More festival notes:
The Jewish Film Festival (https://www.vjff.org/) started last night and follows today and tomorrow with a droll and wise comedy about Israeli and Palestinian relations called Tel Aviv On Fire. Another highlight is the documentary Once Were Brothers about The Band.
The Vancouver International Women in Film Festival (https://viwff.ca/ ) starts Tuesday for a 5-day run. The opener is Parkland Rising which documents the gun control campaign mounted by students from the Florida high school where a shooter killed 17 people two years ago. The director, Cheryl Horner McDonough will be at the screening.
The Cinematheque (https://thecinematheque.ca) has a new collection of films that UCLA has restored, rediscovered and generally rescued from neglect. They range from early silents, including some rare Laurel and Hardy films, film noirs and even a Don Johnson film from 1975. The series runs for three weeks and starts Thursday with The Mortal Storm the 1940 film that got all MGM films banned from Nazi Germany. It shows a family split and a father ruined when the Nazis came to power.
And the Van City Theatre has a free screening Sunday night at 7:15 of The World is Bright, an award-winning documentary that I’ve praised a couple of times. A Chinese student dies in Vancouver and his parents arrive to find out why. The director, Ying Wang, will be there for a post-screening discussion along with an immigration lawyer and an expert in refugee mental health.
And these are the new films this week:
Ordinary Love: 4 ½ stars
The Twentieth Century: 4
One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk: 3 ½
Disappearance at Clifton Hill: 3
The Invisible Man: 2
The Jesus Rolls: 2
Impractical Jokers: The Movie: --
ORDINARY LOVE: It’s best to relish films made for mature adults when they come along because these days there aren’t enough of them. This one is extraordinary because it is so real in a depicting a long-time marriage. The couple played by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville are settled, comfortable, happily following a routine. They go for walks, laugh, banter and debate. Their conversations are perfectly scripted by playwright Owen McCafferty and directed by the husband and wife team Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn to show the easy understanding and respect between them.
That’s the central concern of this film although I’m sure you’ve heard that it gets disrupted when she’s diagnosed with breast cancer. How will their good rapport fare under that intrusion? Again the film is absolutely authentic. “There isn’t a moment I won’t be there with you,” he says early on. Later, there are flash arguments brought on by the tension and fear. “We’re both going through this.” “No we’re not. I have the cancer.” It gets louder. At the same time we’re taken along to the hospital visits and the tests (“They charge you for parking”) and follow every step of the procedures she goes through. Not too graphically but, with 12 medical advisors on the film, very accurately. Her emotions too are perfectly defined. She gets advice from and gives advice to other patients but laments that for the big decisions “we’re all just really on our own.” There’s an unnecessary subplot about grieving a lost daughter but elsewhere the superb acting gets across all the variable feelings and help make this a very satisfying film. It came without fanfare but is worth your time. (International Village) 4 ½ out of 5
The Canadians …
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Perverse, wicked, phantasmagoric. They’re all accurate in describing this wild film about Canadian history and its send up of our national identity. It’s reassuring that we can make films as cheeky and outrageous as this about our image of ourselves. And that we can also see it as sort-of-correctly represented in this film by Matthew Rankin about William Lyon Mackenzie King.
He was our 10th Prime Minister, a bachelor, a mama’s boy all his life, a weirdly fastidious individual, and an apt subject for Rankin, who used to work for Winnipeg’s Guy Maddin and has absorbed his off-the-wall style. Now living in Montreal, he found how strange King was by reading his diaries and got much of that into this film. Instead of the usual, war-time leadership and political acumen, he gives us lots about sex with shoes, clubbing seals, a national inferiority complex (“long have you smoldered in your disappointment”) and a generally impish view of our history. King, as played by Daniel Beirne, is a nebbish. His mom, played by Louis Negin, a tyrant. Her insistence that King is great, propels him. The film shows him and every Canadian institution with a skewed twist, usually with hand-painted backdrops. He’s riding a giant duck in one and later in a funhouse loop. B.C. is a hill of tree stumps. Dazzling, inventive and mischievous fun. (VanCity Theatre) 4 out of 5
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF NOAH PIUGATTUK: The new one from the team that gave us Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner , including its director Zacharias Kunuk, is another clear-eyed examination of life in the far north. And of white/Indigenous interactions in Canada. This one is languid and relies very much on a series of conversations. They are compelling though and reveal precisely how colonialism looks. This is based on a true story by the way; there’s a clip of the real Noah attached at the end.
The film starts slowly, maybe prepping us to expect fine pictures. We get some when Noah and two others go out on their dogsled to hunt. They spot another sled in the distance and when they realize one of the two men on it is white they immediately understand they’ll be under supervision yet again. When they meet and sit down to talk, Noah (played by Apayata Kotierk) is being asked by a Canadian government representative (Kim Bodnia) to, in effect, give up his traditional way of life. He’s to move to a settlement, as part of a program Canada did impose on Inuit people back in the 60s. They talk at length about what that means. He’ll have to follow rules; he’ll get family allowance in return. The conversation through a translator is marred by mistranslations, misunderstandings and mistrust but they converse on and try to overcome all that. It’s a very credible version of how interchanges like that went, and probably still do. There’s good will on both sides but a divide that’s awfully broad. It’s fascinating to watch it portrayed like this, and feels particularly relevant right now. (VanCity) 3 ½ out of 5
DISAPPEARANCE AT CLIFTON HILL: Here’s an engrossing mystery, a sharp-edged Canadian film and a realistic view of our country’s best-known tourist attraction, Niagara Falls. It’s the off-season; the lights, the wax museums and the Sky Wheel are there but not many tourists. It’s a good time to get a peek low down underneath the glitz, as beheld by writer-director Albert Shin. His parents used to own a motel there and took him back on many visits. He recalls witnessing what may have been an abduction and that memory fuels this film.
Tuppence Middleton plays a woman obsessed with a similar childhood memory—a possible abduction of a boy--and years after investigates what really happened. Microfilmed newspapers, a pair of family photos and cynical thoughts from a local historian (played by David Cronenberg) leads her to a tangled history involving a property developer, his errant son and a pair of magician entertainers (one of them played by Quebec’s Marie-Josée Croze). The story twists and turns maybe one or two times too many and the time frame is a problem. The magicians don’t look like they’ve aged in what is supposed to be 25 years. And the main character is dodgy. She’s a congenital liar and was once diagnosed with “retrograde amnesia”. So can we rely on her and the facts she turns up? It’s a good puzzle anyway. The solution is vague but there nicely displayed in behind is the seedier side of Niagara Falls that you won’t find in the tourist brochures. The film had a shorter title, Clifton Hill, at the film festival last fall and now has four nominations at next month’s Canadian Screen Awards. (International Village) 3 out of 5
The two others …
THE INVISIBLE MAN: It’s not the H.G. Wells story; only the bare idea and part of a name. It’s worse, though it starts well, with edgy scenes in which Elizabeth Moss is scared by noises, clunks and some kind of presence. (In a shift from the usual, she doesn’t go searching down in the basement. She goes up into the attic). The film comes down severely after that.
She’s walked out on an abusive (“controlling”) partner (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) only to fear he’s made himself invisible (he’s an optics scientist), faked a suicide and is stalking her. Nobody believes her, not the police, not the guy’s brother who says he has his ashes in an urn in his office, not her own sister or some helpful friends. She’s tabbed as a hysterical, delusional woman. Those scenes are plausible and true to life. What happens along with them though, as we come to see what is really going, is not believable in any way. The film that was nicely tingly with fear and trepidation degenerates into pure silliness. Three throat slittings remind you it is a horror movie directed by a current star of the genre, Leigh Whannell. (Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 2 out of 5
THE JESUS ROLLS: When is a sequel not a sequel? When it has little to do with the original, plays on a theme that’s actually quite opposite to it and is a re-make of an entirely different film altogether. So the foul-mouth bowling rival from The Big Lebowski has his own spin-off adventure here but none of the Buddhist attitude encapsulated by the motto “The Dude abides.” Instead we get Jesus Quintana’s thrill-seeking nihilism as he and a pal cruise around in a series of stolen cars along with a ditzy hairdresser (after they boost her boss’s car). There’s no plot as such; just a series of incidents that may have been written to reveal character and serve as a rowdy crime spree intended to epitomize freedom. In fact they don’t do much of either.
John Turturro, wrote, directed and stars; pretty well repeating a French film from 1974 that starred Gérard Depardieu. Maybe that’s how he got actors like Audrey Tautou, Susan Sarandon, Jon Hamm and Sônia Braga to appear in this low-rent romp. Bobby Cannavale is the pal and Pete Davidson has a bit role. There’s some wacky fun but it doesn’t add up to mean much of anything. To get it started they had to quickly do away with the pederast rumor hanging over Quintana. Just a misunderstanding, we learn. The Rio is showing the film late tonight, and then in a double bill on Tuesday with The Big Lebowski. The juxtaposition won’t do it any favors. 2 stars out of 5
Also just arrived, very quietly …
IMPRACTICAL JOKERS: THE MOVIE: Four high school buddies from Staten Island formed a comedy troupe and got a show on a cable station called TruTV. That was nine years ago; now they’re a cult phenomenon. They do arena shows, cruises and now a movie, which in a test release in the US last week proved a surprise big hit almost making it into the Top 10. It’s now in five times as many theatres. They do hidden camera gags. One plays an embarrassing scene to strangers on the street while the others give directions into an earbud. For the movie they link several together with a contrived story. Years after they tried to sneak into a Paula Abdul concert, they meet her, they get invites to a party but only for three and stage more hidden camera sequences to eliminate one. A mall Santa in the summer? Testing out a eulogy before tourists in Washington? (“Grandma was a bitch”). It’s at Scotiabank and some suburban theatres if that’s your style.