subject close to her, not what she’s proposing but knows little about. Hogg follows that advice exactly with this film.
Honor Swinton Byrne plays her, or at least that imagined film student, who falls into a romantic relationship with a suave young man (Tom Burke) who works at the foreign office. He’s not much involved with international matters but has lots to say on just about anything else. For instance, he says he doesn’t want to see real life reflected in the movies. But that’s exactly what this one has. It’s slow to start because it’s overly arty but compelling when the real story kicks in. He’s a heroin addict, a money borrower and a thief. It takes time for her to realize that and it almost breaks relations with her mother, played by Byrne’s real mother, Tilda Swinton. Apparently heroin use was rampant among the British higher classes back then. This film carefully details one woman’s coming to see what’s going on around her and at the same time grow stronger and assertive. It’s a well-written character study and, in effect, memoir. And very-well acted. (5th Avenue) 4 out of 5
THE TOMORROW MAN: Two veteran actors play well off each other in this one. I’m just not sure what it is about. It’s a love story for sure, of two older people who start spending time with each other. But it seems to be about more, or so the script by director Noble Jones suggests, but doesn’t explore.
John Lithgow and Blythe Danner portray people with mild emotional issues. He’s a survivalist who fears society will crash, has a storeroom full of goods for that eventuality and bores his adult son with long proclamations about what might come and the need to be ready. She’s a widow who he sees shopping at the same grocery store as he, conspires to meet, take out to dinner and get to know. Turns out she’s not like him; she’s a hoarder. Her house is cluttered with stuff.
How they came to be that way is not explained, though grief over lost loved ones may be involved with her. No elaboration, though. The whereabouts of his ex-wife is a quirky surprise that doesn’t help elucidate anything. And the film’s ending is so out of character that it undercuts what we’ve been thinking. Despite all that, this is a warm, sweet love encounter by two seniors, and therefore a rarity in modern movies. (International Village) 2 ½ out of 5