... even though I sometimes forget it.

I haven't blogged about the many other things going on in my life right now, and I'm sure most of you don't care... But for the interested, here are the non-film items that are capturing my interest at the moment. Enjoy!

1. The University of Michigan Football Team

We're 2-2. We lost to Notre Dame and Wisconsin (Wisconsin!). We have a lot to prove this weekend and who do we play? Only the 11th-ranked Michigan State Spartans! Michigan is out of the Top 25 for the first time in eight years (grrrr), and Michigan St. is 4-0 and rolling. We need this win badly. This is Michigan, the winningest program in college football history! Let's go get it done.

Get In There My Son! : Braylon Edwards scores the game winner in last year's Michigan- Michigan State 3 OT thriller.

Divorce has shaped my generation. I am not sure I can count on one hand the number of my friends whose parents are still together, mine included. Growing up, divorce seemed so natural I often grew suspicious of homes not touched by it; surely these were the people who attended church on Sundays, smiled their way through school meetings, and invariably had giant stacks of skeletons in their closets. I still don?t carry a lot of faith in marriage as an institution. But for a lot of people, marriage represents the final frontier of adulthood, the place one is meant to land when she has found true love and wants to start a family. If that last sentence sounds like an attractive option to you, I encourage you to grab your ideals by the lapel and sprint down to your local movie theater to catch Noah Baumbach?s note-perfect ode to the terminus of a once happy marriage, The Squid and The Whale.

Forty Love: Laura Linney, Owen Kline, Jeff Daniels and William Baldwin in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and The Whale

A long week of screenings, the Opening Night Party at the NYFF, and work to get things rolling for the Sarasota Film Festival, and somehow, I have had very little time to blog (yes, I know, it's the hard knock life...). Today, I took the day off from screenings (my first since September 8th!) and got all caught up. For what they are worth, here are my thoughts on recent NYFF screenings. Let?s get down to business! Oh, and spoilers abound. Proceed at your own (relatively risk-free) risk.

L'Enfant by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Critics are reaching for thesauruses in order to find the new adjectives to praise this year's Palm D'Or winner, but a thorough inspection of the latest film by the Dardennes shows a significant twist in their award winning, social realist formula. For this first time I can remember in their films, they present a protagonist so unlikable that, by challenging the audience with the task of following his efforts to rectify his great mistake, the story creates almost no sense of empathy. Whereas characters like Rosetta (in Rosetta, their masterpiece) and Olivier (in The Son) are struggling against the weight of incredible loss and injustice, L'Enfant's Bruno is the victimizer; a listless single father who decides the best way to financial independence is to sell his new-born son on the black market while his girlfriend (and the baby's mother) is absent.

The act of selling one's own baby for cash while using said money to buy tacky euro-trash leather jackets and living on the streets is, I guess, one way to expose the complete buy-in by the poor into consumerist model of happiness; it's better to look good than be good. Just ask Breathless's protagonist Michel Poiccard (upon whom the Bruno character seems based- just look at that hat!). But what this approach does not do is engender good-will or interest in the audience, and this would be fine in the hands of almost any other filmmaker because we would probably be given psychological insight, time with other characters, and the distance to contextualize the crime. But this is a Dardenne Brothers film, and once we meet Bruno, we're stuck with him for the full 100 minutes as the camera tracks his attempts to undo his terrible crime. This is at once compelling (thanks to a great performance by Jámie Renier) but also incredibly frustrating, because Bruno is a character who will never know the depths of his wrongdoing until the bitter (and I mean bitter) end. It doesn't help that his punishment comes in response to another (albeit related) crime, because it takes a terrible price for Bruno to comprehend the depth of what he has done when, to every other sane person in the world, the horror of his actions are obvious from the start. This reduces L'Enfant to an experience equivocal with watching an adolescent learn his lesson the hard way, and despite the incredible style and artistry on display which we almost (and should not) take for granted in a Dardennes film, it is Bruno's character that keeps complete emersion and empathy at a cold distance.


Havin' My Baby: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant

Much has been made of the declining box-office receipts this year, but the concerns of movie folk have nothing on the bookish. The decline in book culture in our country and the rise in the consumption of moving images (be they on computer, video or television) as can be seen as both a blessing as a curse; sure, people may not be reading hard-bound texts with the frequency of old, but more information is immediately accessible today to more people than at any time in human history. That said, there is some cause for concern in this environment; yes, people can access facts and ideas with greater ease, but where does the creative process, the act of making art, fall in the digital age? I am suspicious of computer art (that is, art that exists only in an on-line context) as a form not because it isn't art, but because of my uncertainty as to how it may be preserved for future enjoyment and analysis. Say what you will about good old-fashioned books, painting, or photography, but the analog, tactile reality of an object brings me greater pleasure than any virtual experience ever could. There is a comforting sense physical presence that comes from holding, inspecting, touching, or feeling proximity to the detail of an object; a sense that you and the thing are there, together, in the world. Living in a city like New York, I have been spoiled by the relative popularity of books and art. Here, like most cities, there are lovely moments of consumptive communion; spotting strangers on public transportation holding a book you recently finished and feeling a sense of kinship, running into friends at museums or bookstores (and especially cinemas). Without art, I am not sure from where my feelings of connection with my fellow citizens, however fleeting, might spring.

I guess I am feeling sentimental about the power of creative work because I have just seen Bennett Miller's Capote, a film that essentially describes the passionate pursuit of artistic creation as a torrid, fucked-up love triangle between an artist, his subjects, and his labor-intensive work. Philip Seymour Hoffman once again puts in an incredible, deeply affecting performance, this time as the writer Truman Capote, as idiosyncratic a character as Hoffman has ever played. The film is thankfully not an exploration of the "womb to tomb" chronology of Capote's life, but instead a representation of the crucial five-year period in the middle of Capote's life, from his decision to explore a murder case in Kansas to the ultimate completion of his now classic 'non-fiction novel' In Cold Blood. The story of the book is well known to anyone who took a literature class in high school; Capote traveled to Kansas to chronicle the investigation of the Clutter family murder of 1959. The investigation later proved that two paroled felons, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, in search of an illusory $10,000, murdered the family of four in their farmhouse before fleeing to Mexico and the West Coast, leaving a trail of bad checks that lead to their ultimate arrest in Las Vegas. After receiving the death penalty, Hickock and Smith (with Capote's help) appealed their conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, who declined to hear the case, allowing Kansas to execute the pair in 1965. In Cold Blood, with its deeply affecting humanization of the criminals balanced beautifully with its acknowledgement of the depth of their crimes, became a smash hit and virtually invented the practice of novelizing current and historic events.

Writer's Block: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller's Capote

In 1996, writing in The New Yorker magazine, the great American playwright Arthur Miller discussed his feelings about the McCarthy era while watching his play on the subject, The Crucible, being filmed. The article was published some 40 years after Miller's own appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and it's a fascinating read, but I quote here a passage that showcases a haunting rhyme with the creative climate of today's America:

"The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us?indeed, from me. In "Timebends," my autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay ("The Hook") about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, 'The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out.' By then?it was 1951?I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage."

It is in this sense that our own times feel so dispirting, so stifled of nuance. When Miller wrote The Crucible, he used the 17th century witch trials in Salem, MA to illustrate his own understanding of American life in the McCarthy era. And now, history has looped back on itself once again. George Clooney and his co-writer Grant Heslov have taken a page out of Miller's book and used the history of the McCarthy-era HUAC hearings to create as powerful and important an American film as has been made in the past five years, Good Night, And Good Luck.

Good Night, And Good Luck is the story of CBS news man Edward R. Murrow (an Oscar-worthy David Strathairn) and his decision to use his news program See It Now to advocate for Consitutional reason in an age of red-scare insanity. Murrow's pleas for justice are met with a swift and dramatic response from not only McCarthy, but the top brass at CBS and the network's advertisers and sponsors. Despite McCarthy's own censure in the Senate, Murrow would be forced into network obscurity for "losing money", but that wouldn't last either; although not in the film, we know that Murrow would go on to produce an international politics show called Small World until his departure from CBS in 1961. He died of lung cancer in 1965.

To Tell The Truth: George Clooney as CBS News producer Fred Friendly and David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow in Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck

The film itself is a stylistic leap from Clooney's previous directorial work in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and features a prowling, 'direct cinema'-style camera that is constantly combing the crowded interiors of the CBS newsroom and the tiny set where Murrow delivers his stinging political critiques. The absolutely gorgeous black and white cinematography (by Robert Elswit) is complimented by an evocative jazz score, performed by a luminous Dianne Reeves. The tone is set immediately, and despite the thematic and geographic differences, I couldn't help but think of the opening of Woody Allen's Manhattan; the elegaic black and white shots of a black tie reception and the longing of the music establish the period perfectly. Strathairn is unbendingly committed to inhabiting the speech and physical demeanor of Murrow (as well as his good-humored seriousness), and the gravity of his performance gives weight to the political ideas that are central to the film.

There is no mistake to be made; Good Night, And Good Luck is to the Bush Administration's policies in a post-9/11 world what The Crucible was to the McCarthy era. The parallels are clearly highlighted in Murrow's numerous speeches, but Clooney isn't interested in simply blaming the man on top; the finger is clearly pointed at the media, the uneasy marriage between corporate interests and the editorial policies in a free press, and the personal price paid by those who dare to ask questions of men in power. The film details this battle without the epic sweep of a film like Michael Mann's The Insider, instead focusing on the broadcasts themselves (and the newsroom in particular) as the forum in which these ideas are articulated. There are very few exteriors in the film, no shots of Murrow at home with the family, or of Mr. and Mrs. America reading the headlines in disgust (save a single shot late in the film). Instead, archival footage of McCarthy himself, in hearings and in interviews, is utilized to great effect and the cramped CBS newsroom is the dramatic centerpiece of the story; this is not a film about the social issues of the early 1950's, it is instead a film about making news and challenging authority because it is one's job.

But who has that job today? Despite questioning the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, there has been far too little investigation by the press, and far too little access granted by the federal government, of the U.S.'s war on terror or the war in Iraq. Clooney's film is as articulate a plea for inquiry as can be made; Murrow's own questioning of McCarthy's tactics was based on his personal credibility as a fair-minded defender of the Constitution. Without a press independent of ideological apologists who seek only to shill a party line at the expense of actual reportage, the government, regardless of who is in power, is free to dismiss media inquiry into its practices as ideological posturing. The same happenes to Murrow in Good Night, And Good Luck, and it is only because popular culture rejected McCarthy's tactics that he was forced to end his witch hunt. In the conservative echo chamber that passes for newsgathering today, a man like Murrow might throw up. What broadcaster would go on national television today and say what Edward Murrow said on his See It Now program, March 9, 1954:

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular... There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

In recent years, Soviet files have been unearthed showing that, indeed, the Communist Party had made serious strides in infiltrating our national government. Some would use this as justification for McCarthy's tactics, probably the same people who were defending the use of torture on prisoners held without trial, some of whom may be responsible for brutal, indefensible acts of terror. But at what cost to our freedom and the freedom of the innocent people, suffering in unconstitutional bondage? That we can point to no one in our country with the courage to rigorously question the Constitutionality of federal policies is a great tragedy and this is precisely the spirit of Clooney's film, of Murrow's work, and of what we need so desperately in our culture right now. Whether the America will respond by seeing and discussing the film, well, I certainly have my my doubts. But you can't doubt the work itself; Good Night, And Good Luck is essential.

Steven Soderbergh is the once and future king of American independent film. I remember seeing Sex, Lies, and Videotape for the first time during my freshman year in college; my soon-to-be ex-girlfriend and I tucked into a crowded multiplex in Kalamazoo, MI, where she was attending college and were blown away. At the time of its domestic release, Sex, Lies was an exciting moment for the independent film scene, the moment that historians point to as the birth of the modern day independent film business. The impact of the film on the movie industry and its surprising win at Cannes were completely unknown to me; I felt the tinge of revelation in finally seeing an American film that thrilled me with its "European" attention to character and style (ah, the undergrad years...) and its decidedly kinky take on intimacy. I had seen Jarmusch, Wenders' Paris, Texas had changed my idea of movies, and I was a couple of years away from catching Linklater's generational signpost, Slacker. It is sometimes hard to put hindsight away and recapture the context of certain moments in one's life, but for me, an eighteen year old college freshman on the verge of heartbreak and about to discover independent film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape is a personal touchstone. I will never forget its thrills and the hope it gave me.

Of course, it is just as easy to forget that Steven Soderbergh's post- Sex, Lies career teetered on the disastrous. He followed his huge hit with a string of flops; the underappreciated Kafka, King of the Hill, The Underneath, Gray's Anatomy and my personal favorite among his films, Schizopolis. It marked a nine year stretch where Soderbergh hovered beneath the radar, making interesting films without ever duplicating the commercial success of his debut. Of course, Out Of Sight garnered critical raves but still earned less in domestic box-office than it cost to make, but that film and its stylized companion piece The Limey entrenched Soderbergh in the minds of Holywood execs. It wasn't until 2000, eleven years after his initial success, that he made the smash hit Erin Brockovich and launched himself into the upper-echelon of Hollywood directors, winning the Best Director Oscar the next year for his re-make of the British mini-series Traffic. Even after these huge hits, Soderbergh has followed his own muse, with films like his critcally admired but box-office poison re-make of Tarkovsky's Solaris and the universally ignored Full Frontal.

Like I said, it is sometimes hard to recapture things in context, but during the indie heyday of the 1990's, Soderbergh was on the outside looking in. It took a star-driven blockbuster to ressurect his name in the public eye. Now that name is as loaded as his films. Regarded by many as a crowd-pleasing Hollywood craftsman and equally as many as a sell-out, a Soderbergh film comes packed with expectations. And so, after seeing his latest incarnation, the low-budget, working class thriller Bubble, I will go out on a limb and guess that Steven Soderbergh will once again face commercial indifference and hostile critics, but I will also say that no film he has made since Schizopolis has gotten it so right. The film, his first HD feature (and part of a glitzy new media film production deal with HDNet and Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's 2929), is being publicized, like all products in America, more for its production process and its business dealings than its artistic merits. That's the same media logic that looks at the disaster in New Orleans and asks aloud how inflated gas prices will affect the President's poll numbers. Who cares?

Spoiler Alert: There are important plot details revealed in the remaining discussion of Bubble.

What does matter is Bubble as a film. It is unlike anything Soderbergh has ever done, in that it is formally excellent while housing incredible performances by non-professional actors who, without question, re-create the cant and tone of Midwestern working class life like no other film I've seen. Whereas the Dardenne brothers can throw a 35mm camera on their shoulders and follow the trudging brutality of working class life in a film like Rosetta to critical shouts of genius, I expect Soderbergh's formalism in the face of his utterly informal location and actors to be the subject of critical scorn. That is a mistake; Soderbergh's sly telling of this blue-collar whodunit houses some amazing moments, and his direction of the non-actors, particularly lead actress Debbie Doebereiner as the sweet but humiliated Martha, makes for a truthful reverence for the rhythms of working class life. I can think of no higher praise for a movie than it feels absolutely true, but Bubble does. I don't know how many of you have spent time among the workers of the rust belt, struggling against hope to make a living while confronting loneliness and a puritan understanding of right and wrong, but I believe that Soderbergh and screenwriter Coleman Hough have hit the nail on the head. The way these characters walk, mumble their conversations, lie, cheat, and steal is note perfect. This is no small feat; I can't remember the last time I saw an American film with a coherent depiction of manual labor coupled with the understanding of the deeply felt shame, pride, and the physical violence lying under the surface of the American class system. It also absolutely understands the selfish jealousy and the longing of unrequited adult love, and the combination of class struggle and romantic indifference make for a potent cocktail; what other killer can you remember who goes to the beauty salon after committing murder?

Workin' For The Weekend: Misty Dawn Wilkins as Rose, Debbie Doebereiner as Martha and Dustin James Ashley as Kyle in Steven Soderbergh's Bubble

The look of the film is straight out of a 1970's thriller, with enough dark exteriors harboring palpable danger to evoke a film like Klute. In addition to the look of the film, it features a surprisingly evocative score performed on acoustic guitar that echoes the stripped down lives of the characters; it sounds like music written and performed by American Movie's Mike Schank. The score is a perfect compliment for the character's dreams of overcoming their economic struggles, dreams we know will never come true. It is curious to think of this as the follow-up project to Ocean's Twelve, but looking back over Soderbergh's career, it should be no surprise. It is great to see the director taking up the formal challenges of low budget independent films again, and while Bubble is no Sex, Lies, it is certainly a step forward. Here's hoping that Bubble is given a chance in the marketplace. It is a deserving film and signals Soderbergh's return to his indie roots.

Directly across the street from Lincoln Center, so close you can still hear the famous fountain, is Dante's Park; a small patch of grass, hidden on a concrete pedestrian island in the middle of Broadway and Columbus Ave. Surrounded by a small fence, and ringed by park benches facing the road, stands a statue of Dante Alighieri, the great poet himself, clutching a book and looking down on the tiny patch of real estate that has been dedicated to his memory. It is a modest little park, nothing so grand as the poet deserves, but on my first trip to Lincoln Center for this year's New York Film Festival press screenings, it was nice to see Dante still there, observing the indifferent, modern world that swirls around him.

I, on the other hand, felt hyper-aware. I had spent two weeks in Toronto, and I was more than a little homesick. Sure, Toronto has doubled for New York in the movies, but in real life, there is no place like home. As the feeling of autumn has begun to find its way into the air, I have found myself taking in everything around me with a new relish; it is nice to come home and find your favorite time of year blooming in the city you love, on your way to your favorite film festival. Past the fountain, up the marble stairs, through the throngs of Juilliard students on a permanent smoking break, I made my way into the Walter Reade Theater where, much to my surprise, I was immediately introduced to another Dante on his own trip through the modern inferno, Dante Remus Lazarescu (Ioan Fiscuteanu), the protagonist of Cristi Puiu's The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu

Sick of the Runaround: Ioan Fiscuteanu as Dante Remus Lazarescu in Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

There is a lot to say about the film, but I feel ultimately safe in guessing that I cannot spoil the ending by talking about it; the revelatory title spills it all. The film follows our Dante on a single night from the moment he begins to feel sick until his ultimate death at the hands of an indifferent health care system. Puiu has created as naturalistic and realistic a fiction as I have ever seen; the slow, perfectly modulated decline of Lazarescu's health is one of the most infuriatingly comic and tragically accurate depictions of the state of modern medicine as one is likely to ever see. Michael Moore's forthcoming HMO documentary will have a hard time trumping this film for outrage, laughs, and melancholic frustration.

At the heart of this film is Fiscuteanu's performance as Lazarescu; a performance so gripping that it creates a tangible, slowly mounting sense of anxiety as Lazarescu fades away to the chorus of insulting, bickering medical professionals who are supposed to be saving his life but instead spend their time flirting, arguing, and attacking each other's enormous egos. Every Dante must have a Virgil (a name which we hear throughout the film), and this Dante is guided through the health care hell by an EMT named Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu), a woman on the fringes of the health care system who, albeit reluctantly, is the only person who empathizes with Lazarescu's constant dismissal and the only one who takes professional and personal responsibility for him. When she leaves his side at the end of the film, we know that no good will come of it; his guardian angel gone, Lazarescu has nothing left to do but to die.

In his comments in Cannes, Puiu mentioned that he sees this film as the first in a film by film answer to Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales series, and you can see the relationship immediately; whereas Rohmer's films show the constant search for love and human connection between people, Puiu seems set upon expanding that responsibility to the social contract and exposing the troubled relationship between people and the institutions that they create and serve. If The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu is any indication of things to come, there are five amazing films on the way and I am very much looking forward to following Puiu's tales of the state of human relations. In the meantime, I'm going to have a hard time getting Fiscuteanu's face out of my head as experiencing the loss of this character was such a traumatizing experience, I know I won't recover from losing him any time soon.

Arrived back in NYC late Saturday afternoon and after a nice dinner, collapsed into a deep, refreshing sleep. I didn't want to sum up my Toronto Film Festival experience this year before taking a day of repose to get my head together, but now that I have, I think this year's event was, for me, a challenge of self-control mingled with a minor sense of disappointment. That is not to say the festival itself didn't have several exceptional films; from everything I've heard and read, there were really great films to be seen. And in many cases, I saw some great films. But most of what has risen to the critical surface, unfortunately for me (or fortunately, depending upon how you look at it), is playing in this year's New York Film Festival, so I stayed away from all of the films that I knew I would be seeing here at home. That list (Cach�, TheSun, Tristram Shandy, Les Amants Reguliers, L'Enfant, Manderlay, The Squid and The Whale, Capote, Paradise Now, The President's Last Bang, Gabrielle, Three Times, Sympathy for Lady Vengance, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Breakfast on Pluto, and Bubble) makes for one exceptional film festival in and of itself. When you add in the films I was interested in that have or will have a domestic US release (Oliver Twist, A History of Violence, Corpse Bride, and Brokeback Mountain), it's almost like I wasn't in Toronto at all.

Can't Get You Outta My Head: The Ever-Haunting 2005 TIFF Poster

When you put together a festival as ambitious and important as the one in Toronto, with several programmers working in several programming categories, you almost feel that the festival can be all things to all people. The festival is as broad as can be, from the Masters section (featuring new work by longtime filmmakers) to Midnight Madness and everything in between. That said, there are so many films packed in so tightly that by the end of the festival, I spend more time cursing what I missed than praising what I saw and enjoyed. Even the screening of a film I loved can be erased by the unknown pleasures of a potentially great film never seen. And so, when leaving Toronto, I felt more than a little compromised. Sure there were wonderful screenings of Un Couple Parfait, The Wayward Cloud, Twelve and Holding, 51 Birch Street and Into Great Silence to remember. There were surprises, like Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home: Bob Dylan which has lingered with me all weekend. And in the end, that is more than enough. But until the staff at TIFF decide to spread out the Press and Industry screenings by featuring bigger films later in the week and running the screenings into the late evening (so few 10:00pm screenings? Who cares about parties? I party all the time anyway... I want films!), Toronto may always feel like a festival where I'll never know how great it was, or could have been. But that's ok, because like any festival, you have to choose your own path. Kudos to the TIFF for a great event.

NYFF press screenings start tomorrow (for me, anyway) and I'll try to keep up with my two-a-day screening schedule and post as often as possible. Time to catch up on some rest.

David Hudson at GreenCine Daily, ever the exceptional linker, pointed to a very compelling argument put forth by Glenn Kenny of Premiere Magazine about the lack of appreciation of art films among the film industry types.

"But you might remember what Lenin said about imperialist/ capitalist/ corporate culture. 'Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves,' or was it 'We shall sell them the rope with which?' I know,whatever. In any case, as with so much else, Lenin was wrong here. The actual situation with imperialist/capitalist/corporate culture is that if you give it an inch, it'll take a yard, and then kick and scream (or whatever else is necessary) until they get the whole field. A lot of the associate editor types coming in (to TIFF) exemplify a taste that I'll, for immediate lack of a better term,classify as hipster-bourgeois. Bourgeois because the sensibility is reflexively hostile to any aesthetic experience that challenges what these people already think they know. These are the people for whom the word 'pretentious' is a rubber stamp by which they seek to invalidate and close off any argument about anything they don't 'get', never mind that they don't even know the actual meaning of the word. And while their bourgeois perspective seeks out work that affirms and validates their intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual complacency, they still claim to seek 'edge'... For the hipster-bourgeois, it's not just about not seeing the new Aleksandr Sokurov movie; it's about creating a film culture in which Aleksandr Sokurov is not permitted to exist. (But, thank God, he still does.) In any case, for the first time in my life, I really understand how William Holden's character in Fedora felt."

I have to say, I agree. There is a sense among many in the industry, programmers, PR types, even press, that you must follow the buzz. This is nothing new and is not exceptional to the film industry, but I found it utterly ironic to read such an argument in Premiere Magazine (well, a blog on the Premiere Magazine website) of all places. One of the great things about blogging and new media forms is the ability for passionate people to connect to one another's ideas, to present ideas in an open space; we can create our own buzz. If Les Amants Reguliers is as good as Glenn says, when I catch it this Friday, I will be certain to add my voice to those who speak passionately about the film. But like all underground movements (and foreign language and art cinema are certainly an underground movement in America), we have to create our own sense of value and hype. Who cares what the PR kids from LA say? We know what the hipsters like and it is boring. Why not use Premere Magazine to create a useful, consistent journal of the art you care about? I am not surprised by any of what Glenn reports, more surprised at his sense of surprise. But one thing is true, and I said it before, I know a lot of people working the film industry who don't even like movies. Toronto isn't the only place this dilemma plays itself out, but it is depressing to see empty houses for great foreign titles. If not at festivals, among those who profess a love of cinema, where will these films ever find an audience?

I am not a child of the 1960?s, nor am I a child of children of the 60?s. If anything, I have always framed the 1960?s as a time of great social upheaval that included lots of victories and many losses, losses which ultimately lead to the rise of "me-generation" politics, the rise of Ronald Regan and our current conservative political crisis. Don?t get me wrong; the 1960?s produced some amazing art, an awesome film culture that I long for, and a transcontinental embrace of youth and creativity that has not been seen since. But as a child of the 1980?s, of American post-punk and the VCR, I have always seen the 1960?s in critical hindsight. I wasn?t there, and I am sure it was a lot of fun, but every former ?peace love and understanding? type I know is either a bitter self-serving snob or a full-on conservative. When I see flower children, I can only see what they have become, tainted by the knowledge that these people were exactly the types my generation, my small, unsung, unloved generation were rebelling against. If flower power can lead to Reganomics, if free love leads to a generation of broken homes and STD?s, what was so fucking great about the 1960s? On top of the reality of what became of the hippies and the youth revolution, add to it the massive idealization of the era by the baby boomer PR machine, and all I can see is a tragedy being paraded as the apotheosis of human civilization by a bunch of self-loving hypocrites. What can I say? I?m not a fan.

So, it was extremely surprising to me to feel the exact opposite of my usual bitterness while wrapping up this year?s Toronto Film Festival with Martin Scorsese?s excellent and frustrating No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. If there were ever a symbol of the 1960?s values, it?s the ?voice of his generation?, Bob Dylan. His music has become iconic and his nasal, talky sing-song voice is instantly recognizable; there is no one quite like him. I?ve always viewed Dylan?s music as the type of folky, earnest, poetry-laden music that punk rock was invented to erase. Scorsese?s film has revolutionized my idea of Dylan (which was obviously wrong) and could go a long way toward turning young people on to an artist whose own struggles with his generation, with the bizarre expectations and responsibilities of being a protest singer in the heady days of great social change, and with his radical decision to follow his own muse and plug his guitar into an amplifier illuminated the essential conformity of the non-conformist movement. Scorsese?s film is divided into two halves; the first details the early biography of Dylan and his move to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the very early 1960?s as a devotee of the late Woody Guthrie, the second half tracks Dylan?s iconic rise to folk music fame and his infamous (and absolutely great) three song set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where, for the first time, he played an electric guitar with a band.

Dylan Becomes Electric: Newport, 1965

There are glaring omissions in the film, including a real lack of forthcoming self-analysis from Dylan himself, who often speaks in metaphor and is evasive of personal issues. There is a small discussion of Dylan?s relationship with Joan Baez, but no discussion of feelings or details from either. There is a lot of footage from the time where Dylan looks strung out, clearly using alcohol or drugs, but no mention of Dylan?s use. There is also a real lack of analysis of the film?s fulcrum; Dylan?s decision to plug-in and rock out. The way the film tells it, the pressures of the folk scene, which Dylan effectively buried at Newport, allowed him to think of and frame blues music with electric instruments as an almost natural progression from acoustic folk music. However, there is a clear mischievous gleam in his eye as, night after night on a tour of Europe, rabid folk music fans boo him, call him ?Judas? and ?traitor? and journalists question his reasons for changing. Scorsese illuminates the conflict by way of some excellent performance footage, letting the excellence of the music underscore the bravery of performances that, time and again, are loudly rejected by the audience they were intended to entertain. You can see the hurt on Dylan?s face as he bravely soldiers on, raising the volume night after night, putting his songs and his vision in his audience?s face but in retrospect, Dylan still doesn?t seem to understand it. ?They weren?t booing the music,? he says. ?They weren?t booing anything they were hearing.? In fact, Scorsese uses the controversy over Dylan?s electric decision to expose a deep orthodoxy in the free love crowd; Pete Seeger, that liberal bastion of freedom and justice, was so outraged by Dylan?s Newport set, he still talks of wishing he could have found a saw to cut the power to the stage. They weren?t booing the music. They were booing change.

Scorsese ends the film in 1966, at the precise moment after Dylan has suffered a motorcycle accident and will not tour again for eight years, and so the film is really about Dylan?s six year rise from coffee shop protest singer to iconic voice of a generation to disillusioned artist who has earned the right to experiment and create, only to be labeled an outsider once again. As such, it is a rich portrait of an artist who struggles against all attempts to pigeonhole and stereotype him. Dylan has gone on to create music for another 40 years, to continue to experiment, succeed, fail, but always with a great deal of integrity. Ok, so let's not count The Traveling Willburys. But still, there is an enormous amount of material that remains unspoken, that is, the majority of Dylan?s creative life. And so ultimately, like the responses to his work, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan is not really about Dylan at all. It is about Dylan?s role as a generational totem to which dreams and identities were pinned and his personal encapsulation of the disillusionment of the 1960?s. Sure, it was 1966 when Dylan had had enough but, as in most everything Dylan has done, it took America almost ten years to catch up to him. Scorsese knows this as well as anyone, and No Direction Home: Bob Dylan not only celebrates a misunderstood artist, but forecasts the coming implosion that would manifest itself in the 1970?s ?me generation?. It is no small irony that Dylan?s song ?Like a Rolling Stone? featured prominently in his downfall. How does it feel? Kill your heroes, indeed

Lots of films the past few days, so let's get to it.

Le Temps qui reste by François Ozon

This film was a lovely meditation on death and dying, and on the art of saying goodbye. In typical Ozon fashion, the lyrical moments contain an almost dream-like quality but are tempered by some subtle performances by the leads, especially Melvil Poupaud as the hipster photographer who learns that he only has a short time to live. The film deals directly with the act of reconciling one's self to the world, about memory and preservation of memory, and despite a truly unbelieveable plot twist which arrives out of nowehere and feels totally unearned, the film overcomes its shortcomings and by the time the sun sets on the film's amazing final shot, everything is as it should be. Despite the film's pleasures, Ozon seems to be getting stuck in some sort of rut, with Under The Sand, 5X2 and this film all feeling like variations on a theme, but none a complete masterwork. They all feel like Ozon films, but none (save Swimming Pool) has the depth of story you'd expect as Ozon's mastery matures; despite all the heavy situations and loss, somehow his films feel lighter than they should.

Take a Picture, It'll Last Longer: Melvil Poupaud in François Ozon's Le Temps qui reste

Angel by Jim McKay

McKay's latest film, about a troubled teen and the social worker who seeks to help him get through his teen years on the mean streets of New York City, is at once a formal experiment in adapting the tonal and visual language of Eurpoean cinema to an American film, and a bizarre miscalculation in storytelling that leaves the film feeling hollow. Instead of McKay's usual stories of young people in trouble, Angel tries as hard as it can to convey a familiar slice of life realism, but its formal techniques and lingering, dialogue-free shots do not carry any dramatic weight. Instead, we are left to wonder not what Nicole (Rachel Griffiths) is thinking and feeling as the camera remains trained on her after the scene seems over, but why McKay has decided to stay there with her for 5 more minutes as she pours a bowl of cereal and eats it. I am no critic of slow, well-paced scenes that convey the weight of the drama being presented, but in Angel there is no there there. Where is the story? I can't imagine there is no formal idea at play behind the long takes, but I don't think the film adequately converys what that idea is and instead of drama, Angel feels like killing time.

The rest of the day, I walked into and out of Bam Bam and Celeste of which I was not a fan, Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War which had a great deal of beauty and visual energy but whose story left me baffled. I think the film presumes a shorthand knowledge of what the Yokai legends are and I had no idea, so I am not sure how this film would play outside of Japan (or maybe it's just me). Next, I was off to John Turturro's absolutely bizarrre Romance and Cigarettes and after 10 minutes, I was not able to take any more as the projection was so loud, the film so strange, that I felt driven from my seat (as in physically compelled to get up and get out of there). I can't comment on the film because I would like to watch it through and figure out what about it drove me so nuts; was it James Gandolfini reciting Charles Bukowski, the singing of pop songs by characters in musical sequences that made no visual or dramatic sense, or the constant bickering among the characters and their use of obscenities in strange contexts that made everything feel cheaply made and written by someone on LSD? Like I said, I haven't seen the whole thing, but I have never seen a film so all over the place in my entire life. And that was only 10 minutes. This being a film festival, I then headed out with friends for the night.

After the previous day's minor disappointments, Thursday's many pleasures felt like a revitalization.

Drawing Restraint 9 by Matthew Barney

Ok. It is hard to describe my affection for Matthew Barney's films without feeling like a complete pretentious asshole and the film's official description doesn't make things easier;

"Its core idea is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid vaseline, called 'The Field', which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film. Barriers hold form in place, and when they are removed, the film tracks the descent of form into states of sensual surrender and formal atrophy; this shift in the physical state of the sculpture is symbolically mirrored through the narrative of The Guests, two occidental visitors to the ship played in the film by Matthew Barney and Björk, who we first see taken on board, groomed, bathed and dressed in mammal fur costumes based upon traditional Shinto marriage costumes. In a harrowing liebestod which is the climax and centerpiece of the film, the Guests, locked in an embrace and breathing through blowhole-like orifices on the back of their necks, take out flensing knives and cut away each other's feet and thighs. The remains of their lower body are revealed to contain traces of whale tails at an early stage of development, suggesting rebirth, physical transformation, and the possibility of new forms."

Um, yeah. Actually, despite whatever internal defense mechanism is triggered by that description (how can your bullshit-o-meter not go off?), the preceding paragraph does accurately describe the film's "story" but in no way captures the visual thrills and thematic repetitions that, somehow and someway, drive me to fits ecstatic curiosity. Despite being best known for his photography and sculptural work, Barney is an amazingly consistent filmmaker. So consistent, in fact, that his previous Cremaster films seem like a single, extended meditation on art, life, and lots of white goo (ok, it's petroleum jelly). Drawing Restraint 9 continues on the path laid by the Cremasters if not in setting (the new film takes place in Japan and on a Japanese whaler), then certainly in its sumputous representation of ritualized action and its trademark camera work and sound design. Barney's long, slow tracking shots and his camera, constantly zooming and pulling out in precise patterns that will be familiar to Cremaster fans, are things of wonder. While my earlier complaint about a lack of an artisitic idea in Jim McKay's Angel and the nonsensical aesthetic on display in John Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes may seem contradictory to this point, I have to say that Barney's style and dramatic structure are so well organized and constructed, so rigorous, that it makes up for the pretension on display in his films. Watching his kilt-clad figure scale the interior of the Guggenheim Museum in Cremaster 3 was some of the most thrilling moviemaking I've ever seen, and despite his bizarre logic, Barney's ideas come across as if he is creating an entire cosmology; every film is a new sphere to be explored and discovered. There is a fierce, masterly intelligence at play in this film, and while I have no idea how these big budget films get made when they have absolutely no commercial appeal, there is something about the scale and ambition on display here, a rejection of the commercial model wherein box-office means absolutely nothing and ideas are everything. Anyway, Barney and Björk are excellent in their almost silent parts, and their "wedding" ceremony (wherein they cut off each other's feet and legs in a room filling up with petroleum) made all the other marriage movies seem a bit easier in retrospect. There are lovely moments in the rituals, including a Matthew Barney bachelor party, where, with Barney asleep on the floor, a man comes in and shaves a strip of hair off of the top of his head, removes his eyebrows with hair clippers, and leaves a can of Asahi next to the sleeping Barney. Good times! Let me end on this note: I know somewhere in the Sea of Japan, there is a ship full of very confused sailors who have no idea what the hell Drawing Restraint 9 is about. That doesn't stop it from being beautiful and compelling, and I really liked this film as a start to my day.

From there, it was a quick cab ride to the Paramount Theaters for Larry Clark's low-budget homage to Latino punks in present day Los Angeles, Wassup Rockers?. As a teen, I was hugely influenced by watching Penelope Spheeris' LA punk films Suburbia and The Decline of Western Civilization and Wassup Rockers? feels like a direct descendent of those early, amazing films; it is funny, honest, full of real-life punk rockers and great music. About an hour and half in, I had to remind myself that I was watching a Larry Clark film; gone are the (in my opinion) confused exploitations of beautiful young boys and girls, gone is fetishzed nudity, and in their place is a real affection for and belief in the importance of these boy's lives. The story of the film starts off like Kids-era Clark, following the lives of a group of skateboarding friends as they make their way from impoverished, adult-free homes to school where they are ostracized for not being into the hip-hop lifestyle. But when the boys decide to take the bus to Beverly Hills so they can skate, the film suddenly shifts into a Warriors-like story of innocent punks on the run, simply trying to get home and finding nothing but trouble. There are some amazing scenes in this film that literally thrilled me; the boys' band rehearsal, where the beautiful Johnathan (Jonathan Velasquez) screams a song in english over the thunderous punk rock music, the scene between one of the boys and his Beverly Hills crush, talking about the violence the boys face in the ghetto, and a great scene where the boys try dangerous and very very painful skateboard tricks before being stopped by a racist police officer. There is a big heart on display in Wassup Rockers? that comples me to re-visit Clark's earlier films and re-think them; maybe it's been there all along. Regardless, there is no wya this film should not find an arthouse audience. It is amateur, shot on a film stock that makes the film scream "1980's", but it is a really wonderful, unexpectedly poignant exploration of identity and friendship among these boys. I will be begging someone for this film for my festival, I can tell you that much.

Finally, the day brought me to Tsai Ming-Liang's The Wayward Cloud. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner for the most misunderstood, wonderful movie of the year. How did this film receive such a negative response? I'll be bold enough to say, right now, the world is wrong; The Wayward Cloud is a masterpiece.

Mmmmmelons: Chen Shiang-chyi knows what she wants in Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Clouyd

There must be some sort of prudish conspiracy working its way through critical circles, but just as I suspected, Tsai is the perfect director for this story about unfulfilled desire between a porn actor and the unsuspecting woman who loves him. There is a great deal of graphic sex in the film, but almost all of it (save for the film's devastating climactic scene) is played as slapstick; When Tsai was at the 2003 NYFF with What Time Is It There? he mentioned in his press conference that he would be making a "Buster Keaton-esque comedy", well, this is it. The film is an inversion of The Hole (which detailed a flood in Taipei, The Wayward Cloud deals with a drought), where, instead of desire unleashed by a torrential rain, desire is bottled up (literally) and expressed through some wonderful musical numbers (at which, if you're reading this John Turturro, you should takle a look). While the characters never speak of their desire for one another, they instead harbor it in a wonderfully symbolic way; ripe watermelon becomes the vessel in which desire literally is contained. There are some great visual gags; A crew shooting a porn scene in a shower with no running water, a sex scene with a watermelon that will forever change my idea of that fruit, and the musical pieces are a lot of fun. All of this play and unspoken desire comes to a screeching halt in the final 10 minutes of the film, where the empty, deadening realities of pornography and its impact on intimacy are expressed in as fiendish a scene as you could imagine; Tsai has outdone himself. One would never expect the film's final two shots, and the devastation they impose on the characters is so powerful, and held so long in a post-coital stare down, that I found myself on the verge of tears. If sex is comedy, Tsai has found the perfect tragi-comic balance to make The Wayward Cloud, poignant, powerful and a must-see for all fans. More on this film, and its baffling exclusion from the NYFF, in coming posts.

Off to see Scorsese's Bob Dylan biography, then back to NYC tomorrow. I will post more later, but as my TIFF winds down, I think I have seen greatness a few times, but I will always remember this as the year of The Wayward Cloud.

Yesterday, like every other day here in Toronto, I woke up nice and early and, nursing a mild hangover, made my way down to the Varsity cinemas for a day of screenings. The films were hit and miss, but all had something in common; every movie I saw yesterday dealt with the complications of love and married life. After watching four films in a row that deal with the complex battles constantly being waged in a married relationship, I have to confess that, as an unmarried man, I found myself wiping my brow with relief. If the films at this year's festival have any bearing on the reality of married life, I think we're all in big trouble.

First up was Gentille, a sweet and tender romantic farce starring Emmanuelle Devos (of Kings and Queen fame) as Fontaine, a doctor who is constantly dealing with the coincidences and mistaken identities of her Parisian existence. Director Sophie Filliéres does a nice job of keeping things light, but the film suffers from its reliance on a single joke (the constant use of mistaken names and words gets old after a while) and despite some fun, winning performances, the script's lack of real wit undermines the overall ability to connect with the characters and their search for love. There is a lovely scene in which Michel (Bruno Todeschini) tries to leave an engagment ring for Fontaine, but things go terribly wrong and Fontaine must go to unique measures to recover her ring and finally make a decision about her relationship. Of all of the day's films, this was the lightest of the bunch, and I bet a small domestic release would do just fine among fans of sweet French comedies.

Next up was one of my favorite films in this year's festival, and perhaps the bleakest in terms of its devastatingly real take on the end of a relationship; Nobuhiro Suwa's Un Couple Parfait. The film is a co-production between France and Japan, and Suwa's unflinching, unmoving camera is the perfect compliment for this story of a married couple who, having decided to end things after 15 years, arrive in Paris for a friend's wedding. Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and Bruno Todeschini (in a much grittier performance than in Gentille) are pitch perfect in their painfully honest performances, and the film captures something I have never seen executed so masterfully; I watched as a real relationship dissolved right before my eyes. Most of Un Couple Parfait takes place in a cramped hotel room, and the camera holds steady as the actors walk in and out of the frame, arguing, apologizing, kissing, longing, and regretting every word they speak. The confusion and anger so prevalent at the end of a relationship is the prime dramatic force in the film, and when the final shot arrives, the classic train platform departure scene is stood on its head and completely revolutionized. This is not everyone's cup of tea, but Un Couple Parfait is an outstanding achievement in acting, direction, and the perfection of tone. Unsparing and powerful.

After the knock-out downer of Un Couple Parfait, the haughty melodrama on display in Hur Jin-ho's Wae Chul (April Snow) felt like a step backwards. As one colleague put it, the film is essentially a modern Ozu film, without any of the modulations of character and tone that Ozu delivered. The film centers on two strangers whose spouses are hospitalized when the car in which they were travelling togther crashes. The strangers discover that their spouses were having an affair and they decide to support one another and ultimately fall in love. The film thematically resembles In The Mood For Love, but it is missing the sumptuous visuals of Wong Kar Wai's film. Instead, moody performances capture the grief of betrayal and the desire to forgive a cheating spouse, but the story feels like a color by numbers romance; there is no doubt where the story is headed, but there is little en route to the conclusion that surprises or delivers any thrills.

Crash Into Me: In-su (Bae Yong-joon) and Seoyoung (Son Ye-jin) learn of their spouses' affair in Hur Jin-ho's Wae Chul (April Snow)

Finally, a brisk walk to the Royal Ontario Museum, and it was time for the final film of the day, Doug Block's exceptional 51 Birch Street. Block uses his camera to document his parent's marriage and, after his mother's death and his father's quick re-marriage to a former secretary, to uncover the hidden secerts of his parent's lives. This film should become a huge hit on the festival circuit, because its central question is universal; if you could learn everything about your parents' lives, would you really want to know? Block confronts this issue head-on when, upon his mother's sudden death, he discovers 20 years worth of her highly detailed journals which expose her unhappiness in her marriage to Block's father. The film is structured around the central mystery of the parent-child relationship, of our tendencies to idealize out parents, and Block's editing ends up making the film play almost like perfect fiction; by the time the movie has ended, our alliegances to the characters, our understanding of own desires, our opinion of Block himself have all shifted significantly. This is wonderful non-fiction storytelling and just what I was hoping for from the film.

After watching all of these married couples struggle, it was off to help host the Sarasota Film Festival party at Sassafraz. The party was a big hit, with lots of friends and colleagues stopping by to talk shop, try some food, and sip some Absenthe, our party's sponsor. Kudos to JS for making the event into a special night (as always)! It was off to bed at 2:30am, and up at 8:00 for films by François Ozon, Jim McKay, Takashi Miike, and John Turturro, but more on those later. The bed is beckoning me... Must... sleep...

What a couple of days. As the weekend turned into a new week, the crowds at the Press screenings have grown and grown to the point where the lines have stretched and beyond the concession stands, into the utility hallways and back outside the theater for today's screenings of Mary Harron'sThe Notorious Bettie Page and Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies*. That said, despite the throngs of increasingly pushy press folk, most of the films I have seen have failed to live up to my hopeful expectations. Tonight, head down and somewhat depressed for having worked my way through so many films, I made my way to the Cumberland Theater. And then, it happened. Finally, after days of so-so screenings, a film to talk about; Michael Cuesta's outstanding tragi-comedy Twelve And Holding.

The film is an extension of his powerful work in L.I.E. and is made with a mastery of tone that had me laughing, cringing and ultimately, profoundly moved. I don't want to give too much away, but the film revolves around the tragic death of a child, and the impact that death has on his friends, family, and his twin brother. Like L.I.E., Twelve and Holding deals with children in precariously adult situations for which they do not have the social and emotional experience required to succeed. And so, we know that our early laughs at the kid's awkward attempts at 'embracing life' and attempts to deal with their losses and new hopes will pay off with uncomfortable emotions later on, but that doesn't keep Cuesta from completely earning big laughs and big cringes. The most wonderful part of the film is that these emotional responses feel legitimate and real; the kid's actions feel earned. Earned emotions in story, performances, and direction have been in extremely short supply at this year's festival, so watching Cuesta's film was doubly satisfying because it scratched an itch that I have been feeling for days; a satisfying fiction film experience. I hope someone picks this film up very soon. I am not sure how it could be marketed, but it should be seen by a wider audience. This is one I would love to bring to the festival. I hope the timing works.

Tomorrow is the SFF party, and I am hoping that we have a good turn out. In the meantime, my schedule is packed; I have scheduled 4 films before 6:00pm...

Gentille (excited to see Emmanuelle Devos!)

Un Couple Parfait (and excited to see Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi!)

Wae Chul (April Snow)

51 Birch Street

Let's keep it rollin'....

* How did Where The Truth Lies earn an NC-17? Outrageous! The film is interesting despite some casting issues, but it is by no means an NC-17 film. Shame (again) on the MPAA. The system is broken and must be fixed!!!

Well, as I mentioned before, my goal at this year's TIFF is to uncover the gems that might not otherwise be seen in American movie theaters, films I can get behind and hopefully program for my own festival in late March and early April. Well, I have stuck to my guns. Despite numerous temptations to stray from my mission to a) skip any film that I know will be coming out before 2006 and b) avoid the big, undistributed indies that I will be seeing at the NYFF in a couple of weeks, I have held true to my mission. Instead of screenings of Oliver Twist, A History of Violence, Corpse Bride and Brokeback Mountain (all of which will be opening before Christmas), I have spent the first three days of the festival visiting other films that may have travelled under the radar. Today, however, I hit a wall. While bypassing some of the big fish to see the little ones, I have found hardly anything that I found moving or compelling as material for programming.

Sure, yesterday there was the modestly charming Marock, which plays like a cross between an Muslim vs Jew version of Romeo and Juliet, a euro-trash version of Rebel Without A Cause and an episode of Casablanca 90210. Nothing I haven't seen elsewhere, but it had its moments. Then there was today's douple dip of French vanilla; Douches Froides, which will enlighten audiences not aware of the homoerotic undertones found in the sport of judo, and the mind-bogglingly problematic L'Annulaire about which, despite amazing photography, the less said, the better. The day's most troubling film was the highly-anticipated Entre ses mains which hovered perilously between a serial killer farce and a serious thriller. Casting Benoît Poelvoorde as the suspiciously creepy stalker didn't help matters; it's hard enough to forget his amazing performance in the classic Man Bites Dog without the director dangling his face as another potential murderer. The casting became too loaded, and the (in)actions of the film's heroine were so absurd that by the time the plot was resolved, the tension had been broken by the sharp pangs of improbability. Unfortunately, despite some very strong performances and polished filmmaking, the story and direction fail to find the proper tone and the film fails to satisfy.

Only one film has really captivated me so far; Philip Groening's Into Great Silence, a three hour exploration of the rituals of daily life at the Grande Chartreuse monastery near Grenoble, France. The monks have taken an oath of silence, so needless to say (no pun intended) there is very little dialogue in the film. Instead, the sounds of monastic living abound; bells tolling, floorboards creaking, prayers being chanted, and fires crackling in tiny aluminum stoves. The film succeeds beautifully in capturing the rhythm and repetition of the monks' days while never attempting to delve into psychology. We never know why any monk has chosen the monastic life, what his opinions about religious life are, how the monks feel about one another outside their own individual prayers and duties. Instead, we simply move in their midst, and Groening's camera is well suited to the task, oscillating between bright light and haunting darkness, close ups of faces and medium shots of activity, and beautiful long takes of the monastery's exteriors and deeply focused interiors.

Groening captures the rhythm of routine by following its patterns in the film's editing, and after an initial hour of struggle with the absolute quiet on screen, I found myself completely absorbed in my own thoughts; analyzing my relationship to the images, to the discipline of the lifestyle, to the issues of religious devotion. You could hear every sound in the theater and I don't think I am exaggerating by saying that the movie theater became an extension of the monastic space; every rustling of a candy wrapper, a cough, the air conditioner turning itself off and on, conversation in the projection booth; the world of the theater literally shared physical space with the projected monastery. Bazin might have wept.

The truth is, I didn't want any dialogue. Here was a film that gives the viewer complete freedom to engage the images and create meaning for one's self by allowing space and time for thinking. But there are moments of dialogue; the monks pray and chant, and on Sundays they are allowed a communal meal after which they stroll together outside the monastery's walls. This allows for two of the film's best moments; when the monks finally do talk, they choose to discuss the relative value of hand washing. In another sojurn, we see a group of monks sledding down an Alpine mountainside in a glorious long shot.

Do Trappists wash their hands?: Monks finally get to gossip in Philip Groening's Into Great Silence

I found the film to be a wonderful comfort from other non-fiction films that try so hard to force a narrative together and approximate real life experience, and blessed relief from most of the films I have seen so far at TIFF. After experiencing Into Great Silence, a film that makes Diary of a Country Priest seem as kinetic as Kill Bill vol. 1, a calm descended over me as did a jealous urge to slow down my own life, discipline myself to appreciate silent concentration, and a longing for my own rituals back home. After a couple of days of mediocre stories, who would have thought that the perfect remedy would be no story at all?

Long day today. Very early to the airport only to have the flight delayed. Nice to see friends at the airport; it always makes the delays go more quickly. Arrived in Toronto and, passport in hand, breezed through customs and into Canada. A very quick cab ride into the city with friends, express check-in at my hotel, and I was off to TIFF Registration which took all of 35 seconds. Amazing! The most well-organized and efficient registration I have ever experienced. As a frequent festival attendee (and worker), it was a marvel. If everything in Canada is this smooth (universal healthcare, anyone?), well, sign me up.

Off to the Press and Industry Screenings, and I was just in time for a personally anticipated screening of The Brothers' Quay The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes, which, for me anyway, failed to deliver on the promise their legendary animated shorts. The film uses classic Quay techniques, but the story and especially the acting are so off-key and portentous that the film suffocates immediately under their weight. The Quays may be better served hand-crafting their wondrous animated devices and models (which play heavily in the film's visuals) than trying to sculpt performances from a wooden cast, script, and story.

Having some unexpected time on my hands, I was able to catch the beginning of another highly anticipated American independent film, only to have the print (digital tape... not quite there yet...) have a terrible sound problem which forced the screening to stop for a few blessed minutes, allowing me a moment to slip away before having to endure any more. I got word later that TIFF was sent a rough cut and the actual print arrived after the technical fiasco, much to the dismay of the film's producer. I can't imagine the film being bearable in any form, but the editing room is a magical place. I won't be giving another look here, however. And so, after a wonderful trip, my workday was suddenly a disaster. 0 for 2, I walked to the Royal Ontario Museum for a screening of a film I had been dying to see since I read about it during Cannes; Carlos Reygadas' Battle In Heaven.

The Naked Truth: Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz) gets some rest in Carlos Reygadas' Battle In Heaven

Full confession: In 1988, a junior in High School, I joined some classmates for a group trip to Mexico City to participate in an exchange program with the American High School there. Students from their school came and visited us in Flint, MI for a week and we returned the favor in Mexico City. Of course, despite the fact that I was living in a rust belt disaster of a city, I had assumed that the Mexican students would be impressed with America. It turned out that the American High School was a private institution, catering to Mexico City's elite. Not only had they been to America, they were used to places like Aspen and Los Angeles. Trust me, I was more shocked by their wealth and privilege than they ever could be my little town. When we arrived in Mexico, I went to my host family's house in a Volkswagen driven by an armed chauffeur. We were followed everywhere we went by bodyguards and security personnel, carrying walkie-talkies and giving us the illusion of an unsupervised good time; in reality, we were allowed to do whatever we wanted, but we were always under their watchful eye. I later discovered that my host's father was the CEO of AeroMexico who, at the time, had scandalized the nation, accused of stealing millions from the national airline. Or maybe it was all a silly High School rumour. Regardless, we were given a very special insight into Mexico City from a perch high in the suburban hills.

Fast forward to tonight; again, traveling abroad, but this time seeing Mexico City from afar. I have never been back, but watching Battle In Heaven, the images of a nation divided by class and privilege, characters of tremendous wealth living above the law, I remembered so many moments from my own, albeit brief, experience. The film scandalized critics and audiences at Cannes for its depictions oral sex so explicit they would make Chlöe Sevigny blush, but the film's graphic sex is nothing more than allegory; the perfect battlefield for simple, brutal, devastating class warfare. Battle In Heaven revolves around two characters; Marcos (Marcos Hernández), the chauffeur and security guard for an unnamed Mexican general, and Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), the general's privileged daughter who dabbles in prostitution just for kicks. The film's opening shot lays it all, and I mean all, bare; As Ana services Marcos, his sexual power, the machismo of the impoverished and unattractive male, is clearly the battleground in question. Marcos' class status has emasculated him and filled him with shame; after confessing to Ana of his role in a crime in which he and his wife committed, Ana demands he turn himself in to the authorities. Despite his illusion of sexual mastery over the beautiful young girl (Reygadas' sexual palette is removed of any real intimacy, a pure power struggle), Marcos remains Ana's subordinate. Marcos discovers his power in the most terrible of ways, and in a scene of stunning realism, commits another terrible crime before seeking redemption on a religious pilgrimage.

The film is difficult going, but it has moments of outrageous humor and an amazing tracking shot during Ana and Marcos' lovemaking that levels sexual intimacy with the most quotidian of human activity. It is clear that Reygadas is making a very valid point about class and about sex; that audiences would be outraged watching oral sex and lovemaking between an overweight couple is nowhere near his point. The real battle in heaven is between the haves and the have-nots, between the sexual privilege of the beautiful over that of the everyman, and the struggle inside a single workingman between his desire for sexual power and potency (a wonderful scene involving a soccer match and masturbation makes the point quite nicely) and his impotent political reality. The film is a fiercely intelligent, completely non-commercial look at the brutal underpinnings of class and gender expectations in a nation that cannot deliver a true sense of empowerment without obscene privilege. Kudos to Tartan Films for having the courage to bring this film to audiences outside the festival circuit.

Tomorrow, a full day of screenings and I need some sleep...

Tomorrow morning, I catch an Air Canada flight from LaGuardia to Toronto. The bags are packed, the films schedule has been lightly circled in pencil, and I am ready for the big show. I plan on daily updates from the festival, so check back often.

In the meantime, the Industry Screening Schedule is up and running and, not surprisingly, conflicts abound. Tomorrow, I am planning on checking into my hotel, picking up my registration, and rushing off to see The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes at 3:15, then Battle in Heaven at 6:00, since L'Enfer is playing on Sunday. Oh, the dilemmas!

More soon and wish me safe travels!

The 8th Annual Sarasota Film Festival
March 31st- April 9th, 2006
Expose Your Film To The Sun

The Sarasota Film Festival, presented by Regal Cinemas and Mereceds Benz of Sarasota, is seeking submissions for the 8th Annual Film Festival, March 31st-April 9th, 2006. Applicants may submit films for consideration in five (5) categories: Narrative Feature, Documentary Feature, World Cinema, Independent Visions, and Short Film. Early Submissions will be accepted from September 7, 2005- January 9, 2006. Late Submissions will be accepted from January 10- February 6, 2006.

For more information, please visit our website!

This weekend is Labor Day weekend, and for many Americans, it is an annual ritual marking the end of the summer; a last chance to wear white, fire up the ol' grill, spend time in the sun, watch Jerry Lewis' annual telethon, and enjoy an extra day off from work with friends and family. But like much of American history, the origins of the holiday are generally misunderstood by the public as just another day off. Labor Day is actually the result of political action.

In 1884, a newly organized U.S. labor movement began demanding an eight-hour workday. When business and the government refused to relent, a general strike began on May 1, 1886 across the U.S. The strike was brutal, especially in Chicago, where workers faced some of the worst working conditions. On May 4, in Chicago's Haymarket Square, workers gathered to protest the violent retaliation of police against the strikers, the police showed up again and someone threw a bomb at them, killing 8 policemen. A riot ensued, and the subsequent crackdown pressed labor's cause forward, ultimately winning the eight-hour workday. In commemoration of the general strike and labor's victory, nations around the world adopted May 1st as International Workers Day. Why did President Cleveland forego May 1st? Cleveland, not wanting to be seen as capitulating to labor's victory, but hoping to avoid the conflict of not honoring American laborers, instead selected the first Monday in September, aligning the national celebration with the Knights of Labor's annual parade in New York City. The move distanced the celebration from commemorating the general strike of 1886. And so, while the rest of the world's workers point to the success of the American general strike of May 1, 1886 as International Worker's Day, Americans now end their summer on what is essentially a federal holiday that has lost its meaning.

When Unions Mattered: An Old Union Rally Poster

Long time readers of The Back Row Manifesto know that I was raised in Flint, MI, which has its own special place in U.S. Labor history. Although the city always had an annual Labor Day celebration and parade, my understanding of what Labor Day means didn't really come until college. Since that time, and having myself been a worker in all kinds of employment situations, I have watched American labor become essentially neutered as union politics have failed miserably, corporations have effectively kept organized labor out of the workplace, and the political concerns of the working man have been co-opted by the moralizing of the right who preach the gospel of deregulation and quality of life while stripping working people of the rights that were so hard won all those years ago. Organized labor has been its own worst enemy, imposing arcane contracts and policies on companies that work in 21st century models, losing tons of local battles, fighting internal corruption, and alienating itself from the real concerns of its membership base. At the same time, as labor has stumbled, the political landscape has changed substantially, to the point where talking about worker's concerns sounds strange; it has literally been removed from the lexicon of public discussion. Meanwhile, the only national holiday meant to celebrate American labor has become just another day in the sun.

I don't want to get too heavy handed about the topic (this is a film blog after all), so in honor of Labor Day, The Back Row Manifesto remembers the fight for worker's rights and the impact those changes have had on our lives with a list of Labor Day films that remind us of what this holiday is all about. Enjoy!