Wow – I have been really bad with my movie blog, so I
thought I had better start playing catch up with Part One of the InternationalFilm Fest films on my agenda for 2015!
So far, I have seen five of the ten on my list, and I
have to admit, I have not had a terribly good hit rate this time around.
First off was Grandma,
a film starring Lilly Tomlin as a hard-nosed feminist poet visiting her friends
throughout the city trying to rustle up $500 for her granddaughter’s abortion. With that kind of hook, how could this
incredibly dark comedy go wrong?
In fact, the mistakes the film makes is to shift the
focus away from Tomlin one too many times and for far too long. As the centre of most of the film’s
attention, she is acerbic and witty and no holds barred and a barrel of
laughs. However, as we go visit her
friends, she takes back seat to John Cho, Laverne Cox and others. Don’t get me wrong – these actors are usually
amazing, so I have to blame the script and/or the direction for the immensely
unfunny and unengaging tales they tell and contributions to the story. When Sam Elliott and a hyperactive Marica Gay
Harden show up save the end of the film, it was already a bit too late. In a session that seemed mainly filled with
lesbians of a certain age, the lack of applause at the end (a pointless thing
in my eyes, but you hear it every so often at the festival) to me spoke
volumes.
Verdict: Grandma
got off to a great start and, considering the issues it was addressing, was
quite a bit of fun. Unfortunately a
flabby and slow middle section brought the whole movie to a halt from which it
could never really regain its momentum.
6 cadillacs out of 10.
I dashed to the Embassy cinema to see TurboKid, one of the incredibly strange
festival picks, and a Canada-New Zealand co-production. Set in a future where everything looks cheap
and like a gravel quarry, the populace rides bikes, road signs are in French
(ah, Canada!) and no one is quite sure where the water comes from, this film is
pretty much bonkers. The fact Michael
Ironside was playing the lead baddie was proof that this would be cheese of the
highest order, and he chews scenery like he is teething.
So the film itself starts off super slowly, and then
settles into being pretty much mad. A young
boy adopts the guise of TurboKid to rescue his friend, with Tarantino-esque
levels of blood letting and a story that was kind of internally consistent but
which seemed to bend rules and make things up as it went along. The 80s theme that rules and defines this
film also makes it seem much more dated and a bit more pathetic than I think it
deserved, but I have to say I laughed a whole lot more at this film that I did Grandma, even if I thought it was a
load of bollocks.
Verdict: Not a good film by any stretch of the
imagination, TurboKid was at least
true to its origins and inspirations and it made me laugh. 6.5 game controllers out of 10.
Into day two of the fest, and I was off to the Roxy to
see Results, another film chosen
because of its rom-comish flavour and an impressive cast, including Guy Pearce,
the stunning Cobie Smulders, and the “not meant to be as attractive as the
first two” Kevin Corrigan and Giovanni Ribisi (wow – he pops up in the oddest
places), and a Russian accent toting Anthony Michael Hall for good measure.
Looking back on the film, all of the actors themselves are
great in their roles. Pearce plays
Trevor the health guru with the winning philosophy as if he actually believes
it (and considering the fantastic shape the man is in, perhaps it is his own
matra), Corrigan (as Danny) is fun as the broken hearted slob trying to spend
his inheritance away to get over his marriage break up, and Smulders plays the
much younger trainer, Kat, with a bit of a temper much like she played Robyn in
How I Met Your Mother.
Where things kind of go off track is in the focus in the
film, in that there isn’t much. The film
kind of wants to follow all three of these characters, but forgets about
certain members of them throughout the course of the movie. At first, it feels like this is Danny’s
story, but then the focus kind of shifts to Kat. Quite how Kat becomes Danny’s trainer must
have ended up on the cutting room floor (wasn’t he going to be trained by
another person?) but then their lives become entwined, and the story kind of
shifts over to Danny again. When Danny
and Kat have a falling out, Kat falls off centre stage and up pops Trevor who
from there on in kind of drives the story even though he was more or less
absent for the first half.
And for a romcom, I have to say, there was not really
much romance in there. Smulders plays
Kat as too cool to really be a sucker for charm, so the relationships are more
a case of people agreeing they want to hook up or not.
The audience laughed a bit when we “listened in” on the
music choices of Kat and Trevor as they went for a morning jog around a town,
and while Kat was listening to a gangsta/hip top/rap song from “now”, Trevor was
pacing himself to Split Enz’s Six Months
in a Leaky Boat, which I presume was meant to show the difference in ages
(and perhaps Trevor’s antipodean roots?), but I would be curious to know what
American audiences thought of that selection.
In the end, the moral of the story was not so much that
the characters were living in self denial (which from the guide blurb tells me
is what is happening) but more that older guys can hook up with women at least
20 years their junior as long as they are buff (Trevor) or rich (Danny) enough.
Verdict: Results
was pleasant enough, but a bit too unfocussed to let you really care for the
characters. Who do you support? Who do I care about? The film seems determined to keep you in
suspense and doesn’t really get to the true “romance relationship” until the
final third of the film, and by then, it’s pretty hard to really be all that
enthusiastic about any of them. 6
burpees out of 10.
Heading to the Embassy for one of the feature films of
this festival, I ended up in the neck straining front row for The Assassin, a Taiwanese film about an
assassin. Who doesn’t actually
do that much assassinating.
Beautiful but boring.
Verdict: The long, lingering shots of the Taiwanese/Chinese
landscape were breathtaking, but they slowed the almost non-existent plot of The Assassin to a death crawl, and then some of the jerky editing especially around the fight scenes made the faster-paced sections almost incoherent. Reading the synopsis in the guide, I did not
pick up what the movie was all about from the film itself, and if the film
really was a “cat and mouse” game, perhaps they were both old and senile and
limbless. And where on earth did the
undying witch doctor come from – or go?
Again, a crowd applause-less film, which I think said a lot. 4 knives out of 10.
The final movie for this entry was Ex Machina, which I think got a general release in some countries
but was kept for a festival here. Unlike
the other films of the day, the story was focused, straight forward, thought
provoking and tense.
When will we know if we have created Artificial
Intelligence? What does that even mean? Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, with an American
accent) is brought in by inventor Nathan (Oscar Isaac, with an American accent)
to assess Ava (Alicia Vikander, with an American accent) to see if this passes
the Turing test to gauge machine intelligence.
But there are sinister things afoot…
It all plays out really well, ratcheting up the tension
and the discomfort until the conclusion.
Of course, looking back, it seems a bit stupid that the conclusion comes
around as it does (Nathan’s objectives and rationale for doing anything are
dubious and his super smart house retreat seems really dumb) but that’s okay –
the film had me guessing and interested all the way through (the story has been
told many times before, but you can’t quite tell how this one will end
up).
And, as a sign of audience approval, there was that
smattering of pointless applause. Pointless,
but helpful in letting me know what others thought of it too.
Verdict: Ex
Machina has redeemed my faith in the festival, or at least, of the choices
I have made this time around. Smart,
great to look at, but a small set, small cast, simple story, all done and told
really well, it is great to be able to say I liked it. 8 artificial arms out of 10.
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