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Bliss nominated for Best Local Short award
Monday, February 25th, 2013—NewsBliss is up for the Steam Whistle Home Brew Award for Best Local Short at the 2013 Kingston Canadian Film Festival! Congratulations to the other filmmakers in this category.
Bliss to open Kingston Canadian Film Festival
Saturday, February 23rd, 2013—NewsI just got word that my short movie Bliss will open the 2013 Kingston Canadian Film Festival! As part of the Local Shorts Program, Bliss will show before Kickass Canadian Michael McGowan’s latest feature, Still Mine, starring James Cromwell, Geneviève Bujold and Campbell Scott. This is a huge honour for me, as McGowan has directed such Canadian film treasures as Saint Ralph (see the Saint Ralph review from April 2009) and One Week (see the One Week review from May 2009). Bliss can be seen at Kingston’s Baby Grand Theatre at 7pm on Thursday, February 28 (the opening night gala screening!) and 12pm on Saturday, March 2.
WIDE OPEN: A Canadian Perspective available to download
Tuesday, February 19th, 2013—NewsAfter selling out the limited edition print run of WIDE OPEN: A Canadian Perspective at our recent CARE Canada fundraiser, KickassCanadians.ca has made the photobook available to download as a PDF. The e-book is free, with an option to donate to CARE Canada. Thank you to everyone who made this possible, including shift180 designer Shawn Phillips, web designer Thomas J. Bradley and CARE Canada Ambassador Laura Nicol.
Bliss to screen at 2013 Kingston Canadian Film Festival
Sunday, February 17th, 2013—NewsAfter debuting earlier this month at the Vancouver Island Short Film Festival, my short movie Bliss will next be seen at the 2013 Kingston Canadian Film Festival as part of its Local Shorts Program. Details pending on the day and time… Check back here for details!
WIDE OPEN photographs develop standout crowd
Monday, February 11th, 2013—NewsWIDE OPEN: Kickass Canadian Photographs for CARE generated a stellar turnout yesterday afternoon. We sold every copy of the limited edition photobook WIDE OPEN: A Canadian Perspective, raising $3,280 for CARE Canada. A very special thank-you to Patricia Barr and Wall Space Gallery for hosting, and to our primary photobook sponsors, Andrew Morrisey, Broker, Re/Max Metro City Realty Ltd. and Brad Rollo, Owner, Bramel Developments Inc. For details and photos, please visit the KickassCanadians.ca event page.
Kitchissippi Times features WIDE OPEN: A Canadian Perspective
Thursday, January 31st, 2013—NewsThank you to Kitchissippi Times for writing a wonderful article about WIDE OPEN: A Canadian Perspective. The piece, in papers today, features John Bagnell and Dwayne Brown, two of the book’s 10 photographers.
Beasts of the Southern Wild & Daughters of the Dust
Wednesday, January 30th, 2013—FilmBeasts of the Southern Wild (USA 2012, Drama/Fantasy), Writers: Benh Zeitlin, Lucy Alibar; Director: Benh Zeitlin
Daughters of the Dust (USA/UK 1991, Drama/Romance), Writer/Director: Julie Dash
I almost wrote about Beast of the Southern Wild in my 2012 year-end “wrap-up,” but I just couldn’t crunch it in; there’s so much to say about it. I still won’t be writing it justice here, largely because it’s been too long since I’ve seen the movie. But here it is anyway. It’s too special not to include. And it continues to remind me of another unique film, which I saw even longer ago, in my film school days, but still want to call to your attention: Daughters of the Dust.
Beasts and Daughters are both first-time feature films by American directors, who explore American subcultures (or co-cultures) by stirring up fantasy and “reality” to create highly unusual, very impactful works. They’re more multimedia poems than traditional narrative movies, relying heavily on atmosphere and setting to capture the spirit of a place and time, and to create lyrical, poignant worlds. The films are also both narrated by otherworldly young girls.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is based on Lucy Alibar’s stage play Juicy and Delicious. Its narrator is the film’s main character, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old living in a Louisiana bayou community called the Bathtub. With a missing mother and an ailing, alcoholic father named Wink (Dwight Henry), Hushpuppy is left to raise herself, and she does so with great courage and imagination. As the Bathtub braces for a Katrina-like storm, and Wink’s health deteriorates, the young girl carries on, even as she sees her world flooded with rising waters and stampeding aurochs—fantastical prehistoric creatures that symbolize the impending destruction.
Daughters of the Dust is narrated by the unborn child of the one of the characters. (Though being unborn doesn’t prevent her from gracing the screen now and then, in the form of a spirit.) The film is set in 1902 on a small island off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, which is home to the women of the African-American Peazant family—all members of a Gullah community. As the family prepares to migrate north, their story serves as something of a microcosm, exploring the clash of ancient cultures against modern influences.
There’s a lot more to know about these fascinating films. In addition to being significant and powerful as finished products (Daughters of the Dust was the first feature film by an African-American woman to get a general theatrical release in the U.S.), they each have interesting production backgrounds (Beasts of the Southern Wild involved casting non-actors and working from an unfinished script that was developed throughout the filming process). If you’re interested, check out writer/producer/director Julie Dash’s book, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film, or the Creators Project documentary on the making of Beasts of the Southern Wild.
I hope you’ll be able to watch the films, too. Beasts of the Southern Wild should be easy to find, as it’s nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actress (Wallis). Daughters of the Dust will be a little more elusive, but it’s around—try treasure troves like Ottawa’s Glebe Video International.
The Sessions & Zero Dark Thirty
Sunday, January 20th, 2013—FilmThe Sessions (USA 2012, Drama), Writer/Director: Ben Lewin
Zero Dark Thirty (USA 2012, Drama/History/Thriller), Writer: Mark Boal; Director: Kathryn Bigalow
In the last couple weeks, I saw two wonderful films. Both recount true events, both explore extraordinary resilience in the face of tremendous adversity, and both had a very big impact on me.
The Sessions is based on the autobiographical articles and poems of Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), an American man who contracted polio as a child and spent most of his adult life in an iron lung. The movie joins Mark at age 38, when he sets about trying to lose his virginity with the help of his priest (William H. Macy), his caretaker (Moon Bloodgood) and a sexual surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt).
Mark’s story is treated with such frankness that the scenes, no matter how intimate they get, never feel voyeuristic or exploitative. He’s spent more than three decades having to submit to others tending to his bodily needs; for Mark, even when it may be embarrassing, discussing his body and putting it in the hands of his caregivers is just a matter of fact. It also helps that Hawkes wickedly captures his character’s sense of humour, injecting the film with a healthy dose of levity.
What I loved most about The Sessions were the performances, and the way it sheds light on so many different ways to live, and look at, life—which is made all the more poignant because the film is based on real people.
The cast is fantastic all-around, from the supporting actors who play Mark’s fleeting caretakers, to the luminous lead actors. I’ve written about Hawkes’ amazing versatility in my reviews of Me and You and Everyone We Know and Winter’s Bone (he was also fantastic, and once again very different, in Martha Marcy May Marlene, which I didn’t get around to writing up). In The Sessions, he does it again, this time in a very physically challenging role. Hunt is also excellent, in spite of a laughably uneven Boston accent (I mean that literally; every time the accent resurfaced, my friend, GR, cracked up beside me).
As for the second reason I loved The Sessions, there are plenty of insights shared about contrasting views of the world. They come throughout the film, sometimes from Mark’s caretakers and priest, but most significantly from Mark and Cheryl. Mark’s perseverance and determination to find a way no matter what are the epitome of inspiration. This is a man who, in spite of being effectively paralyzed from the neck down, manages to attend Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, go on to have a successful career in writing, and even co-found a publishing press dedicated to poetry by people with disabilities. Not to mention lead an active sex life. You can read more about Mark’s story in this The New York Times article and in a piece he wrote for The Sun called ‘On Seeing a Sex Surrogate.’
Cheryl’s story is also unique and inspiring, from her deep empathy for her clients, to her unusual approach to marriage, to her unfailing (and all too rare) open-mindedness. I’m curious to read her book, an intimate life: sex, love and my life as a surrogate partner.
The Sessions turns out to be therapeutic for more than just Mark. It leaves you with a lot to think about: that there isn’t only one way to do things; that happiness can exist even in very trying circumstances; and there are wonderful people who not only accept difference, but embrace it.
Now, onto a horse of a different colour: Zero Dark Thirty. This is director Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliant depiction of the hunt for, and killing of, Osama Bin Laden, following the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centers. Intriguingly, it centres on a female CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain), who played a major role in keeping the investigation going and in discovering Bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.
Bigelow brings the same standard of excellence and realism to Zero Dark Thirty as she did to The Hurt Locker. Her latest film is utterly captivating from start to finish. I can’t comment on what liberties may have been taken with real life events, but what I saw was an absolutely mesmerizing account of an important piece of recent history.
As with The Hurt Locker, Bigelow assembled a first-rate cast to pull off the complicated, often upsetting storyline in Zero Dark Thirty. Her team is impeccably led by Chastain, who stole the show in The Tree of Life and delivers again with Zero Dark Thirty. Not surprisingly, she’s up for a Best Actress Academy Award. (The film is also up for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.)
I would have liked to see Hawkes up for Best Actor for The Sessions, but ah, well… His time will come. And he did score a Best Actor nomination at the recent Golden Globes.
Awarded or not, both these films deserve to be seen.
Brick, Stories We Tell & Les Misérables
Monday, December 31st, 2012—FilmBrick (USA 2005, Mystery), Writer/Director: Rian Johnson
Stories We Tell (Canada 2012, Documentary), Writer/Director: Sarah Polley
Les Misérables (USA 2012, Drama/Musical/Romance), Writer: William Nicholson; Director: Tom Hooper
Having seen so many great films in 2012—and with my movie excitement spiked thanks to the recent news that my short film, Bliss, got into the 2013 Vancouver Island Short Film Festival!—I’m determined to play a bit of catch-up and write one last film post before the New Year strikes. (At least in my time zone.)
Here are a few shortish thoughts on a few of the films that made an impression on me in the past few months:
I rented Brick after discovering Rian Johnson’s brilliance in Looper. Brick is his first feature, and also stars the stupendously talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt, so I was keen to pick it up. (The last-minute endorsement from my buddy, CG, who hailed it as being even better than Looper, didn’t hurt either.)
Brick is a high school detective movie that elegantly transplants the film noir genre into a crowd of teenagers and comes out the better for it. It casts Brendan (Gordon-Levitt), a brooding loner hell-bent on solving the mystery of his ex-girlfriend’s disappearance, as the detective protagonist, muddling through the regular adolescent challenges such as eating lunch alone, crashing sinister mystery parties and de-coding cryptic messages scrawled on crumpled bits of paper.
The movie triumphs by treating its subject matter with all seriousness. It never makes a punch line of the ludicrousness of mom offering milk and cookies to the gang of villains, or the vice-principal standing in as a corrupt official. Brick is also triumphant because of a stellar performance by Gordon-Levitt and a brilliant, poetic screenplay by Johnson. The script’s lyricism (and occasionally enigmatic dialogue), and the tone Johnson cultivates through his direction, gives the film a special quality that sometimes reminded me of a less trippy Mulholland Drive.
On to Stories We Tell. I saw this at the ByTowne in October, and always meant to write about it because it’s absolutely fantastic. Definitely my favourite Sarah Polley film so far, which is saying something, given that it comes after Away From Her and Take This Waltz.
Her latest work documents an unusual family discovery in her adult life: that she was the product of her late mother’s affair, and that the man who raised her isn’t her biological father. Interviewing the characters involved, including her siblings and two fathers, Polley takes an honest and highly intelligent approach to reveal the often contradictory versions of events that each player came away with, and to expose the fact that the stories we tell others and ourselves inform, and therefore sometimes distort, how we see the world.
By presenting these conflicting versions of events rather than marrying them in the editing room to create a single “truth,” she takes us behind the scenes, so to speak, giving us insight into the wonderful world of film and how it can be used to weave a story all its own. She further plays with the medium by intercutting remarkable recreations of her mother’s story (so convincing that I didn’t immediately realize they were recreations), and brings it all home with one last little reveal at the very end. Beautifully done.
Most recently, I saw Les Misérables, dubbed by my sister-date as “the best movie I’ve seen in a long time.” My grandparents took me to see the stage musical many years ago, and I wish they could have seen this film adaptation; I think they would have loved seeing it.
Tom Hooper, the skillful director behind The King’s Speech, really knows how to let his stars shine. In Les Misérables, the esteemed musical set in 19th Century France, he gives them the freedom to be creative in their delivery, occasionally speaking or choking out lyrics rather than singing each note to perfection.
There’s been some backlash to this approach. Critics and musical fans have said that it takes away from the songs’ grandeur. If that’s true, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. The interpretations of these songs certainly aren’t traditional and aren’t always pretty, but I think they pack a lot more emotional punch than do the more presentational versions I’ve heard. And this is an adaptation for film, a medium that allows for much more intimacy and emotional subtlety than the stage. It isn’t meant to serve primarily as a showcase for the music.
To me, Hooper’s approach to the songs works in the same way Christopher Nolan’s character exploration works in the Batman trilogy (see The Dark Knight), or Daniel Craig’s cerebral take on James Bond works in the latest installments of the franchise. They’re powerful and moving because they relate on a more human level than other campier interpretations.
Of course, allowing the acting to shine through the songs would only work with an excellent group of actors. So that’s what Hooper lined up. The entire cast is solid, but a few standouts include: Samantha Barks as Éponine; the blond imps Isabelle Allen and Daniel Huttlestone, playing young Cosette and the little French rebel Gavroche; Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as the innkeepers; and Anne Hathaway as Fantine—her I Dreamed a Dream is crushing, a truly stunning piece of acting.
There you have it: the year in review. Sort of. Three very different films, all very worthwhile. Feel free to let me know which movies you recommend for 2013 and beyond!
Happy New Year. I hope it brings wonderful things.
Bliss to debut at Vancouver Island Short Film Festival
Saturday, December 29th, 2012—NewsI just got the wonderful news that Bliss, the short film I wrote, directed and produced, will have its world premiere at the Vancouver Island Short Film Festival on February 1, 2013. It was one of only 14 films selected for the two-day event (another on the program is The Kissing Booth, a short film directed by Bliss editor and Kickass Canadian Matt West). What a fantastic way to wrap up the year. Thank you again to everyone involved!!
