On Wednesday the 17th, the music portion of this year’s North By Northeast Festival began, which for many years was the full extent of the festival, but since has come a long way. It has not only grown in size and quality but in scope as well. A few years ago the festival added a film component that has remainined very music focused in its programing. However, it has recently broadened its scope slowly to include more peripherally music-related fare like Sook-Yin Lee’s Year of the Carnivore, which is making its umpteenth Toronto film festival appearance.

This year also marks another expansion of the festival’s mandate with the premiere of its first interactive media conference, NXNEi. The conference kicked off the festival ahead of both the film and music schedules on Monday the 14th, though unlike the other two components which are far-reaching, it was restricted entirely to the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

NXNEi can safely be called a success and seemingly much-needed, considering it sold out, despite a limited mainstream media push, and included web luminaries such as the creative and audacious Ze Frank. With NXNEi, the festival in general took another step towards perhaps one day matching its venerable sister festival, South By Southwest, which has become unmissable both for indie music and new media followers.

This year, NXNE’s music lineup features 650 bands over five days and 50 venues with an increasingly kick-ass and extensive free lineup at Yonge and Dundas Square which includes not only The Raveonettes (8 pm on Sat. 19th),  Iggy and the Stooges (9:30 pm on Sat. 19th), and De La Soul (9 pm on Sun. 20th) but also 21 other great bands over four days (Thurs. 18th – Sun. 20th). In addition, there will be free shows all over the city from Union Station to Bellevue Park in Kensington with less established (and unspecified on the website at least) bands throughout the day. Single showcase tickets are available at the door of the venues, and the other two ticket options are 5 day festival ($50) or 1 day festival ($25) wristbands.

Check out some media show recommendations for further intel.

• Now Magazine
• Eye Weekly
• Torontoist
• blogTO

Up is one of the best films of 2009, having the perfect balance of humour, romance, and adventure: an instant classic. I am a reluctant watcher of animated films; I loved Toy Story and Finding Nemo, but am part of a minority that did not like Wall-E, so the fact that I loved Up so much is a testament to its pure and wonderful movie magic. After losing his lifelong partner and wife, Carl Frederickson (voiced by Ed Asner) decides to attach thousands of helium balloons to his house to achieve his and his wife’s lifelong dream of visiting Paradise Falls in South America and seek adventure. But the diligent Wilderness Explorer, Russell, unexpectedly goes with him, having camped out on Carl’s porch the night before in an attempt to catch a “snipe” and earn his “assisting the elderly badge”.

Up bears great resemblance to its predecessors – it’s no surprise that its writers were also on the writing team of the aforementioned films – but the writing in Up is much much richer; it is a masterpiece in “showing” the story rather than just “telling” it. There is a brilliant and touching montage at the beginning of the film as we watch Carl and his wife Ellie meet as children, get married, and build a life together. There is no dialogue but we watch as they fix up their new house, we watch as they save money for Paradise Falls, but inevitably have to use those savings to pay for various emergencies – a broken tire, medical bills, and a leaky roof – delaying the achievement of their dream. We also watch the rituals that they build together: picnicking and watching the clouds, and reading together in their chairs while holding hands. We see their love, their disappointments, their hardships, and their happiness. And I cannot watch this montage without weeping like a baby, because it is so sweet, so well-observed. We do not need to be told their hopes and dreams, we watch them and see the hope in their faces. Amazingly, the rest of the movie is as good as this first sequence. (more…)

Micmacs, or orignally Micmas à tire-largiot, is a French film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the man who directed Amélie. Now, I’m sure some of you are asking, “How on earth will this ever escape the shadow cast by the ever so amazing Amélie?” Well, all I can say is that, even to all the die-hard Amélie lovers out there, Micmacs will not disappoint. (more…)

The Parking Lot Movie (D: Meghan Eckman; USA)

It would seem strange that anyone would want to see a documentary about a parking lot, but director Meghan Eckman has been able to craft in The Parking Lot Movie an interesting, funny, and revealing film. It is not so much about the physical space of the parking lot, but the people, culture, and life revelations and lessons that can be gained from minimum wage labour at a very peculiar parking lot in Charlottesville, named the Corner Parking Lot. (more…)

Hot Docs Audience Top Ten

1. THUNDER SOUL (D: Mark Landsman; USA)A DRUMMER’S DREAM (D: John Walker; Canada)
2. A DRUMMER’S DREAM (D: John Walker; Canada)
3. MY LIFE WITH CARLOS (D: German Berger; Chile, Spain, Germany)
4. AUTUMN GOLD (D: Jan Tenhaven; Austria, Germany)
5. LEAVE THEM LAUGHING (D: John Zaritsky; Canada, USA)
6. RUSH: BEYOND THE LIGHTED STAGE (D: Scot McFadyen, Sam Dunn; Canada)
7. LISTEN TO THIS (D: Juan Baquero; Canada)
8. A SMALL ACT (D: Jennifer Arnold; USA)
9. WASTE LAND (D: Lucy Walker; UK, Brazil)
10. MARWENCOL (D: Jeff Malmberg; USA)

Hot Docs Recap 1

The 17th Annual Hot Docs Festival wrapped up on Sunday, May the 9th with the highest attendance ever with approximately 136,000 attendees, 170 plus of worthy and intriguing films, and the often revealing film festival advantage of Q & A sessions by the directors and producers of many of the films. We at blogUT tried valiantly to see a wide variety of films using previews, synopsis diving, and random serendipity to discover the best of the best, but have somehow missed the most well loved highlights of the festival (as judged by the Hot Docs 2010 audience award). This is, however, no slight against the consistently fantastic films we did manage to see. Out of the 10 most loved films by the audience, we managed to see just one, the fantastic Marwencol, an inspiring story of a hate crime victim who creates an eponymous 1/16th scale model Belgian town circa WWII and filled it with complex story lines in order to help resolve his anger and fear from a near death inducing beating. We also somehow managed to miss all of the films that won awards (again with the exception of Marwencol that won the HBO sponsored Emerging Artist Award). Most sadly, we missed the internationally critically acclaimed and massively sold out  A Film Unfinished, a daring deconstruction of an unfinished Nazi propaganda film that depicted the Jewish ghettos as happy and quaint residential communities, which won the festival’s top prize of Best International Feature. Other major award winners we did not see were The Oath, a character study of a once bodyguard and driver to Bin Laden, which won the Special Jury Prize for international feature, and In the Name of the Family, an exploration of honour killings of girls in North America that was named Best Canadian Feature.

So what did we managed to see? Over the eleven days of the festival we caught 9 films and it is a testament to the quality of the festival that despite all but one not being audience favourites or award winners they were all thought provoking, emotionally poignant, often funny and insightful, and powerful. As such, in the next few posts blogUT will review and dissect the slight portion of the 2010 edition of Hot Docs that we were lucky enough to experience. Today we start off after the jump with Marwencol and Talhotblond. (more…)

Nicholas Philibert’s Nénette is a 70-minute film in which we constantly observe 40-year-old orangutan, Nénette, and her two orangutan companions, through the glass, in her captive habitat at a Paris zoo. Orangutans live to 30-35 years in the wild, so Nénette is quite old, but Philibert has us questioning, throughout the movie, if those extra years were worth the price of captivity.

Philibert puts us in the place of a visitor to the zoo, constantly gazing at but never interacting with Nénette through the glass. Nénette, for the most part, provides little entertainment, sitting still with a world-wearied expression on her face. Philibert fills the soundtrack with voiceovers of zoo visitors talking about Nénette, watching Nénette, pondering Nénette’s thoughts, and sometimes making absurd assumptions. At seventy minutes, the film feels rather long. We are desperate to see Nénette do something -anything – and in the absence of action, we make up a story about how Nénette must be feeling and thinking, just as the zoo visitors do.

Orangutans share many anatomical similarities to humans such as the hairless face and sunken eyes. But they also have a large lump below the neck; many visitors were fascinated by Nénette’s lump, which is not a breast, but is not comparable to any other part of human anatomy. Visitors gawk at the lump, as do we. The lump’s purpose is not explained until very near the end: it stores a large amount of air, which when appropriately compressed, allows orangutans to let out a very loud noise which can be heard from miles away, to warn other orangutans of danger.

We never hear Nénette make this loud cry; in captivity, she has no need to use it, the zookeeper reminds us. We learn that Nénette has had three mates, and has borne four babies, one of which still resides with her. A few years ago, when Nénette lost her third mate, the zookeepers decided to give her a break and not find her another mate; they keep her son with her for company. However, because they are uncertain of whether incest is forbidden in orangutan society, Nénette is on the birth control pill, which is slipped into her yogurt each day. They want to ensure there is no chance that Nénette will be impregnated by her son and they have no way to tell if she is yet menopausal: menstruation leaves no traces of blood in orangutans, we are told. (more…)

What: Kings of Pastry
When: Friday, May 7th @ 11AM
Where: The ROM theatre
How: The film is sold out for the screening so you’ll need to show up AT LEAST 1 hour early and stand in the rush line. It’s during the day so it’ll be free for students if you can get in. HotDocs keeps a set of tickets for press (like me), so once these are unclaimed (15 minutes before the film) they’ll start to let the Rush line in — bring something to sit on and to read!

Every year, HotDocs selects a few documentary gems, which later become great successes (like Helvetica from 2007) and seeing them at HotDocs before they are known is always a pleasure. The trick, however, is finding these films beneath the large mass of films by neophyte directors with inchoate ideas and the ridiculous notion that documentary filmmaking is merely the art of pointing a camera at anything “real”.

So far, I’ve seen two big winners at this year’s festival: Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s Kings of Pastry and the great Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything is Going Fine. Kings of Pastry plays again this Friday at 11AM at the ROM: it is RUSH only so show up early (no later than an hour in advance if you want to make sure you get into the movie) but it is worth the wait.

Kings of Pastry is about a group of sixteen chefs who are finalists for the MOF (Meilleurs Ouvriers de France) competition, a French competition for pastry chefs to show their cooking prowess and earn the very prestigious striped collar. Kings of Pastry focuses on three chefs: we watch them prepare for the competition, revise their pastry inventions, and finally participate in the competition.

The process by which these chefs craft pastries is utterly fascinating: a feat of structural engineering. A delicious dessert is a prerequisite for success but by no means a guarantee; presentation is equally important. One of the challenges of the MOF competition is to make a sugar sculpture, which, by nature of the material, is extremely fragile, meaning the MOF candidates must be very inventive (and careful) to ensure that their pastry is structurally sound and does not break when moved. Structural integrity is This also an issue for every other pastry, and the chefs achieve this by carefully planning and considering, at minimum, the ingredients, the thickness of materials, and the cooking time required.

Perhaps even more fascinating than the structural engineering behind these pastries is the iterative design process – yes, design process – that these chefs undergo to arrive at the perfect pastry. In one scene, we see five different versions of the same puff pastry, each with different arrangements, as one of the chefs tries to decide which pastry he wants to present at the competition. Each participant must make a large wedding cake sculpture, and the one chef we follow most closely designs and redesigns the cake many times, largely in an effort to ensure that it can support its own weight.

Although Kings of Pastry chronicles a competition, it does not feel forced or scripted and it does not follow a formula like American Idol, to use a crude example. Hegedus and Pennebaker focus on the story behind making the pastries and the art and dedication that goes into this trade, with many mouth-watering shots of these gastronomical works of art, which is absolutely mesmerizing. Last year, Nora Ephron made another movie for the epicure, Julie and Julia, about the trials and tribulations of two ambitious chefs and featured many delectable shots of gourmet French cuisine; Kings of Pastry does an equally good job of photographing food and celebrating the epicure culture, though it focuses on the story behind that special food group, dessert that has its own separate compartment in everyone’s stomach. Kings of Pastry, like Julie and Julia, celebrates the art of cooking and it’s sure to leave you craving an incredibly fancy French pastry dessert by the end of the film.

Steven Soderbergh’s film, And Everything is Going Fine, is a continuation of Soderbergh’s obsession with the actor/performer Spaulding Gray. Soderbergh made Gray’s Anatomy in 1996, which was an eighty-minute film version of one of Gray’s monologues. And Everything is Gone Fine is essentially a mash-up of old recordings of Gray’s various monologue performances interspersed with the occasional personal interview (between, presumably, Soderbergh and Gray) and television interview. (more…)