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Two words: Emma Stone. If not for the not-so original storyline and beautiful people, then at least see Easy A for the wonderfully talented Emma Stone who plays Olive Penderghast in this year’s comedy Easy A. This movie is pretty much your typical teenage comedy/chick flick but it has one thing that separates it from the rest and that’s Emma Stone. I don’t know how many times I can harp on how great she is but she is. Stone is a gifted actress and she reminds me of Ellen Page and her portrayal in Juno. Though, it’s unlikely Stone will get as much recognition as Page did. Enough of Stone, who/what else was so great about the movie you may ask?

Well, despite the minor roles, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci who played Olive’s parents shined on screen also. They played their cooky/intellectual/loving characters brilliantly. I particularly loved the scene where Olive’s adopted brother points out that he’s black and their father (Tucci) jokingly reacts with enthusiastic astonishment. The movie had many hilarious moments and despite the unoriginal storyline, there was great dialogue and funny characters. I even liked Penn Badgley’s character, yes the dude from Gossip Girl. Funny enough, there was even a reference made about Gossip girl in the movie.

Now back to Stone. I liked her bit where she sings Natasha Bedingfield’s Pocket Full of Sunshine; I couldn’t imagine anyone else acting that scene as well as she did. Though Stone had many shining moments in this movie, that scene was by far to me her best shining moment.

Pinoy Sunday is a movie about a red couch. More specifically, it’s a movie about Manuel and Dado, two Filipino migrant factory workers in Taiwan, who dream of luxury and better days, and discover a discarded red couch on a Sunday, their day off. They decide to carry the couch back to the dormitory where they live so that one day they might be able to relax under the stars, drinking beer, stretched out on their couch, after a hard day’s work.

As the genre requires, they encounter many vicissitudes on their journey: a collision with a motorcyclist gets them picked up by the cops; a lady spotting them walking by with a couch sees this as an opportunity to cushion the fall of her son who is standing at the top of the apartment building threatening to jump; and enlisting the help of someone with a car puts them on a long detour to the middle of nowhere.

They are racing against the clock, since they must return to their dormitory before curfew at 9PM or else risk deportation. The couch, of course, is a symbol of luxury, and of hopes and dreams. It’s an impractical, heavy, clunky thing that they must carry across the city, with the hope of one day finding comfort and joy from it. Ultimately, this is a film about the difficulty of maintaining optimism and motivation against all odds, which seem to point towards your dreams being crushed. (more…)

I saw Achero Mañas’s brilliant film, Noviembre, at TIFF in 2003 and absolutely loved it. It won the audience choice award and for good reason; it was a masterpiece. Eight years later and I still haven’t managed to find a copy of it on DVD and it certainly never received a theatrical release in North America. So when I discovered that Mañas would be bringing his latest film, Anything You Want, to this year’s TIFF, I jumped at the opportunity to see the master at work once more.

Anything You Want is a sad and poignant story of how Leo, a family-law lawyer in Madrid who spends little time with his own family, must cope with taking care of his four-year-old daughter, Dafne, when her mother, his wife, passes away. At first, Leo feels completely incapable of handling the responsibility. We watch him break down into tears in front of his father as he admits his fear and anxiety about taking on the role of both mother and father, when he was so used to having Alicia be the primary caretaker for Dafne. His struggle is exacerbated by Dafne’s grief and alienation from him: Dafne refuses to kiss him or hug him and wants solely to speak to and be comforted by her mother.

At first, Dafne is content to take on a “fake mother”. When Leo brings home his girlfriend, Marta, Dafne asks Marta to read her a bedtime story and lie with her like her mother would. Dafne is eagerly searching for a female replacement and Leo feels helpless, convinced that what Dafne needs is a woman in her life. He confides in his co-worker at work that he feels obligated to date for Dafne’s sake, so that Dafne can have a woman in her life. Ultimately, however, both Dafne and Leo abuse Marta’s kindness, too keen to pretend she really is a substitute for Alicia, and unwilling to admit to themselves that she is someone different, and so Marta leaves.

In an effort to get closer to his daughter and gain her affections, Leo agrees to begin to dress like Alicia, at Dafne’s request. It starts off small, with Leo acquiescing to a request from Dafne to have him put on some lipstick, as a comforting reminder of her mother. But the obsession grows. It is only through dressing up as Alicia that Leo is able to have a close and caring relationship with his daughter.

Achero Mañas problematizes gender roles by examining Leo’s approach. It is heartbreaking that Leo feels that Dafne cannot love him if he is a man, and equally so that he feels that the only way to be gentle and loving towards his daughter is to take on a female persona. Certainly, Dafne is missing something by not having a woman in her life, but is Leo really right to think that only a female could fulfill the role of caregiver? Is there not some way for him to maintain his identity as the handsome, masculine male that he is while still finding a way to tenderly parent his daughter? (more…)

Chico & Rita is a lovely animated film about two Cuban jazz musicians in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Chico is a talented pianist and Rita is a one-of-a-kind singer. They meet and fall in love but they face many obstacles that separate them, from miscommunications to the schism that occurs after the Cuban revolution which leaves Chico stuck in Cuba, unable to play his music, and Rita in the United States, unable to fulfill her musical potential because she is black.

The story is told from Chico’s perspective, as an old man reflecting back on the good and sad times of his youth, which lends some additional romanticism to the story. Although the romance between Rita and Chico is what grounds the film, their story is somewhat clichéd. The real success of the film is in the animation and music and how these visuals and sounds capture an era and what Cuba and the US was like for jazz musicians in the 1950s and present day. (more…)

Michael Cera has made a career out of playing the same darn character: the goofy geek  that somehow always gets the girl. In Juno, we see his character, Bleeker, through the eyes of the wise-cracking Juno, and so we grow to love him for the sweet, albeit awkward, boy that he is. Even in Superbad we get to see his character’s heart and so we care for him. And in both cases, he is either in school or looking ahead to university, or he has at least something motivating him and propelling him through life.

In Scott Pilgrim vs The World it seems as though we are supposed to remember how much we liked Michael Cera’s character in previous movies and thus the film assumes we will like his similarly geeky and awkward character here. But in Scott Pilgrim he is a 22-year-old loser: he is not in school, he does not have a job, he is in a terrible band, and he lives in a tiny basement apartment with his gay roommate (with whom he shares a bed) across the street from his parents’ house. Oh yeah, and he’s dating a 17-year-old high school student who conveniently wears a Catholic school uniform, presumably to help him fulfill, through this completely hands-off relationship, any related fantasies. He could not be more pathetic. And when he starts up a relationship with his dream girl without breaking it off with the high schooler, he becomes a jerk.

At least his life is populated by colourful characters, which would have made for a far more interesting film if they were more in the foreground and less in the background. There is his gay wise-cracking roommate, Wallace, who is a master at the sarcastic and dry wit, played by the very talented Kieran Culkin in a 2-dimensional reprise of his role from Igby Goes Down. There is also his gossipy sister (Anna Kendrick from Up In The Air) who is often in league with Wallace for ridiculing Scott and attempting to get him to stop screwing up his life. And the wonderful Canadian actress, Allison Pill, plays Scott’s ex-girlfriend and the drummer – with attitude – in his terrible band. I pretty much enjoyed every minute that any one of these three were on screen. (more…)

The films of Jean-Luc Godard have rarely been accessible, are often slow, but almost always, even the worst ones, have at least a few moments of sheer brilliance and stunning photography throughout. Film Socialisme, Godard’s newest film, which had its North American premiere at TIFF, is certainly slow and inaccessible. In fact, this was by far the slowest and least accessible Godard film I’ve seen, which means that the 10-minute traffic scene in Weekend and the pain that was Masculin Feminin are a rollicking good fast-paced time by comparison. Unfortunately, Godard’s trademark genius and exquisite photography are also often lacking in this film. He seems unaware of what the strengths of the film are; the few small glimpses of greatness are overshadowed by a long and disconnected mess.

Although the primary language of the film is French, and there is at least some dialogue in Russian and Arabic, the film has no subtitles. Intentionally. I am almost fluent in French and can follow along with all of the dialogue and yet, I did not feel like that helped me much in understanding either what was happening in the film or what the point was. There are no characters. There is no plot. Not only is there no plot, but also there is no story. People appear and talk at each other or at the camera now and then, but these can hardly be described as “characters” since they are in no way emotionally involving and the nonsense they spurt can only be understood by the select few that happen to speak the language.

The film can be split up into three main parts: the first takes place on a cruise boat, the second in a Martin gas station, and the final goes all around the world and attempts to – largely unsuccessfully – connect the disconnected threads from the rest of the film. Often, dialogue is undercut by loud noise. Sometimes this is white background noise from the digital camera’s microphone (how dare Godard not use a boom! my ears!) and sometimes it is a loud sound or piece of music overlaid on the audio, making it nearly impossible to decipher the words being said. People seem to philosophize about various subjects and the film seems to be lampooning capitalism and civilization, in typical Godard form, but to what point is much less obvious.

If you can accept that there is little sense to be made of the film, then you might be able to appreciate its few merits. Each frame is masterfully composed, a characteristic of most Godard films. Sometimes the HD digital photography leads to moments of beauty like the shots on the cruise deck at night. Yet instead of using digital photography to enhance his usually skilled shots, he sometimes uses cell-phone-quality video, which is painful to watch and overlays extremely low quality audio. In the 1960s, when Godard made La Chinoise, he put together beautiful shots that were exquisitely lit on a stunning set. Fifty years later, technology is better, yet Godard’s photography has become – intentionally – sloppier through use of low quality video. (more…)

One of the best films at TIFF this year is Delfina Castagnino’s What I Most Want, which is about two women – Maria  (Maria Villar) and Pilar (Pilar Gamboa) – and the week they spend together in Pilar’s hometown in Patagonia as they cope with their respective problems. Maria is at the tail-end of her four-year relationship with her boyfriend which has gone very sour; Pilar copes with the recent death of her father and the subsequent responsibilities that come with that such as managing her father’s extensive land and business. The two friends need each other to cope, yet they cannot fully communicate their pain to each other and so we watch them experience loneliness in the company of a close friend and we also see how that company gives them security and comfort.

The films opens on the backs of Maria and Pilar, sitting silently in front of a beautiful look-out point in Patagonia. After a few minutes they begin to talk about breathing classes and gossip and relationships, the conversation flows the way real conversation flows: sometimes there are long pauses of acceptable silence and sometimes dialogue is continuous with a realistic fast-paced rhythm. They are charming and bright and we like them instantly.

In both her writing and directing, Castagnino has mastered the art of conversation and silence. The film is shot in a series of long takes each with a still camera, and each take can last ten minutes or longer still. These long takes allow us to experience these characters in “real-time”: we can enter their world and really experience the awkwardness of silences and the excitement of flowing conversation. Such long takes require remarkable acting skills and Castagnino has found such mastery in these two exquisite actresses. Both actresses started out in theatre, which is perhaps why they are able to carry their performances throughout these long takes.

Near the beginning of the film, Maria gets a phone call from her boyfriend, and we follow her on the phone for about five or ten minutes. We watch as her body language changes from completely open and confident to slowly becoming more enclosed and less self-assured. We can hear subtle changes in her voice as the effects of this emotionally-demanding conversation begin to take their toll on her. We see her suppressing her desire to cry – she needs to cry but she does not want to – as she hears, what we can only imagine, is something very hurtful. We never hear what her boyfriend says but it doesn’t matter: we can see it all on her face. Here we experience silence and minimal dialogue, but we follow Maria on her emotional journey completely: the words spoken are just enough and just right. (more…)