Capitalism: A Love Story begins with a brilliantly edited montage equating our current state of despair with the fall of ancient Rome. This leads into a typically Michael Moorean voiceover pondering what our civilization will be remembered for centuries after our demise: funny cat videos, or the forced evictions resulting from the mortgage crisis? The actual answer is probably either “both” or “neither,” but the question is a rhetorical device. Capitalism: A Love Story is primarily an examination of how the country’s romance with free markets spectacularly soured, and secondarily an ode to the ways in which the masses have made their heartbreak visible, including viral video. Moore wisely spends less time intervening into the action here than he did in Sicko, often letting public eruptions of frustration speak for themselves.
At film festivals, you usually have to make a choice between seeing about a quarter of the program and writing about everything you see, or seeing as much as you can and writing about very little of it. I usually opt for the former strategy, but at this year’s TIFF, I decided to switch it up. Tired of feeling like I miss all the good films at a given festival because I’m off seeing the important ones, I made it a point to spend my six days in Toronto seeing far more films than I could possibly write about within the temporal confines of the festival. As a result, I wrote about very little within the temporal confines of the festival. Whoops.
So, instead of rushing out a bunch of crap content just to do it, here’s a brief accounting of everything I did see, with links to things I did write about, and lazy letter grades for all! I’ll revisit a number of these films — including The Road, Hipsters, A Serious Man and Videocracy, when I have more time to do them justice.
Note: I’ve seen about 20 films that I have not yet found time to write about, so welcome to the first in a series of very brief writeups. Some things may be worth revisiting, and if so I’ll do so if and when they get a US release.
A nuclear bomb is dropped on Tokyo, killing 90,000; a new virus is causing previously healthy people to first foam from the mouth, and then within minutes drop dead; European coastal cities are evacuated once the water turns a toxic shade of neon yellow. What’s happening, and why? Robinson (Matthieu Amalric) doesn’t seem to know or really care — he’s just got to find the Spanish sex club hostess who seduced him, destroyed his marriage, cost him his right arm and then left him alone and devastated, first in France, then in Taiwan, and finally in Canada, and each time with zero explanation. Before the world ends, he has to know whether Laetitia (“Call me Lae,” she winks) is alive or dead.
Arnaud and Jean Marie Larrieu’s overlong but seductive apocalypse epic (the English title is Happy End, which lends itself to an ironic reading in a way the French title does not) skips sci-fi procedural to langorously explore Robinson’s last days on Earth. As the globe implodes all around him, Robinson travels, mostly on foot, from Biarritz to Saragossa to Toulouse. Along the way he uses his remaining hand to scratch out reminiscences of his life under the influence of Lae, and half-heartedly succumbs to temptations and obligations from his ex-wife and a host of old friends and acquaintences. At first blush, the structuring metaphor is a little too easy — he barely notices that the world is ending because his world ended the last time Lae left ––but there’s something about this ode to solipsism and the forms it takes in the face of global tragedy (panic sex, lots of booze, suicide) that I can’t shake. “We fuck so much when things are bad,” muses one of the women Robinson econounters on his travels. The film is heartbreakingly honest about the hell of having to absorb the pain of something unexplainable, and the impulse to combat death by trying to fix the relationships that didn’t work in life.
Werner Herzog’s emphatic declarations that he’s never seen Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant finally seem credible. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans plays as nothing if not a work-for-hire project, with Herzog approaching a story and cultural lineage to which he obviously has no innate connection, and imprinting his own flourishes and concerns . What makes the film an undeniable blast is that Herzog’s ongoing obsession with man’s inherent animal instinct meets its ideal expression in Nicolas Cage, an actor for whom hysteria is autopilot, who here finally finds justification for his odd hybrid of wide eyes and monotone. Whether they know they’re doing it or not, the actor and director laugh in the face of the earnest spiritual confusion that’s ultimately the Ferrara film’s raison d’etre, conjuring a powerfully loony portrait of American rot.
I should note that on my actual third day in Toronto, I saw two films that I’m not going to be able to write about on just one viewing: The Road and A Serious Man. If you follow my Twitter updates, you’ll know that I was blown away by the former and don’t know what to make of the latter. I know better than to try to waste words on first-blush reactions like that. I plan to catch up with both before their theatrical releases and will report back then.
So let’s skip straight to Sunday’s screenings. As mentioned previously, the “accidental” double feature is not an unusual phenomenon at TIFF, but I still didn’t wake up this morning expecting to see two one-note comedies about the odd symbiotic relationship between wealth accumulation, fabrication and faith. An even more surprising commonality between Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and The Invention of Lying starring/co-written and directed by Ricky Gervais, is that both feel in a way like huge-scale home movies. They tackle grand concepts from an ironic remove, and yet still leave the impression that their most important statements are about their makers.
Before I go forth with reports from my first 19 hours in Toronto — over the course of which I’ve seen three films, attended one party where waitresses were literally physically branded with the name of the skincare conglomerate sponsor, spent a morning at the Canadian Broadcast Center doing a radio segment about the festival (listen online here) and finally figured out how the Toronto subway system works — I should note that my internet access up here is not constant and my writing time is minimal, so blog posts may be irregular. Check out my Twitter feed for short updates; I should have my first longer dispatch up on the blog this afternoon.
Film blogs are sure to be a buzz-influencing force at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which opens tonight and runs through the 19th. And they better be, especially after the apparent runaround bloggers — including Spout’s own Karina Longworth — were getting from the TIFF press office last month regarding credentials. Alex Billington of FirstShowing even arrived in T.O. only to find that the festival had still not decided if he should be given a badge (he was eventually granted credentials).
Anyway, Karina will be reporting through the fest’s run, but I want to first share what some other bloggers are writing as the fest begins. Check it all out after the jump:
Peter Knegt points to 45 seconds of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which debuts at TIFF this week and then comes to NYFF in about a month. It’s sort of a trailer, and it’s everything you could hope for from a teaser for a shot-on-circa-80s-VHS portrait of Korinean freaks at play. That green analog noise fadeout at the end is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen … well, today, at least.
indieWIRE has news of dozens additions to the lineup for the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Most interesting to me: the world premiere of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime (guess that rumor that it had been retitled Forgiveness was bunk) and Hipsters, the Russian musical whose Cannes market guide summary famously promised to “never leave the audience indifferent.” Oh, and they’re also showing movies that people think are legitimately good, like A Prophet and An Education. More at the link.
In more Toronto lineup news, indieWIRE has posted TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers’ selections for this year’s festival. Highlights:
Emmett Malloy’s The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights will mark Jack White’s return to the festival as the star of a nonfiction film, after last year’s It Might Get Loud.
In Collapse, American Movie director Chris Smith follows “radical thinker Michael Ruppert” and “explores his apocalyptic vision of the future.”
Bassidji tracks director Mehran Tamadon’s three-year immersion “into the very heart of the most extremist supporters of the Islamic republic of Iran (the Bassidjis) to understand their ideas.”
In Videocracy, Erik Gandini examines the business and political interests of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlosconi, to show “how his reality TV shows full of bikini-clad women enriched his friends and beguiled a nation.”
Straight from Cannes, L’Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot follows archivist Serge Bromberg’s discovery of an unfinished film by the director of Wages of Fear.
How to Fold a Flag, from Gunnar Palace directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, tracks “U.S. soldiers as they create new lives post-Iraq—from a Congressional candidate in Buffalo to a cage fighter in Louisiana—set against the backdrop of the 2008 election.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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