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Oscar Pistorius court concerned over ‘trial by media’ in Reeva Steenkamp murder case

The magistrate presiding over the latest hearing in the Oscar Pistorius murder investigation has expressed concern over a ‘trial by media’ for the Olympic and Paralympic sprinter, as the case was adjourned until August. (continue reading…)

Channel 5 interviews parents of Oscar Pistorius’ girlfriend

The parents of Reeva Steenkamp will discuss their daughter’s death – at the hands of boyfriend Oscar Pistorius – in a new Channel 5 documentary on the killing. (continue reading…)

Oscar Pistorius’s brother Carl cleared of killing motorcyclist

The brother of Oscar Pistorius cried tears of relief as he was cleared of killing a motorcyclist in a road accident. (continue reading…)

Oscar Pistorius ‘not ready’ to compete again this year

Oscar Pistorius will not compete again this year as he awaits trial for murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, despite receiving a number of meeting invitations, his agent has confirmed. (continue reading…)

DVDs A Brawling Mark Wahlberg a Psychic Matt Damon and a Buddhalike Little Boy

THE FIGHTER ($39.99 BluRay or $29.99 regular; Paramount) — I wish I liked The Fighter more than I do. It’s a passion project for Mark Wahlberg, a very good actor with good taste in scripts. It’s bursting with talent, including Oscar winners Melissa Leo as Wahlberg’s pushy mom and Christian Bale as his drug-using brother. And it gives the talented director David O (continue reading…)

Actors Rashida Jones and Chris Messina Entangle in Monogamy

When it debuted at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, Monogamy seemed more like a fiction film done documentary style than a highly stylized indie feature. No wonder, for director Dana Adam Shapiro had done a highly stylized doc, Murderball, as a sports action feature. And it snagged an Oscar nom in 2006 — deservedly so.
In Monogamy, actors Rashida Jones and Chris Messina portray a couple, Nat and Theo, grappling with the very meaning of that word. Interfering with their relationship is Theo’s obsession with a woman he has been stalking from a distance behind his camera lens (continue reading…)

Are the Academy Awards Past Their Prime

If you didn’t already know so, you would never guess while watching ABC’s telecast of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards Sunday night that it was one of the two most important events on the broadcast calendar. There was nothing particularly big or important or exciting about it; nothing dramatic, nothing suspenseful, nothing spectacular, nothing impactful, and nothing to warrant ferocious blogging or spirited morning-after conversation. I didn’t think it was as God-awful as so many critics are saying, but it wasn’t great, either. For the most part, everyone showed up and did what they were supposed to do without embarrassing themselves, and that was it.
Unfortunately, that’s not nearly good enough for Hollywood’s biggest night of the year — a critical few hours that should reinforce both the state of the movie industry and the power of broadcast television (continue reading…)

Liveblogging the 2011 Oscar telecast

8:39PM EST
Off to a good start with the hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, inserted into scenes from several of the Oscar nominees, on an Inception theme. The writing is funny and their performances sparkle – but mostly, the writing is funny. Best gag: Morgan Freeman narrating Alec Baldwin’s dream. Then Franco and Hathaway opened up with a decent opening banter poking fun at themselves as tools to attract a young audience (continue reading…)

Shhh Heres Your Winning Oscar Ballot

If you want to win the Oscar pool, why not use my ballot? If you triumph, you can lord it over your friends. If you lose, you can blame me. It’s a win-win!
BEST PICTURE — The King’s Speech
(I’d vote for Toy Story 3. Like The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King, it’s a capper to a great trilogy and one of the most successful and acclaimed franchises in Hollywood history (continue reading…)

Oscar May Overlook Winters Bone but You Shouldnt

With the Oscars in the offing it’s become much more of a challenge for those of us who feel we must at least have seen all the Best Picture noms before the big day now that there are ten instead of just five. Many of us make sure we see at least the films that have a chance of winning and/or have significant possible wins in other categories. This means that some films get cut from the list of “must see before Oscar” when the deadline is near because of a complete lack of any possible wins. Winter’s Bone is one such film (continue reading…)

Iranian OscarWinner Narrates Defends Alarmist Iran Doc

Due to recent protests in Iran, authorities are reportedly jamming the BBC Persian satellite broadcast. Iran’s leaders regard the channel as a propaganda outlet for the Brits’ nefarious aim of regime change.
But if the Iranians were paying attention, they would see that BBC Persian has an excellent report on another piece of propaganda: the neoconservative-dominated “Iranium” documentary from the Clarion Fund.
The movie’s narrator, Academy Award-winning Iranian actor Shoreh Aghdashloo, answered some tough questions. Aghdashloo said she is against a war — which organizers of a premiere event said was Traiman’s goal — but can tolerate opposing or critical views. She said that some of the comments about “executions” may be exaggerated, but this film reveals the true appearance of the regime.
The BBC Persian piece notes that the film’s writer and director, Alex Traiman, is an ideological Israeli settler who lives in the West Bank.
Aghdashloo’s statements about exaggerations track closely with Traiman’s own comments (continue reading…)

Live from Sundance 2011 Day 3

Good comedy is a precious commodity – and one you don’t find with much abundance at an event that takes itself as seriously as the Sundance Film Festival.
Yet three of the four films I saw at Sundance 2011 on Saturday not only fit the bill but acquitted themselves nicely. And the three came from a trio of different countries – the U.S., Ireland and Norway – offering a refreshing example of the various shapes and forms that comedy can take.
My favorite was the first of the day, The Guard, the kind of darkly comic crime tale that the Irish seem to have a patent on. The fact that first-time writer-director John Michael McDonagh has a cast that includes Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Mark Strong, Fionnula Flanagan and Liam Cunningham in his cast – well, talk about the luck of the Irish.
The title character is a rowdy and unorthodox police sergeant, Gerry Boyle, played by the wonderfully cocky and sarcastic Gleeson. He’s a small-town cop in Connemara who finds himself awash in big-city crime: a murder that turns out to be part of a cocaine-smuggling operation worth a half-billion dollars.
It’s so big that the bigger-city cops from Galway bring in an FBI agent, Wendell Everett (Cheadle), who is immediately rubbed the wrong way by Boyle’s wonderfully politically incorrect talk (continue reading…)

HuffPost Review Applause

I may have seen her before, but it wasn’t until I saw Applause that the name of actress Paprika Steen stuck in my head. Now I can’t get her off my mind.
In Martin Zandvliet’s Applause, opening Friday in limited release, she plays Thea, a popular Danish actress who is playing Martha in a stage production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Edward Albee’s corrosive play is an uncomfortable mirror to Thea’s offstage life, a device that works here precisely because no one talks about it (or even mentions the name of the play she’s doing).
In fact, Thea is fresh out of rehab. A hard-living alcoholic whose career was threatened by her drinking, she’s sober and struggling, playing this difficult role while dealing with the aftermath of her former life.
Specifically, she’s divorced from Christian (Michael Falch), and has surrendered custody of her two sons (continue reading…)

HuffPost Review Biutiful

Somewhere along the line, we’ve lost the ability to appreciate a film as deeply felt and intuitive as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Biutiful.
Too often, we simply look at the thumbnail – which, in this case, would be, “A man finds he is dying of cancer” – and say, “Ehh, not for me.” But Biutiful is about much more than death and dying.
Rather, with the deeply soulful performance by Javier Bardem in the central role, Inarritu has created a story that captures the human dilemma at both its most simple and its most complex.
Bardem plays Uxbal, a single father in Barcelona dealing with a pre-adolescent daughter and younger son. He’s concerned, he’s involved – but he’s also exhausted by the hustle of day-to-day life.
Specifically, he’s making ends meet by scraping together a living dealing in the gray market and worse. He is the middle-man for a ring of counterfeit goods – Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags – that he supplies to a group of undocumented African immigrants, who sell them on the Barcelona streets. They give a percentage to Uxbal, who pays off the cops as much as he can. But he also turns a blind eye when his sales force begins working tourist-rich intersections that the cops have placed off-limits. More sales means more profit – but also more risk.
Meanwhile, he’s also working with the sweatshop, run by Chinese bosses, that manufacture the counterfeit goods for his sales force. And he and his brother supply undocumented Chinese workers for construction sites around Barcelona as well. One of the illegal Chinese women even babysits for Uxbal’s kids each afternoon.
But it’s a hard-scrabble life, fraught with potential danger. The cops are always a threat – and, at one point, unleash a full-blown raid on Uxbal’s African street vendors, chasing them through a toney Barcelona shopping district. The sweatshop is obviously an inhumane place to work – and the so-called construction workers don’t have any actual skills at anything other than the most basic manual labor. And then there’s the matter of housing all those illegal workers in a way that keeps them under the overboss’ thumb.
Meanwhile, Uxbal has problems of his own. He’s trying to be a good dad and is separated from his wife Marambra (Maricel Alvarez), whose bipolar problems are exacerbated by her drinking. She’s fooling around with his brother – yet she wants to get back together with Uxbal to be with her kids. But she’s too scattered to be responsible.
Which leaves it all to Uxbal, who is pulled in a half-dozen directions at the same time. And finally, undeniably, his body begins to give out on him. A trip to the doctor because of a growing pain produces a diagnosis of nameless killer and a death sentence: It might be prostate cancer, it might be kidney or bladder cancer – Inarritu doesn’t specify. But it’s killing Uxbal quickly and leaving him incontinent to boot.
Bardem, so chilly and frightening in his Oscar-winning performance in No Country for Old Men, is painfully human in this role. He’s a man who loves his children and longs to do right by them. At the same time, he’s trafficking in what amounts to the slave trade of illegal workers. The demands on him are almost superhuman and he’s just one man, stumbling and failing more often than he succeeds, and suffering in the knowledge of just how short he is falling of the mark.
Bardem’s eyes convey the anguish, the anger, the conflict that are at war in this man. There is great affection for his children, self-loathing at his role in the suffering of others, sorrow at the knowledge that his time for his children – already limited – has suddenly been proscribed even further by an illness that he can’t afford to treat.
Movies too often focus on the extremes of our world – people at their best, people at their worst, people at obvious crisis points. Biutiful does something else, taking one man near the end of his life and showing the path he walks as he tries to get his affairs in order, despite an increasingly chaotic existence. It is as moving a character study as I’ve seen in a movie in years.

This Blogger’s Books from
Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the Independent Film
by Marshall Fine
Bloody Sam
by Marshall Fine

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Interview Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and Biutiful

Sitting in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu could be Don Quixote, tilting at Hollywood windmills with movies that, as he puts it, run up against “the dictatorship of corporate thinking.”
Just the release of his new film “is a reason to celebrate,” he says. “I would say that it is an act of resistance against the intoxicating culture we live under. At least it’s an attempt to survive.”
He’s talking about Biutiful, which opens Dec. 29 in limited release. Four years in the making, it’s exactly the kind of film that he couldn’t get made if he undertook it today, he says. And he’s loathe to try to encapsulate or thumbnail it in a two-sentence description.
“After four years, to reduce it to a couple of lines really minimizes the whole thing,” Innaritu says, sipping at the dregs of a cappuccino. “If you actually asked me, I would say that this film is an observation of a simple man’s life in the extremely complex world we all are living in. It’s an ordinary story. The world surrounding him is extraordinarily complex. Behind all that, it’s a love story between a father and his children. The heart of the film is that.”
Biutiful stars Javier Bardem as a hustler on the streets of Barcelona, trafficking in both counterfeit designer goods (sold by his army of illegal African immigrants) and in illegal workers themselves: another army of Asian immigrants working in sweatshops, producing the counterfeit designer goods. He’s also a single father of two kids, dealing with an ex-wife who’s struggling with alcoholism – until he receives a sudden diagnosis of inoperable cancer.
For Innaritu, it’s the first film he’s shot in Europe – specifically, Barcelona – and his first film as a director since 2006′s Babel.
“I joke that, 60 years ago, Bunuel went to Mexico to shoot Los Olvidados’and, 60 years later, this is my version, shot in Barcelona,” he says. “I wanted to shoot in my own language. It’s the first film I did in Europe. I observed an urgent phenomenon no one wants to talk about: immigration. And the food is fantastic.”
He wrote it with the Oscar-winning Bardem in mind: “It’s the first time I wrote a role for one actor,” he admits. “That’s a super-dangerous thing to do. He was attached to do Nine at the time. I arrived with this hot script and he said no to Nine and did this. It was a tricky decision. I was really worried. Because if he says no to me instead, then I’m dead.”
Click here: This interview continues on my website.

This Blogger’s Books from
Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the Independent Film
by Marshall Fine
Bloody Sam
by Marshall Fine

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David O Russell battles for The Fighter

David O. Russell is on the phone, eager to talk about The Fighter, a movie whose unexpected dash to the top is not all that dissimilar from the story it tells.
Which means that Russell and his cast – Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo – find themselves thrust into the year-end awards race. Dark horses in November, the film and Russell – along with Adams, Bale and Leo – suddenly are considered Oscar contenders, having won critics’ awards and multiple nominations for the Golden Globes.
“The fact that people are connecting to it is what means the most to us,” Russell, 52, says.
Set in the early 1990s in the depressed town of Lowell, Mass., The Fighter tells the true story of a pair of brothers: “Irish” Micky Ward (Wahlberg), a boxer with potential but only a so-so record, and Dicky Eklund (Bale), his brother, a former boxer who once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard and who now serves as Micky’s trainer. But Dicky and Micky’s mother, Alice (Leo), have fumbled Micky’s career management – and the fact that Dicky is a crack addict, something no one in the family wants to address, isn’t helping.
In real life, Eklund was the subject of an HBO documentary on the dire effects of the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, a fact that brought shame to the town of Lowell. It’s an element of Russell’s film as well, in which Bale’s hot-wired Dicky believes the film crew is making a movie about his comeback.
“Dicky was the most famous thing about Lowell for a long time,” Russell says. “The town was known for Bette Davis, Ed McMahon, Jack Kerouac – and then Dicky. The town had a scar from that HBO film. Now it’s got ‘The Fighter.’
“The family was the pride of Lowell until the HBO thing. Then people said, ‘You’re killing us.’ Now we’re able to follow the story in a fuller circle.”
When Russell took over The Fighter, he reworked the script. While the story had certain elements of the boxing genre, Russell knew he could move beyond clichs to find something deeper.
Click here: This interview continues on my website.

This Blogger’s Books from
Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the Independent Film
by Marshall Fine
Bloody Sam
by Marshall Fine

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Sally Hawkins Made in New York

When Mike Leigh cast her as the lead in his film Happy Go Lucky, Sally Hawkins knew it was a good role – but she didn’t realize how good.
Then she was nominated for an Oscar, won a Golden Globe and swept almost every critical and festival award she was eligible for.
“It was such an overwhelmingly huge thing,” Hawkins, 34, gushes by telephone. “It will be a number of years before I realize that all those things really happened. I just know I’m incredibly proud to have been part of the film.”
Still, while she relishes the new opportunities that it offered her, Hawkins can’t see that much has changed since then – except for people’s expectations of her.
“It didn’t change my life in a dramatic way – except that I think people think I’m a multimillionaire now,” she says. “I’m very far from that. And people think you leapfrog to superstardom. So, yes, more people are aware of me, which is something for an actor. But there are only so many really good scripts around at one time. I’ve been lucky to be presented with interesting and intelligent ones.”
The latest is Nigel Cole’s Made in Dagenham, which opens in limited release Nov. 19. Based on a true story, the film chronicles the strike by a group of female autoworkers at a British Ford plant in 1968. Initially upset that their work doing elaborate stitch work on seat covers was classified as unskilled – entitling Ford to pay them less – they went on strike and eventually brought about the equal-pay act in Parliament.
“My mother remembers it very well,” Hawkins says. “These women weren’t interested in being politicians. But God knows where we’d be without women like this. I’m glad to be representing one of them. I’m not representing one particular woman; my character is an amalgam of many who led the fight. But there were many who stepped up at the right time.”
As part of her research, Hawkins met with three of the actual strikers to talk about their experience: “What I got was this intelligence and humor and modesty,” she says. “I loved their humor. But they were very passionate about what they believed. And they didn’t suffer fools gladly.
“I wanted to make sure I got that across. I wanted to be as truthful as I can. I had a duty to do the story justice, to do them justice.”
Click here: This interview continues on my website.

This Blogger’s Books from
Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the Independent Film
by Marshall Fine
Bloody Sam
by Marshall Fine

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HuffPost Review Waiting for Superman

Our priorities are so screwed up in this country that, even as Congress debates continued tax cuts for millionaires, schools and libraries go begging for funding. Teachers struggle to make ends meet and we continue to lose entire generations to the streets because the schools so poorly meet their needs.
The results of these funding shortfalls for schools and education – and of Tea Party candidates mouthing off about how they would eliminate the Department of Education – are amply illustrated in Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for ‘Superman,’ a provocative documentary that shows in both broad strokes and frightening detail how our schools continue to fail our children.
Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, lays out in facts and figures the many ways that so-called “failure factories” perpetuate and expand the dropout rate, how entrenched teachers (thanks to unions that allow no give in their work rules) fail their students, and so on.
Guggenheim looks in at various charter schools and sees them as part of the answer – but not the complete solution – to the problem. As he notes, the real issue is not how to get more charter schools, but how to make public schools achieve the same kind of success that the best charter schools do. He follows several youngsters who long for a better school and are forced to participate in lotteries to win one of the scarce places in those free private schools. It’s heart-breaking to watch.
He talks to a variety of educators – including the controversial Washington, D.C., superintendent Michelle Rhee, whose efforts to prune the deadwood from the District of Columbia’s dreadful public school system met only resistance from parents at the schools. Some have criticized the film for failing to offer another side to this facet of the story – but offer no solution.
Some may see Guggenheim’s viewpoint on the charter schools, on Rhee, on the state of education in general – as simplistic, as overly broad in its tendency to tar public school systems across the country with the same brush. And, in general, his points tend to be general rather than specific.
There is no mention, for example, of the ongoing hypocrisy of a federal government that gives lip service to the value of education while under-funding education initiatives, or of spending a trillion dollars on a pointless war while cutting education funding at a time when states are in dire straits in terms of money for their schools.
Indeed, Guggenheim casts such a wide net that, even though he focuses on a handful of young children – whose only hope is winning a lottery spot in a local charter school – the film offers only generalities in terms of solutions, hand-wringing instead of a specific call to action.
By contrast, the much smaller, less-advertised documentary The Lottery, released in June, deals with the same issues but cuts deeper. Madeleine Sackler’s film, which should be available on DVD or video-on-demand, focused on one Harlem neighborhood, in which a battle raged over a local charter school, even as the neighborhood schools were failing. It dealt with the same issues, seemed to find more specific solutions and more specific problems than Guggenheim’s film.
Unfortunately, the reality is that Guggenheim’s documentary – which has received huge support from its movie company for advertising and promotion – will still struggle to reach a wide audience. Waiting for ‘Superman’ seems to say that we are the only change-agents who can solve this problem – but actually reaching that audience is an uphill struggle in a country that’s more caught up in who will be the new judges on “American Idol” than what’s happening in its local schools.
Click here: Find more reviews, interviews and commentary on my website.

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Toronto Film Fest Day 9 10 and 11 The Irish The Scots and Werner Herzog

DAY 9: JUVENILE DELINQUENTS, VIDEO GAMES AND HORROR FILMS
NEDS **
The first half of Neds (short for Non-educated Delinquents) had me very excited. Director Peter Mullan’s earlier drama The Magdalene Sisters was a well-acted if heavy-handed look at the abuses of young women by the system. Now he is telling the story of a smart young kid with a vicious dad, a criminal older brother and a world that wants to lower his expectations at almost every turn. The casting of the two young actors who play John McGill (Gregg Forrest and Conor McCarron) is spot-on. They’re both excellent and look strikingly similar, making his growth from little kid to bulky teenager very believable. John is very bright and some teachers do encourage him. But the spectre of his older brother, his nasty father and his poor circumstances frustrate the boy at every turn. He snaps finally when a nice kid he befriends from a wealthy family is cut off from him simply because he’s lower class. John takes refuge in a gang and they drink and thug around in increasingly violent ways. John is both victim and persecutor here. But I simply didn’t buy the ham-handed way he descended into Taxi Driver territory, no matter how inexorably brutal his world may be. A compelling case study became a whacked out tale with multiple hard-to-swallow twists (especially from his dad) and not one but two crazily metaphoric moments, one with Christ stepping down from the Cross and the other with John walking through a field of lions that is spoiled by what appear to be obvious digital effects. Mullan has great skill and brought together an excellent cast. But like so many directors he pushes his stories into the extreme when small and quiet was proving far more effective.
COLIN GEDDES
After Neds, I had a chance to sit and chat with Midnight Madness impresario Colin Geddes. He’s a genuine enthusiast for all genres of movies, especially the under-appreciated horror, sci-fi, action, Hong Kong, martial arts and other movie types that fall under the broad midnight movie banner. I’ll link to my feature when it appears in the Los Angeles Times. You can follow Colin on Twitter or check out the Action Fest, which he just helped launch this year. At the end of the interview, he mentioned he was intro-ing The Butcher, The Chef and the Swordsman, a movie I’d missed earlier and was glad to sneak into. I should have checked to see if the Rush line for movie fans was full and whether I was taking someone’s place. Happily, the screening was full but not sold out so everyone got in and I wasn’t a jerk. Or at least, not in this case.
THE BUTCHER, THE CHEF AND THE SWORDSMAN ** 1/2
This entry from mainland China feels a lot more contemporary and smart and just plain cheeky than you would expect from the People’s Republic. Inspired by Peking Opera conventions, it’s a broadly funny, over-the-top melange of entertainment, containing stories within stories that nod and wink at the audience at every turn. The Butcher is a fat, vulgar but decent fellow who falls hard for a beautiful courtesan. Every time he tries to approach her the Butcher is frustrated by the evil Swordsman or laughed off by the tea house mistress, who even breaks into a rap at one delirious moment. But that’s just the framework for all sorts of tales that revolve around a potent weapon: a butcher’s cleaver crafted from the metal of five legendary swords. The best story within a story revolves around a handsome mute who works as a servant in the restaurant of a master chef. The mute is really the son of a slaughtered family who is planning revenge on the cruel court eunuch who is sure to come calling at this famous restaurant sooner or later. It’s a funny, but moving tale with genuine drama and emotion amidst the silliness. Director Wuerhsan delivers it with aplomb. The problem is that this should be the heart of the film. Instead it’s a diversion while the main focus is on the Butcher. The Butcher is like one of Shakespeare’s fools, perfect for comic relief but not potent enough to be the center of the tale. That fatal mistake is what keeps this caper from being more than a one-time pleasure. (Tossing in yet another fight scene staged as a video game showdown doesn’t help. This idea has been done to death, people.) Still, it’s silly fun while it lasts.
CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS *** 1/2
I’m writing this sentence in the year 2010. Now imagine that someone came along in the year 7010 (some five thousand years later) and added this second sentence. Then the two sentences sit there side by side until the year 32, 010 when we come along and see those sentences for the first time. That’s the span of time we have to grasp when watching this bewitching film. I would have been ashamed to come to the fest and miss this new work Werner Herzog. It’s a documentary — shot in 3-D no less — that explores a recently discovered cave in France filled with drawings some 25,000 to 32,000 years old that rank as one of the great cultural and archeological finds of all time. The cave is off limits to everyone except rare visits by scientists. But Herzog being Herzog he is rightly given some brief hours to document the find. The result is not as eccentric as his recent documentary Encounters At The End Of The World but it’s a marvel nonetheless. And the usage of 3-D is spectacular; you want to reach out and stroke the walls again and again. A hush fell over the crowd watching this film as we absorbed the images: a herd of horses galloping across one wall, the palm print of a visitor appearing over and over at the entrance and at various points throughout the caves, not to mention the sheer beauty of the space itself. Herzog asks his usual philosophical, probing questions that elicit unexpected remarks from the scientists. But his masterstroke was commissioning the perfect score by Ernst Reijseger, which is angular and haunting, celestial and ancient, religious and earthy all at once. The postscript wanders off to a nearby sanctuary where albino alligators are spawned in the warm waters tossed off by a nuclear reactor and I don’t quite get the connection. But Herzog is always looking for those connections or just taking in the world in wide-eyed wonder and he is the perfect tour guide. An experience.
DAY 10: DRINKING AND GAMBLING AND FIRE
WHITE IRISH DRINKERS ***
TV talent John Gray (The Ghost Whisperer) takes a promising step into cinema with this solid coming of age tale. Relative unknown Nick Thurston is very appealing as Brian Leary, a sensitive young lad growing up in the rough and tumble of Brooklyn in the Seventies. His older brother is a petty thief. But Brian works at the local cinema, convincing the owner to book rock acts from time to time, obsessively draws in his basement hideaway and fancies the local travel agent with a sharp tongue but a friendly smile. When Brian’s boss unexpectedly pulls in a favor and arranges to have the Rolling Stones do a one hour concert in Brooklyn, everyone’s dreams collide, with Brian’s brother pushing him to rob the place and his boss hoping to avoid a death sentence from the local hood he owes too much money to. Melodrama might intrude towards the end, but the acting is solid throughout and Thurston has a low-key charm — he could be the kid brother to Kevin Connolly’s Eric on Entourage. But unlike a player in Hollywood, Brian has to learn that he has a right to play the game in the first place. Sweet, unforced.
CASINO JACK **
Kevin Spacey stars in this broad, loopy look at Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who was once the toast of K Street and had direct access to the White House. We start with Spacey in prison, so we know Abramoff is headed for a fall. But while Spacey has snap in the role, it’s not that interesting to see him and his partner get ballsier and more crude in their influence peddling. I wish there were more sting, either in Abramoff’s self-awareness of his crimes or our awareness of how much we might enjoy similar power. But they’re basically jerks with no real talent for anything but bullying and coercion, so what’s the fun in that? Jon Lovitz however steals away with another movie, thanks to his droll and very funny turn as a mattress king looking to get into casinos. A movie about him? Now that would be worth gambling on.
FIRE OF CONSCIENCE ** 1/2
I caught the opening night movie at Midnight Madness. And after profiling Colin Geddes, I’m ready to check out the closing night film, even if it does mean getting home at 3 in the morning. Soup to nuts! My space in line was held by Peter Kuling, a college professor, film critic, pitch spokesman and actor I bumped into last year at Midnight Madness. He needs to update his Facebook (which focuses on his alter ego Professor Kuling, the mind behind Recessionomics) but you can follow him on Twitter and — if you’re in Canada– watch for him in a new Nikon camera campaign.
Anyway, Peter and his girlfriend held a seat for me and I dashed in at the last moment to see this Hong Kong police flick that reveled in every Hong Kong police flick cliche I’d seen to date: corrupt but appealing cops, the noble loner who just won’t play by the rules, a hapless sidekick who gets injured or killed and an uber competent female cop (in this case May, played with dash by Michelle Ye, who deserves her own film). The story becomes crazier and sillier as the movie progresses but it’s a terrific showcase for director Dante Lam, who’s been turning films out for the past decade. He stages numerous gun battles with daring style that make this undercooked storyline worth the ride. Undoubtedly Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes has seen most of his work and could school me on Lam. Maybe he’s already made a great film and I missed it. But he deserves to be seen in the US (though the English subtitles are terrible; I’d be glad to tweak them for you, guys). And here’s hoping he gets a great script sometime soon.
DAY 11; WESTERNS, KINGS AND MADDIN — A WONDERFUL FINAL DAY
Argh. I just HAD to sleep in and missed the Errol Morris documentary Tabloid. I’m gutted. If I’d had a ticket I would have gone. But I was going to have to get up three hours after falling asleep to get in line just for the hope of seeing the film at 9:30 am. And I knew I’d be exhausted for the rest of the day and decided to be smart. That meant sleeping in, sort of, and filing my profile of Colin Geddes in the afternoon. Just before heading off to what I thought was my final film, I found out The King’s Speech (a movie I really wanted to catch) had won the Audience Award and was going to be screening for free at 6 p.m. Huzzah!
MEEK’S CUTOFF *** 1/2
What a great way to start off the final day. Director Kelly Reichardt gets better and better with every film and here she fulfills the promise of Old Joy and Wendy & Lucy. The latter starred Michelle Williams as a woman who lost her dog; her central riveting performance kept the slight story afloat. Here, Williams is part of a marvelous ensemble and while the plot comes fast and furious, it’s presented in a low-key, ambiguous manner that suits Reichardt to a t. In this Western set during the 1800s, three families are headed west with their guide Meek (Bruce Breenwood). Meek is either lost or being urged by residents of the Territory they’re headed for to steer newcomers away to their deaths. (Too many Americans might turn the Territory over to the US in a vote.) Meeks may be clueless or cruel but they undoubted need water and the capturing of a “savage” gives them a chance to ignore Meeks and use this man to save them. There you go. That it’s, all delivered in an open-ended manner sure to frustrate general audiences. But what a cast. Paul Dano is wonderful as a weak-willed man who only seems strong compared to his hysterical wife (Zoe Kazan) who sees Indians lurking behind every tree. The inestimable Shirley Henderson is wittily on target as a woman constantly keeping an eye on her wandering son and a husband who refuses water when it’s scarce (to all of their detriment). Greenwood is wonderfully offbeat as the guide and Will Patton is a rock of common sense as the husband of Williams, though their relationship is a little tense. (She’s his second wife and he seems uncertain about this woman with opinions.) Without a hint of modernism, Williams creates a strong, fascinating character who insists on seeing the captured savage (Rod Rondeaux) as a man and not just an object of scorn or even pity. Exceptionally well-acted, quiet and observant this is pure art house fare, which is meant as a warning for those who might want, you know, a little action and some answers, and as praise for a talented director coming into her own.
THE KING’S SPEECH ***
Middlebrow. That’s the derogatory term for “prestige pictures,” mainstream movies geared towards an adult audience that is intelligent but not necessarily wildly bold or cutting edge. The Hurt Locker is arty. The Blind Side is middlebrow. But I like middlebrow films, the sort of movies that studios are increasingly reluctant to make. A friend dismissed The King’s Speech but then added that the two central performances by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush were very good. Well, if a movie’s two central performances are very good, it’s got to be worth seeing. Is it a movie for my mom, I asked? “Exactly,” he said. “All our moms will love it. In fact, it should have been dedicated ‘To Moms Everywhere.’”
Well, Mom, this one is for you. It tells the story of George VI, a reluctant king who was always in the shadow of his glamorous brother and beloved if tradition-bound father. George (Bertie to his family) also suffers from a terrible stutter, which makes it painful to fulfill his obligations as a member of the Royal Family in the 30s. Thanks to his wife (a spot-on Helena Bonham Cater), Bertie finally finds a speech therapist who can help him: the eccentric Aussie Lionel (Rush). In Lionel’s home, under terms of equality and respect, Bertie slowly and with difficulty starts to master his stutter. This is pure Masterpiece Theater, with both actors relishing the many comic moments in the script (cursing helps one avoid the stutter, it should be said) and the drama in Bertie’s situation. When his brother abdicates for the woman he loves, Bertie is thrust onto the throne just as England needs a king to rally around for World War II. Tom Hooper’s film is a broadly appealing, very funny and quite moving film. it’s unquestionably headed to the Oscars. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that Firth and Rush will be nominated and Carter is a strong possibility as well, not to mention the film and the director. Many festival audiences are friendly (at Cannes, they give most everything a standing ovation and in Toronto solid applause is considered only polite). But the audience at this screening without the stars in attendance ate it up, laughing strongly and bursting into huge applause at the very end. This isn’t just a prestige pic: it’s a potential hit looking at $50 million or more, handled properly. Me? I can’t wait to take my mom.
GUY MADDIN ****
Finally, I ended the fest on the perfect note by checking out the brilliant installation at the Lightbox by Canadian director Guy Maddin, one of the best and most distinctive directors in the world today. If you’re in Toronto, by all means, check it out and take the time to watch at least some of the shorts he displays in full. I’ll talk about it more in my festival wrapup on Tuesday.
Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It’s available free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes.
NOTE: Journalists are given free access to all the movies at most film festivals with the understanding that they will be providing coverage of the fest for their media outlets. No expectation is given for positive coverage of the films or the fest in general. But journalists who don’t provide sufficient coverage (a complicated judgment based on their outlet and its frequency of publication) may not be given a badge the following year.

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