Movies I have liked so far in 2011
Since I no longer work for a Montreal weekly, I have the luxury to list films that haven’t opened here yet; this is just a list of new films I have seen this year, either here or at festivals elsewhere, and liked. In alphabetical order:
Attack the Block - Joe Cornish
Beyond the Black Rainbow - Panos Cosmatos
Book chon bang hyang (The Day He Arrives) - Hong Sang-soo (I used the Korean title because I really don’t like the English one)
Drive - Nicolas Winding Refn
Fright Night - Craig Gillespie
Hanna - Joe Wright
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2 - David Yates
Melancholia - Lars von Trier
Midnight in Paris - Woody Allen
Oslo, August 31 - Joachim Trier
Tree of Life - Terrence Malick (at least one solid hour of it)
Thor - Kenneth Branagh
TrollHunter - André Øverdal
Your Sister’s Sister - Lynne Shelton
X-Men: First Class - Matthew Vaughn
• 22 September 2011 • 2 notes
For the Talent Lab programme I participated in at TIFF this year, we were asked to create a video “self-portrait,” running less than five minutes and shot on a cell phone. I enlisted my friend Dan Buller to help me. Here it is.
• 20 September 2011 • 6 notes
It’s the “scary” Sorry, Rabbi trailer! (With apologies to Alexandre Desplat and Roman Polanski.)
• 3 September 2011 • 2 notes
Check it out! It’s the official poster for Sorry, Rabbi, designed and illustrated by the brilliant Matthew Forsythe.
This seems as good a time as any to announce our TIFF dates, and that we will also be showing at the Atlantic Film Festival!
TIFF screenings:
Short Cuts Canada 2
Sunday, Sept. 11, 8:45pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox
Monday, Sept. 12, 5pm, Jackman Hall - AGO
AFF screening:
Shorts 5
Thursday, Sept. 22, 9:25pm, Park Lane - Theatre 7
• 31 August 2011
World premiere
So, it’s offish: Sorry, Rabbi will be making its world premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. I will also be doing some other stuff there. Excited!
• 11 August 2011 • 1 note
Bringing back the motherlode: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring, Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow is making the “genre” festival rounds—Fantasia, Fantastic Fest, others— where it’s been met with either adulation or confusion. The latter because, I think, Black Rainbow doesn’t fit comfortably in the genre mould, despite the fact that it’s indisputably informed by decades of sci-fi cinema—most specifically the florid fantastical offerings of the 1970s and ‘80s, to which it makes explicit, frequent homage.
In that sense, the film is sci-fi through and through, but at the same time it’s an unabashed art film: slow, challenging, even austere. This isn’t the supposedly grown-ass-man science fiction of Moon or Monsters. It’s something more ambitious, less welcoming, but much more rewarding.
Sculpted from deeply saturated blacks, reds and blues, it’s a film you submerge yourself into like an isolation tank of the kind you might find in the institute where the film mostly take place. Set in a very specific 1983—the VHS 1983 of Brainstorm, The Dead Zone and, of course, Videodrome—Beyond the Black Rainbow slowly, deliberately unspools the story of a frightened young girl (Eva Allan) under observation in the mostly empty Arboria Institute (“Serenity Through Technology”), overseen by the troubled, fascinatingly coiffured Barry Niles (Michael Rogers). Niles’ motives are obscure, his actions and reactions cryptic. Cosmatos lets us space out on the meticulously art-directed Arboria’s tense surroundings, playing scenes out with calculated, even frustrating patience, all wrapped in a period-perfect analog synth score by Jeremy Schmidt (Sinoia Caves, Black Mountain).
And just when its pace feels like it’s about to grate, just when you start to think that Cosmatos is not being so much oblique as stingy with the narrative, the film changes spectacularly, with a truly remarkable, sublimely creepy psychedelic flashback sequence that at once tells you everything you need to know about the first half of the movie and prepares you for the rest. It’s been a while since I’ve seen something so startlingly strange and evocative; I don’t want to say much more about this sequence except that it has been stuck in my imagination for days since I saw it.
And here’s where I’m duty-bound to admit that I know Panos, that we’ve had an intermittent friendship of telephone calls, movie chats and occasional hangs since I first met him at a friend’s apartment sometime in the early 2000s. So take all of this with a big grain of salt if you must—though I spent 10 years as a film critic and I’m pretty sure I know when to trust my gut. Beyond the Black Rainbow is, in my opinion, one of the most refreshingly imaginative and accomplished sci-fi films I’ve seen in years, and certainly one of the most exciting Canadian films in a long, long time. Magnet and Mongrel have picked it up for distribution in the U.S. and Canada, respectively; I hope you get a chance to see it soon.
• 8 August 2011 • 3 notes
Last week I shot a short film I’d been working on for some years now (if you count writing), called Sorry, Rabbi. It was kind of a big deal for me. Here’s some pictures from the shoot.
(Standing, l-r: Adam Waito, Sean Michaels, Noah Markowicz, Etan Muskat, Douglas Hollingworth, Dan Beirne. Seated, l-r: Jacob Tierney, Howard Bilerman.) Photo by Dan Haber.
Co-star Jessica Paré and DOP Bobby Shore. Photo by Andi State.
The Hasids with costume/wardrobe designer Jenna Wright. Photo by Darren Curtis.
Art director Veronica Classen, Sean, me, 1st AD Boji Albany and Jenna on the monitor. Photo by Maya Fuhr.
Producer John Christou, me, Jess and Jacob. Photo by Andi State.
Slate. Photo by Maya Fuhr.
• 27 June 2011 • 6 notes
photo by Daniel Haber
Wrapped on my movie Sorry, Rabbi last night!
More pics to come soon.
• 22 June 2011 • 4 notes
